art blog since 2009
Post-Frieze comedown fodder: Too much has been written about the fair this year, I know. But this sharp analysis by critic JJ Charlesworth makes a lot of sense. Non-native English speakers only need to know 1500 words and ‘globish‘ is one of them. The Guardian also reports from a talk at Frieze. If you’re not …
October 17, 2011
As a structuralist who wrote about wrestling, wine and fashion, it can seem Roland Barthes is one of the less abstruse theorists you might come across in an artwork. And now Nick Davies has added a layer of either difficulty or simplicity by translating the Frenchman’s 1975 work, The Pleasure of the Text, into mobile …
October 14, 2011
More time has elapsed. More links have accrued. Thank you, as ever, for reading… RIP Steve Jobs. Very sad, of course, but as Art Info point out he was hardly Che Guevara. Although as Slate recall, he did once drop acid. Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective have captured the flowering of a utopian protest movement in Wall …
October 10, 2011
If you perchance see a hammer and sickle in this abstract Frank Stella sculpture, don’t bother paging doctor Rorschach. It is impossible not to see. Certainly, the rest of the dynamic caged forms here recall early Soviet art. If nothing else, they resemble parts of Vladimir Tatlin’s famous tower. But they are also post industrial. …
October 7, 2011
Once again, here are some of the more readable/watchable/listenable links from the past seven days: “Freud’s cranium is a snail”: listen to a short radio 4 programme about the meeting between the founder of psychoanalysis and Salvador DalÃ. Tom McCarthy, in the Guardian, provides some intelligent appetite whetting for the forthcoming Gerhard Richter show at …
September 24, 2011
As with any 21st century talent contest, the three judges in Casting Jesus are impatient, cutting and at times cynical. They praise as well, of course, but not always with great sincerity. But unlike the panels we know from primetime TV, these worldly starmakers are a Vatican priest, a Vatican newspaper art critic, and a …
September 20, 2011
My abiding memory of September 11 is soul searching about the point of starting an MA in one of the bars at the University of Sussex. Not sure that we ever reached any conclusion: Jerry Saltz, however, was collecting missing person posters and you can read his confession of sorts on artnet. For all other …
September 11, 2011
How was your week? Mine was all the better for finding these 10 links: Christopher Hawthorne in the LA Times reports on boom time for skyscrapers. To quote from movie Life Stinks: “Gentlemen, you’ll never know how much this project excites me.” And as we approach 9/11/2011, at least one bit of reportage now looks …
September 4, 2011
For artists who don’t perhaps make millions, Frieze art week may be a date to hate. But this year, two man team Karl England and Ben Street are presenting a bold alternative. The brand new Sluice Art Fair will be 15 minutes down the road. “We have had some hostile reactions when we invited people …
September 1, 2011
To those who say, I could have done that when faced with contemporary art, here is a project that you really could have done. The catalogue provides instructions. Mocksim’s show comprised some 200 photos of illegally parked cars. 1) check the parking ticket; 2) visit the Penalty Charging Notice website; 3) enter a code; and …
August 30, 2011