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 […]

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 […]