Today, art can be almost anything. But there was a time in the not-so-distant past when abstraction was inconceivable, and it was believed that art could only represent something that already existed in the real world. There was a time when an object couldn’t be considered art unless it showed evidence of the artist’s touch. And until […]
Can One Make Works That Are Not “Works” of Art? This was a question asked by Duchamp in his notes from 1913, and remains being the essential question while considering the Richard Mutt Case. Exactly one hundred years ago, in 1917, the course of art history has been completely changed by a submission of a urinal […]
Photographed, then subsequently thrown away, by Alfred Stieglitz, urinated on by Brian Eno and sometimes cited as the work of a Bauhaus baroness rather than the man it is most commonly associated with, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is arguably the first piece of conceptual art ever, certainly the most famous ready made in art history, and has inspired […]
The year hasn’t been short of blockbuster surveys and brilliantly curated displays, as well as smaller, more focused surveys that have been unjustly overlooked but which have proved quietly groundbreaking in their own way. The best exhibitions, which are not, of course, always the ones with the biggest fanfare, nor even the best loans, usually […]
Richard Hamilton was an artist whose considerable ambition was to “get all of living” into his work. In his epoch-making collage of 1956,Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?,the living space is crowded with up-to‑the-minute objects of desire: the TV set, the vacuum cleaner, the tinned ham, the tape recorder, the body builder’s muscles, the cone-shape […]
From the streets of Manhattan Alan Cumming whips through the history of Pop Art in America and Britain, from Andy Warhol’s soup cans to Peter Blake’s blue jeans.