The new Culture Minister is Maria Miller. Her background is in marketing (Texaco and an ad agency) which means she’ll be in heaven when blather is required. She was born in Wolverhampton and is MP for Basingstoke, both places whose connections to Culture are so obvious they don’t need repeating here. She joined the Conservative Party aged 21 when Mrs […]
The Jackdaw was given exclusive advance access to a grand project which seems certain to become a place of pilgrimage for intrepid devotees of Land Art. Dixon Smith reports. Already being hailed by the few allowed to see it as the masterpiece of Land Art in the British Isles, In Transit has been one of public art’s best kept secrets. […]
After a large sculpture was stolen from the Henry Moore Foundation in Hertfordshire in 2005 security was tightened up. They have obviously enjoyed some success, if only because the works now getting stolen are a little smaller. The latest to disappear is a bronze sundial from the Yorkshire sculptor’s garden. Melted down, the 1965 piece will net the marvellous, highly […]
It won’t have escaped the eagle eyes of either of The Jackdaw’s readers that our favourite bit of raven-tressed gallery fluff, Griselda van Bonkhorst, resurfaced pretending to hold up Constable’s The Lock. She was last found swooning over a Rembrandt and before that upstaging a Stubbs with her impeccable embonpoint. What with her fashionably unironed T-shirt and sexy rubber gloves […]
The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has bought for £362,500 the ship in a bottle by Yinka Shonibare which had sat ornamentally becalmed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square for the previous 18 months. It is the Greenwich museum’s job to collect ships and related tackle and, lately, any sea-related nonsense deemed ‘challenging’ by State Art’s omniscient spivs. It […]
Glyn Thompson, the pickler’s first teacher, sets the artist’s early record straight… Hirst scholars will have noted a change in the authorised chronology in the Tate Modern Hirst retrospective catalogue to a venerable biographical item, the entry for March 2002 (The Reliance, Leeds). In the corrected Tate chronology the former title, Damien Hirst’s Art Education, now reads as Fountain Footnotes […]
The Weiwei soap opera continues with more plots than Highgate Cemetery. He has now been refused permission to attend his own tax hearing. He is, of course, contesting the imposition of a fine made by the Chinese Government for alleged tax evasion and other financial exoticisms. In his turn Weiwei has issued a writ against the state for violating the […]
62 pictures, the most ever in its 60-year history, have been selected for this year’s John Moores Prize, the winner of which is announced on September 13th. The Jackdaw had heard of five of the 62. 40 years ago we would have heard of all fifty artists, and each represented by one of their better efforts. The exhibition at the […]
Almost part of The Season now, the only surprise these days about the annual BP Portrait Award is that the Queen doesn’t cut the ribbon and hand out the rosettes. As ever, this year is as popular with the public as any art exhibition, with large numbers jostling and genuinely engaging with the work eagerly discussing merits and demerits of […]
The latest masterpiece from the Professor of Drawing is the cover for the tube map. She does a fair warbler with its beak open and trots it out at regular intervals. “When in doubt scribble a bird with its beak open,” advised the Prof as she stepped down from the Margate Express. It was commissioned for a special map to […]
