Que barbaridad! You lend two of your best Boschs to a municipal gallery in a two-horse town in Holland that happens to be the artist’s birthplace, and how do they thank you? By reattributing the works to ‘follower of’ and, furthermore, downgrading a third painting in your collection that you didn’t even lend them. A public spat broke out in […]

So it’s goodbye Cornelissens hello Halfords. Laura Gascoigne parks her brush and tries to follow the instructions for flatpack art, but has the picture upside down It’s a dull job being a customs officer, sitting on the border twiddling your thumbs until the next teenage drugs mule comes along. So it must have added to the gaiety of nations when […]

Things have gone rather quiet on the mortality front since queues stretched around the White Cube block in Mason’s Yard for a sight of Damien Hirst’s £50m sculpture For the Love of God. In those days of skulls and diamonds, Paul Wilks wrote a letter to The Jackdaw lamenting the morbidity of contemporary art, wondering why two horrific world wars […]

                          Another month, another book on the contemporary art economy, this time from an overlooked perspective. The New Economy of Art, a joint publication by DACS and Artquest, looks at the art market from the POV of the average artist. Not surprisingly, it finds plenty to puzzle over. […]

Sixteen years ago, I wrote an article for a short-lived women’s art magazine called Make responding to a complaint on the letters page that only childless women could succeed as artists. Off the top of my head, I immediately thought of half a dozen artists who disproved this rule and I interviewed them for a piece called A Woman’s Work. […]

Among the least impressive legacies of arts administrators’ obsession with Modernism and its aftermath is the impossibility of predicting a work’s status solely from its appearance. You might form your own view about it, but you can’t predict what State Art’s opinion will be because there are no published criteria or guidelines for making such a judgement. You can’t second […]

Crossing the centre of Manchester recently heading for the match, an old friend asked me to step inside a handsome Victorian mill considered the Medici Palace of Cottonopolis.  He’d worked on the conversion of this pile years before and hadn’t forgotten the impression a particular bronze made on him as he entered the building each morning. Although he admits to […]

I may frequently express criticisms about their finer workings but British museums and galleries are generally superbly run. Heroic efforts are made to minimise the impact of funding cuts so that even regular visitors will notice little or no impact. From looking at the outward face of our museums you would never guess the country was in anything like the […]

The Department of Culture recently published a White Paper, the first from that department since Jennie Lee’s in 1965, and apparently only its second ever. This chic pamphlet, in truth more PR exercise than policy document, prominently contains that new-age mantra, “access must be increased for those from disadvantaged backgrounds”. The Arts Council also write this sort of optimistic guff, […]

            Read pdf: Duchamp’s Fountain