public art
Moore’s art has never looked better: Henry Moore at Houghton Hall reviewed
Henry Moore was, it seems, one of the most notable fresh-air fiends in art history. Not only did he prefer…
The man who never cried
It was odd listening to Jim Al-Khalili being interviewed on Radio 4 on Tuesday morning rather than the other way…
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,…
![Ivory plaque of a lioness mauling a man, ivory, gold, cornelian, lapis lazuli, Nimrud, 900 BC–700 BC. [© The Trustees of the British Museum]](https://spectatorau.imgix.net/content/uploads/2018/11/lioness_plaque.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=410&h=275)
The Assyrians of Ashurbanipal’s time were just as into pillage and destruction as Isis
The Assyrians placed sculptures of winged human-headed bulls (lamassus) at the entrances to their capital at Nineveh, in modern Mosul,…
Appealingly meaningless and improbable: Christo at the Serpentine Lake reviewed Plus: memorably pointless paintings at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery
It’s not a wrap. This is the first thing to note about the huge trapezoid thing that has appeared, apparently…
What's that thing? Britain's worst public art
There are, as adman David Ogilvy remarked, no monuments to committees. (That’s not quite true; Auguste Rodin’s ‘Burghers of Calais’…
A short history of statue-toppling
One of the stranger disputes of the past few weeks has concerned a Victorian figure that has occupied a niche…
The work of Elisabeth Frink is ripe for a renaissance
In a converted barn in Dorset, not far from the rural studio where she made many of her greatest sculptures,…
The Spectator declares war on bad public art
Like peace, love and lemon-meringue pie, ‘public art’ seems unarguably attractive. Who but a philistine curmudgeon would deny the populace…
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