Digby Warde-Aldam

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time Guggenheim Bilbao, until 1 November Jeff Koons: Retrospective Guggenheim Bilbao, until 27 September Manhattan in the late 1970s early 1980s was, by all accounts, a pretty scary place. It was caked in graffiti, lawless, and in certain areas, almost emptied by the so-called ‘white flight’ to the suburbs. It was,

I once went out with a girl who jabbed me in the ribs every time I mouthed the phrase ‘conceptual art’. It hurt, but I got her point. The C-word, you see, is a tricky one. All too often, it conjures up terrifying images of ‘explanatory’ texts that take 5,000 words to communicate precisely zilch.

There is good art, there is mediocre art and there is bad art. In the same ratio – about 3:65:32 – there is good political art, mediocre political art and bad political art. There is also a slender sub-genre of this last category, known as so-bad-it’s-good political art. And of this, I am a connoisseur.

You can tell a lot about an art gallery from its attached eatery. The Tate has the grand but gratuitously naff Rex Whistler restaurant. The Serpentine its globular Zaha Hadid nouvelle cuisine joint. Then there’s the Mess Restaurant at the Saatchi Gallery’s newish space in the old Chelsea Barracks. To be charitable, the name is

Before I was asked to go out and cover it, I’d never heard of the Vincent Award for contemporary art. It’s a big deal in the Dutch art world, apparently, a sort of pan-European answer to the Turner Prize. It was set up by a charitable foundation with some deeply serious intent or other, and

What were you thinking? What? What? What? This is the question I’d ask the people who selected the artists for this year’s Turner Prize. The first time I visited, I thought I must have missed something – perhaps I just wasn’t in the right mood. Surely no arbiter in their right mind could’ve let such

You can’t help but want to hate Damon Albarn. While he may not be the most irritating of the Britpop survivors, (as long as fellow Blur-ite Alex James is still droning on about cheese, there’s no competition) he’s a convincing candidate for second place. He spent the 90s as a pop idol, singing chirpy Small

What’s your favourite of Kim Jong Un’s photo opportunities? I like the pictures of the cuddly psychopath inspecting a lubricant factory. One of them has Kim rubbing his hands with glee as pipes squeeze lube into an oil drum. Classic stuff. As one who keeps a close eye on the Dear Leader’s state visits, I

If Thatcher was Britain’s Bonaparte, then Blair was most certainly our Louis-Philippe. It was during the reign of the latter that the bourgeoisie came to dominate the status quo in France, and they needed somewhere to gather. Not for them the salons of the aristocracy – instead, they invented the destination restaurant, imitations of which

Now that the conference season is over, we can compare not just the party policies, but their logos too. Last week’s Tory conference taught us the patriotic adaptation of their tree — now draped in the Union Flag — doesn’t work any better than the original green-tree symbol. The old symbol demonstrated Conservative values as

I’m not sure what took me to Salvador Dalí’s house in Port Lligat, but it sure as hell wasn’t admiration. As a public figure, I hold him alone responsible for the look-at-me culture that gives contemporary art a bad name. And as a painter… don’t get me started. Sceptics slag off conceptual art as a