Stephen Bayley

Bursting the bubble

Plus: though handcrafting his own reputation is Ai Weiwei favoured medium, there are some works of real poignancy and beauty in his Royal Academy show

issue 19 September 2015

The conventional history of modern art was written on the busy Paris-New York axis, as if nowhere else existed. For a while, nowhere else did. People wondered, for example, whyever the mercurial Whistler volunteered for the unventilated backwaters of Britain. But London was eventually allowed into the international conversation following successful pop eruptions that began in the Fifties.

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