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Letter from London: Avatarnation!
Paul Gauguin, "Pandora" (1892) What was it like before the internet was invented? Can you remember? Where did all that pent-up aggression go before you were able to express your rage with the world via...
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Letter from London: Chris Ofili, A Mixtape
Making mixtapes is one of life’s great non-transferable skills; its lack of import in a pragmatic sense is inversely proportional to the amount of time and effort it requires (rewinding, pausing,...
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Letter from London: To The Manner Born
Bronzino: Random! It’s good, useless fun to pre-emptively define the times you live in. Nicholas Bourriaud’s confusingly limned term “Altermodern,” used to define works in last year’s Tate Triennial...
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Letter from London: Ethic Minority
Matthew Broderick in "Election" “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.” — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray “What’s the...
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Letter from London: Ethic Minority (2)
"Their relationship was based on preparing absurdly complicated recipes using overpriced ingredients." From unhappyhipsters.com There’s a lot of discussion and almost no consensus about the difference...
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Letter from London: Battlin’ Tatlin
London Mayor Boris Johnson, Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell, Lakshmi Mittal, and Anish Kapoor Poor old Vladimir Tatlin. Having been ruthlessly picked-apart in numberless modernist critiques, his...
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Letter from London: Everything Must Go
Alfred Molina as Mark Rothko in "Red" John Logan’s play Red, currently playing at the Golden Theater, New York, centers around a perennial ethical conundrum many successful artists face: whether or not...
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Letter from London: Paint, Misbehaving
Angela de la Cruz, "Nothing 1," 1998. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery, London. Writing about painting isn’t easy, simply because painting isn’t built to be written about. So...
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Letter from London: Barnstormer
John Gerrard, "Oil Stick Work," 2008. Courtesy the artist and Art on the Underground. “Time-based art” is a great new contemporary art phrase to drop into conversations, with the redoubtable Orwellian...
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Letter from London: Tate at Ten
Giant spider sculpture "Maman" by Louise Bourgeois at Tate Modern Art Gallery, London. Photo by Steve Greaves. There’s a display outside one of the shops in Tate Modern, showing visitors’ comments...
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Letter from London: Interview with Aaron Moulton (Feinkost, Berlin)
Aaron Moulton photographed by Lars Borges This Letter from London is, for one time only, from Berlin. — B.S. Aaron Moulton is a curator of contemporary art and, with his wife Mette Ravnkilde Nielsen,...
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Letter from London: Tense Present
Richard Wilson, "20:50" at the Saatchi Gallery Let us assume there are two boxes on a table. In one box, there is a relatively normal turtle; in the other, Adolf Hitler’s skull. You have to select one...
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Letter from London: Young Americans
Pablo Picasso walking the dog The “must-see show of the summer” is not, despite what the adverts on the buses might have you believe, the John Richardson-curated Picasso show at Gagosian Gallery. Not...
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Letter from London: In the Loop
Siena's Campo dei Miracoli at Mini-Europe, Brussels My favorite things in Pallant House, the excellent gallery of modern British art in Chichester on the south coast of England, are a couple of small...
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Letter from London: Masterpiece Theatre
“Philip IV” and “Mariana of Austria” shoot the breeze in the Prado. Period costume memo not picked up by majority of attendees On a single day this week I saw a clutch of paintings that would, by most...
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Letter from London: Public Enemy
Brian Griffiths, "Battenberg," maquette, 2010 Public art is rubbish. Starting from that premise is the best possible pre-emptive strike against disappointment. Don’t expect public art to be any good...
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Letter from London: Spoils of War
Jeremy Deller's "5 March 2007" on display in the Imperial War Museum, London. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA There’s a new display at the Imperial War Museum, London, orchestrated by the artist Jeremy...
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Letter from London: Dutch Treat
René Daniëls, "De Slag om de Twintigste Eeuw (Battle for the Twentieth Century)," 1984. Courtesy ABN AMRO Collection. René Daniëls is a really, really good painter, maybe even a great painter, who...
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Letter from London: Frieze of Access
Annika Strom's "Ten Embarrassed Men" at Frieze 2010. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian As part of this year’s Frieze Art Fair, Simon Fujiwara, the winner of the 2010 Cartier award, has conjured up...
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Letter from London: The Time of Your Life
Steve Martin and John Candy in "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," which you need to see again. Christian Marclay’s The Clock (now on show at White Cube, Mason’s Yard) is a twenty-four hour long film...
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Letter from London: Turner Blind Eye
Susan Philipsz. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer The Otolith Group ought to win this year’s Turner Prize, if their installation at Tate Britain is anything to go by, which it isn’t. Tate...
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Letter from London: Tuition and Hopin’
The London protests heat up (image courtesy Antony Bennison) This week, Britain’s coalition government (narrowly) passed a proposal to dramatically hike university tuition fees, the results of which...
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Letter from London: Hell Is Other People
The Heads of the Kings of Judah and Rudolph Stingel's "Untitled" at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris It is a truth universally acknowledged that artists make the best curators. Mark Wallinger’s exhibition,...
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Letter from London: Being Boring
19th century sculpture in the Musee d'Orsay: sexy but boring “Why is sculpture so boring?” So said Charles Baudelaire in 1848. Sculpture in Baudelaire’s time was boring. In actual fact, with some...
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Letter from London: Gutter Rug
Image of a boy playing a video game from Robbie Cooper's "The Immersion Project" Whether or not computer games are actually any good for us – some argue they cause children to become withdrawn and...
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Letter from London: Trip Advisor
Marcus Coates, "The Trip," 2010. Documentary photograph. Courtesy the artist. All travel is retrospective. We don’t travel for the experience – most traveling time is spent waiting, after all – but in...
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Letter from London: The Price is Right
Picasso's "Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust" (1932) at Tate Modern. Image Andy Paradise/PA. Funny how very expensive paintings become metaphors of themselves. The 45-million-dollar Duccio bought by the Met...
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Letter from London | Grave Architecture
Will Corwin, "The Last Judgement" (2011). Courtesy the artist and George and Jorgen gallery. There’s a long history of painters becoming architects and carrying their pictorial imaginations with them....
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Letter from London | Eye of the Tiger
"I am so sorry": Tiger Woods with his wife, children, and two mistresses, Rusty and Mr. Snuffles Tiger Woods is a profoundly uninteresting man, elevated to role model status in America by his...
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Letter from London | Seeds of Discord
Ai Weiwei, "Study in Perspective: Forbidden City," 1995 When an artist dies, their work changes forever. Whatever it was they were doing at the time of their demise becomes loaded with retroactive...
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Letter from London | Pyramid Scheme
Vera Lutter, "Chephren and Cheops Pyramids, Giza: April 12, 2010," 2010. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. A camera is a room and a room is a head, and the head is constantly being filled with images it has...
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Letter from London | The Look of Love
Tony Tasset, "Judy," 1998. 35mm six second film loop, dimensions variable. Courtesy Leo Koenig Projekte Inc. For one week only, this Letter from London is from New York — B.S. Tony Tasset’s Judy,...
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Letter from London | The Secret History
Jacopo Comin, aka Tintoretto, 'The Stealing of the Body of St Mark' (1562-66) and 'The Last Supper' (1592-94) at the Venice Biennale (image courtesy Phaidon) Academic specialization is bad for art, and...
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Letter from London | Classic Rock
Robert Rauschenberg, "Cy (Twombly) + Relics - Rome #5," 1952 The pairing of Cy Twombly and Nicolas Poussin in the current exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery reveals an embarrassment of shared...
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Letter from London | World on a String
Albrecht Durer, "Pictures for Geometry" (2), 1525 Language draws an imaginary line around objects. That demarcation follows through in all the lines in our lives: the Morse code of a Risk board’s...
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Letter from London | Rarely Pure, and Never Simple
Thomas Struth, "San Zaccaria," 1995. Image courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 1996 (1996.297) © Thomas Struth. Maybe Thomas Struth’s 1995...
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