Eric Coombes The near-destruction in the western world of a centuries-long tradition of visual education could be described – hyperbolically but not misleadingly – as having been accomplished overnight.

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nginx/1.17.10 The inherited gifts of that tradition are now being casually, ungratefully and even malevolently thrown away. In its chronologically long-range survey, What Happened to Art Education? provides

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the context in which […]

Eric Coombes responds to an editorial about the art cash cow Is a celebrity a person ‘famous for being famous’, or

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nginx/1.17.10 merely ‘someone in the media that one had never heard 404 Not Found of’. Despite being obscure – in this paradoxical and mysterious mode of obscurity – celebrities, however ill-informed and stupid

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they might be, are entitled to have […]

…by the frivolity and lack of ambition and academic rigour in the 2014 Reith

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Lectures. Immediately after his predictably rapturous greeting at the first performance, Grayson Perry raised the question of why he was asked to give this year’s Reith Lectures. Well, for the

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nginx/1.17.10 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 wrote it. Disagreeable though it is, perhaps

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nginx/1.17.10 one should occasionally draw attention to such material, and subject it to closer inspection. Those who can bear to do so, should read Stephen

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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 2011) Matthijs Van Boxsel cites, in The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity, a ‘Fame Machine’ devised by Villiers de l’Isle

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nginx/1.17.10 Adam, (1883) in which fame could be manufactured ‘by organic means’. Simply put,

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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 allowed conceptual art to prosper uncritically After the

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recent change of government, this might be a suitable moment

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