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 As ever in his review of Susan Hiller ‘feminism’ is taken to be a wrong-headed and outdated phase, rather than a serious belief, approach or political stance.

A complexity it excludes or muffles

Hayley Tompkins; Days Series 2007
Courtesy The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd © Hayley Tompkins
Gouache on wood, spoon
3x13.1x2.1cm

Hayley’s work is risky. Perhaps, you think, this is just a piece of stick with some silver gouache and photographic trimmings on it? Well, that’s exactly what it is. But at the same time it’s a perfect index of a set of lost decisions, the shadow of a sensibility formed by all the gratuitous complexity of contemporary life, a complexity it excludes or muffles.

• David Musgrave on Hayley Tompkins’s Days Series (2007), Tate Etc., 21, Spring 2011. <http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue21/watercolourattenborough.htm>

AW: We were with you for the lost decisions, shadow of a sensibility and muffled complexity bit. But you lost us with the thing about its being a piece of stick with paint on it. Talk sense man!

Turner trouble

Turner Prize bosses made an exhibition of themselves yesterday, by trying to ban any bad publicity.

[…]

The row blew up after members of the Press were asked to sign a form which said journalists could not publish any images or words which would “result in any adverse publicity” for the exhibition.

• Tom Pettifor, ‘Turner Prize in another mess as art bosses try to ban bad publicity’, The Mirror, 5 October 2010, <http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/10/05/prize-idiots-115875-22609674/>

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 # 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 #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

Pornographic Banner?

‘Artist Fiona Banner has been invited to create an installation for Tate Britain, eight years after plastering the gallery’s space with a vivid description of a pornographic film.’

Vicky Shaw, Press Association, ‘Artist back at Tate after porn controversy’, The Independent, 18 January 2010
Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/artist-back-at-tate-after-porn-controversy-1871687.html

AW: It looks like the Indie suspect that Fiona Banner’s Duveens commission at Tate Britain (opening 28 June 2010) will be pornographic.

Fiona Banner: ‘I’m looking forward to the prospect of working within the phallic pillars of this extraordinary grandiose space.’

AW: Looks like they’re right.