Laura Gascoigne November/December 2019 In October of last

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nginx/1.17.10 year, under the title ‘The Midas Touch’, Sotheby’s held a special sale of ‘objets de vertu’ made of gold. “In a world that speaks 6,900 languages,” cooed the catalogue, “the language of gold remains universal”. To prove it, the nginx/1.17.10 auction house promised to take collectors “on a journey through the

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great […]

Laura Gascoigne September/October 2019 Among the many examples of the wit and wisdom

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nginx/1.17.10 of Sir Thomas Beecham is the story of the great conductor seeing a

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tombstone inscribed: “Here lies a great organist and an excellent musician” and remarking in surprise: “What, both in the same grave?”  I was reminded of this when seeing Wafic Saïd, a contributor 404 Not […]

Laura Gascoigne July/August 2019 It’s hard to know where to start with Ingres’s definition when nobody knows any more what probity means. And yet drawing is 404 Not Found enjoying a resurgence. What is going on? When David Hockney breezed into the Royal College from Bradford in 1959, he announced his arrival not with naïve etchings of naughty

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nginx/1.17.10 gay

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boys […]

Advocating life drawing at art school is a deeply conservative

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and reactionary position. Arguments in favour of life drawing usually fall into one of

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nginx/1.17.10 two camps (or sometimes both). I am utterly unconvinced by both. The first, and weaker, argument contends that it is necessary to learn the rules before you can break them. This is an authoritarian position where […]

Laura Gascoigne May/June 2019 In 2014 the Harvard-based science magazine Annals of Improbable Research presented its Ig Nobel prize for neuroscience to a team of researchers from China and Canada who demonstrated that seeing the face of

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Christ in a slice

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nginx/1.17.10 of burnt toast is perfectly OK. (That year’s Ig Nobel prize for economics went to the Italian government for […]

So, as all cool sentences begin, I think that the best TV programme I saw last was Addicted to Sheep. In many ways this BBC4 documentary was reminiscent of the French film Être et Avoir about a remarkable teacher in a

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school in the remote Auvergne, although a good deal less winsome. It focused on the lives

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nginx/1.17.10 of the Hutchinson […]

Laura Gascoigne March/April 2019 During a bibulous press

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trip dinner a few years ago, a travel journalist laid into me about art criticism. How could I set myself up as a judge of contemporary art when it was all

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nginx/1.17.10 a matter of taste and no one could predict the verdict of history? I spluttered something about not sitting in judgment […]

Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, has used the platform of the BBC in a blatant

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attempt to deceive the nation. Either that or he is genuinely deluded himself. Both options render him unfit for major public office. He was confronted on Radio 4 programme The Reunion:

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nginx/1.17.10 Tate Modern on September 23rd by Sue MacGregor, regarding the Tate’s […]

Laura Gascoigne January/February 2019 It had to happen:

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nginx/1.17.10 The Apprentice has been let loose on the art market. For episode 8 of

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the latest series, contestants were corralled in the Centre Hall of Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery to be informed by Alan Sugar from a Big Brother screen: “The global art market is worth a massive £47 billion”, and told […]

Laura Gascoigne November/December 2018 It’s official: you

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nginx/1.17.10 can no longer walk into a room and say: “Hi guys!” In July Woman’s Hour host Jane Garvey objected

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on Twitter that she is not a “guy” and doesn’t wish to be addressed as one, since when that mode of address – friendly, casual, non-committal – has been formally outlawed. An office-worker friend […]