Today John Constable’s The Lock, painted in 1824, sold at Christie’s for £22.4 million. In the current art market of silly prices some lucky person got the bargain of their lives. Let us hope the picture will be placed in a museum, where people might enjoy it, instead of disappearing into a Swiss warehouse as the investment bauble of some […]

The tanks are opening at the Tate on July 18th. These are the very same tanks that stored oil in the days when Bankside served the function of generating electricity by burning Arabia’s finest. And if the ignoramuses in the Tate’s PR department start cooing, and they will – they will – about said tanks being the first of their […]

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. […]

The Tate recently 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 (48 […]