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. 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 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 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 in the 2014 Reith 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 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 one should occasionally draw attention to such material, and subject it to closer inspection. Those who can bear to do 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 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’. 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 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 of liars, buffoons and crooks first came to office. […]