Word art is one of the more curious ingredients of contemporary art. It’s curious because it shouldn’t exist. We already have an art that deals with words — it’s called literature. That said, words do have something visually potent going for them. They are, or can be, striking pieces of design. Translating sounds into shapes […]

The other day I posted something positive on X about Yoko Ono. I often do. She’s a strong, independent, courageous woman. I’ve known her for years. There’s a big show of her art coming to Tate Modern. A positive post seemed in order. Or so I thought. Over the next couple of days my timeline […]

Imagine a pebble stuck between two huge rocks. On one side looms the Renaissance, western civilisation’s most prestigious epoch, an era that gave us Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael. On the other side looms the baroque age, the thunderously exciting century that unleashed Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Veláquez, Rubens. Squeezed between these two cultural behemoths was “mannerism”, an artistic […]

A stimulating way to start the art year is to visit The Cult of Beauty at the Wellcome Collection. It’s an exhibition that prompts the little grey cells into immediate action, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad. At least the damn things are forced to work. Beauty is, of course, one of art’s great […]

Pauline Boty (1938-66) was many things — so many it’s difficult to see how she squeezed them all in. She was an actress, appearing with Michael Caine in Alfie, and in various plays on the BBC. She was a dancer, popping up regularly on the Sixties music show Ready Steady Go!. She modelled. She wrote poetry. She […]

The strangest Christmas I ever spent was in Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia. If you get yourself a world map and a piece of string, and measure out the distance from the isle of Hiva Oa to the coast of Mexico, you will see that it’s about 3,000 miles. That makes the […]

The power of art, its seriousness, its importance, is easy to forget these days. Too easy. Go round the grim Frieze art fair, as I did this autumn in London, and all you see is hawking, money-grabbing and rich people trying to get richer. Which is why the story of Chaïm Soutine, his painting Eva, and […]

Every art historian worth their salt dreams of discovering an unknown or critically undervalued artist. It’s the big art historical fantasy, and happens only rarely. But it does happen. Until Théophile Thoré-Bürger found him stuffed down the back of the sofa in the 1850s, no one had heard of Vermeer. Art history had lost him. […]

A few will take notice when the winner of the 2023 Turner prize is announced on Tuesday. Most won’t. It’s been many a season since the once fierce Turner battled its way on to the nation’s front pages and forced Britain to take an interest in contemporary art. This year’s version takes place at the […]

For mysterious reasons, the fates kept throwing me together with Shane MacGowan. I was a respectable, middle-class art critic. He was the untameable, rotten-toothed, curse-heavy, drug-addicted, Christ-bashing, hissing, pissing, scallywag genius of post-punk Irish poetics. Yet our paths kept crossing. Till the end. I first met him as the 1980s were petering out. I was […]