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 …
Yayoi Kusama doesn’t need a race reckoning
“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 …
Punk’s spirit is broken
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 …
Forgive my male gaze
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 …
Artists have forgotten how to draw
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 …
Should we let the kids be cats?
“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 …
Poetry has lost its violence
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 …
Ingmar Bergman’s moral horror show
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 …
Is the National Gallery’s Rubens a copy?
This has been a long argument. In a few days, I will have lived for 77 years, and for nearly half that time, I have been challenging the National Gallery in London over one of its showpiece paintings.
At issue …
The philistine war on AI art
Among the most ingenious moments in Kraftwerk’s admirable oeuvre is the point in 1981’s “Pocket Calculator” when a human voice self-contentedly sings: “By pressing down a special key / It plays a little melody.” The melody follows in confirmation. The …
Beauty has become our enemy
I was walking through the chaos of Times Square recently when, in search of some minor relief, I reflexively raised my head and focused on a space in the middle distance where I have been conditioned to expect the calming …
The art world’s lost sense of humour
“Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better, but the frog dies in the process.” Truer words than these famous ones of E.B. White’s have rarely been spoken, and so requiring an explanation for jokes has …
Interview 1755 – New World Next Week with James Evan Pilato
This week on the New World Next Week: Trudeau is on the stand as the Emergencies Act inquiry gets underway in Ottawa; Japan to bring in an integrated digital ID card; and AI art is winning prizes now.
The post …
Lucian Freud is finally exposed
In late 1940, the 18-year-old Lucian Freud sent a series of highly decorated letters to the renowned poet and critic Stephen Spender. The pair had become fast friends and, despite their 12-year age gap, would later become lovers. In their …
Why artists sell out
“I’m not green-lighting anything I don’t understand,” says Barry Lapidus, a studio executive at Paramount Pictures. “We’re going to stop developing these rarefied flights of fancy and start applying some good business sense to what we do here.”
This dialogue …
