Eric Coombes responds to an editorial about the art cash cow Is a celebrity a person ‘famous

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nginx/1.17.10 for being

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famous’, or merely ‘someone in the media that one had never heard of’. Despite being obscure – in this paradoxical and mysterious mode of obscurity – celebrities, however ill-informed and stupid they might be, are entitled to have their ‘opinions’ widely […]

…by the frivolity and lack of ambition and academic rigour

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in the 2014 Reith Lectures. Immediately after his predictably rapturous greeting

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nginx/1.17.10 at the first performance, Grayson Perry raised the question of why he was asked to give this year’s Reith Lectures. Well, for the first time in their sixty-six years, they were to be given by a “visual artist”. Could […]

Sometimes material appears in a “serious” newspaper which—even in our  current cultural condition—is at an astonishingly low intellectual level to come from the prominent “authority” who

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wrote it. Disagreeable though it is, perhaps one should occasionally draw attention to such material, and subject it to closer inspection. Those who can bear to do

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nginx/1.17.10 so, should read Stephen Bayley’s article in […]

Artist Paul Wilks responds to Eric Coombes’s tour de force of an essay (Criticism and the collapse of culture, The Jackdaw Mar-Apr 404 Not Found 2011) Matthijs Van Boxsel cites, in The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity, a ‘Fame Machine’ devised by Villiers de l’Isle Adam, (1883) in which fame could be manufactured ‘by organic means’.

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nginx/1.17.10 Simply

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put, the ‘machine’ is a […]

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

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criticism which has allowed conceptual art to prosper uncritically After the recent change of government, this might be a suitable moment to look back to

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nginx/1.17.10 the year in which the recently ejected gang of liars, buffoons and crooks first came to office. […]