Are these the natural filters we have come to accept Novelty, boredom and death? Perhaps we of the 21st century can’t see the wood for the trees and will have to wait a century or a millennium to find out what has survived and what was worth preserving but who, or what circumstance, actually render that decision, if indeed it is even rational, remains a mystery.
The internet has democratised access to the visual arts but is the result an advance in culture or has it reduced culture to its lowest common denominator
The candidates for this year’s Turner prize all work with their political and social pasts, injustice, prejudice and colonialism as the reworking of history seemingly exists to teach us lessons. While art has always been utilised as propaganda, those lessons essentially fall on deaf ears.
A recent controversy over the work of Damien Hirst has brought the idea of conceptual and finished dates into question.
If there is a direct link between art and democracy it is that under any democratic society artists have the collective right to be poor, put upon, misunderstood, barely tolerated and to complain vociferously.
It is not often that portrait painting makes the news twice in a week – albeit it for different reasons. There is nothing new about images of the ultra-rich being hung on a wall and in many historic cases, the painted portrait is the only evidence of their...