Instead of the new season fantasy every woman is instructed to have as autumn approaches, this September I dreamed of throwing all my clothes out. Things that I used to turn to – a...
I am waiting for a plane at Newark. Time was when anywhere in an airport was a good place to read, or just to go slack and empty, to be nobody in particular and, by that token, more...
Rembrandt paints faces. When he finds himself in a world where appropriate facial expressions do not come to mind he is in trouble.
On 6 November, after ten days of legal argument in the High Court, judgment was handed down in the dispute over the University of London’s obligations towards the Warburg Institute. The...
It’s been five years and ten months. I confess to a bit of nostalgia for the nihilism that came with being governed by George W. Bush. For all the continuities, Obama arouses more...
In the latest Coors Light Ice Bar cinema advertisement, Jean-Claude Van Damme slices through enormous ice blocks with his bare hands and shatters them with a single thrust of his legs. Perhaps it...
Writing to his friend Stephen Bann, then a graduate student, in 1964, Ian Hamilton Finlay outlined his plans to treat readers of his brash new journal, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse, to a free...
Robert Wyatt is one of the last survivors of the 1960s pop music scene in Britain. He has been recording for nearly half a century. He was said to be reckless and unfocused for most of his...
The French national necropolis of Notre Dame de Lorette lies on a plateau to the north of Arras where a pilgrims’ chapel once stood. The bodies of some forty thousand French soldiers who...
Monsieur Hulot, with his manic politeness and his endless, baffled curiosity, loped into movies in 1953 in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. He became instantly familiar, although there was a...
Louise Bourgeois died, aged 98, in May 2010. Shortly before her death Jerry Gorovoy, her long-time assistant, found a forgotten box of her jottings, unpublished papers and diaries from her...
Some professions attract people suffering from extreme forms of narcissism (or as it’s sometimes called, narcissistic personality disorder). Politics is one; sport is another. A recent...
While trying to ignore my seventieth birthday I was offered an unexpected gift: the chance to nominate seventy films that would be shown in orthodox and unorthodox venues across London.
Anselm Kiefer first came to public attention in London in A New Spirit in Painting, the exhibition held in 1981 at the Royal Academy. It’s fitting, then, that this should be the venue...
It’s easy to see why Richard Tuttle’s work has a tendency to rile people – in particular people who insist on believing that sculpture, even if it no longer needs to be solid...
Walking from the Bastille to the rue Saint-Antoine in Paris a few weeks ago, I was thinking how swiftly the last few decades have taken their revenge on the past. The spectacle that...
Constable, as the V&A’s press release puts it, is ‘Britain’s best-loved artist’, and that in a way is the problem. (Constable: The Making of a Master is at the...
Warning: Even more spoilers than usual. ‘One can feel that there is always a camera left out of the picture,’ Stanley Cavell wrote in The World Viewed, ‘the one working...