Of the 183 works by John Piper in the Tate’s collection none is currently on display. One of the major British artists of early Modernism does not have a single item of his work on show in the national collection of British art, of which, incidentally, he was once considered sufficiently eminent to serve as a trustee. How could such […]
For the last meeting of Tate trustees of which minutes have been posted on line (i.e. September 2012), only six of fourteen members bothered to show up. Perhaps it was raining. Trustees, you won’t need reminding, are there to oversee the vigilant running of quangos to ensure public interest is looked after. This is important when the Tate costs taxpayers […]
In the last issue I considered the case of a single-minded good artist, David Mulholland from Middlesbrough, whose memory, in the absence of any official recognition or support, has to be kindled for posterity’s sake by friends and family. By The Jackdaw’s usual standard of eliciting no comment whatsoever, this caused a considerable mailbag from many mentioning other artists who […]
In 2011 the Tate named two new trustees, one of whom is painter Tomma Abts. She is a 44-year-old German, recently appointed Professor of Painting at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, who won the Turner Prize in 2006. As an artist trustee, she replaced Jeremy Deller, who won the Turner Prize in 2004. Abts’s paintings are all the same small size […]
Last year it was Poussin in the National Gallery, this year Rothko at the Tate. There will have been other examples of vandalism in between these which galleries hushed up, and it is likely that you wouldn’t have known about the Rothko episode had it not been witnessed and photographed. Museums don’t like admitting to attacks on their collections because […]
Having slipped into its tedious annual routine, the Turner Prize is upon us again, at Tate Britain, until January 6th; the winner – £25,000 better off – is announced to a live television audience of well into double figures on December 3rd. Those responsible for organising this banquet of self-congratulation continue to fanfare its importance, but it is in truth […]
… 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 […]
The Turner Prize nominees and winners came up with a predictable set of embarrassing posters for the Olympics. Apart from the perpetrators themselves, no one could be found to say a good word about their efforts. Someone needs to get a grip. First we were presented with an inept logo which had cost £400,000 for what looked like two minutes […]
The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has bought for £362,500 the ship in a bottle by Yinka Shonibare which had sat ornamentally becalmed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square for the previous 18 months. It is the Greenwich museum’s job to collect ships and related tackle and, lately, any sea-related nonsense deemed ‘challenging’ by State Art’s omniscient spivs. It […]
Glyn Thompson, the pickler’s first teacher, sets the artist’s early record straight… Hirst scholars will have noted a change in the authorised chronology in the Tate Modern Hirst retrospective catalogue to a venerable biographical item, the entry for March 2002 (The Reliance, Leeds). In the corrected Tate chronology the former title, Damien Hirst’s Art Education, now reads as Fountain Footnotes […]
