Timed Entry to Exhibitions: Welcome to Your Special Crowd

 Welcome to Your Special Crowd:

Timed Entry in Exhibitions

 

What is the point of timed entry to exhibitions? It cannot be to lessen crowds: experience all to clearly gives the lie to that hypothesis.

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. 

Spain and the Hispanic World: Goya Portraits

 Hispanic Art at the Royal Academy: Goya Portraits

 

Goya (1746-1828) lived through especially tricky times in Spain – the Enlightenment, then invasion and brutal war, a brief interval of liberalism, followed by reactionary despotism.

Testing Times

 Testing Times

 

 

Car parks may sometimes be a welcome sight, but they are seldom a pretty one. Alexandra Park and Palace in North London, for all its attractive features (not least the views) has some pretty grim examples.

 

Fortunately, the largest area reserved for cars is in a corner by the southerly road entrance, screened by the slope and by trees. It is known as the “Paddock” car park – a name connected to the fact that for many years there was a small but popular racecourse on the flat expanse of the Park.

Re-opening the Royal Academy - Just a Little

 What if We Reopened the Gallery and Nobody Came?

At this time of year (August/September) the Royal Academy of Arts is usually bustling, if not bursting, with visitors to the Summer Exhibition of all-comers’ art, of all qualities and none. It’s not just an exhibition to be viewed- with reverence, excitement or raised eyebrows; it’s also a fair. The art is mostly for sale. Little red “sold” dots  grow like pondweed under many of the works (especially the prints).

The Thing Itself: Antony Gormley at the Royal Academy

The Thing Itself: Antony Gormley at the Royal  Academy

There’s a drawing in the Antony Gormley exhibition at the Royal Academy that stood apart from plenty of others that did not detain me. It was larger than many; but what arrested my, by then, slightly bewildered gaze was the seeming familiarity of the subject: a shadowy, indistinct figure shuffling (fleeing?) away from the viewer, along a faintly sketched tunnel or crevice. Apart from the contours of the tunnel and the dark figure, the white paper is blank, suggesting a hostile frozen landscape.

Sorolla and Vallotton

Sorolla and Vallotton

A couple of London exhibitions (overlapping in just the first week of July) have brought merited recognition to two largely overlooked artists (overlooked in Britain). Sorolla and Vallotton were contemporaries, living and working in the late C19 and early C20, both dying aged 60 within 2 years of one another. Sorolla was Spanish; Vallotton Swiss-French. Both enjoyed success in their lifetime, Sorolla the more conventionally (he sold well in the US).

American Gothic at the Royal Academy

American Gothic at the Royal Academy

American Gothic, currently on display at the Royal Academy, is one of those paintings labelled as “iconic” (examples given by commentators are the Mona Lisa and The Scream). What is “iconic” ?(One modern measure would be the number of reproductions.)

Expressionism at the Royal Academy

I Don’t Know Much about Abstract Expressionism and I Don’t Know What I like

There are two related terms “Expressionism” and “Expressivism”. The former belongs to Art or Culture; the latter to philosophy.

Expressivism is a theory of ethics, or morality, that holds that our value judgments, for example, “lying is wrong”, do not, as the jargon has it, have “truth value”, in the manner of an empirical observation or a mathematical proof. There is no objective truth of the matter – only an expression of feeling. “Lying” bad grunt; “truth telling” (presumably scientific truth) good grunt. Or “Boo”; “Hooray”.