Hope springs eternal, so the poet sings, or dum spiro spero, as that wise and prudent old bird, King Charles I, would put it, and he should know. But then again, true as truth may be, I have to say there are times, and these not the least of them, when it would seem to

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shrunk to the merest […]

Rihanna is in trouble again. This time

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nginx/1.21.1 she has offended ‘the Hindu community’ by wearing a pendant featuring the elephant god Ganesha, a fashion choice denounced on Instagram as ‘mad disrespectful’. The Barbadian singer should have known

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better. She has previous in the fashion department, having already upset the Chinese community by dressing up in ancient Chinese costume for a […]

Across the last 30 years the narrative of official Contemporary Art has unfurled like a Chinese scroll. We can follow

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how, from around 1990, those commercial techniques pioneered to manufacture reputations by

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nginx/1.21.1 Charles Saatchi were adopted as a template by other speculators eager to cash in. This was the start of a racket which turned the art market into an […]

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Bristol University is building a new library. The very

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idea is

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nginx/1.21.1 enough to send shivers down the spine: any British institution that decides to build something new is almost certain to add to the accumulated ugliness of the world. And so it is in this case. The design that the University has accepted combines banality with monstrosity: a combination that, […]

Laura Gascoigne Thank God for books. When shut off from real life, you can see it reflected in novels. But how accurate is the

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nginx/1.21.1 reflection?

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Does the mirror distort? In month ten of the no-longer-new-abnormal I sat down with a stack of novels about artists. Some I’d read before, others were new, chief among them the fons et origo of […]

David Lee March/April 2021 Nothing much happened last year in the visual arts. The usual

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suspects promoted themselves with yards of trivia, usually about the NHS, but nothing serious was made except by those conventional sorts who go

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nginx/1.21.1 quietly about their business. National galleries tried to fill the gap by selling us ‘virtual’ and ‘digital’ ‘experiences’ by the dozen, but […]

Dick French A curious little book has just come out called The Death of Francis Bacon. The author, Max Porter, won the International Dylan Thomas

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Prize some time ago. Whenever awards are deployed I always think of Charlotte Rampling who, in her film The Swimming Pool, remarked: “Awards are like haemorrhoids, sooner or later every arsehole gets one.” It’s

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HOME ALONE Well here we still are – or perhaps not by the time you read this: goodness me,

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nginx/1.21.1 let’s

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hope so – but I do rather worry about how you’re all bearing up in these strange and straitened times. Social distancing is one thing, but this Social Hibernation altogether something else: and, with no release in prospect, it does […]