Box office numbers for drive-in cinemas in Seoul, South Korea, are on the rise as people find a way to avoid crowds during the coronavirus outbreak
Continue reading...Category Archives: Art and design
Asterix creator Albert Uderzo dies at 92
French comic-book artist, who created Asterix with the writer René Goscinny, dies at home ‘from a heart attack unrelated to the coronavirus’
Asterix illustrator Albert Uderzo has died at the age of 92, his family has announced.
The French comic book artist, who created the beloved Asterix comics in 1959 with the writer René Goscinny, died on Tuesday. He “died in his sleep at his home in Neuilly from a heart attack unrelated to the coronavirus. He had been very tired for several weeks,” his son-in-law Bernard de Choisy told AFP.
Continue reading...Parr’s makeup ad for Gucci has a brush with controversy
The shoot, featuring musician Dani Miller in mascara, has reignited debate about realistic standards of beauty
One is famed for warts-and-all realism, the other for high-end gloss, so there was always going to be something spectacular in the offing when British photographer Martin Parr was asked to shoot a make-up advertising campaign for the Italian fashion house Gucci.
The imagery – for the brand’s new L’Obscur mascara – features New York punk musician Dani Miller and her now-famous gap-toothed smile. With lashings of heavy black mascara, natural eyebrows (complete with, shock horror, regrowth), and minimal foundation, it has divided customers and started yet another debate about diversity, even in these times of increased body positivity.
Continue reading...Smile-ing Boys Project – in pictures
Kay Rufai’s portraits of smiling black boys from south London came out of an initiative that investigated the lack of mental health provisions for black teenagers. The photographs will be on display at Brixton Village
Continue reading...‘It almost destroyed me’: behind New York’s greatest nightclub, Studio 54
In a new exhibition, Studio 54 co-founder Ian Schrager goes back to the late 70s to explore the highs and lows of the celebrity-packed hotspot
Ian Schrager has seen many things in his life, but nothing quite like this. The 73-year-old Studio 54 co-founder is freaking out on the phone.
“It’s funny after 40 years! Forty years!” he exclaims. “Doing an exhibition on Studio 54? In a world-class museum? I don’t think anyone would have believed that – but they were too busy dancing.”
Continue reading...Famous for 15 minutes! My week living as Andy Warhol
As an artist and a celebrity, Warhol changed the world. But what really went on behind those shades? Ahead of Tate’s epic show, our writer unleashes his inner Andy
I am in agony. I’m sitting at home wearing a Breton top and a pair of shades, my hair freshly bleached, my belly swollen and sore. Perhaps that’s because I have just eaten five tins of Campbell’s condensed cream of mushroom soup. Why would anyone do that? Well, I’m trying to live like Andy Warhol, the pop artist who died in the 1980s but is still a household name. And it’s not going smoothly.
Like the cafes of Paris or the skyscrapers of New York, Warhol is is so omnipresent in popular culture, the average person could probably draw a good likeness of him, despite knowing little about him. It’s the same with his work. Every framed tin of Campbell’s soup or colour-saturated portrait of Marilyn Monroe screams Warhol. And most people are familiar with his most famous quote: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
Continue reading...Snapshot sisterhood: women train the lens on women – in pictures
To mark International Women’s Day, ActionAid is staging a photography exhibition that celebrates female trailblazers in poor countries – from the Guatemalan hip-hop artist who uses her music to champion feminism, to the founder of Kabul’s first yoga studio. All of the images, which are on show at the Oxo Tower in London until 8 March, are taken by female photographers
Continue reading...Anger on Easter Island after truck crashes into sacred stone statue
Mayor calls for vehicle restrictions around famous structures after Chilean man causes ‘incalculable’ damage
The mayor of Easter Island has called for vehicle restrictions to be introduced around its archaeological sites after a pickup truck hit one of the famous stone statues, causing “incalculable” damage.
A Chilean man who lives on the island, in Polynesia, was arrested after the incident on Sunday and has been charged with damaging a national monument, according to the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio de Valparaíso. The platform on which the statue stood was also damaged in the crash, it reported.
Continue reading...Watching Russian immersive film ‘felt like rape’, says journalist
Lifelike scenes of violence in Soviet-influenced experimental movie raises ethical concerns
Tatiana Shorokhova, a film critic from St Petersburg, has admitted to feeling sick and “physically afraid” while watching DAU. Natasha, a controversial film by Ilya Khrzhanovsky produced from a years-long experiment on an immersive set built as a replica of a Soviet-era research institute. In fact, she likened the experience to rape.
It was not just the graphic scenes of violence against the titular character or depictions of real sex while drunk, she said, but the understanding that all of this was, in a way, real.
Continue reading...‘Hip, rebellious, even a bit sinister’: how Andy Warhol made pop art fashion
As the Tate Modern prepares to open its new exhibition, a menswear expert – and Warhol superfan – explains why the artist continues to impact on personal style
• Read more from the spring/summer 2020 edition of The Fashion, our biannual style supplement
“Artists aren’t supposed to dress up and I’ll never look right anyway,” Andy Warhol utters in Bob Colacello’s fantastic biographical Holy Terror book. It’s ironic, given that when anyone talks about men having a sartorial uniform, I always think of Warhol. Specifically, the blazer, shirt, tie and jeans era. He often also had a plastic carrier bag in hand, with copies of his magazine Interview inside to give out to potential advertisers. Warhol was never not working. He was his art.
Warhol’s dedication to jeans is also something of a personal obsession; I recently bought three pairs of vintage Levi’s – his favourite denim brand. Arguably, one of the best denim-related stories is of Warhol keeping his Levi’s 501s on under his tuxedo suit – he was going to the White House for the first time – because the trousers were itchy. Then there is the picture of him skating in jeans and a blazer, or a roll neck with New Balance trainers, Basquiat in the foreground, topless and weight-training.
Continue reading...Vibrant, progressive and bold: graphic designs of Japanese modernism – in pictures
Between the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923 and the calamities of the Pacific War (1942–45), Tokyo and Osaka developed into some of the world’s most vibrant and modern metropolises. A new generation of creative and financially liberated young people – playfully known as moga and mobo, or modern girls and modern boys – spurred a movement that energised Japanese innovation.
Japanese Modernism, which opens at the National Gallery of Victoria on 28 February, investigates this period with fashion, decorative arts, popular culture and design. Annika Aitken and Wayne Crothers – senior and assistant curators of Asian art respectively – handpicked posters that demonstrate the evolution of a design aesthetic which tells the story of a changing Japan
Continue reading...Tate and MoMa ‘playing catch up’ in collections of modern African art
Art fair founder says western institutions belatedly investing in contemporary art from Africa
Major western culture institutions – including Tate and MoMA – are “playing catch up” to create truly global collections that recognise modern art from the Africa, according to the founder of an influential art fair devoted for contemporary African art.
Touria El Glaoui, the director and founder of 1-54, said that only in the last decade have institutions begun to take it seriously.
Continue reading...Hidden Away review – makes a rich, heavy meal of a biopic of feral Italian painter
This account of the tough, troubled life of naive artist Antonio Liguabue boasts a committed performance from actor Elio Germano
Georgio Diritti has directed a lovely-looking and fervent film about the life of the 20th-century naive artist Antonio Ligabue, who suffered poverty and mental illness throughout his life but whose fierce, primitive, impassioned studies and sculptures of animals and human portraits made him celebrated in his own day as an authentic unschooled genius, and an object of cult fascination from the metropolitan elite who perhaps regarded him as comparable to Van Gogh. (There was another biopic in 1978, with Suspiria star Flavio Bucci in the lead.)
The Italian actor Elio Germano stars as Ligabue here, with a performance that has something of both Daniel Auteuil and Daniel Day Lewis — and also, maybe, a little of Sacha Baron Cohen. He plays him with the stoop, the shuffle, the fierce glare, the occasional equine twitch of the head and teeth-baring and drooping lower lip. This is a congenital dysfunction but also the natural brusqueness of the creative spirit and someone who does not suffer fools gladly (despite or because of being dismissed as a fool all his life). And for all that Ligabue once lived an almost feral existence, he is someone with some sense of the good things in life, particularly a decent meal in a restaurant.
Continue reading...Minamata review – Johnny Depp attempts redemption in heartfelt look at disaster that struck Japanese town
Depp plays real-life US photojournalist W Eugene Smith who travels to cover the story of mercury poisoning that caused horrendous disfigurements
Minamata is not a masterpiece and there are one or two cliches here about western saviours and boozy, difficult, passionate journalists who occupy the perennial Venn diagram overlap between integrity and alcoholism. This movie’s producer-star Johnny Depp has form on this score, with his starstruck impersonation of Hunter Thompson. And once again, he has chosen a role in which he wears a hat indoors. But Minamata is a forthright, heartfelt movie, an old-fashioned “issue picture” with a worthwhile story to tell about how communities can stand up to overweening corporations and how journalists dedicated to truthful news can help them.
Depp plays real-life US photojournalist W Eugene Smith whose glory days were in the second world war and the decades following, working for Life magazine in that now-forgotten era when analogue cameras were incapable of lying and magazines with compelling photos could command newsstand sales.
Continue reading...Banksy artwork in Bristol is vandalised days after appearing
Piece, which appears to be a nod to Valentine’s Day, has graffiti scrawled across it
A piece of street art in Bristol that was this week confirmed as being by Banksy has been vandalised.
A picture shared on social media showed “BCC wankers” scrawled across the artwork, which shows a young girl firing a slingshot filled with flowers.
Continue reading...Early Damien Hirst artwork bought for £600 could fetch £1.8m
Artist pays tribute to collector Robert Tibbles, who was his first customer in 1989
In 1989, 28-year-old Robert Tibbles bought a medicine cabinet artwork full of bottles of pills for £600. His friends derided it as “crap” and told Tibbles he had been ripped off and should return it.
On Thursday that medicine cabinet, called Bodies by Damien Hirst, is expected to sell for between £1.2m and £1.8m in an auction of Tibbles’ entire Cool Britannia collection, which also includes works by Michael Craig-Martin and Gilbert & George.
Continue reading...David Hockney’s The Splash sold for more than £23m
The painting depicts the moment after a diver hits the water in a swimming pool
David Hockney’s The Splash has sold for more than £23m at auction.
The 1966 piece by the Bradford-born artist last sold at Sotheby’s in 2006 for £2.9m and returned to the same auction house on Tuesday evening as the star piece in its Contemporary Evening Art Auction.
Continue reading...Critics pour scorn on Scotland-Northern Ireland bridge idea
Architect and PM’s enthusiasm for Celtic crossing tempered by local cynicism of ‘pipe dream’
“The stars are aligning” for a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland, according to the principal advocate for a Celtic crossing, the leading architect Alan Dunlop.
Although engineering experts have dismissed the concept as “bonkers”, Dunlop has been pressing for serious discussion of Boris Johnson’s latest grand infrastructure scheme since he conducted a feasibility study into the proposal in 2018, when he first raised the prospect.
Continue reading...Lisbon’s outdoor art gallery – in pictures
Street art has transformed Quinta do Mocho, an area once plagued by crime and unemployment
Critic accidentally destroys $20,000 artwork at Mexico fair
Avelina Lésper said it was almost as if Gabriel Rico’s piece knew how much she disliked it
An art critic has destroyed a contemporary piece at Mexico’s premiere art fair, sparking a debate about what constitutes art.
Critic Avelina Lésper said she accidentally shattered the installation on Saturday at the Zona Maco art fair in Mexico City when she placed an empty soda can near it to express her disdain for the piece: a sheet of glass with a stone, soccer ball and other random objects suspended inside.
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