Art

Sunday

Laura Freeman

The art of politics: what ministers hang on their walls

If I am ever appointed to one of Britain’s Great Offices of State — stranger things have happened to Spectator hacks — the first thing I’d do is furnish my office. A raid on the Government Art Collection is a perk of being a minister, and better than the car and the driver. A few Hogarth engravings, a set of David Jones’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ etchings, Cedric Morris’s ‘Irises and Tulips’, Edward Bawden’s ‘The Coal Exchange’...I’d have liked to nab Winifred Nicholson’s ‘Flower Piece’, if only Carrie, the new Mrs Boris, hadn’t got there first. A Freedom of Information request from The Spectator has lifted the little red velvet curtains on which works of art ministers have got from the vaults.

art

Wednesday

James Panero

Cuomo by design

'Please. I beg you. It’s not worth seeing. Avert your eyes. It’s all laptop screensaver crack smoke. Just please don’t make me write about Hunter Biden’s artworks.' Such were this critic’s fevered thoughts as the news of New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s resignation came across the Twitter-tape. And so we turn to another artist manqué. This time, he is a builder, a builder of works on the order of the Romans of the 1930s. And now, these works will remain unappreciated (such is the fate of true artists). So, let’s appreciate. 'Excelsior', this governor scrawled across the edifices and tunnels and apps of his numinous creation. 'Ever Upward', he helpfully provided just beside it in translation. 'It’s Latin!

design Andrew Cuomo (Getty Images)

Friday

Christopher North

Why we need bullfighting

Which US state will be first to legalize bullfighting? OK, I need to qualify the question. A few bloodless corridas were held in Nevada in 2009, and some Portuguese-style bullfighting — again, bloodless — is permitted in California, legally classed as part of religious tradition. It won’t stop there, though. A friend in California breeds fighting bulls for sale to the Mexican market (bloodlines matter more than almost anything else to aficionados, each breeder seeking to stamp his beasts with his own aesthetic). My friend, the son of Mexican immigrants, is convinced it is only a matter of time before the law changes — probably through a referendum. ‘But we don’t want to win with 50 percent plus one. We want a big enough margin to settle the argument.

bullfighting

Monday

James Panero

Meet the Medici at the Met

Someone turned up the lights on portraiture in 16th-century Florence. Lyrical poetry went hard rock. Colors became high key. Posers now scowled at the oil-on-canvas flashbulbs, giving attitude, hands on hips, codpieces a-thrusting. Not that they even cared about looking as good as they do. Sure, they got dressed for the occasion, but notice the sprezzatura, the indifference in their eyes to the whole affair. That was the maniera moderna, the new mannerism in art, and no one captured it better than Agnolo Bronzino. Whether it’s the ‘Portrait of a Young Man with a Book’ (mid-1530s), his haughty painting in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or ‘Lodovico Capponi’ (1550-55), his side-eye romancer at the Frick Collection, these figures are boys interrupted.

Medici

Friday

Roger Kimball

The truth about beauty

In the late 1940s, the German art historian Hans Sedlmayr observed that ‘many things that are classified as “back-ward”... might be the starting-point of real inner progress’. At a moment when the art establishment has abandoned art for political attitudinizing, the path forward begins with a movement of recuperation. In an age when anything can be a work of art, the question of whether something is art has ceased to be compelling: what matters is whether something is a good work of art, and about this the art world has rendered itself hors de combat. Should we be pleased with this state of affairs? Or, to put it another way, is the celebrity of people like Damien Hirst or Marina Abramović or the Chapman brothers a good thing for art?

beauty

Wednesday

Andrew L. Shea

Culture and anarchy

Paul Signac’s portrait of Félix Fénéon is a striking and historically important painting. But is it a good one? Its subject didn’t think so. Signac profiles Fénéon against a swirl of complementary colors and kaleidoscopic shapes, as if anticipating an acid-trip scene from a Roger Corman movie. This radioactively abstract background was bold stuff for Paris in 1890, when the picture was made, but contemporary critics disapproved, one finding the work ‘cold and dry’, another calling it ‘neither decorative nor comprehensible in terms of feeling’. Fénéon himself was similarly vexed by the final result, though he held onto the portrait throughout his life out of loyalty to his painter friend.

Féneon anarchy

Tuesday

James Panero

Stalin at Yale

Are we in our own revolutionary moment? Many of our leading institutions clearly believe so. Yale University has been working overtime to prove it is on the right side of history. ‘Problematic' colleges have been renamed. ‘Offensive’ stained-glass windows have been knocked out. Only the leadership of an Ivy League school could spread such a poisonous rash. Heading the charge against the Dead White Male has been a progressive Yale bureaucracy that is, for the most part, pale and stale. Now the task of dismantling Yale’s famous art history survey course has fallen to a scholar I respect, Tim Barringer. British-born, Barringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University and has been a leading curator at the Metropolitan Museum.

yale art history woolf

Sunday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

All modern art is quite useless

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Laramie, Wyoming ‘It’s pretty, but is it art?’ Rudyard Kipling asked in 1890. In those days the modernist movement across the Beaux Arts was gaining a grip on the western world that it maintains in the 21st century and is likely to hold into the 22nd, if there is one. One hundred and thirty years later, Kipling’s question calls for a plain response: ‘If it’s ugly, it has to be art.’ Aquinas defined art as ‘right reason in action’; reason in making. Right reason depends upon a man’s knowing what he ought to believe, desire and do. The modern artist is ignorant of all of these things.

art

Thursday

Chadwick Moore

The insufferable wokeness of public art

In the middle of the 20th century, the Central Intelligence Agency executed a commendable troll against the American left. Long rumored to be a joke, documents released in the 1990s revealed that during the Cold War the CIA secretly funded and promoted some of America’s biggest contemporary artists without the knowledge of the artists themselves. It was art as weapon. The US aimed to showcase the intellectual freedom and creative superiority of Western, capitalist societies against the drab, inhibited propagandist art of the Soviet Union by broadcasting this wildly inventive style in vogue at the time. The CIA propped up artists like Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.

public art

Thursday

Cockburn

After seeing Donald Trump fan art, your life will never be the same

How does Donald Trump make you feel? For the oft-maligned sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome, incandescent rage might be the first emotion that springs to mind. Incredulity is a fairly common one too. Indeed, the 45th President causes a veritable rainbow of sentiments around the world. Perhaps one of the rarer ones, though, is the urge to create. But for some in the online artistic community, Donald Trump has served as muse to truly inspired works. Cockburn is delighted to welcome you back once more for a viewing of his private gallery, where this week we will be showcasing the boldest, finest, strangest Donald Trump fan art that the dark recesses of the internet has to offer. The images of President Trump span a number of different artistic styles.

donald trump fan art

Friday

Cockburn

Inside the strange world of Fox News fan art

Fox News viewers go to some length to show their dedication to their favorite cable personalities. They might have Twitter alerts set up for whenever their preferred pundit says something, or they might go in to bat in the comments of a Facebook post. But then, some people really like heads they see on Fox. It gets their creative juices flowing, and inspires them to put pencil to paper. Cockburn is pleased to welcome you to his private gallery, where he’s been collecting the finest Fox News fan art the internet has to offer. Naturally, the higher profile personalities are depicted in a number of ways.

fox news fan art

Monday

Mark Cocker

The sacred chickens that ruled the roost in ancient Rome

Even the most cursory glance at the classical period reveals the central place that birds played in the religious and political lives of the two key Mediterranean civilisations. Their gods, for example, were often represented in avian form, so that the Athenian currency bore an owl image, which was intended as a portrait of the city’s patron, Athene. ‘Owls to Athens’ was a proverbial expression, much like ‘coals to Newcastle’. From North Africa to the shores of the Black Sea there are still Greek temples dedicated to Zeus that are topped by weathering stone eagles as symbols of their supreme deity, while the imperial legions of Rome fought under an eagle standard for much the same symbolic reasons.