7,006 words

Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

Editor’s Note:

This is the transcript by V. S. of the audio of Jonathan Bowden’s short film Against the Turner Prize. Unfortunately, only the audio is available on YouTube. If anyone has access to the video version, please contact me at [email protected]. Bowden talks about 25 illustrations. Without the video, however, I have had to try to provide new illustrations based on Bowden’s descriptions, frequently without success.  (more…)

3,213 words

Andy Goldsworthy, Ice Ball

The English sculptor Andy Goldsworthy is a practitioner of Land art, a practice that seeks to create art from natural materials and settings. Other practitioners of Land art include Richard Long, Robert Smithson, and David Nash. Whilst there is this common element of setting art in (or creating it from) the landscape, there is also a particularly striking quality to Andy Goldsworthy’s work that sets him apart from other Land artists. In short, this particular quality of his work might be termed sacred or numinous. For this reason he is both lauded as a contemporary shaman and derided as a twee pastoralist. Neither extremity really reveals much about Goldsworthy’s art.  (more…)

Jonathan Yeo, Portrait of Damien Hirst, 2013

3,374 words

For the radical Right the issue of contemporary art is something of a non-starter. The past century or so of developments in the fine arts have been dominated by American (and often Jewish) theoreticians who have fashioned a sensibility wherein anything that smacks of European tradition is automatically verboten, unless it can be refracted through a distorting lens of ironic detachment or disinheritance.  (more…)