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 school in the remote Auvergne, although a good deal less winsome. It focused on the lives of the Hutchinson […]

Laura Gascoigne 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 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 23rd by Sue MacGregor, 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 8 of 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 can no longer walk into a room and say: “Hi guys!” 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 an urgent 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 2016 inched the Doomsday Clock […]

Laura Gascoigne July/August 2018 When the betting opened on this year’s Turner Prize in April, Forensic Architecture were favourites to win at 13/8. Architects just can’t stay away from art; they keep turning up in the Turner like bad pennies. It’s only three years since the prize was won by Assemble, that well-meaning group of socially minded young things who […]

A survey by the Office for National Statistics in May revealed that the British are changing their spending habits. Instead of filling our homes to the rafters with consumer durables and not-so-durables, we’re spending our spare cash on ‘experiences’, including recreation and, yes, culture. “People are interested in servicing a lifestyle rather than buying stuff,” one trend forecaster commented in […]

Laura Gascoigne May/June 2018 Was Stone Age society more open-minded than ours? In December, just before Instagram was flooded with pictures of Kim Kardashian’s 37-year-old butt crack, Facebook decreed that an image featuring the front bottom of the 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf was “dangerously pornographic” and removed it, until forced to apologise two months later to the statue’s owner, the […]

Laura Gascoigne March/April 2018 In the Royal Academy’s Tennant Gallery a man in goggles is lurching around waving his arms like someone conducting an orchestra on ketamine. It could be a piece of performance art, but it’s too amusing. In fact the man isn’t air-conducting, he’s air-drawing and the results are appearing in real time on a screen. Time is […]