Visual arts
Drawing Attention, Dulwich Picture GalleryThursday, 22 October 2009
The first thing to say about Drawing Attention is that its title decidedly undersells the scope of this compelling and unpredictable exhibition, which spans five centuries and includes 100 works from the Art Gallery of Ontario’s collection. Most of... Read more... |
theartsdesk in New York: Extreme BlakeSunday, 18 October 2009Outwardly the Morgan Library & Museum is a citadel of sedateness - inside it may be the locus of turbulence. Thirteen years ago I walked around one of the rooms with the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, on whom I was writing a profile. She was then... Read more... |
Frieze Week: Art, Parties, PeopleFriday, 16 October 2009If there is one thing which I should impress upon you about the Frieze Art Fair, it is do not believe what anyone else says (a good principle for reviewing generally): go and see it yourself this weekend. It is a great day out: Regent’s Park is... Read more... |
Damien Hirst: No Love Lost - Blue Paintings, Wallace CollectionWednesday, 14 October 2009
Damien Hirst's new exhibition at the Wallace Collection is evidence of a deal between nervous guardians of the past and a contemporary artist seeking to burnish his future historical credentials. It stinks. Entitled No Love Lost, Blue Paintings by... Read more... |
Turner Prize 2009, Tate BritainFriday, 09 October 2009Anyone who has had their sensibilities battered by Tate Modern’s Pop Life show is likely to be equally taken aback if they wander along the Thames to this year’s Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain – but for completely different reasons. If Pop... Read more... |
Conrad Shawcross: ChordFriday, 09 October 2009Is site-specific the new collaboration? What I mean by this is that where it was once the fashion for artists and dancers (think Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham) or film directors and opera houses (Anthony Minghella and the ENO) to mix art... Read more... |
The Museum of Everything, Primrose HillThursday, 08 October 2009The art world has never been unself-aware – its navel is deeper and more gazed-at than almost any other art form. So what happens when you bring artists unaware of the art world into the contemplated and contemplating fold? The Museum of Everything... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Photographer Jillian EdelsteinSunday, 04 October 2009
Jillian Edelstein, the distinguished photographer, is joining theartsdesk. She grew up in Cape Town and in 1985 moved to London, where within a year she had won the Kodak UK Young Photographer of the Year award. It was to be the first of many such... Read more... |
Photographic Gallery: Jillian EdelsteinSunday, 04 October 2009
Acclaimed photographer Jillian Edelstein's series of Portraits include images of significant figures from the world of arts, fashion and the demi-monde, but also politics: her portrait of Nelson Mandela, taken in Cape Town in 1997. There is also a... Read more... |
Pop Life: Art in a Material World, Tate ModernSaturday, 03 October 2009
That artists didn't just respond to the rapacious commercialism of the late 20th century, but actively contributed to it is hardly news. That the marketing of art can be part of the art itself is ... Read more... |
Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler, British MuseumMonday, 28 September 2009History is written in blood, however elegant the cover. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the collapse in 1521 of the Aztec Empire, a culture that presented Europe with a vision of such otherness that it could only be destroyed. In 2002, the... Read more... |
Titian in LoveSunday, 27 September 2009In 1522, Jacopo Tebaldi, agent of Titian’s great patron Alfonso d’Este, paid a visit to the artist who had claimed to be too ill to work. "I have been to see Titian," he wrote to Alfonso, "who has no fever at all. He looks well, if somewhat... Read more... |
