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For the Love of Disruptive Strategies and Utopian Visions in Contemporary Art and Culture No.2 by James Cauty.
I usually wouldn’t bother writing about the over-rated and over-valued Damien Hirst—I’ll leave that to heavyweights such as Robert Hughes—but one story this week toasted the cockles of my black and cynical heart. Before we get to that, [...]

Day of the Dead
| Robert Hughes excoriates Damien Hirst.

My apologies to any visitors arriving here during the past week to find the site down. What should have been a straightforward upgrading of the hosting service became overly-extended due to compounded misunderstanding and poor communication. It didn’t help that I was also extremely busy catching up with work after the long bank holiday weekend.
By [...]

Retroactive I (1964).
My youthful enthusiasm for art acquainted me with the name of Robert Rauschenberg (who died two days ago) earlier than most. Surrealism and Pop Art held an appeal that was immediate, if rather superficially appreciated at the time, and it was seeing works from both those movements which were the most memorable aspect [...]

The paranoiac-critical gaze: Dirty Dalí.
I finally managed to see this fascinating documentary this week. Since my TV broke down some time ago I refused to waste money buying another, partly for the reason that films such as this are increasingly rare and most of them have been shunted to minority channel BBC 4 which [...]

Cadeau Audace by Man Ray (1921).

L’amour fou
Fur teacups, wheelbarrow chairs, lip-shaped sofas … the fashion, furniture and jewellery created by the Surrealists were useless, unique, decadent and, above all, very sexy.
Robert Hughes
The Guardian, Saturday March 24th, 2007
THE VICTORIA AND Albert’s big show for this year, Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design, is—well, maybe we don’t much [...]

Ask anyone for a definition of this term and most people would immediately mention Leonardo Da Vinci (can his reputation survive Dan Brown?) or Michelangelo, the two most highly-regarded geniuses of the Italian Renaissance. While Leonardo’s numerous achievments are well-documented, Michelangelo’s work as a painter and sculptor tends to overshadow his other talents as an [...]

Robert Hughes writing in The Guardian about Rembrandt this weekend had this to say about one of the painter’s later works:
He had done pictures of himself that fairly radiate a gloating success, but the deepest was saved for the last decade of his life, when he painted himself as a painter at work, holding brushes, [...]