Art

As 2021 continues to progress at a dizzying rate, one of the recurring social phenomenon we’re seeing is the surreal eruption of online activism in the real world. From the recent explosion of GameStop share prices – hiked up by amateur investors co-ordinating online – to the large-scale protests and riots in Washington following the 2020 Presidential election, the communities in cyberspace continue to spill out into the real world. The question is: why are these kinds of actions becoming an increasingly unsettling occurrence in the usual running of society? In the lexicon of web-design, the term UX, user experience, is often used to describe how an individual may interact

Superficially, the Olafur Eliasson exhibition at Tate Modern can seem like a theme park. To enter many of the exhibits, you have to queue. The average age of the crowds in the galleries is much lower than it might be at, say, the RA. And most visitors keep their phones permanently ready to snap a selfie — which isn’t really what the artist has in mind. He wants you to concentrate on a reaction that is internal and unphotographable. Eliasson — as the title of the show, In real life, might suggest — offers sensory experiences. One of the most memorable of these is produced by ‘Din blinde passager’ (‘Your

Last month a painting that had been found in an attic in 2014, supposedly by Caravaggio, was put up for sale in an auction in Toulouse. The vendors must have known there was little interest, as they accepted a pre-emptive offer for an undisclosed amount. Surely it wasn’t what they were hoping for; but they will have done well enough so there’s no need to feel sorry for them. It’s just business. But what about the painting? Why does it look so different – to put it politely – from everything that is known to have come from Caravaggio’s hand? Do our eyes deceive us, or have so many esteemed

Think of the children in opera. Not knowing sopranos and mezzos, pigtailed and pinafored or tightly trousered-up to look child-like, but actual children. There are Mozart’s Three Boys, Menotti’s Amahl, possibly Debussy’s Yniold and Handel’s Oberto and, if you stretch a point, Marie’s little son in Wozzeck. But that’s about it. Until, that is, you come to Benjamin Britten. It’s a rare Britten opera that doesn’t include a child. Whether it’s Grimes’s doomed apprentice, the chattering powder monkeys of HMS Indomitable, teenage vision Tadzio in Death in Venice, Tytania’s fairies or the watchful Miles and Flora, they are ever-present, but why? There’s something about innocence, certainly, but it’s interesting just

‘Playing God is indeed playing with fire,’ observed Ronald Dworkin. ‘But that is what we mortals have done since Prometheus, the patron saint of dangerous discoveries.’ There’s no Prometheus in the RWA’s new exhibition Fire: Flashes to Ashes in British Art 1692–2019, but there are plenty of flames, some dangerous, some not. The third in the Bristol gallery’s trilogy of shows on elemental themes, following The Power of the Sea (2014) and Air (2017), Fire features the most dramatic of the four elements, and the most fun to paint. Artists love playing with fire. It’s a subject that has held audiences in thrall since medieval worshippers were kept on the

Vincent Van Gogh has been airbrushed by the secular arts media. I have not yet seen the new exhibition at Tate Britain about his London years, so I can only comment on the publicity I have read and heard. This arts chatter downplays, or even ignores, the central feature of his life at this time: his religious zeal. It gives the impression that he was dedicating himself to art, gearing up to be the archetypal creative genius. In reality he did not take art fully seriously in the mid 1870s: though he worked for an art dealer, his real passion was religion. This is not mentioned in the articles about

The ethics of the private patronage of arts institutions has never been straightforward issue. But as the preoccupation with transparency and corporate responsibility has grown, wealthy benefactors can nowadays turn from pillars of respectable society to moral pariahs in the blink of an eye. Such is the fate of the fabulously rich Sackler family, major philanthropists with fingers in arts institutions across the UK, in the face of mounting criticism over its close links to Purdue Pharma, the family-owned US pharmaceuticals giant and maker of the opioid painkiller OxyContin – the drug now the focus of outrage over the opioid epidemic that has made addicts of thousands in the US