Visual arts
fisun.guner
When we look at still images of moving figures what we see is not exclusively determined by what is in front of our eyes but what we already know about the world. If we stopped to think about this, it would seem obvious. We would know, for instance, that the putti who are so joyously leaping, dancing and bounding about in Donatello’s static frieze Cantoria would make little sense to us if we didn’t already know what such static postures implied: still images of moving figures can only come alive in the imagination when we have some understanding of how living bodies move, and of what comes Read more ...
fisun.guner
The latest official royal portrait, and the first painted portrait featuring the Princes William and Harry, hangs in a small room at the National Portrait Gallery among a selection of royal portraits of the Windsors. There’s the rather quirky one of the Queen Mother, painted in 1989 by Alison Watt, an artist who sought to capture her sitter “as ordinary as possible”. What our attention seems most drawn to is the china cup turned upside down on the arm of the Queen Mother’s armchair. Eh?Then there is the immensely engaging portrait of Charles and the boys taken in 2004 by Mario Testino. Read more ...
theartsdesk
theartsdesk received a New Year's gift last night when we were given a significant accolade from BBC Radio 5 Live. In Web 2009 with Helen and Olly, the station's podcasters and self-styled "internet obsessives" Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann recognised theartsdesk as one of the five "essential sites of 2009" in a series of awards to the "cream of weblebrity". The shortlist included such big names as Google Streetview and Spotify, the winner.Our category consisted of sites which "this year seemed to become entirely essential" and the presenters (pictured right) praised theartsdesk's " Read more ...
fisun.guner
2009 hasn’t been a vintage year for art, exactly - no queue-round-the-block showstoppers, if that’s your type of thing. Nonetheless the year was nicely topped and tailed by some memorable, and quietly seductive shows. My top five are Picasso, Mark Wallinger, Gerhard Richter, Sophie Calle and The Sacred Made Real.Picasso: Challenging the Past, National Gallery, London (February-June)
Originally shown in Paris, where Picasso’s paintings featured alongside works that had directly inspired them, this became a much tighter, more focused exhibition by the time it arrived in London. It was all the Read more ...
mark.hudson
2010 begins with a worldbeating blockbuster capable of breaking all attendance records – and it ends with another. It’s more than 40 years since Britain saw a major exhibition of the work of Vincent van Gogh; 40 years in which the tormented Dutch genius has gone from being merely an extremely famous and influential painter to, by common consent, the world’s favourite artist, the man who sacrificed himself for his art, whose light-filled canvases tell us most about what we think art should be – never mind that many of them are of dark, rain-drenched Dutch fields.The Royal Academy’s The Real Read more ...
theartsdesk
The morning after the day before has dawned. If you're not inclined to join the shopping queues, theartsdesk is happy to suggest alternatives. Our writers recommend all sorts of cultural things you could get up to in the next week.See Wicked. This smart, feisty show is not just for teenage girls (though heaven knows they’ll thank you for taking them) but will tweak at the imagination and tickle the funny bone of anyone who’s ever contemplated the back-story of The Wizard of Oz. Stephen Schwartz’s zingy score is one of the best to have come out of Broadway in the last decade and you really Read more ...
sue.steward
Every day till 3 January theartsdesk will carry a survey of one of the arts we cover. We begin with Photography. Photography books are exploding on to the market like fireworks just as the book as a tangible object is becoming increasingly endangered. And with so many titles emerging from established and pop-up publishers, it’s a hard task to pin them down to the best of 2009 without some shocking omissions. So I’ll call them “Favourites” - and await cries of outrage about who’s in and who’s out.
First, some regretted omissions: the National Portrait Gallery’s Beatles to Bowie exists thanks Read more ...
fisun.guner
There was a time, not long ago in fact, when contemporary art could seem all too wrapped up in its own juvenile cleverness. It was all about being ironic and irreverent. Certainly a lot of it was achingly self-referential. But we eventually got fed up with all that. What’s more, we now live in less frivolous, more fearful times: recession has hit and the sea waters are rising, ready to flood us out and turn our congested cities into swampy, primitive marshland, like an apocalyptic J G Ballard novel.So now the mood music is sombre, more earnest. Artists have once again turned their attentions Read more ...
fisun.guner
Walk into the gaping mouth of the metal container featured in Miroslaw Balka’s installation at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and you are plunged into a disorientating darkness. Unnerved, you shuffle forward, passing and perhaps finding comfort in the ghostly presence of other limbs, other bodies which are also shuffling uncertainly, all awareness of spatial relationships denied in the enveloping blackness.Balka, a Polish artist born 13 years after the end of the Second World War, has become known as a Holocaust artist. He mines personal memories of growing up in post-war Warsaw, and mixes these Read more ...
Jasper Rees
After the opening earlier this autumn of the reconfigured Ceramic Galleries, the Victoria & Albert Museum's renovation continues. Here is a selection of exhibits on permanent display in the newly reopened Medieval and Renaissance Galleries - Fisun Güner reviews the display elsewhere in theartsdesk.
The Robinson Casket, from Kotte, Ceylon, c. 1557
The Burghley Nef salt cellar, Paris, 1527-8
Andrea Riccio: Shouting Horseman, Padua, c 1510-15
Giovanni Antonio Baffo: Harpsichord, Venice, 1574
Giovanni Pisano: Figure of the Crucified Christ, Italy, 1285-1300
Salamander Pendant, Europe, late Read more ...
fisun.guner
Perhaps we think we’ve got the whole thing more or less sewn up in the nurture versus nature debate. DNA profiling, gene studies, twin studies, inherited traits - this is the stuff we read about almost daily and it is all meant to tell us who we are. At any rate we seem to live in a culture obsessed with genealogy, which is perhaps as much to do with living as atomised units as it to do with the latest research about genes, or what used to be called heredity.Or perhaps the fixation that has more to do with the television series which gets expert genealogists to look into the family tree of Read more ...
josh.spero
If Andrew Graham-Dixon's arts career ever goes belly-up, there is surely a microphone with his name on it at Radio 4, so warm and confident and trustworthy is his voice. Judging, however, by his new three-part programme on BBC Four, The Art of Russia, there is no chance of this happening soon.The first episode is entitled "Out of the Forest", describing how the Russian people under Ivan the Terrible emerged from their wooded subjugation by the Mongols, but the story Graham-Dixon starts with - how they got there in the first place and how they survived - is at least as interesting.It was - as Read more ...