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 As ever in his review of Susan Hiller ‘feminism’ is taken to be a wrong-headed and outdated phase, rather than a serious belief, approach or political stance.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 # 22: Muybridge

Had Muybridge been able to record the movements of Lady Hamilton’s Attitudes we might have understood the erotic charge that so fascinated Nelson and led to his seduction, but for this his ingenious camera was a long half-century too late.

• Brian Sewell, ‘Motion Pictures from Edward Muybridge’, The Evening Standard, 9 September 2010, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23876025-motion-pictures-from-eadweard-muybridge.do>

AW: Where did that come from?

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 # 20: Pricks, dicks, bums and bosoms

The pricks, dicks, bums and bosoms of the saucy postcard mingle with the riotous rumpy-pumpy episodes of Rowlandson; the silken elegance of Beardsley’s tumescent penises puts to shame Grayson Perry’s monstrous strutting phalluses, veinous with over-use, masquerading as Hans Andersen.

• Brian Sewell, ‘A stick of rock, cock? Tate Britain gets smutty’, The Evening Standard, 24 June 2010, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23848885-a-stick-of-rock-cock-tate-britain-gets-smutty.do>.

AW: Right, we’re there!

p.s. don’t anyone tell my female co-editor about Sewell’s summation of Sarah Lucas’s piece as ‘the wanking forearm, for example — surely an expression of feminist envy’. 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 #18: Pseuds, panjandrums and penises

I fell to wondering what French critics have made of it, but long ago, translating for the Arts Council, I learned that French art criticism is what David Lee, editor of Jackdaw, might dub high octane artbollocks — the self-indulgent blethering of pseuds in the obscure jabberwocky that has developed among cod-philosophers who pretend an interest in art.

• Brian Sewell, ‘Ooh la la, Freud!’, The Evening Standard, 20 May 2010, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23836139-ooh-la-la-freud.do>

AW: Thanks, we like that Brian. Though the phrase ‘takes one to know one’ springs to mind. This was a great week for Sewellisms. As well as throwing a ‘panjandrums’ in there (one day I’m gonna count them up, I’m guessing he says it every other week), there is a classic Sewell dissertation on naughty bits:

Occasionally they stand for a moment, but only to pursue some genital enquiry, as with the almost life-size awkwardly recumbent Leigh Bowery (Nude with Leg Up) whose largely tumescent penis is pretty well dead centre in a canvas seven feet wide — for Freud is nothing if not thorough in his depiction of the penis, testicles and cunt.

Sewellisms # 17: On drawing

‘it is in drawing that the sperm penetrates the egg, so to speak, and the conception of a work of art begins (it is tempting to suppose that pen, pencil and penis come from the same root, but they do not)’

• Brian Sewell, ‘Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings’, Evening Standard, 22 April 2010, <http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23827227-italian-renaissance-drawings-on-display-at-british-museum.do>.

AW:  Phallocentric much?

On Botticelli’s Allegory of Abundance:

‘Her movement thrusts the diaphanous stuff of her dress against her legs and into her crotch but above it is bundled as wrapping for a belly, waist and breasts that, strung about with tapes, seem far less real than those of Pollaiuolo’s Eve — are they invention, rather than observation, welded to the figure of a boy? Can she have been, with her face and feet, a boy? Perhaps a rather bewildered boy, slack-jawed and open-mouthed.’

AW: Hmm. Fantasising much?