Laura Gascoigne September/October 2018 “This is an urgent message. Time is running out!” warned an automated voice on my phone one morning. I slammed the phone down assuming it was a sales pitch, but whatever the voice’s motive it wasn’t wrong. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists the election of Donald Trump in 2016 inched the Doomsday Clock […]
Laura Gascoigne July/August 2018 When the betting opened on this year’s Turner Prize in April, Forensic Architecture were favourites to win at 13/8. Architects just can’t stay away from art; they keep turning up in the Turner like bad pennies. It’s only three years since the prize was won by Assemble, that well-meaning group of socially minded young things who […]
A survey by the Office for National Statistics in May revealed that the British are changing their spending habits. Instead of filling our homes to the rafters with consumer durables and not-so-durables, we’re spending our spare cash on ‘experiences’, including recreation and, yes, culture. “People are interested in servicing a lifestyle rather than buying stuff,” one trend forecaster commented in […]
Laura Gascoigne May/June 2018 Was Stone Age society more open-minded than ours? In December, just before Instagram was flooded with pictures of Kim Kardashian’s 37-year-old butt crack, Facebook decreed that an image featuring the front bottom of the 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf was “dangerously pornographic” and removed it, until forced to apologise two months later to the statue’s owner, the […]
Laura Gascoigne March/April 2018 In the Royal Academy’s Tennant Gallery a man in goggles is lurching around waving his arms like someone conducting an orchestra on ketamine. It could be a piece of performance art, but it’s too amusing. In fact the man isn’t air-conducting, he’s air-drawing and the results are appearing in real time on a screen. Time is […]
Laura Gascoigne January/February 2018 You get a better class of junk mail in Hampstead. Recently a ‘stiffy’ (in the polite old-fashioned sense) arrived from something called ‘The Restory’. From its sober shade of indigo with silver lettering I guessed it announced the opening of a restaurant in a former rectory, but no, it advertised an “on-demand shoe and handbag restoration […]
If you’re thinking of committing an art crime, now’s your moment. In June budgetary pressures forced the ‘temporary’ closure of the Met’s Art & Antiques Squad and the transfer of expert staff to the Grenfell Tower fire investigation, and there’s no knowing when, if ever, they’ll be back. So it’s bye-bye blue light, hello green light to thieves, fakers, fraudsters […]
“Why is there so much sewing?” demanded The Art Newspaper’s Christina Ruiz after visiting Christine Macel’s exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale. “I get it: domestic work, women’s work, is important and undervalued. But is it in itself art? No it is not.” There was a time when so-called textile arts were prized above all others; when first unveiled in […]
Last month a new sort of museum opened in Sweden. The brainchild of psychologist Dr Samuel West, the Museum of Failure in Helsinborg is an unnatural history museum of commercial fossils, a repository of innovative products that flopped. “The majority of all innovation projects fail,” its website announces cheerfully, before expressing the hope that showcasing “interesting innovation failures” will “provide […]
Ever since Anya Gallaccio made her name by exhibiting an ice block called Intensities and Surfaces in an East London pumping station in 1996, I’ve been monitoring the advance of ice through the contemporary art world, where it seems resistant to climate trends prevailing elsewhere. While the polar ice caps recede, the phenomenon of ice art only grows. I wouldn’t […]
