As the plaster in Margolles’ sculpture dissolves into a dirty mess, her monument will be neither beautiful, nor true. It will, however, be gruesome.
Büchel’s work exposes that the endgame of mainstream artistic political sentiment is pure spectacle.
Nan Goldin’s oeuvre is a testament to the power of art over an artist in the service of addictive images.
There is no way to exorcise the ghosts of capitalism from art’s institutions. But instead of contending with the museum’s purpose, the art world looks to the HR department.
The very purpose of remembrance is to facilitate the corruption of memory. We must wary of artists offering simplistic attributions of guilt.
The Biennale marks the completion of art’s total ‘decolonisation’ after which no particular aesthetics or politics can take precedence over any other.
A studied detachment from the subject has become the art world’s habit as. Wales’ Artes Mundi fails to reverse this trend.
As life of truth, beauty, and goodness appears beyond our reach, we may need to write a theory of ugliness before beauty can find its social function again.
This year’s Turner Prize compounds the problems of past editions into one shortlist and in trying to show something for everyone risks pleasing few.
Will Sarah Lucas go down in art history as Cool Britannia’s response to Carolee Schneemann and Valie Export?
Art and money have come a long way together. But what can art tell us about economics?
The Czech Republic is barely thirty years old, its earlier 20th century defined by acts of non-heroism and a glorious imperial past that isn’t entirely its own. How does one come up with a marketing slogan for that?
In absence of an official memorial, Steve McQueen’s film Grenfell poses the tower as a hyperreal monument of itself dedicated to those who perished in it, an encounter with both a scene of tragedy and an aesthetic object.
Who is this person, exactly, and what is she doing? You’d be surprised how quickly a ‘hey, you alright?’ turns into a declaration of war.
In Martine Syms’s art school-insider satire ‘The African Desperate’, clichés such as ‘the work’ or dramatic jeopardy are long gone. Everybody is trying so hard to look like they’re not trying that they nearly succeed.
Queer Britain and Queercircle mark capital’s transition from appropriation of queer culture to full-scale colonisation.
Documenta 15 reads like a series of creative workshops staged by corporate HR departments to boost loyalty at the lowest possible cost. Perhaps the next Documenta should be curated by an artist.
Kader Attia’s Still Present!, the 12th Berlin Biennale is an attempt to unpick the centuries-long threads of imperialism one by one in the hope that they can reconstitute a universe capable of averting its demise. But this is a vain hope.
This year’s Biennale is in denial of the circumstances that have forced the event to shift from odd to even years. To find artistic politics in Venice, one has to consider form and matter on their own terms: in the long term.
My generation of gay men has no memory because it never became acquainted with a previous generation whose time came and went leaving a mere caricature as a historical record.
Ai WeiWei may be ‘the perfect Asian artist for lazy western curators’. He may also be the lazy marketer’s idea of viral cool, and the lazy politician’s idea of a progressive thinker.
When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer… Eric Bristow’s only 27.
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