Jemima Kirke of TV show Girls discusses how women have always made art, even if they’ve been absent from the history books (and gallery walls). This short film made by the Tate investigates the role of women as makers, not just muses – from Lee Miller to the Guerrilla Girls.
At least two guiding spirits hover around To Leave a Light Impression, the new show by British artist Darren Almond at White Cube, Bermondsey. The most obvious is Charles Darwin, in whose footsteps Almond followed to make several of his images. The other is the lesser-known Scottish nature writer, Nan Shepherd, whose book, The Living Mountain, provides the […]
While Dasha Zhukova was all apologies yesterday concerning what some observers have dubbed the “Racist Chair” fiasco—in which Russian socialite and arts patron Zhukova was pictured on Russian fashion website Buro 24/7 sitting atop a Bjarne Melgaard sculpture of a black woman trussed up to form the shape of a chair—Melgaard and his dealer, Gavin Brown, are taking a different tack. In […]
Any sense of real subversion or originality Emin ever conveyed has long since been packaged, copyrighted, and reproduced as kitsch self-caricature. An interview in the latest issue of Time Out reads like a cut-and-paste summary of previous public statements: Emin’s views on life boiled down to bullet points: • She is oppressed as a woman artist. […]
Bjarne Melgaard’s black woman in the shape of a chair – as seen in the now-notorious photoshoot of Roman Abramovich’s girlfriend Dasha Zhukova – has been totally misunderstood. The contemporary art world likes to think it has a common touch. While classical music is for the elite and the literary novel a minority taste, the […]
William Burroughs’s photographs offer real insight into his written work. Lynch’s and Warhol’s images pale by comparison. “A picture just means I know where I was every minute,” Andy Warholonce said. “That’s why I take pictures. It’s a visual diary.” In this instinct, Warhol was, as always, ahead of the game. One senses that he would […]
From the 17th-century painter who repeatedly depicted a woman beheading a man to the last great surrealist, Louise Bourgeois, here are 10 women artists who took on the patriarchy and won.
MoMA’s many expansions and redesigns have destroyed one of the most unique and precious public experiences of modern art. Who is Glenn D Lowry? A particular modern problem is that megalomania, especially when it involves real estate development, is the disturbance of many faceless men. And a faceless man is a difficult enemy.
A dog in a shirt. Sounds silly, looks great – when it’s a greyhound (picked, presumably, from thousands) styled by the house of Trussardi.
Can visual art offer solace, hope and reassurance as music can? The writer chooses the works that make him feel less alone. It comes naturally to most of us to think of music as therapeutic. Almost all of us are, without training, DJs of our own souls, deft at selecting pieces of music that will enhance or […]
The critic of today’s art is ironically its biggest benefactor: Perry has taken a fifth-rate talent and made himself an old master. In the great game of contemporary art, Grayson Perry is a master. He has perfected the move that trumps all others: denouncing the art world from within. His Reith lectures, to be broadcast on Radio 4 […]
Crotchless trousers, baths of excrement, John Cage, Yoko Ono and Marina Abramovic … in the first of a series of exclusive films with the Tate, in which stars give potted histories of art movements, Frank Skinner opens up the wild world of performance art.
Forget pickled sheep and unmade beds – Peter Doig’s new show will turn the Scottish National Gallery into a temple of painterly delights. The pleasure principle struggles for recognition these days as a measure of art appreciation. The pleasure of paint in particular, with life-drawing as its grammar, has been brushed aside with gestures heavy in conceptual irony. There […]
Her magnificent sculptures conjure up vanished lives, lost voices and forgotten loves – and sit easily alongside modern masters.
Canadian name-brand art reporter, Sarah Thornton, has pulled a Greg Smith, today, penning a screed for TAR Magazine entitled “Top 10 reasons NOT to write about the art market.” In it, the “Seven Days in the Art World” author concludes that the subject is too corrupt to report on and therefore she will shift away from this kind […]
The titles of Damien Hirst‘s spot paintings give them a slightly menacing, as well as a dangerously attractive, air: Cocaine Hydrochloride, Morphine Sulphate, Bovine Albumin, Butulinium Toxin A. Their relentless, insistent brightness feels almost bad for you. No wonder one group of paintings is called Controlled Substances. Yet they have no discernable secrets, and that’s part of the deal. […]