Letter from London

News and reviews from England’s capital

Letter from London

Letter from London: Bad Taste Explosion

Letter from London

Letter from London: Bad Taste Explosion

Sometimes working in or around contemporary art can be a bit embarrassing. When the papers are splashed with the latest case of a work of art being mistaken for rubbish …

Letter from London

Letter from London: Altermodern Love

Letter from London

Letter from London: Altermodern Love

I have to confess to a fear that strikes me whenever I go into a gallery of contemporary art and see the entrance to a video installation. Does anyone else …

Letter from London

Letter from London: Revealing Mystic Truths

Letter from London

Letter from London: Revealing Mystic Truths

At the risk of sounding like the opening voiceover in Sex and the City, all this talk of the Vatican’s pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale has got me thinking: …

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

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Art21 Extended Play

Best of the Art21 Blog, 2008 edition

Flash Points

Letter from London

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Art21 Extended Play

Best of the Art21 Blog, 2008 edition

With our blog’s redesign in February, we hoped to see the site take off this year with a slew of new features. Following are some of our favorites, all of …

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 …

Letter from London

New blog features!

Letter from London

New blog features!

In addition to our new guest blogger for the next fortnight, whom you will learn more about soon, we are pleased to introduce a new regular column to the blog. …