Laura Gascoigne January/February 2019 The buzz of anticipation in the COL Ballroom in Davenport Iowa is audible, the audience murmurating like a flock of starlings; then the first twangs of an electric guitar tuning up, followed by a smoky voice: “I’m going to ask one question before we start: Are y’all experienced?” “Yeah!” roars the crowd, unleashing a 10-minute guitar […]
Laura Gascoigne November/December 2019 In October of last 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 auction house promised to take collectors “on a journey through the great civilisations […]
Laura Gascoigne September/October 2019 Among the many examples of the wit and wisdom of Sir Thomas Beecham is the story of the great conductor seeing a 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 to Boris […]
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 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 […]
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 Christ in a slice of burnt toast is perfectly OK. (That year’s Ig Nobel prize for economics went to the Italian government for […]
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 […]
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 […]
