Read my updated post on art and ethics - with a (very) modest proposal about contemporary art and modernism - by clicking here.Above, Rodney Graham's 'Three Musicians'. No reason.
Monday, 22 March 2010
New! 'Ethic Minority 2' at Art21
Read my updated post on art and ethics - with a (very) modest proposal about contemporary art and modernism - by clicking here.Above, Rodney Graham's 'Three Musicians'. No reason.
Monday, 15 March 2010
New! Hugh Mendes at Saatchi Online
Hugh Mendes takes on the troubled legacy of photorealist painting - and wins! Read my piece here.Monday, 8 March 2010
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
New! Me And Giulio Romano Down By The Schoolyard
It’s good, useless fun to pre-emptively define the times you live in. Nicholas Bourriaud’s confusingly limned term “Altermodern,” used to define works in last year’s Tate Triennial and, by extension, contemporary society as a whole, dropped out of parlance as soon as we got used to its pronunciation. Charles Saatchi’s 1999 show, New Neurotic Realism – a compendium of mainly loose-limbed realist painting, including Cecily Brown, Martin Moloney, and Dexter Dalwood – was an unsuccessful attempt at drawing the line under the YBAs. Even Rauschenberg’s and Johns’s “Neo-Dada” back in the late-50s had a lame-duck ring about it. It’s not only our era that has found its unique identity nigh-impossible to define, although the teeth-grinding muddling over “aughts” and “aughties,” “naughts” and “naughties” is perhaps the one thing that is definitively of our time: an anxiety over what our era is actually defined by. (Imagine a “naughts” or “naughties” theme party – well, you won’t have to for long – and you get the picture). Art writers suffer from pre-emptive epochal-definition disorder almost as much as music writers do (remember the New Wave of New Wave? No?), but something particular has entered the argument recently — an attempt to define today’s art in reference to the art of the past, in particular, to the art of Mannerism.
Read the whole thing here.
Monday, 1 February 2010
New! Chris Ofili: A Mixtape at Art21
Discussed: Mixtapes/curating, David Hammons/Chris Ofili, Funkadelic/Chris Ofili, Jungle Brothers and Wu Tang Clan/Chris Ofili, Alice Coltrane/Chris Ofili, Gregory Isaacs/Chris Ofili, Minnie Riperton/Chris Ofili, Culture/Chris Ofili.Read the whole thing here.
Update: kind words from museyon.com - merci!
Saturday, 23 January 2010
Belated best of 2009!
Ben Street, Columnist, Letter from London
[Caveat: one of the requirements of writing an end-of-year best-of list is that you remember what you've seen right from the beginning of the year, and I'm not sure that the pieces of art I remember seeing this year are necessarily the best ones. (I can remember, for instance, Adel Abdessemed's fighting animals video at David Zwirner in New York quite clearly, although I thought it was pretty rubbish as art). The other requirement is that you demonstrate a) that you're an enormously well-traveled and cosmopolitan person by featuring art from a broad range of far-flung locations and b) that you have privileged access to the most obscure and under-the-radar art events which most ordinary mortals won't even have heard about. So, actually, the best art show I saw this year was a video installation down a mineshaft in Azerbaijan, but in the interest of the reader, I'll try and keep it relatively mainstream. So: this is a list of (mostly) individual works of art that I've seen this year that have both stubbornly remained in my memory and are, I think, really good.]
1. Charles Ray’s sculpture, Boy with Frog, at the Punta della Dogana, Venice
2. Tacita Dean’s film, Michael Hamburger, at Tate Britain
3. Johanna Billing’s film, Magical World, at Camden Arts Centre
4. John McCracken’s plank pieces at Inverleith House, Edinburgh
5. Rodney Graham’s film, Coruscating Cinnamon Granules, at Jeu de Paume, Paris
6. Eva Hesse’s Studiowork at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
7. Gregorio Fernandez’s sculpture, Dead Christ, at The Sacred Made Real, the National Gallery
8. Sophie Calle’s installation, Take Care of Yourself, at the Whitechapel Gallery
9. Fred Sandback’s string pieces in The Russian Linesman at the Hayward Gallery
10. Canova’s model for his tomb of Titian at Infinitum, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice
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