Art in the time of plague

With the order to close museums and galleries as well as other public spaces, a little like a 16th-century closing of the playhouses against the plague which saw theatrical companies tour the provinces to maintain their revenue streams, what is there for an arts fan to do? Well... You could watch some design and architecture …

Finishing on a high: personal faves and highlights

Featured strings: Just Go Nuts, Overlooked Treasures This is my last blog entry for Artstring; I've had the most tremendous time exploring the collections at the National Gallery, Science Museum and British Museum in greater depth than I had previously, and I sincerely hope, as I mentioned in my introductory post that other museums, London and worldwide, follow suit …

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Science in Art

Featured string: Standing on the shoulders of giants: science in art We don't tend to memorialise scientists in art any more despite still producing great thinkers, any more than we really publicly memorialise military leaders in quite the same way; new statues rising in cities or atriums of public buildings tend to be either corporate …

The Splendour of the Ordinary

Featured string: The Splendour of the Ordinary Spending a lot of time with museum collections and history, as I'm lucky enough to be allowed to, means grappling with the surprising timeline of inventions and "normalisations" (when using stuff that's been invented becomes normal--this can sometimes be a large gap. For example, the first video call was …

Let’s Talk About Dicks, Baby

Featured string: Teeny Weeny Peeny: the phallus We're all adults here. Or at least I hope we are. So we should be able to face the following with some semblance of maturity: there a lot of dicks in art. Especially old art. So many gentlemen's members (very rarely are the members in question attached to ladies, …

The Animal Parade

Featured Strings: If You Liked London Zoo, Animal Charm: Lovely Livestock From the earliest years of our lives and some of our earliest art as human beings (even perhaps before we were human beings), animals are everywhere in art. Before photography, art was the only way of providing any kind of accurate image of unknown …

Against Nature: Changing Views of What’s “Normal”

Featured String: Against Nature This string deals with things that are or were at some point considered "taboo". The word itself doesn't come from English, but has travelled back to English-speakers with James Cook from a number of Polynesian languages, where similar-sounding words have the same meaning: something that's forbidden to do. Some taboos are almost universal: …