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Cecily Brown’s show at Gagosian comes as a surprise from an artist famous for big canvases (and distended prices to match). Her latest works are small in size and number, and their formal range narrow almost to the point of repetitiveness. This restrained exhibition centres on one main triptych – a busy, bristling mass of vaguely organic forms (foliage or flesh) which initially calls to mind the slick distortions of James Rosenquist, as well as the biomorphic abstractions of Arshile Gorky. The painting abounds with flesh tones – reds and mauves and pinks – yet these seem oddly eviscerated. It’s as if once-fiery shades have faded, through long exposure to sunlight, to anodyne pastel hues.
James Cahill
ArtSlant
Most Wanted: Vermeer, “The Concert,” 1658-1660
It seems like a longshot. But Jason Felch’s and Ralph Frammolino’s “Chasing Aphrodite” Twitter page now tantalizes us with the following:
Coming tomorrow: a story in the LA Times about how the arrest of #whiteybulger could help crack the biggest art heist in history.
That could only be the 1990 theft of 13 artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, including three Rembrandts and the above Vermeer.
Lee Rosenbaum
CultureGrrl
Jury’s in, but what about the public? … Richard Wright, winner of the 2009 Turner prize. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
Our culture is turning into one long awards ceremony. Last week alone saw the BP Portrait award, the Art Fund prize and the shortlist for the Samuel Johnson book prize. As a judge on two recent prizes, including the portrait award, I have taken a certain amount of pleasure in the way a jury can make a point, even advance an argument; how an interesting choice of shortlist, a convincing winner, can convey ideas about art. But that’s one way of looking at it. At times there seems to be a new prize announcement every few days. Can this really be good for culture? And what drives it?
Dramatists were awarded prizes in classical Athens, and Sophocles was a frequent winner, so clearly prizes are not incompatible with great art. But surely there are drawbacks to a culture dominated by competitions and awards. The rise of the prize means the public is more and more guided by official taste as embodied in juries. It is often said the critic is a dying breed. But juries are replacing critics, and they exert influence in a far more questionable way. A jury does not have to explain its decision to the public; does not have to say why one artist is better than another. Yet while critics are constantly questioned, the decisions of juries seem to be taken incredibly seriously.
That is a mistake. I have been on two juries. When I was involved in the Turner prize as well as this year’s BP Portrait award, I did what a critic should do, and wrote pieces explaining and defending my point of view. In doing that I hopefully made clear that it is a point of view, a personal opinion: no more. But I also saw, on both juries, how things work behind the scenes and how easily bad, biased decisions might be made.
Jonathan Jones
Guardian
Peter Zumthor’s 2011 Serpentine Gallery pavilion
You would be wise not to call Peter Zumthor a monk. He may be white-bearded and dark-clad and his office, in a secluded spot outside the Swiss town of Chur, may take the form of a cloister around a garden. His studio gathered there of young acolytes may have a superficial resemblance to a cult. He may be someone who talks with reverence about his craft and who inspires extreme reverence in other architects. He may carry with him a hushed aura, in his own speech, in the way others talk of him and in his buildings. He may sometimes rise at 4am to pursue his work. He may, in his oeuvre, have a certain number of chapels, memorials and other contemplative spaces, and he may like to talk of such things as the “mystery” of materials. But at the suggestion he might be otherwordly, he becomes vehement.
“There are these prejudices that have always been accompanying my whole career, which is first they said, ‘Yes he does these beautiful buildings, but they are up in the mountains and they are only possible in the mountains…’ Then they say, ‘You only build in wood’ or they’re saying you’re the monk or you’re arrogant.” He is, he insists, down to earth: “I design for the use of a building and the place and for the people who use it… the reputation for arrogance comes because when work is offered to me I look whether I can find a genuine interest in quality. If I only find an interest in using my name for economic reasons, or if I can see that this is a project that only deals with image and facade, of course I say no.”
Rowan Moore
Guardian
The British don’t go in much for self-proclaimed movements, particularly in the arts. They are more comfortable with the idea of the singular artist or groups of friends gathered together in bonhomie and shared views.
Not for us the manifestos of the Continental ‘isms’, with their endless explanations, violent denunciations and exclusive societies.
The one exception are the ‘Vorticists’, the group banded around Wyndham Lewis which exploded on the London scene with a full manifesto and magazine just before the First World War, only to become all-too-quickly subsumed by that terrible conflict and to be forgotten once it was over.
Was this a small flash on the margins of European art, or a brave and distinct British contribution to the modernist revolution that Cubism was wreaking through the art world? The Tate Gallery, together with the Nasher Museum of Art in Duke University in the US and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, would argue its distinctive merits. Not only did the Vorticists form an important movement in British terms, they also served as a significant bridge between the avant-garde movements of Paris and Europe and the US. Their membership was drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, their aims were truly radical and their achievements considerable in their brief period of vitality.
Adrian Hamilton
The Independent
