Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 69
September 25, 2020
The $80m Botticelli: could its auction trigger a Covid-rescue fire sale?
If the Renaissance artist’s wavy-haired youth can fetch $80m, will collections start selling off masterpieces to get them through the pandemic? Could the RA’s Michelangelo be next?
There’s money in those Renaissance hills. The Royal Academy can sniff it. Confronted with a huge pandemic deficit that may mean sacking 150 workers, some Academicians have reportedly headed up to the cobwebby attic – or rather Norman Foster’s Sackler Galleries – to put a price on their most precious heirloom. “A hundred million pounds,” they whisper. So should the RA sell The Virgin and Child With the Infant St John – Michelangelo’s poetically unfinished marble relief and the only stone sculpture of his that Britain has – to save jobs and secure the Academy’s future?
Actually, £100m may be way too low a figure – because, as the RA has doubtless noticed, Sotheby’s has just estimated a portrait by Michelangelo’s fellow Florentine Sandro Botticelli will shortly fetch at least $80m (£63m) at auction in New York. There is clearly a huge leap in preciousness between Young Man Holding a Roundel, as Botticelli’s lovely painting is called, to a sculpture that’s not only by Michelangelo’s hand but even has his chisel marks all over it. Yes, Michelangelo’s chisel, held and hammered by him, a year or so after he finished David. Gotta be worth something.
Can anyone put a price on such mystery? Of course not, but you can’t blame the market for trying
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'New' England rethought, hot tantric tickets and rodeo's queer makeover – the week in art
Plymouth’s Box considers early American settlers, the British Museum reveals Tantra treasures and LGBTQ+ cowboys ride out – all in your weekly dispatch
Mayflower 400: Legend & Legacy
Native American art, including a work by contemporary Wampanoag artist Nosapocket/Ramona Peters, is set beside early settler documents and artefacts in this exhibition about the Puritan refugees from Stuart England who created a “New” England across the Atlantic.
• The Box, Plymouth.
September 22, 2020
When does street art become ‘art’ art?
Whether you think graffiti is a subversive, democratic art form or a public nuisance, it harks back to our cave-painting days
Modern Toss on street art ...In the Guide’s weekly Solved! column, we look into a crucial pop-culture question you’ve been burning to know the answer to – and settle it, once and for all
Surely you must have your doubts. It’s all very well for the entire world to laud Banksy’s latest mural on a pigsty in Suffolk and have the savvy to rave about Stik (who does stick figures under bridges in London). It appears to be a truth universally acknowledged that street art is subversive, democratic and brilliantly creative. But then you find yourself paused on a train waiting to enter a station, looking at the “art” on a goods shed wall. Someone took risks – legal and physical – to spray-paint those giant letters and curly lines, but the results look about as inspiring as a discarded crisp packet.
Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips
Continue reading...September 21, 2020
Tantra at the British Museum review – acrobatic lovers and human skulls
British Museum, London
Embraced by the 60s counterculture including the Rolling Stones, the ancient spiritual philosophy of Tantra finds enlightenment not just in sex but death
On a stone relief from 11th-century India, a moustached man is enthusiastically pleasuring his lover. She’s upside down, legs in the air, so he can devote himself to tonguing her yoni. Their acrobatic enjoyment is precisely and gracefully carved.
This isn’t just erotic art – it’s a religious masterpiece. A new philosophy emerged in India from about 500AD, defined in Tantras, religious dialogues written down in Sanskrit, some of the oldest copies of which are in the British Museum’s first new exhibition since lockdown. One key belief emerging from these texts is that women can personify divine beings. So female sexuality has sacred power. This artistic masterpiece depicts the Tantric devotion to the vulva and its needs.
Related: The art of tantra: is there more to it than marathon sex and massages?
Continue reading...September 18, 2020
A lockdown portrait, a trip to the seaside and America's bad dream – the week in art
Gillian Wearing paints her self-portrait, bronze age mysteries are unearthed, and Grayson Perry maps the mess of the American psyche – all in your weekly dispatch
Gillian Wearing
A stunningly intelligent and sensitive lockdown project in which the celebrated video artist set out to paint her self-portrait.
• Maureen Paley, London, until 25 October.
September 16, 2020
Gillian Wearing's lockdown self-portraits peel back the mask and show the truth
Maureen Paley, London
Wearing has abandoned the video art that won her the Turner prize and taken up watercolours and oils to create a soul-baring investigation of the human condition
A face wearing a mask over mouth and nose greets you as you enter Gillian Wearing’s exhibition Lockdown. It is like all the masked faces you pass at stations or in the supermarket, but the eyes are empty holes, and underneath the face covering is a second mask, lifelike and made of smooth latex. The outer mask is easy to remove: you take it off and feel like yourself again. It is a lot harder to remove the mask that is your face. But in the quiet and loneliness of lockdown earlier this year, Wearing set out to peel off all the layers and see herself inside herself, a woman without a mask.
This surreal sculpture is the only new work in this show that looks like a “Wearing”. The Turner prize winner is famous for videos and photographs. The first mask she strips off here is her official artistic identity as someone who works with a camera. She comes before us naked, as she might have looked in her first year at art school: not a famous conceptual artist, just a sincere nobody who likes to draw and paint.
Gillian Wearing: Lockdown is at Maureen Paley, London, until 25 October.
Continue reading...September 11, 2020
Garden of evil: Trevor Paglen's sinister digital paradise puts you in the picture
Pace Gallery, London and online
The artist’s AI images of nature are not what they seem – and they aren’t the only things being watched in this mind-boggling show about surveillance
Is Trevor Paglen a hyper-suspicious activist exposing the state? Or is he an artist who has found that adopting such a stance helps him reveal things about how we live now? It’s hard to tell. Previously, he has photographed secret military installations in the desert and taken long-exposure pictures of the night sky that at first glance look like astronomy, but in reality record the paths of satellites watching our every move. That was before Covid-19, which seems to have driven Paglen to new depths of paranoid introspection, responding with the blackest of humour in an exhibition that may not even be an exhibition but a lure to catch the unwary in his sinister web.
The white walls and partitions of the gallery are hung with what look like artworks. Big photographs of flowers and woodlands bring the outdoors into this city interior. Paglen appears to have turned to nature for solace during lockdown. Like David Hockney and Nan Goldin, who have produced lockdown images of trees and flowers, he has wandered in pastoral meadows to relieve the stress – or so it seems. Except these meadows are unreal. They were produced using artificial intelligence. The harder you look, the less soothing they are. The colours are hyper-intense yet unseasonal. The leaves and petals are brittle, even plasticky.
At Pace Gallery, London, and on online until 10 November.
Continue reading...Muhammad Ali up-close and a mother's gaze – the week in art
Next exhibitions celebrate women of the Scottish avant garde, pioneering photographer Gordon Parks’ shots of Muhammad Ali, and a mother’s raw paintings of her daughter – all in your weekly dispatch
Chantal Joffe: For Esme – With Love and Squalor
Raw and expressive paintings of Joffe’s daughter Esme reveal a mother’s feelings as her child grows up.
• Arnolfini, Bristol, until 22 November.
September 10, 2020
Not Without My Ghosts review – Yikes! It's time to unleash your inner Scooby Doo
Drawing Room, London
From a seance with a museum in space to Victorian spectres and an artist more depraved than Aubrey Beardsley, this fascinating celebration of ethereal forces keeps wrecking the spooky mood
It’s a ghost! And a naughty one at that. The apparition floats up, sprouting faun-like forms and wicked faces in what resembles a cloud of opium smoke. This vision, in a drawing by the early 20th-century British occultist Austin Osman Spare, emanates from a creature at the bottom of the page, whose hand is hard at work between his thighs. Another work by Spare, in this exhibition about “mediumistic drawing”, blossoms with spectral faces and devilish beings surrounding a nude youth in ecstasy.
Spare is fantastic, like an even more depraved Aubrey Beardsley, taking the fin de siècle master’s luscious graphics into seedy and deranged territory. For Spare seems to genuinely believe he has Seen Things. His art was championed by the occult leader (his followers hate it when you say satanist) Aleister Crowley. The demons Spare portrays have an awful reality.
At the Drawing Room, London, until 1 November. Then touring the UK with Hayward Gallery Touring.
Continue reading...September 5, 2020
From Blackpink to Bruce Nauman: your guide to autumn’s best culture
The Guide’s writers and critics on this season’s best culture, including Tracey Emin, Candyman and the return of Kylie
by Leonie Cooper
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