… when branding and art formed a marriage of convenience, argues artist John Kelly. 1988

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is the seminal year, the year that our concepts of art, money and values changed irredeemably. It was the year I came

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nginx/1.21.1 to London as a 23-year-old artist, having taken an opportunity to play league cricket in London. It was a chance for a young […]

Charles Thomson reviews

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the unexpurgated life story of Charles Saatchi. “Ad man you’re a bad

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nginx/1.21.1 man”, proclaimed the artist collective Bank bluntly about Charles Saatchi in 1997. In 2004, Guardian art critic, Adrian Searle, praised Saatchi’s popularist approach, eye and humour in his New Blood show, but drubbed the curatorial incoherence. Sir Peter Blake has refused to sell his work […]

From the Hayward and the ICA to the Royal Academy, and from the public to the private sector, Angus Stewart compares

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and contrasts the qualities of works on show in London. The British Art

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nginx/1.21.1 Show at The Hayward Gallery should be lively – there are 39 artists. It is, according to the Southbank Centre, recognised as the most ambitious and […]

Artist Paul Wilks responds to Eric Coombes’s tour de force of an essay

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(Criticism and the collapse of culture, The Jackdaw Mar-Apr 2011) Matthijs Van Boxsel cites, in The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity, a ‘Fame Machine’ devised by Villiers de l’Isle Adam, (1883)

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nginx/1.21.1 in which fame could be manufactured ‘by organic means’. Simply put, the ‘machine’ is a theatre but with […]

Dr Eric Coombes looks back over the period since 1997 and identifies the collapse in standards of art criticism which has

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allowed conceptual art to prosper uncritically After the recent change of government, this might be a suitable moment to look back to the year in which the recently ejected gang

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nginx/1.21.1 of liars, buffoons and crooks first came to office. […]