Articles by Ben Street

Flash Points

Letter from London

Letter From London: Dissent (of a Woman)

Flash Points

Letter from London

Letter From London: Dissent (of a Woman)

After the assassination of JFK in 1963, Lenny Bruce said, “They put two graves in Arlington—one for John Kennedy and one for Vaughn Meader.” Meader was a pitch-perfect Kennedy impersonator …

Letter from London

Letter from London: Yes We (Vati) Can!

Letter from London

Letter from London: Yes We (Vati) Can!

Holy neo-conceptualism! The Vatican has issued a press statement announcing that it will be participating in the Venice Biennale this summer, which will make this year’s event one of the most refreshingly …

Letter from London

Letter from London: The sound of two hands being rubbed together

Letter from London

Letter from London: The sound of two hands being rubbed together

Schadenfreude is so central to how the art world functions that it’s no surprise to hear the sound of two hands rubbing together when it comes to talk of how the economic …

Flash Points

Letter from London

Letter from London: Fifteenth Time Leckey!

Flash Points

Letter from London

Letter from London: Fifteenth Time Leckey!

On Monday night, the winner of this year’s Turner Prize was announced—the fifteenth since its inception in 1984. The prize itself has become synonymous with a sort of willful controversy, …

Letter from London

Letter from London: War(hol)! What is he good for?

Letter from London

Letter from London: War(hol)! What is he good for?

While the prospect of yet another Andy Warhol exhibition will be met by most gallery-goers with an indifferent shrug, Other Voices, Other Rooms, the new show at the Hayward Gallery, attempts to …

Letter from London

Letter from London: God Save McQueen!

Letter from London

Letter from London: God Save McQueen!

British artist Steve McQueen’s current feature film, Hunger, has received pretty much universally positive reviews. Tracing the last six weeks of the life of Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker imprisoned in …

Letter from London

Letter from London: The Turbine Hall

Letter from London

Letter from London: The Turbine Hall

Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall commissions have set a certain standard for scale in art making at a time when many artists have retreated from the big, brash statement towards the self-effacing, the …

Letter from London

Letter from London: The Contemporary Portrait

Letter from London

Letter from London: The Contemporary Portrait

It might seem a bit old-fashioned to bemoan the demise of the portrait tradition in contemporary art, but looking at a new show of Renaissance portraits, and having read a short …

Letter from London

Letter from London: Serra and Irwin

Letter from London

Letter from London: Serra and Irwin

Amid the noise and anxiety of the art fairs (read my review of Scope here), two significant exhibitions by major US artists have opened simultaneously in London: Richard Serra at Gagosian and Robert Irwin at …

Letter from London

Letter From London: A Contemporary Timeline

Letter from London

Letter From London: A Contemporary Timeline

At a recent trip to Tate Modern I spent some time looking closely at something I’d regularly passed by without really thinking about it. On two floors of the museum, …

Letter from London

Letter From London: Bacon Movies

Letter from London

Letter From London: Bacon Movies

  The current (brilliant) retrospective of Francis Bacon at Tate Britain ends with a montage of filmed interviews the artist gave, largely with David Sylvester as part of his extended sequence of …

Letter from London

Letter From London: Protest Too Much

Letter from London

Letter From London: Protest Too Much

Whichever candidate succeeds this November, there will be a discernible effect in art. The last eight years have seen a resurgence of politically motivated art comparable to that produced during and …

Letter from London

Letter from London: Art During Wartime

Letter from London

Letter from London: Art During Wartime

All the talk around the potential sale of two of the most important paintings in British collections (Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto) has generated more interest than usual in …

Letter from London

Letter from London: Hirst Among Equals

Letter from London

Letter from London: Hirst Among Equals

Art gets into the national news in the UK in four ways. One: a publically funded institution decides to purchase something of apparent worthlessness (a ‘pile of bricks,’ a can of poo) …

Letter from London

Letter from London: Lackluster Blockbuster

Letter from London

Letter from London: Lackluster Blockbuster

Assuming they couldn’t speak our language, read our minds, develop a communicable form of sign language, or were made out of gas, a good way for aliens to gauge the …

Pop (and) Art

Pop (and) Art

The relationship between fine art and pop music is characterised most often by a specific historical period in Europe and America, the mid-sixties, which is probably the closest point there …

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Pre-Teen Wolf

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Pre-Teen Wolf

I spent last Sunday morning at the National Gallery with a large group of very small children in front of Sassetta’s early Renaissance painting of St Francis and the Wolf …

Best Supporting Artists

Best Supporting Artists

Artists in films tend to act as shorthand for oversensitive loners, just as lawyers in films are shorthand for unscrupulous money-grubbers and people with British accents are shorthand for oleaginous …

Bacon: Whoopee

Bacon: Whoopee

Roman Abramovich, the partially-bearded Russian owner of Chelsea Football Club (AKA ‘Chelski’), and 16th-richest person in the world (according to Forbes), was this week reportedly the purchaser of two paintings …

(Artist) Frays Book

(Artist) Frays Book

The Victoria and Albert Museum’s latest exhibition, Blood on Paper: The Art of The Book, showcases book-based work by a wealth of modern and contemporary artists, including Cai Guo-Qiang and …

Turner: New Leaf?

Turner: New Leaf?

The announcement of the shortlist for this year’s Turner Prize has coincided neatly with a short-lived heatwave in the UK that sent Londoners leaping out of their winter clothes to …