Rachel Whiteread

The mesmerising Olympic posters designed by the likes of Warhol and Whiteread

From our UK edition

You could be forgiven for assuming that the citizens of Paris weren’t exactly bursting with joy at the prospect of this summer’s Olympic Games. They’re annoyed at everything: road closures, public transport price hikes and – would you believe it? – the prospect of their country being taken over by extremist cranks before the month is out.  Bref, or indifference towards the Games is the prevailing attitude – and should you need (flimsy, anecdotal) evidence, I offer you the fact that when I visited an exhibition devoted to the Olympics the day before the first round of voting in the election last week, I had the space entirely to myself. Beyond a single wall down by the Seine, you won’t see the artist posters displayed much around Paris It was a shame.

The human clay

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.The topics in The Necessity of Sculpture emerged randomly, thrown off by successive exhibition calendars and coming to range in time and place from ancient Mesopotamia to 21st-century Manhattan. As I made the selections, what began to take shape, beyond a conventional anthology, was a synoptic history of the art form. The title is a belated riposte to Ad Reinhardt’s famous dismissal, in around 1960, of sculpture as ‘something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting’.

sculpture