
Kenneth Noland: Stripes/ Plaids/ Shapes
As one of the leading figures of post-war abstract painting, Kenneth Noland’s commitment to line and colour is unparalleled.
As one of the leading figures of post-war abstract painting, Kenneth Noland’s commitment to line and colour is unparalleled.
Cornelia Parker’s work is all about that liminal thing and, in this show at Tate Britain, it looms large. Indeed, one quickly forms the impression that she – intentionally or otherwise – is making the art that this fractured, restless world deserves.
Back in 1991, when Damien Hirst began showing his Natural History works, the Daily Star ran the headline “£50,000 for fish without chips”.
Do you not feel that sometimes we become so swept up with the hidden meanings of art or with the artist’s identity that we forget to savour the sensation of art itself?
Brooding, silent, inert, the works in this exhibition are far beyond death, having passed through rigor mortis, decomposition and mumification… Read More
It was on a warm August morning back in 2014, sitting in a curry house in a side street off Brick Lane, when Gilbert told me he had been at Wembley for the 1966 World Cup Final.
Art is something we experience, and not just something we see. And learning this lesson is crucial if we are to avoid the very intellectual fabric of art being eroded and lambasted by travesties such as Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, which plays into the hands of populism but does egregious harm to the integrity of the experience art.
$69.3 million is a lot of money to spend on something you cannot touch, that does not occupy space and that cannot even be seen without flicking a switch. Now the dust has settled on Beeple’s epic auction debut, it is time to soberly consider whether it is worth it. Spoiler – it probably is! We are, after all, living in the future.
It’s been a while, but the column about the value of art is back. I wrote the first 100 instalments… Read More
Display Gallery is to present a series of expressionist cloudscapes by photographer Benedict Redgrove.
Young British artist Hayden Kays returns this spring with a new body of work.
Readers of this column will have noticed that I am the only person in the world who actually likes Damien Hirst despite not making any money from him.
In his latest exhibition, Gazing Ball Paintings, at Gagosian New York, Koons oversteps the mark of decency and demonstrates that the most horrifying thing about his art is its sincerity.
On the 24th anniversary of Francis Bacon’s death, 28th April 2016, the artist’s first definitive catalogue raisonne will be published, including over 100 previously unseen works and missing 4 that remain untraceable.
If you think about it, you’ll realise you’ve had a funny feeling too. London has felt incomplete, bereft as if part of the furniture is missing but you cannot quite put your finger on what it is or where it has gone.
In the fight again relativism and subjectivity in aesthetic judgements, I have been outlining how we might approach objective judgements of value.
One of GFest’s core functions is to remind us that although some of us are privileged to live without fear of state persecution or backward mob rule, not everybody in the world is. Thus the themes of this year’s festival is aptly (Complacent Present)…Fragile Future?
The perennial question that dare not speak its name on pain of heresy is this: what, precisely, is it about Basquiat that inspires such adoration and extravagance?
The death of Brian Sewell heralded the death of art criticism. Or so I said. It was an inflammatory claim, designed to rile, but there was a grain of anxious serious in it. Sewell was not just a contrarian, he was an astute critic of refined tastes and a conscientious objector.
A mystery Basquiat has appeared in Nashville, Tennessee. An untitled, unknown Basquiat was just gathering dust somewhere until Stevens auction house plucked it from obscurity.
Gibson’s work is characterised by a fascination with the subtle details of everyday life, where seemingly insignificant characters become heroes, strange happenings morph into life-changing epics and insignificant flourishes are seen as clues to a deeper mystery.
At this point in Frieze – that’s three days in for paupers, and five days for the elite – it is customary to begin to round up the highlights and to deliver a critical judgement.
Criticism and all aesthetic debate is founded on a toxic belief in subjectivity which reduces to relativism.
Leonardo DiCaprio has joined the ranks of the world’s top art collectors..