The doomster title of Extinction Beckons at London’s Hayward Gallery had really got me going. Then, almost immediately, things started to go wrong.
Michael Glover
Michael Glover is a Sheffield-born, Cambridge-educated, London-based poet and art critic, and poetry editor of The Tablet. He has written regularly for the Independent, the Times, the Financial Times, the New Statesman and the Economist. He has also been a London correspondent for ARTNews, New York. His latest books are: Late Days (2018), Hypothetical May Morning (2018), Neo Rauch (2019), The Book of Extremities (2019), What You Do With Days (2019) and John Ruskin: a dictionary (2019).
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Making Mischief in Merry Old England
These rowdy, carnivalesque capers, and all this wild costuming, are about defiant displays of unreason, at odds with the dreary drone of the “voices of authority.”
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Cézanne Saw the Nobility of an Apple
The French painter felt he had to rise to the challenge of one question above all things else: What exactly is it to be a modern artist?
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How Great Was Lucian Freud, Really?
Would it be ridiculous to suggest that Freud lacks nobility or generosity, or even that his pessimism reduces him?
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Adrian Ghenie and the Soup of Fame
Ghenie’s paintings of Marilyn Monroe are a relentless representation of a howling, turbulent tragedy, a face broken into crude sideways slewings and gougings and gorgings of paint.
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Is It Possible to Enjoy Cornelia Parker’s Works Without Her Words?
Parker’s stories bring so many of her works alive, give them meaning, and make us warm to her and to them. Is that a problem?
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Picasso and Ingres Face Off in London
Can two paintings an entire exhibition make? Yes. Especially when it is a Spaniard called Pablo Picasso squaring up to a Frenchman called Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.
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Raphael Between Heaven and Earth
The Renaissance master was boundlessly ambitious and intimidatingly energetic, charming, good-looking, diplomatic, and utterly opportunistic.
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A Century of the Artist’s Studio Is a Peek Into the Artist’s Mind
The studio is a place of self-mirroring, self-haunting, a space where the artist plays out the day-to-day reality of the fantasy of being an artist.
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A Lesson in Bad Manners From an Art Provocateur
Bad Manners is thoroughly and unmistakably an endeavor of one-time art world provocateur Jake Chapman.
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In the Work of Ai Weiwei, Biography Supersedes Art
Perhaps Ai is untouchable. If that is the case, where were we left when judging his new art?
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The Beastliness of Bacon
Bacon was obsessed by animals lifelong. Rawness. Beastliness. Fearsomeness. The way they lived. The way they died. The way they preyed upon each other.