Visual Arts Features
theartsdesk in Madrid: City of PhotographySunday, 08 August 2010
International photography festivals are rivalling rock festivals this summer - and rock festivals are featuring photographers. PhotoEspaña (PHE) Madrid beats the lot. Packed with surprise revelations, with central Madrid as the main stage, the fringe all around it, and the whole city involved in the Night of Photography PhotoMaratón, it’s a highly ambitious, even labyrinthine affair. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Los Angeles: Dennis Hopper (RIP) On ShowSunday, 25 July 2010
While most will be familiar with him as an actor, and some will know him also as a photographer and painter, few will be aware of the full extent of the late Dennis Hopper’s artistic practice. Read more... |
Interview: Michael Winner on collecting Donald McGillTuesday, 08 June 2010
This week a new exhibition with no pretence to seriousness opens at Tate Britain. Rude Britannia: British Comic Art is a comprehensive tour of a great national tradition: having a laugh in a line drawing. The show covers the boardwalk from Gilray and Cruikshank to Gerald Scarfe and Steve Bell. It also includes the work of a cartoonist and illustrator whose world view, more than any other, now seems deliciously quaint and old-fashioned: Donald McGill. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Chicago: Radical Invention in the Windy/Second CitySunday, 09 May 2010
On my previous trip to the Second City in 2009, the much-awaited Art Institute of Chicago extension wasn’t quite ready for visitors, but is now about to celebrate its first birthday, and it’s a treat. The Modern Wing adds 35 per cent more space to the Institute, bringing it up to a nice round one million square feet and making it America’s second biggest art museum after the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was designed by Renzo Piano, whose new wing (another glass-and-steel box) will... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Glasgow: Glasgow International Festival of Visual ArtSunday, 18 April 2010
During my two-day whistlestop tour of various galleries and arts venues across Glasgow, I’m afraid I didn’t spot one white bike. There are, apparently, 50 of them that punters are free to use for the two-week duration of the city’s second biennial International Festival of Visual Art. It’s a scheme that pays homage to the original Witte Fietsenplan (White Bike Plan) by radical Sixties Dutch movement Provos. Set up as a statement against consumerism, pollution and congestion,... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Newcastle: The AV FestivalSunday, 14 March 2010
At seven o'clock on a Friday night, with the first spring twilight of the year as a backdrop, Newcastle’s Civic Centre reverberated to a new composition for its Carillon bells. Mingling eerily with birdsong, it marked a rather different start to the weekend from the hoards of hen nights getting ready for a night on the Toon. This was the opening night of AV, the biennial international festival of electronic arts. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Sarnath BanerjeeSaturday, 13 March 2010
When the subversive graphic artist Sarnath Banerjee won a MacArthur grant he opted "to research the sexual landscape of contemporary Indian cities", embroiling himself in the aphrodisiac market of old Delhi and introducing the English reading public to the great Hindi word swarnadosh (erm, "nocturnal emissions"). Banerjee (b. 1972) is generally credited with having introduced the graphic novel to India. Incorrectly, as it happens; but with Corridor (2004) and The Barn... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Baku: Festival puts 'Azerbai-where?' on the mapSunday, 07 February 2010
It’s a rare national culture festival that presupposes its audience will have no knowledge whatsoever of the culture concerned - or even be able to locate the country itself on a map. But that, we must assume from the “Azerbai-where?” promotional bus ads, was the starting point last November for organisers of the BUTA Festival of Azerbaijan Art, a series of very well-connected art and music events in London going on this month. Read more... |
Is it too late to save the Cultural Olympiad?Friday, 05 February 2010
We’d almost blown the so-called Cultural Olympiad, and if the appointment of Ruth Mackenzie as artistic director had come a moment later than the turn of this year, we would have done. Not my opinion: this from Tony Hall of the Royal Opera House, and he chairs the board that appointed her. More than that, on Friday Hall was given a cross-bench seat in the House of Lords to thump the tub for the arts in 2012, and we’ll take notice then. Won’t we? Read more... |
So farewell to the FoundryThursday, 04 February 2010
My abiding memory of The Foundry is being held aloft by my throat by the landlord, Falklands veteran and notorious band manager Alan "Gimpo" Goodrick, as he accused me of stealing a Shirley Bassey album. I had been DJing for a book reading by Mark "Zodiac Mindwarp" Manning, and there was a lot of absinthe being drunk thanks to some fellow from The Idler. I knew at that point I shouldn't have begun the evening by playing the line "there may be trouble ahead" from Bassey's version of "... Read more... |
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