Everyone wants to be a free thinker, or at least to be seen by others as thinking freely. Sometimes we imagine even our most embarrassing acts of conformism as daring ventures of freedom.
The terms we use to express this …
Meet Brazil’s art cannibals
One could chew over the Western canon heavies, the Brazilian cultural critic Oswald de Andrade believed, and still spew out something singularly Brazilian — a sensible enough proposition, you might think at first blush. After all, creativity is a parasitic …
Antisemitism stains the art world
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 …
The North East is too nostalgic
“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 …
Kandinsky was betrayed by Left and Right
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 …
Why we need more Kurt Cobains
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 …
Julian Assange is no fool
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 …
ChatGPT will kill off the Romantic genius
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 …
In defence of showing Nazi art
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 …
Philip Guston’s fight against evil
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 …