Private view podcast: Adrian Searle describes Crash, art’s homage to JG Ballard at the Gagosian

WARNING: contains explicit language

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Liu Bolin and the art of concealment

See if you can spot artist Liu Bolin, the 'invisible man' who can camouflage himself against any backdrop, in any city, from China to the UK

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Private view podcast: Adrian Searle describes Crash, art’s homage to JG Ballard at the Gagosian

WARNING: contains explicit language

Posted in Art, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, guardian.co.uk, London listings | Comments Off

Private view podcast: Adrian Searle describes Crash, art’s homage to JG Ballard at the Gagosian

WARNING: contains explicit language

Posted in Art, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, guardian.co.uk, London listings | Comments Off

Smart art: how to sell out without selling out

For London's smaller art galleries, such as the Courtauld, Wallace and Dulwich, getting crowds in can be done intelligently ... or in a way that suggests desperate fashion-chasing

It's a peculiar destiny to be a small art museum in London. A city whose big galleries are so famous and so well-attended must be an unnerving place if you are responsible for attracting audiences, press coverage and funding to one of the quieter, more taken-for-granted institutions. These smaller London venues have their own "big three". The Courtauld Gallery, the Wallace Collection, and Dulwich Picture Gallery are all outstanding collections that offer unique pleasures of their own.

At the Courtauld, you can see one of the choicest collections of late-19th century French art anywhere in the world. At Dulwich, you can take in such great old master paintings as Rubens's Venus, Mars and Cupid in the setting of an architectural masterpiece by Sir John Soane. And the Wallace Collection can boast such a universal masterpiece as The Laughing Cavalier.

In a sane world these galleries would not have to compete for attention. It would be fine if they were empty of people. They could just concentrate on presenting their collections well, and perhaps putting on the occasional erudite exhibition of old master drawings – indeed, the Courtauld is about to do just that.

But this is not a sane world. Art is as nuts as everything else. If you don't get people in, you're not accessible, you're elitist – and your budget becomes vulnerable. The monies that can be got from gift shops, cafes, and ticket sales are considered indispensable. And besides, these collections doubtless have a genuine democratic urge to share their riches.

These galleries provide three very different models of how a venerable, small but choice collection might do that. The Wallace Collection has been most fazed by the fame of contemporary art, rattled by the roar of the publicists. Its recent D****n H***t exhibition was just the latest in a series of attempted crowd pleasers. And it did get in the crowds: gift-shop sales mutliplied many times over, I hear.

But at what cost has the Wallace Collection modernised itself? This used to be the quietest, most forgotten and therefore most thoughtful museum in London. It was great in its remoteness. Now it feels neurotic: always trying one glib idea after another, ending in this recent unholy car crash.

When all the papers were covering this worthless event, a superb Frank Auerbach exhibition at the Courtauld got far less notice. Yet, that does not mean the Courtauld is failing. Lots of people were at the Auerbach – lots were loving it. This gallery seems busier all the time, indeed, with keen, interested visitors of all ages. That was also true when I went last Friday to see the fine Paul Nash exhibition at Dulwich.

Both the Courtauld and Dulwich are pursuing intelligent, worthwhile exhibition programmes that add to their excellent collections without spoiling their meditative atmospheres. They prove it is possible to modernise without losing your soul - and it is the Wallace Collection, desperately chasing fashion, that looks silly.

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BBC digitises Henry Moore films

More than 20 newly digitised documentaries are to be released online for the first time after a link-up between the BBC and the Henry Moore Foundation. The material will be released on 24 February to coincide with the opening of the Tate Britian's major Henry Moore retrospective that runs until 8 August 2010.

"Visitors to Tate Britain's Henry Moore exhibition will be able to watch clips of Moore, including footage of him in his studio with some of the works featured in the show. We'll also be showing highlights on Tate's website", said Jane Burton, the creative director of Tate Media. "Tate is delighted to have played its part in making these wonderful archive programmes available to the public."

The material encompasses documentaries, interviews and reports spanning nearly five decades of Britian's most famous sculptor. It includes six classic programmes made by pioneering producer John Read for the BBC. Read's first film portrait of Moore was broadcast in 1951 to coincide with a Tate Gallery exhibition, and his "Henry Moore: Art is the Expression of Imagination and Not the Imitation of Life" is considered to be the UK's first television arts documentary. It shows the artist creating the "Reclining Figure" filming the entire process from sketch to the final bronze sculpture.

The material will form a part of a permanent resource in execution of the BBC's commitment to support and enable the cultural life of Britain, particularly through digital access to archive content and investment in arts and music programming. In January, the BBC has launched the interactive website A History of the World in 100 Objects in collaboration with the British Museum and 350 museums across the UK.

"The BBC archive is full of riches and these remarkable programmes are among the most precious. They comprise a treasure-trove of unique footage of a great artist, most of which has been unseen by the public for decades." said Roly Keating, the BBC director of archive content. "We're very grateful that thanks to the support and enlightened partnership of The Henry Moore Foundation, working with Tate Britain, these programmes can be rediscovered and freely enjoyed by audiences across the UK, now and in the future."

The material can be seen by visiting at the BBC's archive website and at the Henry Moore Foundation site.

Posted in Art, BBC, Blogposts, Culture, guardian.co.uk, Sculpture, Tate Britain | Comments Off

BBC digitises Henry Moore films

More than 20 newly digitised documentaries are to be released online for the first time after a link-up between the BBC and the Henry Moore Foundation. The material will be released on 24 February to coincide with the opening of the Tate Britian's major Henry Moore retrospective that runs until 8 August 2010.

"Visitors to Tate Britain's Henry Moore exhibition will be able to watch clips of Moore, including footage of him in his studio with some of the works featured in the show. We'll also be showing highlights on Tate's website", said Jane Burton, the creative director of Tate Media. "Tate is delighted to have played its part in making these wonderful archive programmes available to the public."

The material encompasses documentaries, interviews and reports spanning nearly five decades of Britian's most famous sculptor. It includes six classic programmes made by pioneering producer John Read for the BBC. Read's first film portrait of Moore was broadcast in 1951 to coincide with a Tate Gallery exhibition, and his "Henry Moore: Art is the Expression of Imagination and Not the Imitation of Life" is considered to be the UK's first television arts documentary. It shows the artist creating the "Reclining Figure" filming the entire process from sketch to the final bronze sculpture.

The material will form a part of a permanent resource in execution of the BBC's commitment to support and enable the cultural life of Britain, particularly through digital access to archive content and investment in arts and music programming. In January, the BBC has launched the interactive website A History of the World in 100 Objects in collaboration with the British Museum and 350 museums across the UK.

"The BBC archive is full of riches and these remarkable programmes are among the most precious. They comprise a treasure-trove of unique footage of a great artist, most of which has been unseen by the public for decades." said Roly Keating, the BBC director of archive content. "We're very grateful that thanks to the support and enlightened partnership of The Henry Moore Foundation, working with Tate Britain, these programmes can be rediscovered and freely enjoyed by audiences across the UK, now and in the future."

The material can be seen by visiting at the BBC's archive website and at the Henry Moore Foundation site.

Posted in Art, BBC, Blogposts, Culture, Digital media, guardian.co.uk, Media, Sculpture, Tate Britain | Comments Off

The strange death of liberal England | Jonathan Jones

The current climate crisis shows that even 21st-century science can be trumped by dogma. Or is madness creeping in?

It should be obvious from my articles that I love history as much as I love art. And I think it's time to come clean: I am a historian manqué. As a teenager in the 1980s, I spent so much time reading history that I became as pale as a maggot, got spots all over my face ... and won a scholarship to Cambridge to study it.

In those far-off days, when Margaret Thatcher faced the enemy within and I sat looking out of a classroom window at a rainswept rugby pitch in Wrexham, one history book I had come across in the public library reached out to me like a blazing vision. It was called The Strange Death of Liberal England and its author was George Dangerfield. In the last few weeks its title has kept ringing in my head.

Dangerfield's theme is the disintegration of the Liberal Party in Britain before the first world war. But this is no staid parliamentary history, it is a sweeping cultural interpretation of what Dangerfield sees as the death of Victorian rationalism and sobriety. In the 1900s, a wave of new forces conspired to undermine not just the Liberal Party but the optimistic and reasonable view of human nature on which it was based. The fall of liberal reason is one of the themes of the literature of that age, from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to WB Yeats's 1919 poem The Second Coming:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

In art, you can see the madness creeping on in Sickert's paintings and Epstein's post-human sculpture The Rock Drill.

We seem to be living through the demise of liberal England all over again. The current crisis in climate science is a profound shock to anyone who thought that, for all the cataclysms of the early 21st century, there were some basic values and rationalities that held our society on course. It seems science itself is disintegrating into tit for tat internet accusations and email scandal. Where is human reason if the lines between research, belief and subjectivity disappear?

And where is the liberalism of the New Labour era if it cannot even make a scientific case for environmental action without it being assailed by dogma? We're now in a realm where the maddest opinions are valid and the most apparently cogent are open to doubt.

The strange death of liberal England has us in its grip.

Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Climate change, Environment, guardian.co.uk, Joseph Conrad, Labour, Politics, WB Yeats | Comments Off

Ian Breakwell: Derby celebrates homegrown artist

Be first to tour a major retrospective of the late Ian Breakwell, multimedia artist with an eye for the extraordinary, open now in Derby

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Ian Breakwell: Derby celebrates homegrown artist

Be first to tour a major retrospective of the late Ian Breakwell, multi-media artist with an eye for the extraordinary, open now in Derby

Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off