A new brand of childish radicalism is haunting Britain’s cultural institutions, rendering them wholly inadequate to address the peril they’re in, let alone the world outside.
The ‘technological’ art of the 1960s lost control of the scientific ideas that drove aesthetics.
That kleptocratic internationalist tendency which until recently made London the capital of the global art trade is now an empty habit.
In this art world, nobody wants to look at art because they’re too absorbed in their fragile subjectivities.
The art world doesn’t know how to reckon with the failure of #resistance art, still in shock after Trump’s victory. Will this be too much for cultural institutions?
We must not rely on art or art history to answer our political questions.
As the plaster in Margolles’ sculpture dissolves into a dirty mess, her monument will be neither beautiful, nor true. It will, however, be gruesome.
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?
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 museum is the spiritual successor of the church. But if these institutions are historically entwined, so are their crises today.
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.
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?
If life becomes unliveable, who would you turn to? A friend? A doctor? A priest? This essay was written with Nina Power.
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.
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