In recent 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 one-track mindset which, in these pages, is called State Art. This sinister subversion of the institutions, predicted before and after the last war by Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and… Continue reading Tate Britain needs its identity back
Is there a doctor in the House?
Dennis Skinner once quipped loudly across the Commons to a faltering Cecil Parkinson at the Despatch Box, ‘It’s the in-breeding that does it!’ I was reminded of this amusing sneer when Doctor Maria Balshaw was announced as Serota’s replacement, an elevation met with the customary uncritical lauding with which a fawning Fourth Estate now greets… Continue reading Is there a doctor in the House?
Has the Arts Council betrayed its origins?
Serota takes over at the Arts Council this month, 47 years after first being employed by the same body as a regional arts officer in what was his first job after university. In the interval the Council has developed into a blunt instrument by which State Art, an ethos it co-authored with Serota during his… Continue reading Has the Arts Council betrayed its origins?
Art education is stuck!
Two years ago someone suggested I answer the 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 poverty of tuition and when degree shows have… Continue reading Art education is stuck!
Pictures of nothing and very like
John Moores Exhibition 2016 Most of Europe’s countries are either bankrupt or in economic meltdown, their infrastructure crumbling and public services reduced; the Middle East and Levant are in post-apocalyptic ruin, in part the result of lies told in our own Parliament; an exodus of desperate humanity is seeking refuge from a criminal death-cult; innocents… Continue reading Pictures of nothing and very like
Der Clapham Strassenbahn
When very young, and when not train spotting, I was a keen bus spotter. It was an ideal apprenticeship for a fledgeling art historian. It involved identifying, sometimes at a considerable distance (through rain), the beautifully crafted, hand-built models, of which there were many different marques and specifications. Every town corporation in the county had… Continue reading Der Clapham Strassenbahn
Glyn Thompson: Duchamp’s Urinal – I – He Lied
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.
