Art Wank

Sewellisms # 23: Cliché counter

1 panjandrums

1 jabberwocky

1 piffle

3 feminist

1 feminism

• Brian Sewell, ‘Away with the fairies with Susan Hiller’, Evening Standard, 3 February 2011, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23920219-away-with-the-fairies-with-susan-hiller.do>.

AW: Sometime I think he puts in the Sewellisms and then writes the article around them. As ever in his review of Susan Hiller ‘feminism’ is taken to be a wrong-headed and outdated phase, rather than a serious belief, approach or political stance.

Sewellisms # 21: Ultimate put down

Born in 1946, Jamie is unashamedly a borrower, a crass incompetent incapable of drawing and able to paint only in the idiom of either father or grandfather — corny is the word that comes to mind, closely followed by naive, stale, uncomprehending, vulgar and inane. At his inept attempt to portray Nureyev as a dancer waiting in the wings, mocking laughter is the only reasonable response. As for his September 11, no patriotic blindness can excuse the dim-witted dumb banality of this pondered response to that dreadful day in 2001

• Brian Sewell, ‘Different strokes from Andrew Wyeth’, Evening standard, 15 July 2010, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23856446-different-strokes-from-andrew-wyeth.do>.

AW: Ouch!

Sewellisms # 19: Bronzed Bodies

‘nude women bathed, nude boys drew swords from scabbards, and nude Nubians stood guard. The small bronze was, it seems, a genre of art in which the nude, male and female, could abandon modesty and its futile wisps of drapery and stand full frontal at eye-level on the mantelpiece.’

‘it is at its best with nude male figures, either singly or performing some ghastly ritual of death or torment on some other male.’

• Brian Sewell, ‘Beautiful Bronzes from Ancient Rome’, Evening Standard, 27 May 2010, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23839088-beautiful-bronzes-from-ancient-rome.do>

AW:  Sewell really brings to life the beauty of boys bronzes.

Sewellisms #13: More, More, Moore

‘Reclining Figure of 1931 […] could perhaps be interpreted as a female figure in thrusting ecstatic anticipation of entry by a penis.’

Brian Sewell, ‘Does Henry Moore deserve his monumental reputation?’, Evening Standard, 25 February 2010