Things have gone rather quiet on the mortality front since queues stretched around the White Cube block in Mason’s Yard for a sight of Damien Hirst’s £50m sculpture For the Love of God. In those days of skulls and diamonds, Paul Wilks wrote a letter to The Jackdaw lamenting the morbidity of contemporary art, wondering why two horrific world wars […]

Sixteen years ago, I wrote an article for a short-lived women’s art magazine called Make responding to a complaint on the letters page that only childless women could succeed as artists. Off the top of my head, I immediately thought of half a dozen artists who disproved this rule and I interviewed them for a piece called A Woman’s Work. […]

The Times – God bless its little cotton socks – has just been celebrating the triumphal return of the 1990s as a creative force. “Suddenly contemporary art” it crows, “was part of popular culture. The Royal Academy’s landmark Sensation show in 1997 was a turning point.” It was so indeed, but not exactly in the terms the article intends. Here […]

… when branding and art formed a marriage of convenience, argues artist John Kelly. 1988 is the seminal year, the year that our concepts of art, money and values changed irredeemably. It was the year I came to London as a 23-year-old artist, having taken an opportunity to play league cricket in London. It was a chance for a young […]

Charles Thomson reviews the unexpurgated life story of Charles Saatchi. “Ad man you’re a bad man”, proclaimed the artist collective Bank bluntly about Charles Saatchi in 1997. In 2004, Guardian art critic, Adrian Searle, praised Saatchi’s popularist approach, eye and humour in his New Blood show, but drubbed the curatorial incoherence. Sir Peter Blake has refused to sell his work […]