Archive

  • The Museum of the Mind: Art and Memory in World Cultures

    The British Museum, London, 17 April-7 September 2003

  • 50th Venice Biennale

    The 100th anniversary this year of the Venice Biennale will probably not be its last. But then it’s a good opportunity to call it a century, with the 5oth Biennale creaking, bleeping and glitzing along

  • Philosopher and colleague of Ludwig Wittgenstein dies: GH von Wright (d. 16 June 2003)

    Philosopher and colleague of Ludwig Wittgenstein dies: GH von Wright (d. 16 June 2003)

  • Good news from the trenches

    Simon Callery’s new exhibition at Dover Castle raises the question of ‘what is archaeology?’ It offers sideways on, a long sectional slice of chalk rock, a ‘dip’ within which shards may be found. Such installation works as Callery’s (which they…

  • Absolutely vital for survival; or how vodka in Venice is \’absolutely\’ best paired with tonic

    Absolutely vital for survival; or how vodka in Venice is ‘absolutely’ best paired with tonic

  • Stem cells in the suburbs

    In the 2003 Biennale Australian pavilion, Patricia Piccinini (‘We are family’) entered into the flesh and spirit of the event by seeking to plumb ‘normality’; she goes on the consider ‘What is family?’ A half-understood image of the human genome…

  • Venice nul points

    One of the stranger but understandable results of the Iraq War has been the failure of Chris Ofili – the favourite in the stakes – to win the Golden Lion at Venice. No, it was not the absence of a…

  • To the low countries

    In the Dutch pavilion, ‘We are the world’ is the title of a ‘confrontational juxtaposition of installations by five artists of different cultural origins, but all living and working in the Netherlands’. Thus, Mexican Carlos Amorales shows a small shoe…

  • Foster\’s Trafalgar

    In July, popular London Mayor Ken Livingston will unveil the most significant revision of Trafalgar Square since the Lutyens fountains were installed in 1939. Our Ken had the right idea, since the new setting for the National Gallery transforms Wilkins…

  • Blowing open the turbine hall (soon): foretaste from Eliasson

    In the Danish national pavilion, Olafur Eliasson (‘The Blind Pavilion’) provides a welcome series of optical variations that are polarised in orange light using kaleidoscopes and a multi-faceted array internally. If this offers a foretaste of the artist’s repertoire in…

  • Booty abounds

    The combination of looted heritage from Afghanistan with that from Baghdad has suddenly created a buyer’s market, with an evident surplus of works. There has been no useful analysis as yet about the trade routes for this spread of relics,…

  • Absolutely vital for survival | How vodka in Venice is ‘absolutely’ best paired with tonic

    Absolutely vital for survival; or how vodka in Venice is ‘absolutely’ best paired with tonic

  • Mario Testino: Portraits

    Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, 16 April-15 June 2003.

  • Designer of the Year

    Design Museum, London, 1 March—29 June 2003.

  • John Piper in the 1930s – Abstraction on the Beach

    John Piper in the 1930s – Abstraction on the Beach

  • Outsider Art comes Full Circle – ‘John the Painter’

    Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 12 February–8 June 2003.

  • Norman Foster to chair Alvar Aalto Committee Charitable Trust

    The Charitable Trust, launched by Lord Foster, Finnish Ambassador Mr Pertti Salolainen and other friends of Alvar Aalto’s architecture, aims to save the Viipuri Library – one of Aalto’s greatest works.

  • Letter from Memphis

    I was in Memphis, Tennessee earlier this year to lecture on Charles Rennie Mackintosh and found myself outside the gates of Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley. So, talking about the design icon of Glasgow, Scotland (as one had to…

  • Titian

    National Gallery, London, 19 February-18 May 2003

  • Masterpieces from Dresden

    Sackler Galleries, Royal Academy, London, 15 March-8 June 2003.

  • Guy Bourdin at the V&A. Fashion photography as art

    In the 1970s, fashion seemed to be at its lowest ebb. The 60s, when London was the style capital of the world, had passed; yet to come were the 80s and 90s when fashion would replace radical politics and rock…

  • Obituary: Joanna Drew

    Obituary: Joanna Drew Joanna Drew, a major and formative influence on British Art from the 1970s onwards died on 20 April 2003, aged 73. She became Director of Exhibitions at the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1975, having first…

  • How world cultures were united

    This summer, the British Museum celebrates a quarter of a millennium of history, with a special exhibition in the Joseph Hotung Gallery of the Great Court. The exhibition is something of a curatorial squeeze, and deals with the interaction of…

  • Saatchi googol

    A crowd for the opening: Of 100 metres that Monday, 21,000, most visitors paying 8.50, filing past the Damien Hurst version Mini, nodding catnaps en route with Duane Hanson’s Traveller. The Tate Modern was hardly struggling with 100,000 visitors predictably…