- 6 August: Does Jeremy Corbyn know his potatoes? | Brief letters - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Allotments | YouTube at primary school | Universities and ‘racist science’ | Millet’s potato fork | Gaza and Hiroshima
“Is this government going to put the nail in the coffin of the joy of digging ground for potatoes on a cold, wet February Sunday afternoon?” Jeremy Corbyn wrote in the Daily Telegraph (Jeremy Corbyn warns rules on council asset sales threaten allotments, 5 August). Never trust a man who can’t tell his parsnips from his potatoes: leaving spuds in the ground till February means they’ll have been spoiled by frost or rot. And I say this as a lifelong Labour voter.
Dariel Francis
Tunbridge Wells, Kent• A key point not covered in your article (YouTube most popular first TV destination for children, Ofcom finds, 30 July) is the extent to which schools, particularly primaries, use YouTube, from movement breaks to educational programmes and quiet-time cartoons before home time.
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Cat Mehta
Weybridge, Surrey - 5 August: Millet: Life on the Land review – phallic forks and suggestive wheelbarrows enliven a landscape of toil - Exhibitions | The Guardian
National Gallery, London
There’s a undeniably erotic charge to Millet’s paintings of gloomy hard work – reminding us that, behind the hoes, these are real people with real desiresThe figures in Jean-François Millet’s 1859 painting The Angelus, a French icon that’s come to the UK on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, seem extremely odd on close inspection. Their faces are obscure, their bodies intriguing under their shapeless work clothes. What age are they? How are they related? The man is quite young, his top shirt button loose, although his legs are as stiff as a doll’s, inside thick, rough-cut trousers. It’s harder to tell the woman’s age because she stands in profile, a breeze pressing her heavy skirt against her legs, as she clasps her hands. They might be a married couple or, as this painting’s unlikely fan Salvador Dalí claimed, mother and son. Their physicality is intense. The phallic prongs of a thick wooden potato fork and wheelbarrow shafts add to the feeling that, now the working day is done and they’re saying their prayers, they can finally get to bed. But if they’re mother and son? I refer you to Dr Dalí.
I think there’s a reason Millet makes The Angelus not so much a religious as an erotic landscape. It was the climax of his love affair with the French peasantry. Millet made it his life’s work to portray the rural poor – a class that had been denied full humanity. He depicts lives of backbreaking toil but wants you to see that, behind the hoe, is a human being with a mind, a body, desires.
Continue reading... - 5 August: Man Ray and Max Dupain surrealism – in pictures - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne is showing its first joint exhibition exploring the surrealist photography of Man Ray and Max Dupain. Heide’s director and curator Lesley Harding has written captions explaining the works. It’s on show until 9 November
Continue reading... - 5 August: ‘Constantly being reimagined’: celebrating American art from the 1900s to the 1980s - Exhibitions | The Guardian
A new exhibition at the Whitney looks back at a varied selection of works that tell the story of America across eight tumultuous decades
With “Untitled” (America), The Whitney celebrates 10 years in its new space and offers visitors a statement on what the museum is all about. Combing the institution’s archives, it brings together 80 years of American art, from the turn of the century up through the 1980s.
As art historian and Whitney chief curator, Kim Conaty, was hard at work curating “Untitled” (America), she envisioned the Whitney as a place of refuge and nourishment for artists who have furnished new ways of seeing and new historical narratives. “When I think of the very brave work of artists over decades,” she said via video interview. “I’m excited by how it’s possible for us now through their work to see the questions they have put forth, the histories they have made visible. We need to give our support to those artists who have done that hard thinking and helped reveal or made visible our history and helped us see new futures.”
Continue reading... - 3 August: Peter Kennard’s Gaza exhibition in Edinburgh – in pictures - Exhibitions | The Guardian
An exhibition of graphic work by Peter Kennard is opening at Palestine Museum Scotland to run daily from 9 to 31 August, concurrent with the Edinburgh festival. ‘Gaza’ showcases prints made using a variety of media including photomontage, double-exposed photographs, drawing and paint, in response to the daily reports and footage of the near-erasure of Gaza and the thousands of Palestinians killed. The exhibition also includes earlier work repurposed for the show
Gaza is at Palestine Museum Scotland, 13A Dundas Street, 9-31 August
- 1 August: Deller’s Welsh visions, rollicking Rubens and an Edinburgh extravaganza – the week in art - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Linder headlines the UK’s largest festival of visual art, Jeremy Deller delves into Welsh history and graffiti queen Lady Pink scares Keith Haring – all in your weekly dispatch
Edinburgh art festival
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Artists from Linder to Mike Nelson provide the fun in this hugely varied city-wide extravaganza.
• Various Edinburgh venues, 7-24 August - 31 July: ‘A cipher for crazy self-projection’: why are architects so obsessed with Solomon’s Temple? - Exhibitions | The Guardian
The palatial edifice, believed to have stood where God created Adam, has fired imaginations for two millennia. Now artist Pablo Bronstein has created wild mashups, complete with blue-bearded gargoyles, suggesting how it looked
No legendary building has ever inspired more conjecture about what it might have looked like than Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. It is said to have been built in c.950BC, on the mound where God created Adam, and was destroyed 400 years later by marauding Babylonians. But, beyond some inconsistent descriptions in the Bible written centuries after the temple was razed, there is no archaeological evidence that this palatial edifice ever existed.
And yet, for more than two millennia, generations of architects, archaeologists and ideologues have bickered over the building’s appearance. They have debated its exact height and width, speculated on the design of its columns, and battled over the precise nature of its porch. The mythic building, also known as the First Temple, has inspired everything from a Renaissance royal palace in Spain to a recent megachurch in Brazil, to the interiors of masonic lodges around the world – all built on a fantasy.
Continue reading... - 31 July: The Royal Photographic Society’s international photography exhibition - Exhibitions | The Guardian
The artists for the 166th edition of the Royal Photographic Society’s international photography exhibition, the world’s longest-running photography exhibition, have been announced. The works will be on display at London’s Saatchi Gallery from 5 August to 18 September 2025
Continue reading... - 30 July: Casa Susanna: inside a secret and empowering cross-dressing community in the 1960s - Exhibitions | The Guardian
A treasure trove of flea market photos spotted in 2004 show how some found liberation in the Catskillls at a tough time
A new show at the Met demonstrates the enduring power of photography to affirm trans identities and build trans communities. Titled simply Casa Susanna, it reveals a treasure trove of photographs made by a community of self-identified “cross-dressers” in the 1960s, as they found ways to make precious time to dress as their feminine selves in two resorts offering safe spaces in the Catskill mountains.
According to show curator Mia Fineman, these photos had sat dormant for decades until two antique dealers happened to discover them at a flea market in 2004. “What struck them was that they were men dressed in women’s clothing but not in drag,” said Fineman. “They were not wearing flamboyant clothing, it was a very conservative, midcentury style.”
Continue reading... - 29 July: ‘A succession of bad paintings’: Stanley Donwood and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke – review - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
This Is What You Get explores the intense creative partnership behind countless album sleeves from OK Computer to In Rainbows. But is it good art? Absolutely notFor decades, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and the artist Stanley Donwood have been locked in an intense creative partnership. They scribble over each other’s drawings, scrawl in each other’s notebooks, push each other, inspire each other. Their work has been on every Radiohead album cover since 1995’s The Bends, every Yorke solo record, every poster and every T-shirt. Nothing is farmed out to designers or agencies – Radiohead’s visual identity has been fully overseen by Donwood and Yorke.
And now, in a homecoming of sorts for local hero Yorke, their artistic output is being celebrated at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. There’s no doubt that Donwood and Yorke, who met while studying at the University of Exeter, have created some of the most recognisable, ubiquitous and maybe even iconic album covers of their generation. But do they make sense in a huge, historic gallery such as the Ashmolean? Does any of it make for good art? Does it stand up to scrutiny when removed from the context of the records and merchandise it was designed for? It’s a nice dream, but nope.
Continue reading... - 29 July: A Sidney Nolan above the sofa? Inside Artbank, the collection that lets you rent a masterpiece - Exhibitions | The Guardian
This public collection supports living artists while bringing their work into the homes and workplaces of Australians
We’re familiar with borrowing books from a library or renting a car, a carpet cleaner or a suit, but have you ever considered loaning an artwork? A Sidney Nolan, perhaps? An Emily Kam Kngwarray or Patricia Piccinini? Or maybe something from an up-and-coming video artist or photographer? A neon text-based work? Or something more hard-hitting, such as a series of paintings on discarded aerial maps that symbolically reclaims country from mining companies?
Should any of these pique your interest, Artbank has you covered. The government-owned collection is composed of more than 11,000 works of art available for loan by individuals and businesses, starting from as little as $165 for a year and capping at $11,000.
Continue reading... - 29 July: Porn sets, wild dogs and knitting: 30 years of Yancey Richardson gallery – in pictures - Exhibitions | The Guardian
From Mitch Epstein’s early colour experiments to Ori Gersht smashing glass prints of iconic paintings, these images celebrate three decades of the New York gallery
Continue reading... - 25 July: Pastoral play, AI portraits and a radical utopia for kids – the week in art - Exhibitions | The Guardian
A countryside conceptualist takes root in Edinburgh, digital artists explore beauty in the age of AI and Monster Chetwynd takes on this summer’s Tate Play installation – all in your weekly dispatch
Andy Goldsworthy
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Captivating retrospective of this countryside conceptualist who makes art with substances including sheep fleece, fern leaves, barbed wire and hare’s blood. Read the review.
• Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 26 July to 2 November - 24 July: Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years review – a wild walk between life, death and sheep-shearing - Exhibitions | The Guardian
National Galleries of Scotland, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh
Using barbed wire, graveyard pebbles and prickly thorns, this retrospective plunges viewers into the raw sadness and beauty of rural lifeRural life hits you in the face like the stink of cow dung as soon as you step into the Royal Scottish Academy. Andy Goldsworthy has laid a sheepskin rug up the classical gallery’s grand staircase – very luxurious, except it’s made from the scraps thrown away after shearing, stained blue or red with farmers’ marks, all painstakingly stitched together with thorns.
This is the Clarkson’s Farm of art retrospectives, plunging today’s urbanites into the raw sadness and beauty, the violence and slow natural cycles of the British countryside. Goldsworthy may love nature but he doesn’t sentimentalise it. At the top of the stairs there’s a screen and through its gaps you glimpse the galleries beyond. It feels mystical and calming, until you realise it’s made of rusty barbed wire strung between two of the building’s columns that serve as tightly-wound wire rollers. It made me think of Magnus Mills’ darkly hilarious rural novel about hapless fencers, The Restraint of Beasts.
Continue reading... - 18 July: Alien landscapes, Arctic artists and pioneers of pleasure – the week in art - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Georgia O’Keeffe and David Hockney enjoy the air, the British Museum looks to the far north, and the Folkestone Triennial gets under way – all in your weekly dispatch
Folkestone Triennial: How Lies the Land?
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Dorothy Cross, Katie Paterson, Cooking Sections and many more take part in a sprawling seaside summer art special.
• Various venues, Folkestone, Kent, from 19 July until 19 October - 17 July: Humble peasants … or an odyssey of sex and death? The Millet masterpiece that electrified modern art - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Van Gogh saw compassion for the rural worker; Dalí saw phalluses and a child’s grave. As The Angelus comes to the UK, our critic celebrates a painting so deep it could even induce hallucinations
It was Salvador Dalí who turned a small, intense rural scene called The Angelus, painted by Jean-François Millet in 1857-59 and hugely popular in its day, into a totem of modern art.
In the original, a pious peasant couple have heard the Angelus bell from a distant church, the Catholic call to prayer, and paused their work digging potatoes to lower their heads and pray. But from Dalí’s writings, we know he saw far more in the painting, from obscene sex to family tragedy. In one of his many versions of it, Atavism at Twilight, the couple sprout agricultural implements from their bodies. In his surreal drawings these good country people become mouldering, mummified husks, or are transformed into fossils by time and sadness. Now that the original painting is being lent by the Musée d’Orsay to the National Gallery as the star of its forthcoming show Millet: Life on the Land, we will all get a chance to obsess over this innocent-seeming artwork.
Continue reading... - 15 July: ‘A rarefied world of privilege’: lives of the New England upper class – in pictures - Exhibitions | The Guardian
Tina Barney’s decades-long exploration of the bourgeois set her family belonged to reveals the strange rituals and claustrophobic banality of rich people’s everyday lives
Continue reading... - 13 July: Cyborgs, snapchat dysmorphia and AI-led surgery: has our digital age ruined beauty? - Exhibitions | The Guardian
From photo-editing apps to ‘Instagram face’, technology has radically altered the way we see ourselves. Ahead of a new exhibition at Somerset House, our critic considers the meaning of art in a digital age
It’s the artist Qualeasha Wood who tells me about Snapchat dysmorphia, “a term coined by plastic surgeons who noticed there was a shift in the mid 2010s when people started bringing in their AI-beautified portraits instead of a celebrity picture”. To resolve your Snapchat dysmorphia, you get your real face remodelled to look like the ideal version of you that artificial intelligence has perfected on your phone screen.
There is a fundamental problem with this, says Adam Lowe, whose Factum Foundation in Madrid is at the forefront of art and technology, digitally documenting artworks and cultural heritage sites around the world. When you have surgery to look like your best self as shown on a flat screen, the results in three-dimensional reality can be very odd indeed. You can feel Lowe’s sadness at the way plastic surgery botches human restoration in pursuit of screen perfection: “I have to look away,” he says.
Continue reading... - 11 July: Lubaina Himid has a chance encounter and Ai Weiwei takes to the streets – the week in art - Exhibitions | The Guardian
The Turner prize-winner collaborates with Magda Stawarska, Weiwei unveils a public sculpture and Hockney and Emin celebrate the power of drawing – all in your weekly dispatch
Lubaina Himid With Magda Stawarska: Another Chance Encounter
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An installation exploring the letters of early 20th-century modernist Sophie Brzeska, plus new paintings by Himid.
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, from 12 July to 2 November - 10 July: Heroic images: 20 years of France’s ‘punk’ photo agency – in pictures - Exhibitions | The Guardian
From tearful scenes in war-torn Ukraine to the photo diaries of immigrants making treacherous journeys, French agency MYOP have spent two decades taking the pulse of our era
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Originally posted 2011-02-25 17:28:49. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
