Art

I’d always questioned the creative genius of self-confessed ‘living sculptures’ Gilbert and George. Their dogged determination to be seen as ‘different’ felt archly self-conscious and not particularly interesting. Like so many fly-by-night avant-gardists of the 1960s, the duo’s ‘originality’ tended to hang on hoary old controversies such as scatological imagery, sex and nudity – hardly revolutionary even back then. But listening to the pair’s touching interview with John Wilson on BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life recently made me reassess their contribution not just to art, but to the gaiety of the nation. George is now in his early eighties with Gilbert not far behind, and what I found refreshing about these two throwbacks to a more

Joseph Mallord William Turner continues to occupy a singular place in British cultural consciousness. The English Romantic artist, watercolourist and printmaker – often referred to as ‘the painter of light’ – elevated landscape painting to high art and, when he died in 1851, left a legacy of 550 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolours and 30,000 works on paper. When one of these surfaces at auction, it sells for tens of millions of pounds. However, most of his works – with the power of nature, the sea and the industrial revolution as central themes – were bequeathed to the nation. A collection of 300 oil paintings in the Clore Gallery, at Tate

Why is it that the world of critics, gallery-goers and art-lovers is so overwhelmingly enthralled by Johannes Vermeer? His subjects – quiet interior scenes with women writing letters or playing music – are hardly the stuff of radical innovation or surprise. He wasn’t even that original: his works often have a similar focus to those by his contemporaries from the Dutch Golden Age, from Pieter de Hooch to Jan Verkolje. Nor is his biography the perfect fodder for endless books and feverish interest. So little is known about the man, and his way of painting, that the moniker he was given by the French art critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger in the

If the 20th century was the age of the common man, the 21st is the age of the common man’s confounding. Between shambolic politics, culture wars and actual war, nothing is turning out quite as well as anyone expected. What was meant to be an era of freedom and enlightenment seems to have become the opposite.   Nowhere is this more evident than in the way we interact with one another. In what feels like the blink of an eye, discourse, and by extension society, has taken up residence on the internet. The pace of the outrage cycle has gathered such speed that we must always be finding something new

From the road Gainsborough’s House looks like it could be a thoroughly plausible restaurant in a town like Godalming or Chertsey, the sort of place where a prawn cocktail costs £15 and comes with most of a lemon in a white gauze satchel on a separate plate. The stout two-storey structure is Georgian, red brick and has a front door flanked by a pair of handsome Regency windows. Glance up the neighbouring side street, however, and you immediately see that something extraordinary has happened: there’s an enormous, ultra-modern, industrial-looking extension to the rear in brick and flint. Is it a carbuncle? I’ll leave you to decide, but yes, I’m confident

The Lord of Misrule is surely the jolliest spirit of Christmas past. He is certainly the best named. He used to gambol through cities and courts, churchyards and dining rooms, telling jokes, performing tricks and spreading good cheer. Society shook itself upside down at his coming, so knaves played at being kings, children became miniature tyrants and noblemen misplaced their manners (an exercise in which some, admittedly, needed little assistance). His origins can be traced back to ancient Rome, where each December masters and slaves swapped places for the festival of Saturnalia and engaged in various acts of tomfoolery while gorging on food and wine. These traditions survived the advent

In a corner of St Pancras station, Tracey Emin is always turned on. ‘I want my time with you’, a neon sculpture by the artist, has been on show here since 2018. It was part of the ‘annual’ Terrace Wires public arts programme, in which a new work is commissioned every year to hang from the station’s roof; but the pandemic distended time, and Emin’s words have stayed put. Though a new commission was unveiled yesterday, an installation by Shezad Dawood, that hangs on different wires, elsewhere in the terminus. Assembled from bright pink tubes, and shaped like Emin’s looping script, ‘I want my time with you’ looms over the grand

In March 1995, I entered the Royal Society of Portrait Painters annual exhibition with a portrait of the Right Revd Michael Adie CBE, Bishop of Guildford. A new prize had been created that year to be awarded to the best portrait in the show. Unusually, the reward was in the form of a commission to paint someone in public life. The identity of the sitter was a secret. The evening before the opening, I was informed, to my astonishment, that I had won and the sitter would be Her Majesty the Queen. I had to wait nearly six months before my first sitting. During that time there was very little I

A few months back I wrote a Spectator piece about a phenomenal new ‘neural network’ – a subspecies of artificial intelligence – which promises to revolutionise art and how humans interact with art. The network is called Dall-e 2, and it remains a remarkable chunk of not-quite-sentient tech. However, such is the astonishing, accelerating speed of development in AI, Dall-e 2 has already been overtaken. And then some.  Just last week a British company called Stability AI launched an artificial intelligence model which has been richly fed, like a lean greyhound given fillet steak, on several billion images, equipping it to make brand new images when prompted by a linguistic message. It

Sitting in a posh office overlooking the Royal Academy, the comedian Harry Hill is deploying one of his lesser known modes: introspection. ‘I suppose I’m one of a growing number of celebrities who do art,’ he says, one hand fiddling with his trademark oversized shirt-cuff. His point – which he returns to several times – is one of definition: as much as he enjoys making art, and as much art as he makes, he can never quite see himself as an artist. In his defence, he isn’t alone. After more than a decade as the face of one of the most-loved comedy shows this century, Hill can probably count himself