Contemporary art
The grisly art of Revolutionary France
There was a basket of thick red wool and two pairs of large knitting needles at the start of University…
How capitalism killed sleep
What can you make a joke about these days? All the old butts of humour are off limits. No wonder…
The truth about food photography
While looking at the photographs of food in this humorous exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, I thought of how hopelessly…
![English National Opera's triumphant new production of Harrison Birtwistle's The Mask of Orpheus, directed by Daniel Kramer. [Photo: Alistair Muir]](https://spectatorau.imgix.net/content/uploads/2019/10/Opera_Exhibitions.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=410&h=275)
A triumph: ENO’s Mask of Orpheus reviewed
ENO’s Mask of Orpheus is a triumph. It’s also unintelligible. Even David Pountney, who produced the original ENO staging in…
Full of wonders: Takis at Tate Modern reviewed
Steel flowers bend in a ‘breeze’ generated by magnetic pendulums. This is the first thing you see as you enter…
The women who invented collage – long before Picasso and co.
The art-history books will tell you that sometime around 1912, Picasso invented collage, or, actually, perhaps it was Braque. What…
Why has British art had such a fascination with fire?
‘Playing God is indeed playing with fire,’ observed Ronald Dworkin. ‘But that is what we mortals have done since Prometheus,…
How plastic saved the elephant and tortoise
Plastics — even venerable, historically eloquent plastics — hardly draw the eye. As this show’s insightful accompanying publication (a snip…
The joy of George Shaw’s miserable paintings of a Coventry council estate
All good narrative painting contains an element of allegory, but most artists don’t go looking for it on a Coventry…
Wicked, humorous and high-spirited: Dorothea Tanning at Tate Modern reviewed
Art movements come and go but surrealism, in one form or another, has always been with us. Centuries before Freud’s…
For many artists being propagandists has become their raison d’être
If you want to lose friends and alienate people in the art world, try telling them you support Britain leaving…
Phyllida Barlow’s sculptural wonderland reigns supreme at the Royal Academy
‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’ If there’s an exception to prove Shaw’s rule, it’s Phyllida Barlow. The…
The people have not forgotten me: the exiled Empress of Iran interviewed
Somewhere in the bowels of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art is a portrait from a lost world. Its subject…
The winner of the 2018 What’s That Thing? Award for bad public art is…
Not a bad year for the award. Honourable mentions must go to the landfill abstractions of Oxford’s new Westgate Centre,…
Read The Spectator article that gave birth to musical minimalism 50 years ago
The Spectator is responsible for many coinages. One of the most significant came in 1968, when an article by our…
The objects that sound witchiest on paper just look sad: Spellbound reviewed
Just in front of me, visiting Spellbound at the Ashmolean last week, was a very rational boy of about seven…
Antony Gormley’s art works better in theory than in practice
Antony Gormley has replicated again. Every year or so a new army of his other selves — cast, or these…
Here’s why not to go to the Hamptons
New York The summertime exodus is upon us. The Hamptons are overflowing with mouth-frothing groupies looking for celebrities, and the…
Grief-conjurors, space-mincers and earth-shovellers: performance roundup
They enter two by two. Grannies, mainly. Headscarved, mainly. Some locking arms. A bit glum. Like rejects from Noah’s ark.…
The glorious history of Chatham Dockyard, as told through the eyes of artists
‘Ding, Clash, Dong, BANG, Boom, Rattle, Clash, BANG, Clink, BANG, Dong, BANG, Clatter, BANG BANG BANG!’ is how Charles Dickens…
The artist who creates digital life forms that bite & self-harm. Sam Leith meets him (and them)
Digital art is a crowded field. It’s also now older than I am. Yet despite a 50-year courtship, art galleries…
Intelligent, poetic and profound: Tacita Dean at the National and National Portrait galleries
Andy Warhol would probably have been surprised to learn that his 1964 film ‘Empire’ had given rise to an entire…
Surreal jokes and juicy strokes: Martin Gayford on the power of paint
René Magritte was fond of jokes. There are several in René Magritte (Or: The Rule of Metaphor), a small but…
Emotional rescue
In the 1880s the young Max Klinger made a series of etchings detailing the surreal adventures of a woman’s glove…
Fickle fortune
Here’s an intriguing thought experiment: could Damien Hirst disappear? By that I mean not the 52-year-old artist himself — that…
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