Showing results by author "Edward Lucie-Smith" in All Categories

Anyone who Googles the phrase curatorial theory will immediately come upon quite a long list of suggested websites. Sometimes it is a little difficult to be sure if the texts offered are intended to be taken entirely seriously. However, if I hack my way through the dense thickets of language, I find myself in agreement with what they seem to be trying to say, which is that curating an exhibition - or for that matter, a website - is not an end in itself.

The new Gauguin exhibition at Tate Modern in certainly the art event of the year in London. It’s a blockbuster exhibition of a kind that, thanks to the continuing worldwide financial crisis, may soon become extinct. It is also an exhibition that raises important questions about how we currently see and think about art.

The new exhibition at the National Gallery in London ought to be yet another triumph for an institution that is now running a very ambitious exhibition program. Yet this event makes a curiously uneasy effect. There are several, not just one, reasons for this. The first is that Rubens, of all great artists the one who enjoyed the greatest degree of worldly success, had distinctly uneasy beginnings. Of sound Flemish bourgeois stock, he was born in 1577 at Siegen in Westphalia.

Very seldom in London can a major show of modern and contemporary art at a highly respected national institution have received such universally negative reviews. As I write this, not all the verdicts on the Royal Academy’s exhibition of Modern British Sculpture have been delivered. However, it is already clear that the majority will be hostile. Paradoxically, it is this, more than any other factor, which makes it seem like an important event - a turning point if you like.

Works of art have often been endowed by their audience with talismanic force. Their impact exceeds the visual impression they make. This seems natural enough when we consider the fact that the most ambitious works of art produced by ancient civilizations were religious. To those who originally encountered them, they seemed to speak directly from the gods. Their makers were very seldom recorded, though the names of those who ordered them to be made - pharaohs, emperors and kings - quite frequently survive.

Art in the Caribbean is culturally of great complexity. This complexity reflects the intricacies of the colonial history of the region, with the different islands and territories divided between many different European powers. Artists in each territory tended to mesh into a different education system and a different set of preconceptions about art.

Wifredo Lam is by far the most celebrated, and most people would say the greatest, artist produced by the Caribbean region in modern times. His relationship with where he came from is, however, extraordinarily complex - much more complex than most of his admirers suppose, largely because they usually have no direct experience of the region and little knowledge of its social history.