Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 90
May 24, 2019
Margate gets Childish and Krasner steps out of Pollock's shadow – the week in art
Queen of splatter Lee Krasner shines at the Barbican, Billy Childish continues Margate’s artistic revival and the birth of British art connoisseurship – all in your weekly dispatch
Lee Krasner
One of the great abstract expressionist painters finally gets her due. Krasner gave a lot of herself to her difficult husband, Jackson Pollock, but here she shines alone.
• Barbican Art Gallery, London, 30 May-1 September.
What to see this week in the UK
From Booksmart to Dido, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...May 23, 2019
Hogarth and The Art of Noise review – London's whistles and wails, drums and dogs
Foundling Museum, London
This invigorating exhibition shows how the artist’s appetite for life bursts off the canvas and makes you see, hear and smell his time – don’t miss the soldier pissing against a wall or the one pinching an aromatic pie
When was the last time Britain was as broken in two as it is by now? William Hogarth has the answer. His masterpiece The March of the Guards to Finchley depicts the last war fought on mainland British soil – the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. The fact that it’s a hilarious, obscenely optimistic human chaos of a painting might give us cause for hope. Even with civil war on his doorstep, Hogarth finds joy in the down and dirty details of life.
He might not have found it so funny had he been Scottish. In August 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie landed in Scotland to try and restore the exiled Catholic Stuart dynasty to the British throne. His army quickly reached Derby, only 100-odd miles from London. But that was their high point. They were chased back into Scotland, and on 16 April 1746, the last hardcore Highlanders were catastrophically defeated by the Duke of Cumberland’s army at Culloden.
Continue reading...May 20, 2019
Manga review – where has all the riotous fun and filth gone?
British Museum, London
It has moments of brilliance but asking us to compare today’s graphic artists with greats of the past is misguided. What’s next – Rembrandt meets Dennis the Menace?
One morning in June 1880, the Japanese artist Kawanabe Kyōsai drank several bottles of sake and started painting a 17-metre cloth spread out on a studio floor in Tokyo. It took him four hours to fill this giant scroll with grotesquely vivacious portraits of ghosts and demons. These fascinating monsters are a rare highlight of the British Museum’s blockbuster journey into Japan’s art. Kyōsai was the Jackson Pollock of caricature, turning actors in Tokyo’s kabuki theatre into these uncanny yet very real beings. His freely painted panorama of the supernatural shows exactly why European artists in the late 19th century looked to Japan for inspiration.
Kyōsai still looks like our contemporary. Even though his Shintomiza Theatre Curtain is now so fragile this may be the last time it is ever loaned to an exhibition, its rollicking energy and hilarity burst off the wall as if you were watching a film full of special effects and outlandish superheroes. For Japanese art looked like modern comics long before there were modern comics or movies based on them. You think Thanos is scary? Take a look at Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s 1880s drawing of a mythic warrior swinging his enemy’s severed head around by its hair while he contorts his face into a snarling ecstasy of rage.
Continue reading...May 17, 2019
Cartoon cats, doomed sunbathers and the sound of Hogarth's London – the week in art
The British Museum is turning Japanese for Manga, Gin Lane is making a racket at the Foundling Museum, and the V&A has a lot on its plate – all in your weekly dispatch
Manga
The wildly popular contemporary comic strip art from Japan gets the BM’s blockbuster treatment. Wot, run out of old pots?
• British Museum, London, 23 May to 26 August
What to see this week in the UK
From Birds of Passage to Rita Ora, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...May 15, 2019
'I've seen more self-aware ants!' AI: More Than Human – review
Barbican, London
This crowd-pleasing show throws robots, shiny toys and interactive paintings at viewers. But there’s little sign of creativity amid the chaotic overload
In 2016, a machine beat the world’s best (human) player at the ancient strategy game Go, which up to then was said to be too intuitive for a computer. AlphaGo’s victory was doubly stunning because it taught itself Go by trial and error. Does the fact that computers can now learn mean that artificial intelligence (AI) has moved from science fiction to reality?
The story of AlphaGo is told in a specially isolated display, almost like a little temple, at the heart of the Barbican’s sprawling survey of the past, present and future of machines that can think for themselves. It’s a show that’s sorely needed. AI is everywhere in the media, but public understanding of it is confused. It sometimes seems vested interests want to keep it that way. Why do tech companies create uncannily humanoid interfaces if not to fool us into believing their algorithms are consciously speaking to us? AI: More Than Human should be the exhibition that clarifies our understanding of AI and where it’s really at, but instead it opts for chaotic overload and a groovy utopianism that perpetuates the current blur in public discussion of reality and fantasy of this potentially earth-shaking technology.
Related: Let me into your home: artist Lauren McCarthy on becoming Alexa for a day
Continue reading...May 10, 2019
Cat videos, clever robots and clapped-out computer games – the week in art
The Barbican peers into the future, the Whitworth heads to the Andes, Cory Arcangel has digital fun and Georg Baselitz takes on old masters – all in your weekly dispatch
AI: More than Human
Anna Ridler and Mario Klingemann are among the artists here whose experiments with thinking machines may or may not reveal art’s future.
• Barbican, London, 16 May to 26 August
What to see this week in the UK
From High Life to Joy for Ever, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...May 9, 2019
Red Lady to Richard III: Britain's 10 best buried treasures – ranked!
How does ‘Britain’s Tutankhamun’, a Saxon prince’s tomb found near an Aldi in Southend-on-Sea, fit in with the UK’s great archaeological finds?
We really are good at talking up our treasures. Britain’s Tutankhamun? There are lots of reasons why the remnants of a Saxon princely burial, discovered under a verge near an Aldi in Southend, can’t match up to the ancient Egyptian boy king’s treasures. After a 16-year excavation, the artefacts are now going on display – but for one thing, wet British mud just doesn’t have the preserving power of dry Egyptian sand, even if Anglo-Saxon Essex really could have produced an ancient civilisation as glorious as that of Egypt.
Yet archaeology began in Britain in the 18th century, when the antiquarian William Stukely studied Stonehenge and Avebury. And over the past 250 years, some stunning objects – and remarkable human remains – have emerged from the fields, caves and silt to give that intimate thrill of direct contact with the past, which is what makes archaeology magical. Some lovely shiny things, too. Here is my top 10 of British archaeological finds – ranked.
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