art blog since 2009
“Unfortunately, this being East Germany/Gert patriotically volunteered to be sent on a labour/Beautification course of the countryside north-west of Dresden/And never seen again.†* There is something punitive about Work Programme at the gallery known as CAC. At time of writing we’re on edition 28, and more than 27 souls have already pitched in and …
January 13, 2014
Tis (still, just) the season to be jolly and certainly the time of year for lazy reviews of the past 12 months. And should that review be in the form of a listicle, well all the merrier. So here, in case you were wondering, are the most popular posts on criticismism in 2013: Number 5: …
December 31, 2013
Is it the 24th already? In that case it’s time for some festive Found Objects. Many many thanks to anyone and everyone who has ever read this blog and season’s greetings/happy new year. I ramble. We kick off with a wintry art quiz by Jonathan Jones at the Guardian. I only got seven out of …
December 24, 2013
In a book you can be fairly sure the Chapmans have read, A Thirst for Annihilation, philosopher Nick Land reports on the encounter between American GIs and the mass graves of the Nazi death camps. If memory serves me right, many of the liberators, upon encountering piles of unburied bodies, said they experienced a rush-like …
December 17, 2013
What’s behind a painting or drawing, literally? The reverse of a canvas is a necessary mystery, with its potential for jottings, classifications, signatures and in some cases failed attempts. In terms of drawing, Serra knows enough about failure. The 14 works made for the Courtauld are to some degree beyond his control. So the rejects “far …
December 5, 2013
A queue is a Q is a question. Perhaps ‘what are we waiting for’ or ‘why are we waiting’. The answer will depend on your location, class and political circumstances. In the West we are on the whole happy to queue for a checkout or a cash point. It is, as Jessica Lack points out …
December 1, 2013
Is the title of this Sean Scully work an imperative? I only ask because gallery visitors can do little else when confronted with this three-panelled masterpiece from the 1980s. So we stare . . . but whatever we seek, paint is all we might find. Bands of off-white and off-black, inspired by bleached bone and …
November 20, 2013
Seven more days slip by with but a handful of stories to cling to. Click on: There’s now a Kafka angle to the Munich art hoard story (interivew with Cornelius Gurlitt) Here’s another good Nazi art theft yarn. What became of the Mona Lisa? Museum-show of the season is not in a museum at all. …
November 18, 2013
While there may be plenty of government departments in castles all around the world, we are lucky in Britain to broadly avoid that particular Kafkaesque motif. And yet the darkness of a homegrown bouncy castle made of leather, with its many turrets, and its relentless air pump, is every bit as oppressive as the Czech …
November 14, 2013
Your usual mix of the good, the bad and the trivial (art stories from around the web): Look on the bright side of any imminent apocalypse. Colleen Fitzgibbon interviews filmmaker Ben Rivers for BOMB Magazine Found poetry of Google autocomplete demonstrates that the hivemind sure has an active muse. Read about it on Hyperallergic Here’s …
November 11, 2013