art blog since 2009
The season of list-making is upon us. But lists, according to US novelist Don Delillo, are a form of ‘cultural hysteria’. As if the impending winter festival wasn’t hysterical enough. This year, rather than try and minimise the anxiety, I thought I’d crank things up a notch or two by compiling a list of the …
December 20, 2010
The artists on a gallery roster are invited to think of themselves as colleagues and take part in what we know as secret Santa. Instead of bottles of wine, DVDs and chocolates, they must give artworks. Secret Santa operates as a closed, rational system for regulating generosity at work. It brings teams together. It ensures …
December 14, 2010
Even when the profit margin is not immediately apparent, there is something to be said for ivory towers. More of that later. Now it’s time to step outside and comment on real world protests taking place at the Slade School of Art and elsewhere. The student demonstrations and occupations are about more than the right …
December 8, 2010
There is a highlight of the current show at Grey Area. That word is used because the rest of the works are in darkness. Visitors are provided with torches. A lightbulb forms part of Tavasiev’s sculpture. So what it seems to illuminate is the arbitrary way we give a personality to the spirit of the …
December 5, 2010
No, your eyes do not deceive you. Those really are tiny winged skeletons riding on the back of a dragonfly. And there are a hundred or more spectacles like this in Swarm by Tessa Farmer. They give the impression of an airborne war, as if the skeletons are fighting for control of their glass cabinet. …
December 2, 2010
Today I found myself clapping and cheering for a piece of art although I have little idea what the work might look like and am not at all sure if it is any good. Nevertheless, I was participating. 2,000 of us stood on the seafront in minus temperatures for an hour and a half. At …
November 27, 2010
Two or three millimetres are all that separate the showpiece in MichaÅ‚ Budny’s exhibition from the most workmanlike and mundane results of a bank holiday weekend’s DIY. Invited by the SLG to show in their Matsudaira Wing, the Polish artist has done what any new arrival to this domestic space might have thought to do. …
November 25, 2010
One thing we can know about cave paintings is they tended to show stuff outside the cave. So art got started as a way of showing what was not actually visible at the time. Take this scene of a passenger jet stranded in a jungle. A film crew would have gone all the way to …
November 22, 2010
The first words which spring to mind are of course ‘dogs’ and another beginning with F. Whichever order you put them in will depend on your attitude to the animals and act in question. But either way, it first reduces the painting to a cheap joke at the expense of painting itself. Although there seems …
November 18, 2010
Despite better intentions, this blog post is all about me. And you can see none other than myself in this Polaroid taken by artist, academic, and sometime futurologist John Maeda. I met John earlier today in a sandpit where he is spending four days in performance as a sort of live interactive fortune cookie. That …
November 17, 2010