Visual arts
mark.hudson
People love Canaletto, and the title of this exhibition - which puts the setting of the paintings above the artist who did them - gives a good idea why. Venice as a place and an idea is perennially popular, and Canaletto gives us the big views – the Doge’s Palace, the Grand Canal, the Rialto – in painstakingly literal detail. Having tailored his craft to the tastes of British grand tourists, who hoiked his works back to their country piles as a way of saying, "We were there," he became in the 20th century the epitome of dentist-waiting-room art: art for Read more ...
sue.steward
The Celtic Tiger ran rampant through Ireland during the boom years of 1995-2007 when national institutions expanded their collections, galleries popped up and collectors, buyers and artists had a rare time. With literature, the new young Chick Lit writers made their mark, sometimes even outselling the serious contemporaries, and Seamus Heaney rightly got a Nobel Prize. With the crash, prices in Dublin’s major art auction houses fell by 50 per cent as the blinged-up property developers froze; if they did buy, they shifted from contemporary to reassuringly Irish "genre paintings" of peasants in Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Action-movie season ain't over quite yet, folks. Sure. OK. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow isn't exactly your conventional salute to Armageddon. No guns, no baddies, no hot babes, no long-haired hunks. The pace is slow. The dialogue's pretty non-existent - and mostly European. The setting is pastoral. The soundtrack is Ligeti. It is, in fact, mostly pure, unadulterated arthouse. But still Sophie Fiennes's documentary portrait of artist Anselm Kiefer, I would contend, could also be seen as one of the finest action movies ever made. Certainly, it's got to be the only one to feature a leading Read more ...
fisun.guner
Camera-less photography isn’t, as some might think, a 20th-century invention, discovered by experimental Modernists such as Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray. Thomas Wedgwood, before the invention of the camera and at the very beginning of the 19th century, made paintings on glass and placed these in contact with pieces of paper and leather which had been rendered light sensitive with chemical treatments. Where the painted areas blocked the light, the image left its trace. Unfortunately, since Wedgwood lacked knowledge of how to fix the images, the results vanished almost as soon as they appeared.From Read more ...
Sarah Kent
With the Frieze Art Fair now upon us, the only sane response for anyone interested in art is to leave London until the wretched event is over. Art fairs are for art what pimps are for virgins, to misquote Barnett Newman. The work, in other words, doesn’t stand a chance. And just as supermarkets don’t give shelf space to products for you to admire the packaging, art fairs don’t display work for you to look at and enjoy. In each case, the point is to purchase.So why should this matter when commercial galleries do it all the time? It’s a question of degree. In galleries, an artist’s work is Read more ...
josh.spero
Contemporary art can, unsurprisingly, become dated pretty quickly – the clue is in the name. Another of Damien Hirst’s mirrored cabinets of pills or of Gavin Turk’s piss-takes of Andy Warhol at the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park is hardly the sort of sight which will enthuse hardened art-gallery goers.But then that’s not the point of art fairs – the major ones like Frieze, Basel and Miami, anyway: they codify established trends, reinforce hierarchies. Even the layout of the galleries shows you this, with heavyweights like Gagosian and Gladstone hogging prime positions, with everyone Read more ...
sue.steward
The 2010 Brighton Photo Biennial has seen unprecedented numbers of visitors flock to the coast, and tonight will host a talk by one of the most original fine-art photographers working in Britain today. Wolfgang Tillmans will explore his unique and hugely influential approach to photography and the relationship between contemporary art and documentary and will undoubtedly cite his latest projects, the refreshing summer exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery and the recently launched, more audacious event at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery.It’s easier to imagine a Tillmans show in the city’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The elusive street artist Banksy was invited by Matt Groening to script an opening sequence for The Simpsons. "MoneyBart", the episode it fronted, was broadcast in America yesterday, and comes to the UK on 21 October. The sequence is inspired by recent reports that The Simpsons gets its animation done in South Korea. Banksy has taken that ball and run with it, producing a pitch-black satirical fantasy in which Bart himself is a graffiti artist, while lifeless drones, fluffy furry things and fantasy creatures are all alike put in the service of the great marketing machine that is the animated Read more ...
Sarah Kent
As well as being a great artist, Leonardo da Vinci designed machine guns, tanks and cluster bombs and worked out how to build a submarine; but so appalled was he by the potential of this last invention that he coded his notes to prevent anyone using them to instigate what he called "murder at the bottom of the seas".Murder at sea is exactly what submarines are meant for, of course, while their ability to cruise unseen beneath the waves makes them not only lethal but extremely sinister; more than any other weapons system they have become emblems of predatory stealth and evil intent. Coming Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The public works for free. That is the founding principal of modern broadcasting culture. It phones radio stations with its air-filling thoughts on this and that. It monopolises Saturday nights on primetime in singing and dancing and plate-spinning. Until recently, it would sit in a house for weeks on end while we (in decreasing numbers) watched. But the public as museum curators? That’s a new one.Or almost new. The undisputed radio triumph of the year has been Radio 4’s collaboration with the British Museum, A History of the World in 100 Objects. To leaven what might be perceived as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A near contemporary of the great jazz photographer Herman Leonard, who died last August, Don Hunstein has amassed a formidable collection of images of some of the most indelible names in music, from Miles Davis and John Coltrane to Johnny Cash, Louis Armstrong and Leonard Bernstein. His work with Bob Dylan in the Sixties, when Hunstein was a staff photographer for Columbia Records and Dylan was the visionary folk singer daring to cross the frontier into rock'n'roll, have become an indivisible part of the myth of the Bard of Minnesota.Proud Chelsea's Hunstein exhibition is aptly titled Read more ...
fisun.guner
There may be some who feel this year’s shortlist for the Turner Prize has done little to forge ahead with anything new, innovative and different. And then there may be others who will welcome the rather more established artists on this year’s list, that is those who have continued to steadily develop their practice for well over a decade, with no great surprises, such as Angela de La Cruz and Dexter Dalwood.With the obvious proviso that, old or new, the work must be interesting, engaging and intelligent, I see no problem in tending towards the latter camp. In any case, a relentless drive Read more ...