Category Archives: Art and design

Broken covers: collector puts world’s worst album art on show

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Steve Goldman’s first rule is ‘it has to make me laugh’, and he is sharing the fun with public in Huddersfield

There’s the album cover with the band as rabbits, or the one with a harmony duo walking out of water dressed only in their underwear and ties, but surely the most baffling is the concert guitarist pictured in dinner jacket and no trousers.

Why? “I’ve no idea, sorry,” says Steve Goldman, who owns about 300 records that can lay claim to having some of the world’s worst cover art.

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‘A moment in history’: making a perilous sea-crossing with refugees – photo essay

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Ahead of a UK exhibition of her photo series Journey in the Death Boat, Güliz Vural describes travelling with Syrians being smuggled to Greece from Turkey

Standing on a Turkish beach ready to join a group of Syrian refugees on an inflatable boat bound for Greece, the photojournalist Güliz Vural’s biggest fear was that the people traffickers organising the illegal crossing would not let her onboard.

If she had known that within a few hours of leaving Turkey she would be under arrest, accused of people trafficking herself, she would have thought twice about the journey.

The migrants carry the inflatable boat they will travel in down to the beach. They had to leave all their possessions as they crammed themselves in. Nearly 50 Syrians made the crossing in a boat designed to carry 12 people, adding to the anxiety felt by the children in particular.

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‘I went from having to borrow money to making $4m in a day’: how NFTs are shaking up the art world

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Digital art is a billion-dollar business, with everyone from Paris Hilton to Damien Hirst trading in ‘non-fungible tokens’. But are NFTs just a get-rich-quick scheme masquerading as culture?

“It’s actually a lot simpler than you think.” It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and somewhat to my surprise, I’m on the phone to Paris Hilton, who is graciously explaining the world of NFTs.

Hilton is many things – a reality star, an heiress, an unlikely lockdown fitness guru who uses designer handbags instead of weights. But until now, she has never been considered a significant player in the art world. When artists have acknowledged her, often they’ve done so to fetishise her image. In 2008, Damien Hirst bought a portrait of her by the artist Jonathan Yeo, in which her body is constructed from collaged images cut from porn magazines.

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‘A way to deal with emotion’: how teaching art can help prisoners

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The Prison Arts Collective brings art, and renowned artists, to incarcerated people as a form of therapy and escape

The American prison has a long cultural history, depicted in movies from The Shawshank Redemption to The Green Mile. They are generally portrayed as harsh, dehumanising places populated by hardened criminals and vicious guards.

Who better, then, to demystify prisons and those who live in them than artists themselves? “We’ve had this glorified TV version of what a prison is in America and sure, it’s not a cakewalk, but it’s also humans in there – our fellow humans,” says Brian Roettinger, a graphic designer based in Los Angeles.

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‘We had a fierce anger and suspicion’: Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood on Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac

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In this extract from a book compiling artworks made by Donwood and Yorke for Radiohead, the pair discuss how alienation with Cool Britannia saw them retreat into landscapes, labyrinths and inadvertently inventing Twitter

Stanley Donwood I can’t believe the innocent world we lived in when we were making this work. It was before 9/11, before the “war on terror”, before the conjoining of the police and the military – all of the social changes that have led towards the position we now find ourselves in. It wasn’t possible to know what was going on around the world in the same way that it is now, when news has become a sort of surrogate entertainment.

Thom Yorke Everybody involved felt like we’d been in some weird circus for quite a while, after OK Computer. Personally, I mentally completely crashed, as did Stan. We all did, in a way. Rather than immersing ourselves in this congratulatory atmosphere around us, we felt the total opposite. There was this fierce desire to be totally on the outside of everything that was going on, and a fierce anger, and suspicion. And that permeated everything. It was completely out of proportion, deeply unhealthy – but that’s where we were at.

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Shanghai Century: Shanghai Spirit – in pictures

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A new exhibition captures the changing face of Shanghai through the past two centuries and the development of the past 30 years, from street photography to fashion shoots, from the intimacy of the lilongs to the grandeur of public facades. The exhibition is presented by Porsche in collaboration with the Shanghai Centre of Photography

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Sunbathers of Beirut: the photographs celebrating everyday life in the Middle East

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A new collection of photography aims to capture the upbeat, joyous side of life in the Arab world, away from war and suffering. Fouad Elkoury talks us through his project

On 4 August 2020, Fouad Elkoury was sitting in his home in Beirut when an enormous explosion at the port shattered his windows and blasted through his living room. Miraculously, the Lebanese photographer survived but his home was destroyed, along with those of an estimated 300,000 others. “When you go through such an explosion,” he says, “first, your memory disappears. Second, your hearing is ruined. And third, you stop planning. Things are so big, you realise you are nothing. This is where I am at the moment.”

One of Lebanon’s foremost photographers, Elkoury came to international recognition with his intimate photographs documenting life during the Lebanese civil war in Beirut in the 1970s and early 80s. Travelling in the years following the conflict, he found himself aboard the ship carrying Yasser Arafat during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He created Atlantis, a nautical series of images featuring the Palestinian leader.

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Herzog & de Meuron: ‘Architecture is the art of facts. We shouldn’t have a moralistic standpoint’

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The Basel-based ‘starchitects’ are at work on highly charged projects in Israel, Hong Kong and the new Cambridge HQ of AstraZeneca. How do they negotiate openness and inclusion?

Next month, a mighty new art museum opens in Hong Kong, billed as the most significant in the continent of Asia, whose waterside facade features a vertical digital screen the size of a football pitch. It does this in the middle of the political storm caused by the Chinese government’s national security law, which threatens to crush the museum’s promises of freedom of expression.

On the outskirts of Cambridge, England, the finishing touches are being applied to the crystalline new headquarters of AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company whose Covid vaccine has made it a global household name. In Jerusalem, just across the road from the Israeli parliament building, a new national library is under construction, with the stated aim of serving all the communities and faiths of a violently divided country.

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Ai Weiwei: ‘It is so positive to be poor as a child. You understand how vulnerable our humanity can be’

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From living in a dugout in Little Siberia to his friendship with Allen Ginsberg in New York, artist and activist Ai Weiwei reveals what drives his restless creativity

Ai Weiwei is hard to pin down. For the first few minutes of our Zoom call, him bleary-eyed at his computer, I think he’s talking to me from his new base in Portugal. My mistake – it’s Vienna, where he’s planning a show for next March. A year and a half ago, Ai was giving interviews about his new life in Britain; before that it was Germany, the country that offered him safe harbour when he finally left China in 2015, after years of hounding by the authorities and a spell in detention. So where does he actually live?

“Yeah, the question always comes up,” he says sheepishly. He moved to Cambridge so his son, Ai Lao, could improve his English. His son is still there, but in the meantime, “I found a piece of land near Lisbon, so I’m kind of settled there, but that’s only for the past year”.

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Franz Kafka drawings reveal ‘sunny’ side to bleak Bohemian novelist

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Surreal drawings by author of The Trial – which he demanded be burnt after his death – to be published

Stricken with self-doubt, paranoia and existential despair, the writings of Franz Kafka have taken generations of readers on what the author called “the descent into the cold abyss of oneself”.

A trove of 150 drawings, retrieved from a Swiss bank vault in 2019 after years of legal wrangling and presented to the public for the first time on Thursday, offers a more cheerful interpretation of the term “Kafkaesque”, however.

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Two lovers kiss behind a tree: Clifford Prince King’s best photograph

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‘It’s a private moment but in a wide open public space. It made me think about how queer Black men struggle to be seen for our true selves’

In 2018, I was visiting my cousin in Dallas when I remembered that a friend from Portland had moved there. I hadn’t seen him in a while and heard he had a new partner, so I asked if he wanted to catch up. The minute I saw him and his boyfriend, I wanted to photograph them. They were both wearing similar clothes, and something about the matching colour palette made them feel like a pair. We took a walk through Como Park, where I spotted this tree. I asked them to stand behind it and embrace each other, with their faces obscured.

What struck me was the interplay of intimacy and anonymity. It’s this tender moment, slightly hidden. We can see that it’s an embrace, but we can’t see who it is. It’s a private moment but in a wide open public space. It made me think about how they – and I – as queer Black men, struggle to be seen for our true selves in different spaces.

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‘Joyously subversive sex goddesses’: the artists who gave witches a spellbinding makeover

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Thousands of women were slain after being accused of witchcraft. Don’t they deserve more than the evil cackling hag stereotype? A powerful new book blows away the satanic baby-eating myths

We all know what a witch looks like. A gnarled old face full of warts with teeth missing and bright green skin. Then there’s the long black coat, the tall black hat and let’s not forget the sizable crooked nose, sniffing the fumes rising from a bubbling cauldron in a room festooned with cobwebs.

But that’s not what witches look like at all, or at least not according a hefty new art book being published in time for Halloween. In this compendium of witchy women, from Renaissance paintings to modern Wicca, the caricature of the evil hag is turned upside down. Witchcraft, the latest volume in Taschen’s Library of Esoterica, finds evidence from artists as diverse as Auguste Rodin and Kiki Smith for its revisionist view that witches are typically young, glamorous practitioners of highly sexualised magick. The cover painting, by Victorian artist JW Waterhouse, depicts the ancient enchantress Circe in pale, red-lipped pre-Raphaelite ecstasy – and the fun just keeps coming. The witches here are powerful feminist sex goddesses whose rites and incantations are joyously subversive.

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Six jailed in Spain for selling fakes of Goya and other artists online

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Valencia police seized 27 paintings by various artists being sold for €1.2m, 18 of which were crude forgeries

Six people have been jailed in the eastern Spanish region of Valencia after police broke up a criminal gang that was using the internet to sell crudely forged paintings attributed to artists including Francisco de Goya, José Benlliure y Gil and Nicolás Falcó.

The investigation, carried out by officers from the historical heritage group of the Valencian police, began when doubts arose over the provenance of Falcó’s The Adoration of the Three Wise Men, which had been bought for €18,000 (£15,000) and was being resold for €45,000.

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‘We planted a seed’: the Afghan artists who painted for freedom

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The Taliban has whitewashed Kabul’s political murals – and those who created them have fled into exile

Negina Azimi felt shock and fear like never before when she heard that Taliban fighters had entered Kabul on 15 August. As an outspoken female artist in Afghanistan, she knew they would come for her.

“We heard reports that the Taliban might raid houses. I was scared because I live in a very central neighbourhood and every room in my house is adorned with the kind of art the Taliban won’t approve of,” she says, referring to paintings that feature messages about women’s empowerment and are critical of the Taliban’s atrocities.

Negina Azimi, who is now in a refugee camp in Albania with others of the ArtLords collective. They are now planning an exhibition

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‘You can sense Selim the Grim’s anger’: portraits of Ottoman sultans go on show

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Set of six copies of portraits first produced in 1579 in Venice are going up for auction in London next week

They were powerful rulers of perhaps the mightiest empire the world has ever seen, and their portraits oiled the wheels of diplomacy. Six sultans of the Ottoman empire, which spanned more than six centuries and dominated a great swathe of the world, gaze out beneath magnificent, bulbous turbans, a symbol of their wealth and status.

An original set of 14 portraits was produced in Venice in 1579, and copies were made later. The only surviving intact set is in Munich, but a set of six goes on display at Christie’s in London this weekend before being sold at auction on 28 October.

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‘Secret piety’: new show reveals Andy Warhol’s Catholic roots

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Known for his wild parties and proud queerness, he went to church, met the pope and prayed daily with his mother

He is celebrated for his Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup prints, legendary parties, proud queerness and worship of celebrity.

But Andy Warhol was raised by a devout Catholic mother with whom he prayed daily throughout the two decades in which they shared a New York home. The wild prince of pop art went to church, met the pope and financed his nephew’s studies to become a priest.

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Ai Weiwei on the death of Diane Weyermann: ‘Like a bridge of hope washed away in the storm’

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The artist and film-maker remembers the pioneering documentary producer behind films such as RBG, The Square and An Inconvenient Truth, who has died aged 66

Diane has left. When someone close passes away, we feel that a part of ourselves left together with them. A part of our understanding of the world, a link in our interpersonal network, our previous value judgment and actions in the past have all been misplaced because of the passing of a close friend.

This sense of misplacement is sometimes very strong and clear, almost like the lack of a lit candle on the shore of a river or a pile of extinguished charcoal in cold weather. We cannot envisage it before people disappear from our life. When they do disappear, we suddenly become aware of the fact that the light and warmth, which vanished with their passing, are lost for ever. They are irreplaceable and will never return. No matter what happens in the future, whatever is lost is lost for ever.

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Egypt detains artist robot Ai-Da before historic pyramid show

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Sculpture and its futuristic creator held for 10 days, possibly in fear she is part of spying plot

She has been described as “a vision of the future” who is every bit as good as other abstract artists today, but Ai-Da – the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist – hit a temporary snag before her latest exhibition when Egyptian security forces detained her at customs.

Ai-Da is due to open and present her work at the Great Pyramid of Giza on Thursday, the first time contemporary art has been allowed next to the pyramid in thousands of years.

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