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. […]
The Turner Prize nominees and winners came up with a predictable set of embarrassing posters for the Olympics. Apart from the perpetrators themselves, no one could be found to say a good word about their efforts. Someone needs to get a grip. First we were presented with an inept logo which had cost £400,000 for what looked like two minutes […]
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 […]
Today John Constable’s The Lock, painted in 1824, sold at Christie’s for £22.4 million. In the current art market of silly prices some lucky person got the bargain of their lives. Let us hope the picture will be placed in a museum, where people might enjoy it, instead of disappearing into a Swiss warehouse as the investment bauble of some […]
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 […]
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 […]
It’s the headgear that does it. Gives it away completely. Without it you’d be none the wiser. But the miner’s lamp makes it beyond any doubt. This is the Professor of Drawing at work on her most important finished presentation piece yet, a celebration of the Wigan pit girls of the 19th century. Such economy of line, every mark counts, […]
