A cannon firing Napoleonic wax, a pregnancy sculpture called Mother as Mountain and the biggest penis in the world
Monthly Archives: September 2009
Moctezuma at the British Museum
It’s like being invited to the Playboy mansion to meet Hugh Hefner and getting a Harvard course on the history of the nude One way to understand the fine series of exhibitions about great rulers that the British Museum has been staging for us — The First Emperor, Hadrian, Nebuchadnezzar, Shah Abbas and now Moctezuma […]
Hot lips from Amsterdam
The National Gallery is displaying Ed Kienholz’s re-creation of a red-light district — a scandal or a liberating move? To prepare myself properly for the new exhibition at the National Gallery, I looked up the origins of the term “red-light district”. It turns out, there are two possible sources. One is ancient China, where red […]
Keith Tyson’s new show open until November
Turner Prize winner mixes art and science in the East End’s Parasol unit while Thomas Heatherwick shows Extrusions
Vincent van Gogh: The Full Story
A team of scholars has taken 15 years to put together complete collection of the artist’s letters, with show at Royal Academy
Zhang Huan pig installation in St James’s
As I approached the White Cube gallery in posh St James’s, I could hear a curious snuffling and snorting emanating from the building. Who was in there? Brian Sewell? Pete Doherty? It turned out to be neither of them, but a pair of charmingly spotted pigs given temporary shelter in the gallery by the pushy […]
My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic: Everything You Need to Know About Art, Ads, Life, God and Other Mysteries — and Weren’t Afraid to Ask by Charles Saatchi
It took me 20 minutes to read Charles Saatchi’s book. And that included a couple of minutes dealing with the title, which caused me to squirm and gurn unpleasantly as I worked my way down it. What fearful pretension. What wishful thinking. What tosh. Like one of those miniature bottles of perfume that arrive on […]