3:42pm
Yesterday’s was a rare fine summery evening and a pleasant one to walk through the courtyard of Somerset House, home of the Courtauld Collection. I told Nicola, my drinks companion earlier in the day that I was going along to visit ‘The Courtauld Cézannes’. She was not particularly impressed and rolled her eyes sighing, ‘All those wretched oranges’. (I think she was subjected to a roomful of still lifes at a mid-90s Cézanne retrospective somewhere.) It’s safe to say she’s not a fan. Last night, however, I found that I was.
In the upstairs galleries were the exhilarating blues...
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Wednesday, 25th June 2008
4:37pm
Exhibitions about clothing and fashion provide critics with one mighty visual-arts axe to grind. Pull out the frocks and museums are immediately subject to charges of dumbing down. The public, however, love ’em. The Victoria and Albert Museum is currently showing ‘The Story of The Supremes from the Mary Wilson Collection’ of dresses worn by the Motown trio and last year’s exhibition of Aussie pop chanteuse Kylie Minogue was a tremendous sell-out show but, like its predecessors – including a Vivienne Westwood retrospective attracting the likes of Kate Moss and Sadie Frost – was subject to sneers.
Although...
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11:57am
It was announced yesterday that installations by Antony Gormley and Yinka Shonibare are the next projects to grace the fourth plinth, replacing Thomas Schutte’s neon coloured Model for a Hotel 2007. Gormley’s proposal, entitled One and Other, will see the plinth occupied by members of the public for one hour at a time over 100 consecutive days, enabling some 2,400 volunteers to participate. This human installation will be followed by Shonibare’s scale replica of Nelson’s ship, HMS Victory, with sails made from African textiles bought in London's Brixton market. The model ship will sit inside a giant glass bottle, gleaming...
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5:23pm
A quietly pleasing intervention occurred on my journey to work this morning, courtesy of London Transport’s Art on the Underground scheme that has commissioned new works by Anna Barriball, on display this week around the tube network. For nestled among the array of glossy but uninspiring adverts for Magnum ice cream and the latest crime novel, is Barriball’s series of posters, wryly entitled – given the context – About 60 miles of beautiful views.
The posters consist of short phrases found by the artist on the back of photographs in a discarded album in a junk shop, presented in...
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5:12pm
Nothing announces the arrival of the British summer better than the Royal Academy's annual summer exhibition. Now in its 240th year, the exhibition opened its doors last week, offering us the opportunity to view the spectrum of established, emerging and unknown artists.
We would like you to send us your reviews of the show, in no more than 250 words, and we will publish the best reviews online in 'Muse'. So tell us what you think about the room that Tracy Emin has curated – she has said that she set out to provoke visitors but has she suceeded?...
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Enterprising gallerists are turning Edinburgh into a major city for collectors, and London gets ready for Frieze.
A new book and exhibition are celebrating the centenary of Osbert Lancaster – cartoonist, architectural writer and dandy.
Damien Hirst's decision to sell new works at Sotheby's last month was amply justified in financial terms, but artists and collectors will always need dealers.
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