Laura Gascoigne demonstrates how Artbollocks is now recognised as a joke among almost everyone excepting the time-serving devotees of State Art. In January the Guardian’s G2 section published an article by Andy Beckett titled ‘Er, anyone know what transversal means’? It reported on the publication in an American art journal last year of an essay… Continue reading Beyond criticism
Category: Essays
The Motya Charioteer
Explanations to date concerning this marvellous figure are inadequate. What precisely is it? Where did it come from? And what date is it? The Motya Charioteer stood for six weeks until the middle of September in the large gallery housing the Parthenon pediments and frieze in the British Museum. It was worth making a special… Continue reading The Motya Charioteer
1988 … Year zero
… when branding and art formed a marriage of convenience, argues artist John Kelly. 1988 is the seminal year, the year that our concepts of art, money and values changed irredeemably. It was the year I came to London as a 23-year-old artist, having taken an opportunity to play league cricket in London. It was… Continue reading 1988 … Year zero
Supercollector: Charles Saatchi the bad man
Charles Thomson reviews the unexpurgated life story of Charles Saatchi. “Ad man you’re a bad man”, proclaimed the artist collective Bank bluntly about Charles Saatchi in 1997. In 2004, Guardian art critic, Adrian Searle, praised Saatchi’s popularist approach, eye and humour in his New Blood show, but drubbed the curatorial incoherence. Sir Peter Blake has… Continue reading Supercollector: Charles Saatchi the bad man
Chalk and cheese
From the Hayward and the ICA to the Royal Academy, and from the public to the private sector, Angus Stewart compares and contrasts the qualities of works on show in London. The British Art Show at The Hayward Gallery should be lively – there are 39 artists. It is, according to the Southbank Centre, recognised… Continue reading Chalk and cheese
Beyond criticism, or, Notes from fantasy island (a response to Criticism and the collapse of culture)
Artist Paul Wilks responds to Eric Coombes’s tour de force of an essay (Criticism and the collapse of culture, The Jackdaw Mar-Apr 2011) Matthijs Van Boxsel cites, in The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity, a ‘Fame Machine’ devised by Villiers de l’Isle Adam, (1883) in which fame could be manufactured ‘by organic means’. Simply put, the ‘machine’… Continue reading Beyond criticism, or, Notes from fantasy island (a response to Criticism and the collapse of culture)
Criticism and the collapse of culture
Dr Eric Coombes looks back over the period since 1997 and identifies the collapse in standards of art criticism which has allowed conceptual art to prosper uncritically After the recent change of government, this might be a suitable moment to look back to the year in which the recently ejected gang of liars, buffoons and… Continue reading Criticism and the collapse of culture