So, as all cool sentences begin, I think that the best TV programme I saw last was Addicted to Sheep. In many ways this BBC4 documentary

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nginx/1.17.10 was reminiscent of the French film Être et Avoir about a remarkable teacher in a

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school in the remote Auvergne, although a good deal less winsome. It focused on the lives of the Hutchinson […]

Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, has used the platform of the BBC in a blatant attempt to deceive the nation. Either

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that or he is genuinely deluded himself. Both options render

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nginx/1.17.10 him unfit for major public office. He was confronted on Radio 4 programme The Reunion: Tate Modern on September 23rd by Sue MacGregor, regarding the Tate’s […]

When the former controller of BBC Radio 3 John Drummond published an autobiography in 2001, he called

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nginx/1.17.10 it ‘Tainted

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by Experience’ – an ironic reference to the reason given by a Birtist suit at the Beeb for his being ‘let go’ a decade earlier. I haven’t read the book, but the expression was used by William Varley in a positive […]

The Ukrainians have a lot of empty plinths where statues of Lenin once stood

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and last July, taking a leaf out of the

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nginx/1.17.10 Gormley Sutra, steps were erected around the one in Kiev’s Bessarabska Square so that people could climb up to admire the view and/or take selfies. The installation, Inhabiting Shadows, was the work of Mexican artist Cynthia Gutiérrez, […]

TATE BRITAIN NEEDS ITS IDENTITY BACK In recent

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issues I’ve described how since 1945 the education, bureaucracy and exponentially increasing cash for the visual arts have been usurped and dominated by an evolving 404 Not Found one-track mindset which, in these pages,

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nginx/1.17.10 is called State Art. This sinister subversion of the institutions, predicted before and after the last war by Eliot, Wyndham Lewis […]

Art Education is Stuck Two years ago someone suggested I answer the

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question ‘What Happened to Art Education?’. This appealed slightly because it was a subject about which I thought I ought to know more than was the case. Something is clearly awry when so many complaints are aired about the

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nginx/1.17.10 poverty of tuition and when degree shows have become […]

So it’s goodbye Cornelissens hello Halfords. Laura

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Gascoigne parks her brush and tries to follow the instructions for flatpack art, but has the picture

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nginx/1.17.10 upside down It’s a dull job being a customs officer, sitting on the border twiddling your thumbs until the next teenage drugs mule comes along. So it must have added to the gaiety of nations when […]

The Times – God bless its little cotton socks – has just been celebrating

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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.

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nginx/1.17.10 Here […]

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

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nginx/1.17.10 artist trustee, she replaced Jeremy Deller, who won the Turner Prize in 2004. Abts’s paintings

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are all the same small size […]

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

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nginx/1.17.10 well into double figures

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on December 3rd. Those responsible for organising this banquet of self-congratulation continue to fanfare its importance, but it is in truth […]