Archive

Everything moves so fast in Iraq. It’s no longer a question of ‘shock and awe’, more one of the disappearing museum inventory. In the cradle of world civilisation, the great collection of antiquities has seen looting and pillaging on a…

LRB has actually opened its own shop, in an amazing display of commercial acumen. First Agatha went, from Duke Street, St James’s, then Zwemmer closed in late April. The niche that was the old LRB office is now a newer…

Sir Timothy Clifford has no difficulty these days in turning up important works that other curators and directors do not know to be under their noses. News that Sir Tim, while flicking through the bundles in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence,…

The ‘Rape of Goya’ might be called a curatorial wheeze. In the commodification of bad taste, this peculiar show must take the prix. However, certain elements of this apparent despoliation of Goya, by damaging posthumous etchings of the master in…

The Reverend Julian Spalding, maverick commentator on the decline of British Art, has published his diatribe ‘The Eclipse of Art: Tackling the Crisis in Art Today’. Crisis? Art? Spalding deserves the Chapman treatment of superimposed clowning. But where, indeed, is…

The St Petersburg Amber Room has been remade after almost 25 years of patient restoration. Originally a gift in 1716 from King Frederick-William I of Prussia to Peter the Great, Second World War German forces shipped off 27 panels to…

It is fair to say that the painter Graham Sutherland is not being served well by the national galleries in commemoration of the centenary of his birth. In April, Tate Britain will offer one room of works from its own…

If there was any evidence to prove that art is becoming a commodity, and even more so a consumer product, the excellent exhibition running at Tate Liverpool makes the issue crystal clear. ‘Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture’…