Enjoying free speech since 1984. Your daily dose of anti-propaganda!
Venice during the opening week of the Biennale is the epicentre of the art world. Dealers rub shoulders with artists, sharing champagne and taking speedboats to after-parties in decaying palazzos. It is, at once, glamorous and intoxicating.
In theory, this …
“We had nowt, but we were happy” became my grandmother’s catchphrase in her later years. I was never sure if she was being serious, not least because I knew how grim the Depression had been in the pit villages of …
Expressionism, Nikolaus Pevsner snootily pronounced, was “the art of the ugly, an heroic stylisation of the hideous”. Wassily Kandinsky, its most exemplary adherent, was taxed with the charge of producing “art for art’s sake”. There is, admittedly, some truth to …
It’s been 30 years since Kurt Cobain blew his own head off with a shotgun. It’s impossible to imagine mainstream rock success in bed with that kind of despondency in this day and age. Rap might harbour that kind of …
Earlier this month, the Russian dissident artist Andrei Molodkin announced that he would seal a number of masterpieces — including a Picasso, Rembrandt and Warhol — in a safe designed to destroy them with acid were Julian Assange to die …
You have to salute the brass balls of the Japanese literary novelist Rie Kudan. She was accepting one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, the Akutagawa Prize. The judges were hosing her new novel, The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy, down …
Slightly bedraggled, a Royal British Legion poppy wreath hangs on the railings outside Museum Arnhem. In the pretty sculpture garden that overlooks the Rhine as it flows into the Netherlands from Germany stands a monument to the soldiers of the …
Two years late and trailing clouds of derision after the Boston Museum of Fine Arts didn’t feel it could mount the exhibition without a confetti shower of trigger warnings and leaflets advising on “Emotional Preparedness”, the Philip Guston retrospective finally …
“I decided long ago that one must paint terror as well as beauty from life.” So says the titular character in “Pickman’s Model”, a short story by HP Lovecraft about how artists make monsters — or become them. Pickman’s paintings …
Turns out I’m still hated in Liverpool, even though I’m actually a fan of the Scouse. Wandering around Blue Dot Festival a month ago, I stopped to poach a fag off of a gaggle of Liverpudlians sat around the main …
Lost in thought again, I pace the humming street with my eyes down. They get into less trouble that way. If the pavements weren’t so cluttered with abandoned rented bicycles and e-scooters, I’d try walking backwards.
I am brooding over …
Think of poor Antonio Mini. Once a student of Michelangelo, Mini is now remembered as the most famous slacker in the history of European art. One day, the maestro sketched a couple of Virgins and instructed his pupil to copy …
“Creative” activities for little children tend to fall into two categories: unconstrained mess-making, and strict conformity to a pre-prepared template. The former encompasses the kind of smear and splatter “art” adoring parents pin to the fridge, while the latter looks …
Jerome Rothenberg, aged 91, has made immeasurable contributions to American poetry over the past seven decades. Born in New York in 1931, he first came onto the scene in 1959 with New Young German Poets, the unintended fruit of his …
It’s not exactly headline news if I insist that the Swedish auteur, Ingmar Bergman, was one of the very greatest filmmakers of all time, but when I immersed myself in his films while living alone last winter, they hit me …