mon 01/09/2025

Visual Arts Features

Listed: How I Do Love Thee

theartsdesk

Love is in the air. Today, men and women and boys and girls will be pondering how to say it with roses and cards and candlelit dinners: those three words that contain multitudes. As the old strip cartoon never quite got round to saying, love is... the human condition, which is why a good quantity of the culture we review on this site has to do with it. To help you get into the mood for romancing, we have asked our...

Read more...

John Berger: the critic as artist

Florence Hallett

It’s hardly the lot of an art critic to be loved and admired, still less to speak to an audience that might reasonably be called “the public”. And how many will find their ideas still current 40 years on? All of these things can be said for John Berger, who has died aged 90, a man whose radical approach to looking at art was an absolute inspiration, and whose ideas were a solid presence in my childhood, woven into my early memories as surely as the pages of a photo album.

Read more...

'Before punk, there was Rauschenberg'

Justin Adams

In this cut and paste world, we have become used to a multiplicity of images: screens, words and pictures from across the globe and across history flicker through our field of vision, competing for our attention with the natural world, the urban environment and our own memories, thoughts and dreams. The artist who most successfully began to express this new vision of the world was Robert Rauschenberg.

Read more...

Opinion: ArtReview Power 100

Marina Vaizey

Compiled by an anonymous panel, the 15th edition of ArtReview magazine’s annual list of the most powerful and influential people in the art world was published on Thursday. And who doesn’t like lists, to poke fun at, to argue with – or perhaps even agree with?

Read more...

Helaine Blumenfeld: 'Beauty has become synonymous with something banal'

Rachel Halliburton

Helaine Blumenfeld was living in Paris in the 1960s when she received an invitation from the Russian-born sculptor Ossip Zadkine to attend one of his salons. Zadkine had emigrated to Paris at the beginning of the century, evolving a style influenced first by Cubism and then African art.

Read more...

First Person: Portrait of Britain

Bill Knight

This exhibition includes one of my images, so I hesitated when I was asked to write about it – but I only hesitated for a moment. I have learned that if you are reluctant to promote your own work other people are even more inclined in that direction, so you should seize any chance you get.

Read more...

Zaha Hadid: 'The most extraordinarily gifted architect of her generation'

Hugh Pearman

A lot of colour has drained out of world architecture with the unexpected death last week of Dame Zaha Hadid, aged 65. She was a vivid personality who made astonishing buildings, succeeding as an Iraqi-born woman in gaining worldwide renown from her adopted London.

Read more...

Opinion: Paintings with nothing to lose but their frames

Marina Vaizey

The dazzling, controversial, fascinating exhibition In the Age of Giorgione at the Royal Academy inadvertently provides a striking example of an unavoidable and perhaps insoluble problem common to almost all exhibitions of painting – especially those with a high proportion of loans – in public museums and galleries.

Read more...

100 Works of Art That Will Define Our Age

Kelly Grovier

The back cover of my book makes a big claim. “This book dares”, it says, “to predict the 100 most significant works of art made since the 1990s.” Although the tagline is an entirely accurate description of what I attempt to accomplish in my study of contemporary art, the phrase “dares to predict” has always made me a little anxious. It seems to suggest that the act of forecasting or foreseeing is deliberately provocative, defiant, or even risky.

Read more...

Keep Calm and Knuckle Under

Hugh Pearman

“He lives in Woolwich and Warsaw”. From which author note you might conclude that Owen Hatherley, author of The Ministry of Nostalgia, is not your ordinary kind of UK critic, comfortably ensconced (usually) in North or fashionable East London. Fashion has always passed Woolwich, if not Warsaw, by, though Hatherley himself is quietly stylish, somewhat in the manner of his hero Jarvis Cocker. Can one extrapolate a whiff of left-puritanism from this alliterative choice of abode?

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
BBC Proms: Alexander’s Feast, Irish Baroque Orchestra, Whela...

Many Londoners would already have experienced the musicality incarnate of Peter Whelan and his Irish Baroque Orchestra. A smaller ensemble rocked...

Music Reissues Weekly: The Outer Limits - Just One More Chan...

The Outer Limits were from Leeds. Active over 1965 to 1968, the...

BBC Proms: Moore, LSO, Bancroft review - the freshness of mo...

11am concerts do take some getting used to. The BBC Proms season has no fewer than...

Willis-Sørensen, Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, Wilson, Cadoga...

This week Vladimir Putin tried to murder my hosts in Ukraine. He failed. In more hopeful days, I spoke at a seminar organised by the British...

Interview, Riverside Studios review - old media vs new in sp...

The cult film that director Theo van Gogh left behind when he was killed in 2004, Interview, has already been remade twice;...

theartsdesk Radio Show 37 - Pete Lawrence of the Big Chill d...

This edition of Peter Culshaw’s peripatetic...

Album: Sabrina Carpenter - Man's Best Friend

Following the success of 2024’s flirtatious Short n’ Sweet, Sabrina Carpenter has fully committed to her pin-up popstar status with ...

theartsdesk Q&A: Suranne Jones on 'Hostage', p...

If she decided to run for election, Suranne Jones would probably stand a good chance of winning. The Chadderton-born actress and...

Little Trouble Girls review - masterful debut breathes new l...

Taking its title from a Sonic Youth track whose lyrics describe someone who seems good on the outside but is bad inside, this debut...