The Changing of the Bones: Marina Abramovic

 The  Royal Academy show dedicated to the performance artist Marina Abramovic has attracted many prurient headlines, because of the live nude performances by the artist’s young surrogates, replicating original performances by Marina herself. She, being 77 years of age, has retired from that category of her work, more likely because of its physical intensity then for prudish reasons. 

Good at Hands: Hans Hals

 Good at Hands: Frans Hals

 

The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals (1582-1666) is a paradigm of the immediately approachable in classical painting: the Mona Lisa of the unsubtle chuckle.

The Hals exhibition at the National Gallery confirms his talent for smiling faces. They are everywhere: exuberant, tender, confident, self-satisfied. 

John Gray on Liberalism

 John Gray on Liberalism

 

 

John Gray demolishes the myths and self-deceptions of liberals with gleeful rhetorical flourishes. History-as-progress is bunk. Especially, the Enlightenment project of universal liberalism as the endpoint of historical progress is shot, finished, dustbinned by the intractable vagaries and contradictions of human nature and societies.