Bristol University is building a new library. The very idea is enough to send shivers down the spine: any British institution that decides to build something new is almost certain to add to the accumulated ugliness of the world. And so it is in this case. The design that the University has accepted combines banality with monstrosity: a combination that, […]

State Art is like a virus, it knows no boundaries and spreads like wildfire. In fact, it’s worse than a virus because once it’s arrived you can’t get rid of it because there’s seemingly no cure. And there are plenty of students actually volunteering to contract it. And national boundaries are no protection for it spreads by telepathic brainwashing. This […]

Anthony Daniels I see that the architect, Richard Rogers, is to retire at the age of 87. This is an excellent thing, of course, but unfortunately it comes seventy years too late. Rogers has done as much as anyone to make the world a little uglier (and locally, much uglier); in that sense he has been very successful. He has […]

Alexander Adams This article briefly outlines what happened with the toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol, why it happened and its ramifications. On 7 June 2020, a large protest took place in the centre of Bristol, ostensibly against racism. The large gathering was in contravention on national and local restrictions on public gatherings due to COVID-19. No dispersal […]

Goodness knows we have more than enough to mope about these dark days, even without the current plague, what with the evenings drawing in and the weather on the turn, again. It seems to happen every year, Winter. Was it always like this, this cold, wet, windy, foggy, snowy thing, with a spot of flu thrown in for good measure? […]

Michael Daley Questions proliferate on the disappeared $450 million Leonardo Salvator Mundi. Where is it? Who owns it? Who still believes it a Leonardo? Will it be exhibited this year at the Paris Louvre’s big Leonardo exhibition, as promised? Can it be true, as an artnet blogger now claims (on the claimed say-so of “two principals involved in” Christie’s 2017 […]

Laura Gascoigne November/December 2020 In the introduction to his 1951 book The Greeks and the Irrational, the classicist E R Dodds recalled a chance meeting in front of the Parthenon marbles with a young man who confessed: “This Greek stuff doesn’t move me one bit”. When Dodds asked him why, he replied: “Well, it’s all so terribly rational, if you […]

Presented with an easy choice between making a great deal of money for doing nothing and telling the truth, Duchamp voted for his pocket.
Glyn Thompson’s meticulous research here proves that virtually everything Duchamp said in 1966 about Fountain was a calculated lie. This inconvenient truth, which many scholars refuse to acknowledge even in the face of compelling evidence, is that Duchamp stole the idea, and the work, from Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.