Rex Whistler part two
AN UPDATE Rex Whistler, self portrait in uniform. Wikimedia Commons. The powers that be at the Tate Britain at last have decided that the mural entitled The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats, the centre point of a formerly much loved dining venue in the Rex Whistler restaurant, can be reopened with a new “contextualising”…
What the new security law in Hong Kong means for artists
Hong Kong Skyline -Wikimedia Commons Hong Kong once had a thriving arts scene and cinema industry. No more. The draconian security law introduced by the repressive, authoritarian commissars who reign over Communist China means that anyone “dissing” or being perceived to diss the regime will find themselves being marched off to jail with little or…
A week in the world of Woke. When Wokeists fall out.
The Barbican is hosting a rather good exhibition about weaving and tapestry titled “Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art.” The Barbican website outlines the event on their website with the following description: “Using textiles, fibre and thread, 50 international artists challenge power structures and reimagine the world in this major group exhibition.…
A week in the world of Woke
The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge decided on a rehang of its collection which has just reopened to the public. By now, we usually know what that means. Though the director Luke Syson insisted that the new presentation was not woke but just a different “way of seeing” to quote John Berger. “I would love to…
Weaponising Art Part 2
Well, they’ve gone and done it. Not content with chucking tins of soup over Van Gogh, the activists have taken it a step further and actually sprayed a canvas and slashed it. A Palestinian activist sprayed and slashed with a knife a portrait of Lord Balfour who was instrumental in setting up a Jewish state…
The wrong kind of victims
An artist talk at the Jewish Museum in New York, was disrupted last month by anti-Zionist and pro Palestinian protesters condemning the exhibition by Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky of her depictions of the 7 October 2023 massacres by Hamas. The exhibition, apparently, serves as “imperial propaganda” and “manufacturing consent for genocide” which is all rather…
Weaponising Art
Just Stop Oil protests nearly always involve iconic paintings in public museums, either splashing them with paint or soup or the protesters gluing themselves to the frames. According to their logic, we care more about works of art than we do about the planet. So far, the protests haven’t actually destroyed a work of art,…
The trouble with Hogarth
There is no trouble with Hogarth of course but in the view of the current wave of critical race theory sweeping the museums of the UK and its curators, an exhibition of the great artist’s works and life at the Tate Britain in 2021 which should have been a great moment to celebrate one of…
The Cultural Revolution in Cambodia
The Cultural Revolution using Mao’s modus operandi arrived in Cambodia during the seventies. Using the exact same methods, the Khmer Rouge set about not only terrorising its population, inflicting collectivisation on its peasants, removing children from their parents to be brought up and indoctrinated by the Khmer Rouge but also dismantling the “bourgeois” culture and…
The Chinese Cultural Revolution
Imagine that you are a school student and you discover one day that one of your teachers was cooked and eaten by his students. It may well appear to be a malevolent wish, but it is an event that actually did happen during the Cultural Revolution which occurred in China during the sixties and seventies.…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
Follow My Blog
Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.
Art history Unchained. 