Author: jaywp

  • The Art of Ken Done

    Janet McKenzie, Sydney: Craftsman House, AU$100/ US$60/GB£50

  • Will Maclean: Driftworks

    Will Maclean’s exhibition, ‘Driftworks’ at Dundee Contemporary Arts is the finest exhibition by a contemporary artist in Scotland that I have seen in the 14 years I have lived there since coming from Australia. It coincides with the publication of…

  • Letter from Shanghai

    Ever since the Treaty of Nangking opened Shanghai to foreign trade in 1842, the city has become a trading centre not to be ignored. The setting up of the International Settlement in 1863 and free-trading concessions opened the way for…

  • The return of Wittgenstein

    Currently showing in London is a small ‘cabinet’ exhibition open to the public in the Library Print Room, Royal Academy, through 28 January. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has been a compelling figure in British intellectual life. He died in Cambridge…

  • Kirsty Wark at BBC2 Newsnight Review (Arts)

    One of the traumas of 2001 was, for UK viewers jealously treasuring the almost uniquely intelligent comment garnered by Mark Lawson in the chair of the weekly half-hour long survivor of ‘The Late Review’ (long lamented), the peripatetic replacement of…

  • Tate Britain’s birthday suits: ‘Exposed: The Victorian Nude’

    Tate Britain’s birthday suits: ‘Exposed: The Victorian Nude’

  • Liverpool tales

    Tate Liverpool opens a challenging exhibition entitled ‘Telling Tales: Narrative Impulses in Recent Art’ which displays perfect timing. The absence of narrative in contemporary art has not been much questioned this year. Perhaps, 2002 will restore this long-present element of…

  • The last Turner Prize?

    There seems little more to be said of this drama. Although Martin Creed is an appropriate winner for 2001, and Madonna in making the award administered the expletive kick-start that she was bidden to perform more skilfully than many truly…

  • Not quite the end

    Francis Fukuyama has been strident, since 11 September, in re-asserting, in the Wall Street Journal, that history is indeed foreclosed, terminally in suspense, on a drip feed, but nonetheless ‘we remain at the end of history’. There was surely a…

  • The Finland diaspora 2001

    It has been inspiring to see how, through this year, one small European nation continues to achieve a cultural impact wholly disproportionate to its small population of less than 5.5 million, one-tenth of that of the United Kingdom. Quite apart…