6 March 2015 • daniel barnes
In the run up to the general election, the Hayward Gallery is attempting to decode Britain’s present by having seven artists each curate a section that explores our cultural history.
27 February 2015 • daniel barnes
This week Ed Milliband said that a future Labour government would place the arts and the creative industries at the heart of its mission. It sounded a lot like something we wanted to hear, but in reality it was a crass bit of electioneering. It misses the mark by quite some margin, but it does help us to glimpse what we need to do about the state of the arts.
19 February 2015 • daniel barnes
Jackson Pollock is currently the subject of a show at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where one of his earliest pour paintings, Alchemy (1947), is the centrepiece. He will also be centre stage this summer when Tate Liverpool opens an exhibition of the relatively neglected Black Pouring paintings. This is one of those moments when an icon of art history reveals previously unseen depths.
13 February 2015 • daniel barnes
Auction week heralded the usual suspects: Richter, Hirst, Warhol, Fontanna, Boetti, Klein, Murillo, Twombly, Baselitz, Dubuffet, Basquaiat. Different works, but the same artists endlessly circulating the market.
6 February 2015 • daniel barnes
Damien Hirst sold a lot of very expensive art between 2007 and 2008. So much that he became the world’s most expensive living artist, which gave him the acumen to do whatever he liked. Next week, the seminal Pill Cabinet Lullaby, Winter is going under the hammer at Christie’s, but it has a curious history as an unfulfilled promise that had momentous effects.
30 January 2015 • daniel barnes
Christian Marclay has just opened his first UK solo show since 2010’s The Clock. It looks like a major exhibition in a massive commercial gallery with nothing to sell, as if he has tricked White Cube into doing something for the love of art alone. Recent developments suggest a quietly burgeoning trend towards making a greater effort to conceal commercial interests behind a veneer of pure art in the form of performance.
23 January 2015 • daniel barnes
Only three weeks ago, I joked that 2015 would see the advent of something I dubbed ‘Emoji expressionism’. It was a cruel quip about the absurdity of both new media art and artworld jargon, but little did I know that it was in fact a tongue-in-cheek prediction of things to come.
16 January 2015 • daniel barnes
This year Selfridges presents Bright Old Things – a selection of fourteen men and women who refuse to let old age slow them down and using retirement as an opportunity to try something new. Each Bright Old Thing is given a window to show their wares and has to produce a product that can be sold in the concept store. They range from the actor who paints chips and the actress who designs furniture to the food writer who makes art and the product designer who broadcasts to the universe.
9 January 2015 • daniel barnes
A spectre is haunting the artworld. In the foyer of Christie’s New York, at over twelve feet tall and made of painted steel, Jeff Koons’ Balloon Monkey (Orange) (2006-2013) presides over daily business.
1 January 2015 • daniel barnes
In order to combat this, contemporary art has developed jargon that purports to explain every nuance of the artworld, but it often only deepens the mystery.
23 December 2014 • daniel barnes
A Year of art in review
19 December 2014 • daniel barnes
Poju Zabludowicz, along with his wife Anita, runs the Zabludowicz Foundation, which supports young artists. By all accounts, they are gregarious, educated, good-hearted people who passionately support the arts because they are able to, so one wonders why they have become the subject of a boycott.
12 December 2014 • daniel barnes
James Franco is everywhere, doing everything, all the time. He is an actor, writer, musician, English Literature student, teacher, director and world war agitator. Now, like everyone else in Hollywood, he is an artist, but one who exposes the heartbreaking sycophancy and emptiness of the artworld.
5 December 2014 • daniel barnes
Ever since video killed the radio star, it has acted with impunity. Its latest crime has been to gorge on the Turner Prize.
28 November 2014 • daniel barnes
Ever since Tracey Emin said that it is impossible for a woman to have children and be a great artist, female artists have received attention in the male-dominated artworld.
21 November 2014 • daniel barnes
The Winter Pride Art Awards celebrated its second year last Saturday with a ceremony at Tobacco Dock. It was a glittering event, with wild entertainment, fine food and fine art, not to mention plenty of cocktails. Behind the glamorous veneer of an awards ceremony to celebrate young, emerging artists, Winter Pride has a serious and urgent mission which is so often overlooked in the wider artworld
14 November 2014 • daniel barnes
It all started when Snoop was staying at the Palazzo Versace hotel, where a Versace cushion was the inspiration for a painting that would later sell on eBay for $10,200.
6 November 2014 • daniel barnes
Sotheby’s has been sued over the misattribution of a painting which experts now say is a genuine Caravaggio
24 October 2014 • daniel barnes
In November 2011, Jerry Saltz announced on his Facebook page that he would pay anyone $155 to make him a fake Richter, Ryman, Flavin, Fontana, Duchamp, Hirst, Guyton, or Agnes Martin.
10 October 2014 • daniel barnes
Standing before Tracey Emin’s tiny new paintings in the vast galleries of White Cube Bermondsey, the entire reason for art’s existence unfurls: every line is a snatch of emotion, every drip a careful meditation, equal parts memory and fantasy, brought from artist to audience in an act of pure communication.
2 October 2014 • daniel barnes
A few years ago, I wrote that Creed’s Turner Prize winning Work No. 227 The lights going on and off (2001) was the first great artwork of the twenty-first century.
29 September 2014 • daniel barnes
Anselm Kiefer wants to turn Switzerland into a maritime nation.
22 September 2014 • daniel barnes
Miley Cyrus says her goal in life is ‘to not die a pop pop dumb dumb’.
12 September 2014 • daniel barnes
As autumn descends on London, the artworld is gearing up for the great tragic-comic circus of consumption and gossip that is Frieze Art Fair.
