Wednesday 30 September 2009

New! Kapoortalism

There’s a big lump of birdshit in the eye of Joshua Reynolds. The painter and founder of theRoyal Academy, who once literally took a Titian painting to bits to better understand how he did what he did, stands immortalized in bronze in the Academy’s courtyard, waggling his metal brush reprehensively at a wall of giant stainless steel bubbles by Anish Kapoor, a more recent member of the Academy whose mid-career retrospective dominates the galleries of the building behind. The birdshit has landed capriciously, streaked in the sculpture’s eye, but it’s tempting to read it as clunky metaphor for Kapoor’s all-out assault on the neo-Palladian austerity of the Academy and the art-historical “standards” it represents. One in the eye for the stuffed shirts!


Monday 21 September 2009

Monday 7 September 2009

New! Hot Scots, Part Deux

The second and final installment of my review of the Edinburgh Art Festival can be found here.