Visual Arts Reviews
John Berger: Art and Property Now, Somerset HouseSaturday, 08 September 2012
John Berger isn’t a man who has suffered through appearing to take himself massively seriously. His way of phrasing his most modest utterance as though the fate of the world’s dispossessed hangs on his trenchancy is insufferable to some. But generally the world takes this mountain-dwelling Marxist sage pretty much at his own estimation: as a great alternative voice crying out amid the crassness of our market-driven culture. Read more...
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Cecil Beaton: Theatre of War, Imperial War MuseumFriday, 07 September 2012
The wide eyed little girl is sitting bolt upright in her hospital bed, clutching her large soft toy, her head encased in a voluminous bandage. Eileen Dunne, aged three, was injured by shrapnel during the London bombing in 1940, and Cecil Beaton’s Ministry of Information photograph of the bewildered child travelled the world, graced the cover of Life magazine and silently pleaded the British cause. Read more... |
Lindsay Seers: Nowhere Less NowThursday, 06 September 2012
Lindsay Seers is one of the most exciting artists to have emerged in Britain over the last 10 years. Preoccupied with big philosophical questions, her work explores notions of truth, memory, imagination and history. Nowhere Less Now, commissioned by Artangel, is her first new work in London since Extramission was shown at Tate Britain in 2009. It is no ordinary work. Read more... |
Ai Weiwei: Never SorryFriday, 10 August 2012
Every year, FHM produces its 100 sexiest women of the year list. It follows a simple formula, since sexiness, as determined by the magazine’s readers, is predicated on fame – a particular type of fleeting, red-top tabloid fame. So this year, top of that list is Tulisa of the sex tapes. Likewise, every year Art Review does its 100 most powerful people in the art world list. So what is it to be the most powerful person in the art world? Read more... |
Edinburgh Art Festival: From Symbolists to ColouristsWednesday, 08 August 2012
East coast haar seeping into sun-drenched streets – familiar Edinburgh monuments disappearing dreamlike under blankets of mist, vibrant colour draining from the landscape as the city transformed into its more usual symphony in grey. The dramatic change in weather during the first weekend of the Edinburgh Art Festival has mirrored the overwhelming experience of one of this year’s major exhibitions. Read more... |
Eames: The Architect and the PainterThursday, 02 August 2012
A friend of mine has an Eames lounge chair that he treats with enormous reverence and claims is the comfiest seat ever made. I simply don’t get it; with its bent plywood shell and black leather upholstery, this 1956 American design classic looks to me dark, clumsy and uninviting – especially when compared with Eileen Gray’s Bibendum chair of some 50 years earlier or the delicate designs produced in the 1920s for the Bauhaus by Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe. Read more... |
Another London: International Photographers Capture City Life 1930-1980, Tate BritainMonday, 30 July 2012
Unadulterated happiness: swinging on the wheel, high above the ground, at the fair on Hampstead Heath in 1949, in Wolf Suschitzky’s photograph that effortlessly conveys that sense of moving at ease through the sky. Fourteen years earlier the same photographer, just arrived from Vienna, immortalised a gravely courting couple smoking their cigarettes over a tea in Lyons Corner House, the behatted lady apparently entertaining a genteel proposition; and inbetween Suschitzky shows us the vie Read more... |
The History of Art in Three Colours, BBC FourThursday, 26 July 2012
It’s a patchy history, the history of art told through the colour gold, though I suppose it would be. After all, despite the title of this new three-part series, we’re not actually talking about gold as colour, that seductively warm, buttery yellow of Italianate landscapes and Turner sunsets, but of gold itself. Actual gold. The Impressionists never used it, but those ancient Egyptian tomb builders did, and so did medieval icon painters. Read more... |
Tino Seghal: These Associations, Tate ModernWednesday, 25 July 2012
Tino Seghal’s Turbine Hall commission makes me wonder about fellow art critics. Do they not get out enough? I’m struck by how easily seduced they are by brief encounters with live, interactive artworks, as if spending so much time looking at inanimate things instead of talking to people has made them imagine that talking to strangers who’ve been drilled for the task is either life-enhancing, edgy or, in fact, interesting. Read more... |
Shakespeare: Staging the World, British MuseumSaturday, 21 July 2012
Where on earth do you begin if all the world’s a stage? When not sifting through the entrails of dynastic English history or sunning themselves in Italy, the plays of Shakespeare really do put a girdle round the known globe. They send postcards from the exotic neverlands of Illyria and Bohemia, wander deep into Asia, set foot as far south as Africa, trespass up to the chilly north of Scandinavia and Scotland, and even make reference to Muscovy. And of course there are the Anthropophagi (... Read more... |
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