12:41pm
The Turner Prize 2008 shortlist was revealed this morning at a press conference at Tate Britain. Making the announcement were jury chair and Tate Britain director Stephen Deuchar and two members of the panel; Suzanne Cotter, curator, Modern Art Oxford and Jennifer Higgie, editor of Frieze Magazine. The £25,000 award – given to a UK-based artist under 50 for an outstanding exhibition, or other presentation of their work in the last 12 months – will go to Runa Islam, Mark Leckey, Goshka Macuga or Cathy Wilkes. The Turner Prize exhibition, featuring the work of all four, opens in the autumn....
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1:10pm
Tomorrow’s announcement of the shortlist for this year’s Turner Prize has been neatly preceded by the unveiling of the shortlist for the ‘Booker of Bookers’. Six novels have been chosen from the 41 that have won since the Booker Prize was founded in 1969 (in 1974 the prize was split between Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist and Stanley Middleton’s Holiday – Gordimer’s novel is on the new shortlist, but who has read Middleton’s?) The shortlist seems fairly quirky to me – can anyone seriously believe, for example, that Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (which is on the list) is superior to...
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12:25pm
You will, I suspect, already have an opinion on the proposed sculptures competing to be the ‘landmark’ at the Ebbsfleet gateway. Mark Wallinger’s giant horse or a Rachel Whiteread cast of a house? Public art seems to be mushrooming around us, but a University of the Arts debate at the National Gallery held on the evening of the Ebbsfleet unveiling asked ‘Is public art a waste of space?’ That the question was asked at all already proves one thing. We, the public, are clearly disgruntled. Is this because often the work is poor and unexciting? Or are we reacting to...
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11:49am
The shortlist for a giant £2m sculpture landmark in north Kent was revealed yesterday. Designed to do for the Thames Gateway what Antony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’ has done for Tyneside, it will stand on a prominent site overlooking the new Eurostar high-speed line at Ebbsfleet. Frenchman Daniel Buren – the only non-English artist on the list – has proposed a five-storey tower of stacked lattice-work cubes, through which a laser-beam will be projected into the sky. Richard Deacon has created the most abstract proposal, a steel skelton of 26 differently shaped polyhedrons. Christopher le Brun evokes memories of...
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2:02pm
Two unrelated exhibitions open this week in UK galleries: ‘Stephen Gregory: Down to the Bone’ at London’s Opus Gallery and ‘Unpopular Culture’ at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea. Neither features the work of Damien Hirst, yet both have received national press attention because of an apparent link to the Brit artist. Both shows contain skulls – among many other exhibits – which has drawn comparison with Hirst’s $100m diamond encrusted skull entitled For The Love of God. The artist of one show and the curator of the other have felt compelled to justify their use of skulls in the context...
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11:23am
As Londoners began voting in the mayoral elections, the story broke that Rome’s newly-elected right-wing mayor, Gianni Alemmano, pledged to tear down buildings constructed by his left-wing predecessor, including the Ara Pacis Museum designed by US architect and recipient of architecture’s Pritzker Prize, Richard Meier.
The museum, a modernist glass, marble and steel structure housing the Ara Pacis – a 2,000 year-old altar created by the Roman emperor Augustus, met with criticism when it opened in 2006 for its lack of sensitivity to the surrounding architecture and is cited as an example by those who argue that contemporary architecture...
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2:08pm
Jeremy Broadway, an amateur potter based in Dorset, has been convicted of obtaining money for deception after passing off his ceramics as works by Bernard Leach and Lucy Rie, according to a report in today’s Guardian newspaper. As forgers go, Broadway was a big success: Bonham’s sold two pots by him for £10,000 believing they were by Leach and Rie. Buyers in Denmark and the US as well as the UK are thought by police to have fallen for the scam, which was carried on for at least four years. But perhaps those buyers would be well advised to hang...
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12:03pm
As part of this month’s China-themed issue, Apollo interviewed Baron Guy Ullens about his newly-opened Ullens Contemporary Art Centre in Beijing, which houses part of his 1,300-strong collection of contemporary Chinese art. To fund the project, Ullens and his wife sold their collection of 14 Turner watercolours at Sotheby’s in 2007 for a hefty £10.4m – the biggest group to come on the market for 50 years – and thus relinquished a highly covetable collection and market-assured investment.
For private collectors to sell up and change direction is not unprecedented – Charles Saatchi sold his major collection of postwar American...
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12:00am
Every Friday Apollo will be offering you the chance to win a fantastic prize. Simply answer the question posed each friday and you could win tickets to some of the best exhibtions and art and antiques fairs as well as some of the finest art history books reviewed in Apollo.
To win a copy of the brilliant and richly-illustrated book 'Changing Clothes in China' by Antonia Finnane (Hurst & Company; £25) - reviewed in this issue of Apollo - just answer the following question:
What is a cheongsam?
Email your answers to offers@apollomag.com and we'll announce the winner the following Friday. Good luck!
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The Lower East Side, once home to immigrants and aspiring artists, is no receiving the uptown treatment.
The National Trust's plans to acquire Seaton Delaval Hall are a tribute to a genius who has inspired writers and artists for centuries.
The Fitzwilliam Museum is celebrating the centenary of the directorship of Sydney Carlyle Cockerell with an exhibition that makes clear that he was in many ways the first modern museum director.
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