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.
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...
The speaker at an exhibition opening has to balance any number of aspects of both the art and the artist. Audiences come to openings hoping to come to grips with the work of the artist and expect anecdotes that impel understanding or at least, recognition that artists have lives beyond the gallery walls.
As soon as the audience asks ‘what does it mean?’ we are dealing not with perception but perceptual blindness.
There are those in society who claim the right to do whatever they want, whenever they want. To an extent society tolerates such behaviour but that is the point. Tolerance is set within guidelines and laws which promulgate and protect order. ‘Radical’ artists are tolerated and encouraged as a necessary basis to establishing those norms and inevitably become mainstream before they know it. Free will with constraints.