Dick French September/October 2020 It’s not true that King Juan Carlos is hiding out in Bradley’s Spanish Bar. He only used that cupboard under the stairs while waiting for one of those posh penthouses over the road to be readied for him. Although it is true that he was reluctant to leave after falling for… Continue reading Dick French: On The Town – September 2020
Dick French: On The Town – July 2020
Dick French July/August 2020 Reading Pepys again about the plague of 1666. Not one for self-isolating, he was still enthusiastically putting it about: “Thence to Betty Martin and there did tout ce que je voudrais avec her and drank and away by water, home and to dinner. Down to Deptford, loaded half my goods and… Continue reading Dick French: On The Town – July 2020
Laura Gascoigne: Uncomfortable Truths – September 2020
Laura Gascoigne September/October 2020 Six weeks ago, a Hampstead neighbour left a book on our doorstep. We have got used to acts of kindness from strangers; at the start of lockdown another neighbour posted a book of poetry through our door to cheer us up. My husband read it, and it did. But this book… Continue reading Laura Gascoigne: Uncomfortable Truths – September 2020
Laura Gascoigne: Desperately Loose Ends – July 2020
Laura Gascoigne July/August 2020 You’re a curator working at the V&A, and the place shuts down. What do you do? You’re at a loose end. April comes around and you’re stuck at home with your furloughed partner watching your gerbils spin around on the rolly wheel of life when an idea strikes you. Why should… Continue reading Laura Gascoigne: Desperately Loose Ends – July 2020
Dick French: On The Town – May 2020
Dick French May/June 2020 It’s interesting to read the letters of John Ruskin alongside those of Vincent van Gogh. Most people are aware that Ruskin became rather unbalanced with age, but from reading his correspondence with Euphemia (Effie) it seems to me he was quite mad from the start. It’s the manic density that impresses… Continue reading Dick French: On The Town – May 2020
Laura Gascoigne: Pox On All Our Galleries – May 2020
Laura Gascoigne May/June 2020 At the exit to Tate Modern’s Andy Warhol exhibition, the gift shop tills were barricaded behind an airport queue management system. “You’re preparing for an invasion,” I joshed with a cashier as I emerged from the press view on 10 March. “We’re prepared for anything,” he replied. What they weren’t prepared… Continue reading Laura Gascoigne: Pox On All Our Galleries – May 2020
Dick French: On The Town – March 2020
Dick French March/April 2020 Who now remembers the fashion for wearing two pairs of trousers? It was all the rage in Camden Town twenty years ago but you seldom see it now. The outer pair would be cut at the knee to reveal the underlying pair. There’s one chap on Queen’s Crescent who carries on… Continue reading Dick French: On The Town – March 2020
Laura Gascoigne: Battle of the Sexes – March 2020
Laura Gascoigne March/April 2020 Large woman to much smaller man at a party: “I love the idea of there being two sexes, don’t you?” James Thurber was the Thucydides of the gender war, dissecting its battlegrounds, victories and reversals with his pen: the fight in the grocery, the battle on the stairs; the rout where… Continue reading Laura Gascoigne: Battle of the Sexes – March 2020
They All Look The Same To Me
David Lee November/December 2020 In the last editorial, when describing the new full bloom of official Wokeism, I didn’t have space to consider if, in the context of State Art’s exclusive obsession with conceptual and minimal art, work selected without resort to the gender/sexual/racial ticklist would be of a higher standard than what is chosen… Continue reading They All Look The Same To Me
Waking Up to Tyranny
David Lee September/October 2020 A watershed moment in the official story of art has been reached. Unlike in the first decades of the last century, when experimental isms followed one another annually, the first decades of the 21st have until now seen no signal change in direction or emphasis: recently, in contemporary art we’ve been… Continue reading Waking Up to Tyranny