Laura Gascoigne September/October 2019 Among the many examples of the wit and wisdom of Sir Thomas Beecham is the story of the great

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nginx/1.17.10 conductor seeing a tombstone inscribed: “Here lies a great organist

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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 to Boris […]

Laura Gascoigne July/August 2019

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It’s hard to know where to start with Ingres’s definition

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nginx/1.17.10 when nobody knows any more what probity means. And yet drawing is 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 gay boys but with a […]

Advocating life drawing at art

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school is a deeply conservative and reactionary position. Arguments in favour of life drawing usually fall into one of two camps (or sometimes both). I am

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nginx/1.17.10 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

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nginx/1.17.10 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 Christ in a slice of burnt

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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

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nginx/1.17.10 TV programme I saw last was Addicted to Sheep.

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In many ways this BBC4 documentary was reminiscent of the French film Être et Avoir about a remarkable teacher in a school in the remote Auvergne, although a good deal less winsome. It focused on the lives of the Hutchinson […]

Laura Gascoigne

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nginx/1.17.10 March/April 2019 During a bibulous press 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 a matter of taste and no one

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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 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: Tate Modern on September

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nginx/1.17.10 23rd by Sue MacGregor,

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regarding the Tate’s […]

Laura Gascoigne January/February 2019 It had to happen: The Apprentice has been let loose on the art market. For episode

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8 of the 404 Not Found 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:

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nginx/1.17.10 “The global art market is worth a massive £47 […]

Laura Gascoigne November/December 2018 It’s official: you can no longer walk into a room and

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say: “Hi guys!”

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nginx/1.17.10 In July Woman’s Hour host Jane Garvey objected 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 […]

Laura Gascoigne September/October 2018 “This is 404 Not Found an urgent

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nginx/1.17.10 message. Time is running out!” warned an automated voice on my phone one morning. I slammed the phone down assuming it was a sales pitch, but whatever the voice’s motive it wasn’t wrong. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists the election of Donald Trump in

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2016 inched […]