A new exhibition has trawled the Martin Parr Foundation’s archive to find these haunted images – revealing the UK as a place of fear and fascination Continue reading...
Monzo says 55% of cardholders’ British Museum payments in first hour of latest ticket release were by people under 35A 1,000-year-old embroidery may be an unusual candidate for a pop culture moment, but young people are seemingly more willing to shell out for tickets for the Bayeux tapestry than spend money on Hollywood blockbusters.In the first hour that the second round of tickets to view the tapestry were available last Wednesday, payments from Monzo cardholders to the British Museum reached
Monzo says 55% of cardholders’ British Museum payments in first hour of latest ticket release were by people under 35
A 1,000-year-old embroidery may be an unusual candidate for a pop culture moment, but young people are seemingly more willing to shell out for tickets for the Bayeux tapestry than spend money on Hollywood blockbusters.
In the first hour that the second round of tickets toview the tapestry were available last Wednesday, payments from Monzo cardholders to the British Museum reached £14,100 and were 48 times that of a normal Wednesday morning. More than half (55%) of those buyers were aged under 35.
K-pop star RM gave a boost to the previously struggling SFMOMA with an exhibition of over 100 pieces from his collectioneTwo years ago, RM of the wildly popular K-pop boyband BTS was serving as a soldier in the South Korean military when he received an offer from América Castillo, a museum curator in San Francisco: would he consider an exhibition of his private art collection?“I loved it,” said RM (real name: Kim Namjoon) at the media preview of RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me, a new exhibition
K-pop star RM gave a boost to the previously struggling SFMOMA with an exhibition of over 100 pieces from his collection
eTwo years ago, RM of the wildly popular K-pop boyband BTS was serving as a soldier in the South Korean military when he received an offer from América Castillo, a museum curator in San Francisco: would he consider an exhibition of his private art collection?
“I loved it,” said RM (real name: Kim Namjoon) at the media preview of RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me, a new exhibition that opened in San Francisco earlier this month and is co-curated by SFMOMA’s Castillo and Hyoeun Kim. “There aren’t many things that show a person more honestly than a collection they’ve built over a long period of time.”
Fondation Cartier, ParisIbrahim Mahama put an entire factory in this exhibition exploring Ghana before and after it was ripped to shreds by colonialism. And it’s just one dazzling installation in a show full of hopeIbrahim Mahama has dug through the ruins of post-colonial Ghana, sorted through the ashes of its ancient history, picked through the industrial detritus, the corporate waste, the piles of rubbish, and found something pretty unique: hope.Sit on one of the Asante stools in his circular
Fondation Cartier, Paris Ibrahim Mahama put an entire factory in this exhibition exploring Ghana before and after it was ripped to shreds by colonialism. And it’s just one dazzling installation in a show full of hope
Ibrahim Mahama has dug through the ruins of post-colonial Ghana, sorted through the ashes of its ancient history, picked through the industrial detritus, the corporate waste, the piles of rubbish, and found something pretty unique: hope.
Sit on one of the Asante stools in his circular Parliament of Ghosts and you can almost feel a new future being worked out right in front of you. It’s the first installation in this huge exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, and it sums Mahama up pretty neatly. He’s looking at the collapse of the Ghanaian government in 1966, the way the hope of the post-colonial project was crushed in a military coup, and he’s looking at ancient Ghanaian history, at the empires that fell centuries ago and the way colonialism tore them to shreds. But he’s not lamenting any of them. He’s not mourning. Instead, he’s reclaiming them, asking how things can be rebuilt, how we can move forwards by learning from the past.
As she auctions off her treasures, the synth-pop savant opens up about her eccentric style and why she doesn’t believe in cancel cultureBefore Cyndi Lauper rose to fame as one of the most singular pop breakouts of the 1980s, she was queen of the cash register at the edgy Manhattan boutique Screaming Mimi’s. The vintage emporium is still a downtown staple, but a little of its spirit comes uptown this month with Cyndi Lauper: A Suitcase of Memories, a two-part auction of her fashion and personal i
As she auctions off her treasures, the synth-pop savant opens up about her eccentric style and why she doesn’t believe in cancel culture
Before Cyndi Lauper rose to fame as one of the most singular pop breakouts of the 1980s, she was queen of the cash register at the edgy Manhattan boutique Screaming Mimi’s. The vintage emporium is still a downtown staple, but a little of its spirit comes uptown this month with Cyndi Lauper: A Suitcase of Memories, a two-part auction of her fashion and personal items at the New York auction house Bonhams.
On a recent Thursday morning in New York, the singer is sporting seafoam green hair and is in good spirits as she leads a private tour of the collection. It is an Aladdin’s cave of outfits from her five-decade career, with clashing prints, jutting tutus and statement headwear in every color you can imagine. As she strides around in her platform creepers, she gives a few final notes to the Bonhams team. Is that rainbow fan at the right angle? And can we confirm that more mirror balls are on their way?
A new exhibition – which the Guardian gave five stars – tells the story of the birth of art photography. Here are some of the most astounding images, along with tales of the strange techniques that made them Continue reading...
A new exhibition – which the Guardian gave five stars – tells the story of the birth of art photography. Here are some of the most astounding images, along with tales of the strange techniques that made them
City’s Beatles Story museum to move to 100,000 sq ft new home and official ownership, along with Yellow Submarine makeover of Liverpool’s second-tallest buildingLiverpool is to unveil a new 100,000 sq ft visitor attraction about the Beatles, in plans hailed as “extraordinary” by Paul McCartney, and by Andy Burnham as having “the kind of ambition I want to see more of across Britain”.Opening in 2028, the project is a huge upgrade for the Beatles Story, a museum which opened in Liverpool’s Royal A
City’s Beatles Story museum to move to 100,000 sq ft new home and official ownership, along with Yellow Submarine makeover of Liverpool’s second-tallest building
Liverpool is to unveil a new 100,000 sq ft visitor attraction about the Beatles, in plans hailed as “extraordinary” by Paul McCartney, and by Andy Burnham as having “the kind of ambition I want to see more of across Britain”.
Opening in 2028, the project is a huge upgrade for the Beatles Story, a museum which opened in Liverpool’s Royal Albert Dock in 1990. Ownership will now pass to the Beatles company Apple Corps, making the Beatles Story the band’s first official fan experience in their home city.
A new Washington DC exhibition examines how Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and more used the Bard’s work to help tell their own stories“William Shakespeare was a black woman.” In 1985, Maya Angelou spoke these words as part of a keynote speech at a convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.There, she spoke of the role poetry played in her transition from muteness as a child and how she fantasized herself triumphantly delivering Portia’s speech from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in front of he
A new Washington DC exhibition examines how Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and more used the Bard’s work to help tell their own stories
“William Shakespeare was a black woman.” In 1985, Maya Angelou spoke these words as part of a keynote speech at a convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
There, she spoke of the role poetry played in her transition from muteness as a child and how she fantasized herself triumphantly delivering Portia’s speech from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in front of her entire community at church. Though she never got the chance to perform that rendition, Angelou acknowledged her desire to deliver that rendition as part of a lifelong kinship with Shakespeare, a connection she continued to seek out throughout her life whenever she needed heartening or solace. In her eyes, Shakespeare wrote his emotionally desolate Sonnet 29 “for” her; how else could he have so aptly described the harsh realities of the Black feminine condition?
There’s plenty that stands out at Regent’s Park this year, from antidepressant pens and an ibuprofen-dolling robotic arm to Miriam Cahn’s 26 years’ worth of self-portraiture and a 150m-year-old dinosaur skull – still with embedded toothFrieze review – you’ll see more avant garde wonders in the Bake Off tentThe raised platform in the middle of British artist Ella Fleck’s installation vibrates under your feet to the sound of a male voice. He’s whispering sweet nothings, intoning sexual fantasies.
There’s plenty that stands out at Regent’s Park this year, from antidepressant pens and an ibuprofen-dolling robotic arm to Miriam Cahn’s 26 years’ worth of self-portraiture and a 150m-year-old dinosaur skull – still with embedded tooth
The raised platform in the middle of British artist Ella Fleck’s installation vibrates under your feet to the sound of a male voice. He’s whispering sweet nothings, intoning sexual fantasies. It’s all based on third-party agencies that manage OnlyFans accounts, interacting with users, creating fictional relationships that horny guys spend thousands on. It’s a greasy, gross, uncomfortable exploration of sex work on an industrial scale.
Regents Park, LondonThis year’s art fair is a jumble sale of mediocre paintings for the super-rich, while its Masters sibling hawks dinosaur skulls and sleazy 19th-century nudes. Welcome to the art market as its most grotesqueNaked people climb out of the earth and run around waving their arms and screaming, while someone with a bird’s head and wings plays the bagpipes. It’s my favourite artwork at this year’s Frieze but don’t go looking for this wildly imaginative outrage among the heaps of con
Regents Park, London This year’s art fair is a jumble sale of mediocre paintings for the super-rich, while its Masters sibling hawks dinosaur skulls and sleazy 19th-century nudes. Welcome to the art market as its most grotesque
Naked people climb out of the earth and run around waving their arms and screaming, while someone with a bird’s head and wings plays the bagpipes. It’s my favourite artwork at this year’s Frieze but don’t go looking for this wildly imaginative outrage among the heaps of contemporary art at Frieze London. It’s a painting by a 16th-century follower of Hieronymus Bosch and is on view at Frieze Masters, the posher tent on the other side of Regent’s Park.
I’m sorry to say I was bored rigid in Frieze London. Many people attend, I imagine, hoping to be informed and excited by the newest, coolest art, but you’ll see more genuinely avant garde wonders in the Bake Off tent. There are endless paintings, none of which are much good, interspersed with photographs which tend to be a little better. The first thing here that held me at all was a two-metre-tall, inkjet print by Wolfgang Tillmans called Paul, nude, golf ball in which the naked Paul has his elbows on the floor and his close-cropped head bowed between them in apparent despair, while the white ball beside him eerily mirrors the pale flesh of his bony back. But it’s not new – it dates from 1994.
Modern Art, LondonThe late American took on liberal presumptions and the commercialism of Black culture, even dressing in white bunny ears and underpantsSeven squares are pinned to the wall, each one painted in the high style of American minimalism: pure, austere variations on a theme. At the centre of each is printed the phrase “negro idea” followed by an apparently random number (51, 37, 666). What is Pope.L, the late, great trickster of contemporary American art, getting at?Perhaps it is a cr
Modern Art, London The late American took on liberal presumptions and the commercialism of Black culture, even dressing in white bunny ears and underpants
Seven squares are pinned to the wall, each one painted in the high style of American minimalism: pure, austere variations on a theme. At the centre of each is printed the phrase “negro idea” followed by an apparently random number (51, 37, 666). What is Pope.L, the late, great trickster of contemporary American art, getting at?
Perhaps it is a critique of how minimalism, with its ethos of art-for-art’s sake, excluded politics from art? Or a comment on how racial categories are as constructed (and as subject to fashion) as the theories underpinning contemporary art? Or is it a riff on how the edifice of western modernism is built on stolen ideas? Then again, maybe the deployment of an outmoded racial category is simply designed to discomfort the liberal pieties of those people likely to visit this art gallery just off Piccadilly.
The Back to Black singer’s books, shoes and jigsaw puzzles have gone on display. Elsewhere, a leaky Barbican and some gloriously gloopy sculptures can be viewed in London galleries this week Continue reading...
The Back to Black singer’s books, shoes and jigsaw puzzles have gone on display. Elsewhere, a leaky Barbican and some gloriously gloopy sculptures can be viewed in London galleries this week
This year’s London photography festival takes you from the colourful streets of Kolkata to the grim isolation units of Guantánamo Bay Continue reading...
The late Christoph Schlingensief was one of German art’s great provocateurs. Can his B-Movie horror aesthetics still shock us into thinking anew about media power, colonialism, and the far right?Christoph Schlingensief certainly knew how to provoke. “Fury at German play that shows Queen as a Nazi,” read the Sunday Express’s headline after Kaprow City first premiered at Berlin’s Volksbühne theatre in 2006. Drawing on the happenings of US performance artist Allan Kaprow, the play turned its attent
The late Christoph Schlingensief was one of German art’s great provocateurs. Can his B-Movie horror aesthetics still shock us into thinking anew about media power, colonialism, and the far right?
Christoph Schlingensief certainly knew how to provoke. “Fury at German play that shows Queen as a Nazi,” read the Sunday Express’s headline after Kaprow City first premiered at Berlin’s Volksbühne theatre in 2006. Drawing on the happenings of US performance artist Allan Kaprow, the play turned its attention to Diana, Princess of Wales’s death. In one scene, the then queen performs a Hitler salute. Another re-enacts the paparazzi chase that led to Diana’s fatal crash. Diana appears in bed beside two men with Down’s syndrome; and Camilla is pelted with animal blood. Schlingensief insisted the work was not meant as provocation but as an investigation into how Diana turned into a modern icon. But his art thrived on outrage, exposing the absurdity of societies that glorify their idols while consuming their lives as entertainment.
Kaprow City is at the heart of a new Berlin show – It’s Not My Problem Anymore, Deal With Your Own Shit – that revisits the artist’s legacy. In the Gropius Bau’s grand neo-Renaissance atrium, visitors encounter remnants of the carousel-like rotating stage he called the “animatograph”. Looking at this installation today feels like a glimpse into Schlingensief’s mind: a messy collage of childhood memories, violent fantasies and royal glamour.
Amid economic sanctions and ongoing conflict, a new initiative is returning Iran’s artists to the international spotlightWhen the call came early one morning, Tehran resident Elham Issari knew it must be urgent. The voice on the line was offering something precious. “Miss Elham,” he said excitedly, “I have a single tube of white paint! It’s overpriced and I know it’s overpriced but, if you want it, you have to buy it right now because there’s this other guy in this other city who wants it and yo
Amid economic sanctions and ongoing conflict, a new initiative is returning Iran’s artists to the international spotlight
When the call came early one morning, Tehran resident Elham Issari knew it must be urgent. The voice on the line was offering something precious. “Miss Elham,” he said excitedly, “I have a single tube of white paint! It’s overpriced and I know it’s overpriced but, if you want it, you have to buy it right now because there’s this other guy in this other city who wants it and you have to tell me within the next five minutes.”
The tube of white paint would have cost Issari 5m tomans (about $36), she recalls. “I was like, I don’t think so, because that’s overpriced, and the next thing you know is it’s 4am and I’m on YouTube watching how to make lead white in your backyard without getting lead poisoning.”
As a new exhibition looks at how the pioneering photographer sparked a colour revolution, his son, William Eggleston III, explains his father’s unique approach Continue reading...
As a new exhibition looks at how the pioneering photographer sparked a colour revolution, his son, William Eggleston III, explains his father’s unique approach
His egalitarian homeland used to harbour reservation against the architecture star. But with 13 new Unesco listings and a new exhibition in Helsinki, Aalto’s work is finally getting the recognition it deservesIn the early 1950s, Alvar Aalto built a boat to get to his remote summer residence on an island in Lake Päijänne, about 200km north of Helsinki. But the celebrated Finnish architect was not a happy skipper. He named the boat – a title as cumbersome as his buildings were elegant – Nemo proph
His egalitarian homeland used to harbour reservation against the architecture star. But with 13 new Unesco listings and a new exhibition in Helsinki, Aalto’s work is finally getting the recognition it deserves
In the early 1950s, Alvar Aalto built a boat to get to his remote summer residence on an island in Lake Päijänne, about 200km north of Helsinki. But the celebrated Finnish architect was not a happy skipper. He named the boat – a title as cumbersome as his buildings were elegant – Nemo propheta in patria: “No man is a prophet in his own land”.
The name was a dig at Finland, which the architectural maestro believed had taken him for granted. Other nations, he moaned, recognised his talent more than his own. Today, arriving in Helsinki, I find that Finland doesn’t just love Aalto, he’s a national treasure.
Ibraaz, LondonToo controversial for the Venice Biennale, this haunting video and audio work commemorates murders and genocides with an angry act of mourningThe sound of mourning spills out into the streets. A single, endless wailing note echoes out of the basement of Ibraaz, a relatively new cultural centre in London’s Fitzrovia. This is Gabrielle Goliath’s heart-wrenching Elegy, each of its three films featuring a woman singing just one note until their lungs falter and another woman steps up t
Ibraaz, London Too controversial for the Venice Biennale, this haunting video and audio work commemorates murders and genocides with an angry act of mourning
The sound of mourning spills out into the streets. A single, endless wailing note echoes out of the basement of Ibraaz, a relatively new cultural centre in London’s Fitzrovia. This is Gabrielle Goliath’s heart-wrenching Elegy, each of its three films featuring a woman singing just one note until their lungs falter and another woman steps up to fill in for her. Just as a note is about to die, it is sustained. It’s a haunting, shocking act of mourning for murder, injustice and genocide.
The Portuguese artist is famous for her monumental ceramic wedding cakes and gigantic chandeliers made of tampons. So why is a new show in Lisbon pairing her with Valentino’s size-zero catwalk dresses?To interview the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos is to jump on to a moving train. She is telling me why she uses needlework to make huge things: 15-metre doilies, say, or a tree 13.5 metres tall rustling with 150,000 hand-sewn leaves. “One day, I said to myself,” she says, “why not bring domest
The Portuguese artist is famous for her monumental ceramic wedding cakes and gigantic chandeliers made of tampons. So why is a new show in Lisbon pairing her with Valentino’s size-zero catwalk dresses?
To interview the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos is to jump on to a moving train. She is telling me why she uses needlework to make huge things: 15-metre doilies, say, or a tree 13.5 metres tall rustling with 150,000 hand-sewn leaves. “One day, I said to myself,” she says, “why not bring domestic detail into monumental sculpture? What do we know of works like this? OK, there’s Louise Bourgeois. But it wasn’t enormous. She worked in detail but on small things. There’s the beauty of Niki de Saint Phalle. But it’s always papier mache – a technique that’s very simple, very practical, but not chic.”
It takes a certain something to compare yourself to these two French giantesses of art. It takes something else to castigate Bourgeois and de Saint Phalle for not being big, bold and beautiful enough. But if there’s one female contemporary artist who can do it without coming across as delusional, it’s Vasconcelos. Born in Paris in 1971 into an artistic Portuguese family, Vasconcelos has established herself as one of her country’s leading contemporary artists – and one of the world’s most ambitious.
Bourse de Commerce, ParisThere are 700 works from François Pinault’s collection on display – more than half of them by Irving Penn – but it’s a blinkered selection and annoyingly didactic‘Beware … of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle” scream the words of Aimé Césaire – writ large and bold by Barbara Kruger, in a giant installation, The History of Tears, that fills Bourse de Commerce’s spectacular Rotunda. Kruger’s angry, menacing, viscerally charged work
Bourse de Commerce, Paris There are 700 works from François Pinault’s collection on display – more than half of them by Irving Penn – but it’s a blinkered selection and annoyingly didactic
‘Beware … of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle” scream the words of Aimé Césaire – writ large and bold by Barbara Kruger, in a giant installation, The History of Tears, that fills Bourse de Commerce’s spectacular Rotunda. Kruger’s angry, menacing, viscerally charged work – words as images, and large-scale video clips of people seething with self-hate – is a thrilling setup for Remember Me, an exhibition that promises a take on 200 years of photography through 700 works by more than 70 artists drawn from the collection of the French billionaire François Pinault. That excitement quickly dissipates as the exhibition moves on.
This is the biggest photography show ever held at the Bourse de Commerce. Remember Me has two main problems: first, it tries to say too much with too few artists. For a start, nearly 450 of the 700 or so works are by Irving Penn. It leans heavily on classical, conventional approaches, styles and familiar names, and that creates a very obvious skew in the perception of what photography is, does, and how it is presented.