Environmental issues are the trendiest subject in art right now. The climate. Ecology. What we’re doing to the planet. Everybody is tackling it. And they’re doing it badly. Re/Sisters at the Barbican is essentially a giant PowerPoint presentation packed with jargon and clunky curatorial interjections, masquerading as an art show. The Serpentine Gallery’s Back to Earth programme probably […]

I know what I want to get Nicole Eisenman for Christmas. A copy of The Power of Discipline by Daniel Walter. Even a brief perusal of this helpful tome will make clearer why the artistic career presented to us in the Eisenman retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery ends up as such an evident descent. And why the […]

My advice to anyone visiting the rousing retelling of Frans Hals’s career that has arrived at the National Gallery is: lean in. As close as the guards will let you. Because that is where the magic happens. Oil paints can be used prosaically, and they can be used with guts and bravura. Hals is spectacularly […]

The art world is always capable of preposterous behaviour — it’s that kind of world — but even by its own base standards the decision in 2020 to cancel the Philip Guston exhibition that was heading for Tate Modern was cowardly and callow. Cancel culture had sunk to a new low. At issue were the […]

Two big shows by women artists have opened at prestigious London venues. Both are impressive. Both imaginative. Both tinged with what we might call “a tangible national flavour”. For my money, one of the shows is more worthwhile than the other. But which? At Tate Britain Sarah Lucas, the former enfant terrible of British art, who […]

Iwas talking to a famous art dealer the other day — they’re always good for an alternative view of art realities — and he told me that the biggest growth area in art is the private museum. Everyone everywhere, it seems, is opening them. Especially collectors of contemporary art. There are many reasons. The tax […]

In a few weeks’ time, at Sotheby’s in New York, there’s a painting by Joan Mitchell coming up for sale, called Sunflowers. It was painted in 1991 and the estimate is that it will sell for $20 million. Most art world observers, however, are expecting it to go for more. Maybe a lot more. Joan Mitchell […]

Do you remember Tracey Emin getting drunk on television? It was 1997, at the Turner prize. A group of arty men — including me — had come together to debate “Is painting dead?” The discussion was prompted by an article I had written in defence of Emin in this paper in which I argued that […]

Having read Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge, I did not expect the Black Venus show at Somerset House to be an uplifting experience. When it comes to guilt in these sensitive matters, I am the full package: white, middle class, middle-aged (going on old) and, to top it all, an art […]

Jesus walks into a synagogue in Nazareth. He addresses the congregation and they listen with interest. At the end of his speech, he repeats a well-known proverb: “Physician, heal thyself.” The doubting people of Nazareth, he predicts, will be quoting those words at him in the future. The congregation get agitated. And chase him out […]