Art

Nick Penny announced that he is stepping down as head of the National Gallery. Next door, at the National Portrait Gallery, Sandy Nairne also announced that he is leaving. Could he be after the job at the NG? Nick Penny’s predecessor, Charles Saumarez Smith, came from the NPG but his lack of knowledge about the NG collection is said to have led to an internal curatorial mutiny. Sandy Nairne could also be said to lack the knowledge of the collection necessary to do the job well. Furthermore, he is not currently popular with lovers of the gallery, some of whom believe that his dogged pursuit of the overpriced Van Dyck self portrait – an attractive work of so-so

If art is the new religion, we were always going to end up here. With high priests, acolytes and ‘energy’. That’s the set up at the Serpentine Gallery at the moment: us as the potential believers queuing around the block ready to be received, and Marina Abramović as the high priestess armed with nothing (literally nothing) but her presence. It could be Rome, Jerusalem or Gold Base. It could be the 20th, 8th or 1st centuries. We’re in a world of belief – and possibly make-believe. I was Abramovićed last week. Rationalist cynic that I am, I thought I wouldn’t be able to take it. But I did. I felt

Kenneth Clark’s view of culture may by now be ‘outmoded’, but I was surprised to read that it was also ‘narrow’. An exhibition at Tate Britain about Clark’s influence, Looking for Civilisation, and the BBC’s threatening to remake the Civilisation TV series, have given rise to some depressing comment. Much mention is made of Clark’s ‘stiff’ presenting style; he mostly stood in front of the camera, rather than walking to and from it as one must now. I assume we are being encouraged to take this as the sign of regrettably rigid thinking. But Clark knew where he stood. And that is at the root of the problem. ‘I believe that order is

Tracey Emin’s bed is to be sold at auction this summer with a guide price of £800,000 to £1.2 million, although the man who sold it to Charles Saatchi has said it’s priceless. Emin was part of the British art movement in the ‘90s that gave Richard Dorment trouble at dinner parties; this scene is an occupational hazard of being an art critic, he said. ‘The beautiful person I’m sitting next to has bluntly informed me that modern art is rubbish. We’re only on the soup, and a long evening stretches ahead. Whether or not we round this dangerous corner depends on my neighbour’s tone of voice, which can range

Every now and then, you’ll come across an article which puts a case for something or other being taken seriously as an ‘art form’.  Designing computer games, cake-making, upholstery, you name it, sooner or later it’ll be up there with painting the Sistine Chapel. And the more elaborate or intricate the process of production, the more earnest the appeals of the writer seeking artistic validation. And sometimes the article will even come right out and say it: ‘This [insert the thing being promoted as a Serious Artistic Endeavour] is art. It’s as much art as Turner’s late paintings, which were once dismissed as “soap suds and whitewash” by the sneering

The Turner Prize shortlist has been announced, and includes a video artist who uses YouTube clips, an artist who pairs spoken word with slide shows and photography, and a historical documentary about African art. Among the four nominees for the most ‘prestigious and provocative’ contemporary art prize, not one of them is a traditional painter or sculptor. In short, the Turner Prize seems to have morphed into a film and photography prize. The Tate seem to be aware of this. The nomination announcement said the four artists’ methods ‘suggest the impact of the internet, cinema, TV and mobile technologies on a new generation of artists’. Of course, there’s no reason

Last week, Tate Britain was one of six museums across the UK to be nominated for the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year award, an annual prize in which the winner receives the not inconsiderable sum of £100,000. A couple of weeks earlier, Waldemar Januszczak, the Sunday Times’s ‘cor blimey’ art critic (don’t get me wrong, he has a winning shoot-from-the-hip style) was calling for the head of Penelope Curtis, Tate Britain’s director since 2010. Despite approving of the chronological rehang of the permanent collection which she oversaw last year – in fact, he proclaimed it a ‘miracle’ – Januszczak still insisted Curtis must go. He gave his reasons: she puts

This exhibition examines a loosely knit community of artists and their interaction over a decade at the beginning of the last century. It is centred around the marriage of Ben and Winifred Nicholson (which began to split up in 1931), involves their crucial joint-friendship with Christopher Wood and a fruitful exhibiting relationship with William Staite Murray, topped off by the all-pervading influence of a true original, Alfred Wallis, Cornish fisherman, marine-stores dealer and compulsive painter. The intellectual and artistic meeting of these individuals was a formative impulse in the development of Modernism in England; and it could be said — with some justification — that they brought out the best

A UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1978, Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) will this summer become the focus of European attention. From June to September, the Aachen Palatinate, Europe’s best surviving Carolingian palace complex, plays host to three inter-related exhibitions commemorating the 1200th anniversary of the death of Charlemagne. The exhibition entitled Charlemagne. Power. Art. Treasures. occupies three separate parts of the former palace complex: the town hall, the Centre Charlemagne (a new visitor centre on the site of the original inner palace courtyard) and the Cathedral Treasury. Charlemagne, king of the Franks from 768-814, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope in 800 and hailed the ‘father of Europe’ by a

The suggestion, made by the poet Michael Rosen and others, that Sajid Javid is not sufficiently cultured to be Culture Secretary is as ludicrous as it is pompous. The secretary of state does not write poetry – even bad poetry. He decides how best to make the arts flourish, both as a source of spiritual value and revenue. Therein is a challenge – one that his predecessors have failed to meet. The nadir of Maria Miller’s lamentable ministerial career was not her recent non-apology or even the episode which saw her advisor appear to threaten a newspaper. No, it was the speech on culture in the age of austerity she gave last summer.

Like most ambitious artists, Julian Cooper has been pulled this way and that by seemingly conflicting influences. The son and grandson of Lake District landscape painters — his mother was a sculptor — he fell among abstractionists at his London art college, Goldsmith’s, in the late 1960s. But when I first saw his work in the early 1980s, he had emerged as a flagrant figurative painter, with a series of large canvases depicting scenes from Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano. There was no subterfuge about these works; they went straight back to Manet and Degas, not as imitations but developments. Whether from heredity or early practice at his father’s