Given that I’m involved a campaign for artistic freedom, I thought I might find common principles with a group fighting against the criminalisation of drill music. I was very wrong.
After the theft of thousands of objects from the British Museum by a former curator, what does it mean for another to go missing in the name of art?
Decoupling creativity from policy might give art ambition again.
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.
If the arts are at a breaking point, the question of what should drive the UK’s culture in the future needs a new answer.
A studied detachment from the subject has become the art world’s habit as. Wales’ Artes Mundi fails to reverse this trend.
In Venice and in Warsaw, nationalism only passes if the nation is in peril as it was in Wyspiański.
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.
Labour will finish the Tories’ work of destroying the arts – only ‘better’
The events sparked by the ArtForum open letter reveal an art world whose gangrenous goings-on threaten the social order.
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?
Something has changed in the balance of politics and culture: the culture wars become culture itself.
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?
If life becomes unliveable, who would you turn to? A friend? A doctor? A priest? This essay was written with Nina Power.
What, if anything, is ‘right-wing’ art?
Liverpool Biennial’s rhetoric forgets about the art
The new elites have ruined everything. Now they’re destroying themselves.
The arts must secede from the creative industries. The sooner the visual arts, dance, or music realise that they must fend against the industrial exploits of giants like gaming or streaming, the higher the chances of them finding and articulating their purpose anew.
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 the 1960s, the German Marxist activist Rudi Dutschke proposed that the road to the revolution would involve a ‘long march through the institutions’ first. A few decades on, Dutschke got what he wanted but the revolution isn’t coming. In its place, a reactionary backlash.