Art

She became one of the tourist sights of Venice. When she and her cheetah floated around the canals, people gathered on the bridges to applaud. But Luisa wasn’t just interested in making herself a living work of art – she wanted artists to create a record of her. She began commissioning a lavish gallery of portraits. No fewer than five were exhibited at the 1914 Biennale and, over the following years, she would sit for Jacob Epstein, Augustus John, Man Ray, Kees van Dongen and Giacomo Balla – accumulating a collection as extensive but infinitely more narcissistic than Peggy’s. … [Read more...] about Sex and art by the Grand Canal: how Peggy Guggenheim took Venice

Liberian president and Nobel laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, whose portrait is perhaps the strongest of the ones that have surfaced so far, looks skyward while wearing a purple headscarf. The former Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi (who knows a thing or two about venerating war criminals) smiles mildly with his familiar gray-McDonald’s-arches coiffure. Tony Blair, his Iraq co-conspirator, has been shifted far to the composition’s right – a nice, probably unintentional political metaphor. Vladimir Putin, against a lavender background, gazes straight on, his cheeks depicted with an impasto uncommonly thick in Bush’s work; this one in particular, with its strange use of lights and darks, seems to have been a struggle. … [Read more...] about George W Bush’s portraits of world leaders: art that tells us nothing at all

Rama spent much of the 1990s in Paris, where he lived with another Albanian: Anri Sala, a documentary film-maker turned video artist. “This is more an avant garde of democratization,” he tells Sala in his 2003 film Dammi i Colori, a nighttime escapade through the Albanian capital and its parti-coloured apartment blocks. It’s this seductive tour of Tirana, a midnight reverie of past and present, by which Sala eases us into the grand, busted dreams of the 20th century: modernist dreams, communist dreams, dreams in which politics and aesthetics informed one another and then collapsed into ruin. And Rama’s proposition – that (abstract) art might be your best bet for courage after the failure of the communist dream – ripples throughout all the works that constitute Anri Sala: Answer Me, a cunning, musical, and occasionally glorious retrospective of one of the most important artists in Europe, east or west. … [Read more...] about Anri Sala: Answer Me review – art cures 20th century’s broken dreams

A statement from the jury said: “In this sixth edition of the Vincent award, we saw a strong emphasis on time-based installations, works that are not asking time on the visitor but offering time. Time to reflect, time to submerge and time to step into other worlds and perspectives. In our society, time consuming and multitasking is everywhere. We feel that questioning this is an important role of contemporary art.” … [Read more...] about Albanian Anri Sala wins Vincent award for contemporary art

Picanyol argued the city's newly elected government was scapegoating the centre for years of careless government spending. "They are using it as a symbol of what has really happened in Spain. Spending a lot of money, glamorous experiments, or this craziness about having a cultural centre in any town, or high-speed trains everywhere, any small town has an airport, and so on," Picanyol claimed. … [Read more...] about Centro Niemeyer closes but row over arts complex continues