Stuart Jeffries is a former Guardian journalist and author of Mrs Slocombe’s Pussy and Grand Hotel Abyss.
We need to talk about Eric. In Jennifer Packer’s portrait of her friend and fellow artist, Eric N. Mack sits on a yellow chair that might have been borrowed from Van Gogh’s bedroom. He’s wearing excellent odd socks, one pink to rhyme with his shoes, the other yellow matching his trousers and chair. But it’s
Nearly a century ago, some Chinese water deer swam the River Ore to Orford Ness. They had escaped from the ornamental deer park at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire and, perhaps through ancestral homing instinct, headed as far east as possible without falling into the North Sea. They climbed unsteadily on to this strange shingle spit
Consider the hare and the hyena. The hare, Clement of Alexandria told readers of his 2nd-century sexual self-help manual Paedagogus, was thought to possess both male and female sexes and swapped their roles from year to year. As for the hyena, it was believed to acquire an extra anus annually and ‘to make the worst
When she was 22, Olivia Laing had a sensual epiphany in Brighton. She’d been drawn into a herbalist’s massage parlour by the sign outside claiming that headaches, anger, depression and colds — in fact any symptoms at all — were caused by stuck energy from past traumas that body psychotherapy could release. ‘The idea of
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On this week’s episode, Lisa Bjurwald reports on the Swedish monarchy going woke (01:20); Douglas Murray argues that the culture wars fit the UK even less well than the US (07:00); and Stuart Jeffries interviews the world’s first AI artist. Also on the podcast: a complaints letter to the Times after their March 2020 story
Like a slippery politician on the Today programme, the world’s first robot artist answers the questions she wants rather than the ones she’s been asked. I never had this trouble with Tracey Emin or Maggi Hambling. As we stand before a display of her paintings at London’s Design Museum, I ask Ai-Da whether she thinks
A few years ago, the American artist Barbara Kruger covered the façade of Frankfurt’s Kaufhof department store with a pair of huge eyes. It was as if Big Brother had come out of retirement. Above that unsparing gaze was the slogan, in Kruger’s signature Futura bold italic font: ‘You want it. You buy it. You
On 31 March 1923, Alma Cummings put her feet into a bowl of cold water. Then, tired-eyed but smiling obligingly for the photographer, she held up her dancing shoes. There were holes in both soles. Cummings had just finished a 27-hour stint of waltzing at a Manhattan ballroom, wearing out not just her shoes, but
Not long ago, if you asked discreetly in the right Hackney pub, you would be put in touch with a character called Syd the Squatbroker. For as little as £150, he would gain access to the roof of an abandoned council tower block with a set of fireman’s keys. Then Syd (nom de guerre of
Gwyneth Paltrow has a new neighbour. On the same block in Notting Hill as Gwynie’s Goop store, with its This Smells Like My Vagina scented candles and must-have child-calming essential oil sprays, a shopfront has been taken over to display a poignant series of self-portraits by a rather different woman. Khadija Saye died three summers
‘You’re never alone with a Strand,’ went the misbegotten advertisement for a new cigarette in 1959. What the copywriter didn’t realise is that smokers often smoke to be alone. As Mass Observation had reported a decade earlier: In an increasingly gregarious world, where fewer and fewer habits and pastimes are entirely individual, the cigarette remains
Of all the many things I’ve learned from the radio so far this decade, the most deranging is that the universe is the dream of the god Azathoth. Not unreasonably, Azathoth yearns to wake up and visit his creation. In The Whisperer in Darkness (Radio 4), a crusty coven of drug-addled neopagans seek to realise
Like Elton John, though less ravaged, Tutankhamun’s treasures are on their final world tour. Soon these 150 artefacts will return permanently to Egypt. Nearly a century after Howard Carter disrupted their 3,000-year rest in the Valley of the Kings, they are to be retombed in the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza. But first they
Three million years ago one of our ancestors, Australopithecus africanus, picked up a pebble and took it home to its cave, most likely because the pattern of lines and holes on its surface looked beguilingly like a face. Perhaps this was the birth of art. Or perhaps not. Maybe art arrived in this world later.
‘Everyone of us knows we deserve to be punished,’ says the frail old man before me in a hotel café. ‘You and I for instance. What have we done this morning that is good? What have we done to resist the ruination of our planet? Nothing. It is terrifying!’ Peter Brook fixes me with blue
While Sir Joshua Reynolds, on his plinth, was looking the other way, a little girl last Saturday morning was trying to prise a littler sculpture from the pavement of the Royal Academy’s courtyard. For all its tininess — from a distance the sculpture’s curvy lumps, 12 x 28 x 17cm, resemble horse droppings a security
The Dominican friar Henry Suso was once carving Jesus’s name in his chest with a knife when he noticed a puppy playing nearby. Seeing the little dog amusing itself with a dirty cloth gave the friar an epiphany. Suso realised that redemption is granted not to those who mortify their flesh — for to do
‘Welcome,’ says our guide Stuart Bellehewe, with an imperious sweep of his arm, ‘to the cathedral of shit.’ Before us rises Abbey Mills Pumping Station in all its grade II*-listed glory. It arose on east London’s marshes in 1868, giving Victorians a fecally fixated premonition of postmodernism’s fetish for mashing up architectural styles. Observe, urges
‘I live completely anonymously,’ whispers Jim Broadbent down the phone from Lincolnshire. Nonsense, I counter. You’re one of the most recognisable actors in this united luvviedom. ‘Am I?’ he asks gently. Oh come on. You’re Bridget Jones’s dad, Del Boy’s arch-enemy Roy Slater, Lord Longford campaigning for Myra Hindley’s parole, dotty antiques-shop owner Samuel Gruber
Charles Kay Ogden once proposed that conversations would be conducted more efficiently if participants wore masks. Apart from confirming the hypothesis that Britons don’t care much for philosophising but rarely miss an excuse to dress up, this made me think if only Theresa May had visited Brussels as Darth Vader to meet Jean-Claude Juncker in
