ARTWEEKLY

So we all know the famous story of Hitler and art school (he was rejected twice because he sucked). But what if his enrolment had been successful? What if he’d been an artist instead? The former question is creepy to think about, but irrelevant because his drawings were TERRIBLE. Please refer to the nude painted by Hitler in 1924, below.

                                   Adolf Hitler, Sketch Of A Nude Woman, 1924

Moving from one political leader to another, not so long ago, we learnt (from hackers who broke into email accounts) that George W. Bush had taken the time to paint 50 different dogs, and this really creepy semi-nude bathroom self portrait, which baffled critics and anyone who looked at it. 

                           George W. Bush, Bathroom Self Portraits, 2012

And now, Britain’s very own Prince Charles is giving it a go. Critics everywhere are panning the Prince’s watercolours since he put them online (“why doesn’t he go and paint some council estates”), but I dont think they’re so bad. They are so utterly mind numbingly boring that they are comforting, you know? They remind me of the bad art on the walls of the waiting room of my local doctors in Swindon. They’re shit, but OK to look at when you’re waiting for the morning after pill. 

                   Prince Charles, Trees On Duchy House Farm At Highgrove, 2003

In fact, in ‘Trees on Duchy Home Farm at Highgrove’ his Royal Majesty is ALMOST daring with his palette, using bright yellows and oranges to capture sunlight hitting the trees and grass. If only he’d applied the same painterly rigour to the sky, using purples or pinks instead of the actual colour of the sky, then it could have been a fauvist inspired masterpiece! But alas, it’d look wicked at my doctors. 

On Tuesday, these people (above) protested at Southwark Council HQ, with no clothes on, wearing signs that said “HANDS OFF PECKHAM”. Why? No it’s not a shitty art project (once saw a girl smear eggs and blue pigment all over her vajayjay down the road), it’s because Southwark Council’s plans to “regenerate” Peckham mean that 60 independent businesses that are in the “regeneration area”  will be bulldozed and replaced with “public realm and retail units” (basically Costas) [read item 12 in Southwark Council’s Agenda] . Why should you care about saving Peckham from gentrification? Peckham is a hub of creativity and budding galleries and artspaces, and if the council plan to go ahead with item 12 then galleries such as The Sunday Painter, and Sassoon Gallery are under threat.

@savepeckham was set up shortly after Southwark Council’s agenda was published, and a small buzz about the issue arose, resulting in the above protest. For now, @savepeckham are celebrating victory, as the council have revoked “vacant possession” from their action plan (the naked protest obviously worked). To keep up with the news, follow @savepeckham and @peckhamvision on Twitter. Peckham Vision also have the latest on their Facebook page.

Artist/Critic/Rapper/Whatever Hennessy Youngman (aka Jayson Musson) is all over the internet. His Youtube art critic series ART THOUGHTZ (my favourite) made him an internet sensation, and since then he’s done a whole bunch of other stuff like fuel discussions about racism in the art world, make art out of Coogi sweaters, provide the voice for the Harlem Shake (without permission from Mad Decent), and write a book. This week he’s made a mix on Soundcloud of depressing pharmacy-inspired music, and I love it because its stale synthesised sounds echo many areas of my life.

Hennessy’s statement about CVS Bangers is as follows:

“CVS BANGERS IS THE AUDIOSCAPE FOR WHEN YOU’RE BUYING TAMPONS OR A 12 PACK OF CONDOMS, A SAMPLING OF THOSE MAGIC TUNES THAT PLAY WHEN YOU’RE CONTEMPLATING HOW RIDICULOUS YOU WOULD LOOK CARRYING 24 ROLLS OF TIOLET PAPER ON THE TRAIN, THOSE BITTERSWEET TUNES OF YESTERYEAR THAT SKIP THROUGH YOUR MIND AS YOU READ THE NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION ON THE BACK OF A BOX OF FROZEN PIZZA AND OPT FOR A PINT OF ICE CREAM INSTEAD, THOSE SPECIAL DITTIES THAT ACCOMPANY YOUR SMASHING THE BAR CODE OF A CAN OF RED BULL AGAINST THE SCANNER OF BROKEN SELF-CHECKOUT MACHINE. CVS BANGERS IS COMMERCE ITSELF, AND COMMERCE, MY FACELESS INTERNET FRIENDS, IS BEAUTIFUL.”

Here is the tracklist if you care:

“I Wanna Know What Love Is,” Foreigner

“Where Have All the Cowboys Gone,” Paula Cole

“(I Just) Died in Your Arms Tonight,” Cutting Crew

“I Love You Always Forever,” Donna Lewis

“Oh Sherry,” Steve Perry

“Lady in Red,” Chris de Burgh

“Islands in the Stream,” Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers

“It Must Have Been Love,” Roxette

“These Dreams,” Heart

• The Vatican must get a bit boring after a while, so what else is there to do? Downloaded pirated BDSM art themed porn of course! According to TorrentFreak and ScanEye, who looked at which BittTorrent files have been downloaded by IP addresses located in Vatican City, someone was watching this (NSFW). In “WA-27788 Lea Lexis and Krissy Lynn”, Krissy plays an art critic and Lea plays a scorned artist who takes revenge by giving her a pounding.

• Row over Margaret Thatcher statue location erupts as suggestions of Trafalgar square arise by prominent figures such as Boris Johnson. If placed in the central London square (which was the scene of riots over Poll Tax when Thatcher was PM!) it would replace the fourth plinth project. We must boycott.

• In other Thatcher news, the Reagan library is mounting an exhibition dedicated to Thatcher in light of the former PM’s death. It will celebrate the political alliance between the two, who were determined to fight communism, champion the free market and promote conservative values. I wonder if there are plans for any exhibitions dedicated to Thatcher in London? If so, I’m sure some early twenty something kids who live in Brixton with a vague idea of who Thatcher is will be ready with paint bombs.

• Some guy who reviews video games has “curated” an online tumblr of videogame toilets. Read this It’s Nice That post about it if you care. It isn’t really turning me on, because I don’t play video games.

• WOAH, Google Street View Hyperlapse!!!

• This is weird…. Yemen’s deposed President has built a museum, dedicated to HIMSELF. Look at these photographs to see the bizarre spectacle of vanity.

• Hey, remember I told you that Ai Wei Wei is the subject of a new play with a hashtag in the title? Read this Q&A with the director to find out why there is a hashtag in the title, and find out about the play. It runs in London through till May.

• Loads of kids are designing apps and becoming millionaires (depressing). Is it because they are privately educated, or is it down to the individual?

• twohundredfiftysixcolors is a feature-length silent film about GIFs made up of GIFs, and has taken artists Eric Fleischauer and Jason Lazarus over two years to make. AFC have described is as a GIF “Fantasia”. I love it. Here is an excerpt.

Ken Grant, Photograph from ‘Benny Profane’ Series

• #longreads: An interview with Ken Grant, one of my favourite photographers, who documented working class life in Liverpool from the 1970s. He is so poetically and emotionally involved with his process, and he loves Raymond Carver. An absolute must read

• MIDDLE CLASS OUTRAGE erupts today as an artfinder survey finds that more than a third of youths don’t know who Renoir is. 13% thought that he was one of David Beckham’s team mates.

• Artist Graham Ovenden has been found guilty on four counts of indecency with a child. Ovenden’s Aspects of Lolita, which contained prints inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Lolita are now really really sinister. We had a lot of discussions about the sexual nature of Lewis Carroll’s photographs of children, specifically Alice Liddell, at university; the subject is always very uncomfortable.

• The Tetley, Leeds: Showing that artspaces can prosper even during times of drastic cuts and little funding.

• The Guggenheim Museum and Foundation and The Tel Aviv Museum of Art announced the joint acquisition of Yael Bartana’s And Europe Will Be Stunned (2007–11), a trilogy of videos first presented in 2011 at the 54th Venice Biennale as Poland’s official entry, which I reviewed when ArtAngel brought it to North London last year. It’s a great work, and it’s acquisition by these institutions will introduce it to a larger audience.

• The Silence of Dogs In Cars: some photographs of dogs in cars that I like

• Do you like Kurt Vile? Do you like art? Watch ESPO paint a Kurt Vile album cover.

• Hey, have you ever wanted to just sit a Jew down and ask them some questions about being Jewish? Well now you can! Berlin’s Jewish Museum opened an exhibition last week entitled  The Whole Truth … everything you always wanted to know about Jews, which features a three-sided glass box with a bench inside, on which Jews will sit, one at a time, for the duration of the exhibition answering visitors’ questions. Hyperallergic finds it problematic. Read “Jew In A Box”.

• ART OPENING OF THE WEEK: Cult artist Marcel Dzama has his first show in London in 5 years at David Zwirner. Read this interview with the artist to find out exactly why you should go. Also, I will be there, and there will be booze.

• Until now, I had never thought about Cubism and Digital Art in the same context.

• Tilda Swinton is sleeping in a glass box at MoMA for a month. It is part of a performance piece called “The Maybe” which she previously performed in 1995 at The Serpentine. No seriously, it is true. Here are some photos and reactions.

• MUST READ OF THE DAY: Selfies Through The Ages

• MUST WATCH OF THE DAY: A time-lapse video of Pae White at The South London Gallery, talking about her current  installation which I can’t wait to see. She was influenced by Metallica album covers??

• Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is out next week! Is there more to the film that boobs and guns? Korine and Franco seem to think so, Paddy Johnson doesn’t.

• ArtAngel has commissioned five artists to create original three-minute sound pieces that are being broadcast every morning this week on BBC’s Radio 4. “Open Air,” debuted this morning with a piece by Christian Marclay and will conclude Friday with a work by Mark Wallinger.

• New York art collective Bernadette Corporation are having a retrospective at the ICA. The Guardian meets two of the group’s core members to talk about their work.

• Tamar Harpaz has won the 2013 Kiefer Prize. The prize is given to an Israeli artist under 35 and aids a promising artist with $8000. I’ve been checking out his work today and I like it.

• Roger Henka’s sound and laser installation, Fragile Territories, looks incredible. The audio-visual combination is created from real time “statistic and stochastic algorithms” which I do not understand and will not pretend to, but I wish it was in the UK instead of France.

                                                Lily Cole and Antony Gormley 

Lily Cole is on TV! Yes she is a model, but she also received a double first  in Art History from Cambridge. On Wednesday ‘Lily Cole: Art Matters’ premiered with an episode dedicated to sculptor Antony Gormley. The series will show Cole meeting seminal contemporary artists such as Tactica Dean, exploring how each artist works in their studio and what inspires them.

Arts Council England chair, Sir Peter Bazalgette delivered his inaugural lecture at London’s RSA on Wednesday. Here is a link to listen.

Dean Blunt made one of my favourite songs of last year (I only discovered this year), and it turns out he is also an artist. He has an opening at SPACE gallery tonight, which might be rubbish hipster art, or could be really good- either way there will probably be booze and boys in beanies.

Philip Vaughan is really pissed off that The Hayward Gallery has kept his neon tower in storage and didn’t include him in the light show.

Frieke Janssens photographs of kids smoking are terrifying.

This guy eats food, and then photographs his faeces afterwards. The project is called “Colourful Shit”. DO NOT LOOK AT THIS IF YOU ARE EATING.

When I was a writer for Art F City, editor Paddy Johnson asked me to write the obituary for Herbert Vogel, New York’s most loved art collector. I hadn’t heard of the Vogels, and fell in love with them when I watched this documentary. This week the Whitney premiered a new documentary on the legendary couple, and I can’t wait to see it. Here is a piece about it in the New Yorker.

The RCA start ‘Secret’ again tomorrow. It’s your chance to purchase postcards by established artists and up and coming artists- you won’t know who your postcard is by until you purchase it.

I really want a Smile-Bot! If these were installed in London, everyone wouldn’t be so miserable.

Read ‘An Introspective Glance at Claude Cahun’ by Ruth Lewis at Behind The Curtain. It is a very personal, emotional, and poetic response to a beautiful photograph.

My favourite installations are often colossal in scale and engulf you or adjust your environment. Christo’s latest project looks like heaven.

One day, I will be rubbing shoulders with the rich and richer at TEFAF. This video makes it look a little bit dull though.

• If you are super wealthy and don’t actually skateboard, these are for you! Damien Hirst and other celeb artists including Bansky are designing skateboards for The Sk8 Room. Damien Hirst’s dot skateboard is over 1000 Euros, and the skull edition skateboard is “price on request”. 20% of the proceeds go to charity, so I guess it’s not that bad. There is no excuse for this collab with the Olsen twins, however.

• Jayson Musson a.k.a Hennessy Youngman is suing Mad Decent records for using his voice without permission on “The Harlem Shake”. Maybe he can MAKE IT STOP. PLEASE MAKE IT STOP.

• In other outrageous celeb artist news, Ai Wei Wei making a heavy metal album.

• RECOMMENDED: “No One Lives Here”, Royal College of Art.

• Mark Wallinger unveiled the maquette for giant 15m horse sculpture in London this week to “prod” funding.

• Here is a link to the world’s first Tumblr Art Symposium talks! The editor of Hyperallgeric introduces you to the world’s first computer art, and proceeds to discuss today’s net artists’ use of Tumblr. It is two hours long so buy some beer before you watch it.

• George Bush paints dogs and they’re OK. Hitler’s are better.

• There is an app to tell you what STIs you have! You no longer have to wait in a queue at 9am in Camberwell! Hurrah!

• Powerhouse mining companies threaten to destroy ancient aboriginal artworks in Queensland.

• A Thousand Miles Of History, a play about Basquiat, Warhol and Keith Haring, started last week. It is showing in Peckham throughout March.

• Today the Tate Britain unveils a major new commission by Turner prize winning artist Simon Starling.

• Composer Tod Machover has created a social media symphony. Machover created a symphony of Toronto by combining collected sounds submitted by the public with traditional instruments. I’m going to make one about Swindon. It would feature layers of teen mums shouting at their children. Submissions welcome.

• Here is some lunch bag art.

• Mike Brodie spent 10 years hopping freight trains with other kids and took photographs of it. The photographs in “A Period of Juvenile Prosperity” show closeness and a sense of family, and are shot with 35mm film.

• The Daily Mail thinks ‘Rock On Top Of Another Rock’, Peter Fischili’s piece unveiled at the Serpentine yesterday, is dangerous. “There is nothing fixing these two rocks together”, Anthony Bond writes. BEWARE!!!!!!!!

             Things I am sick of seeing in people’s artwork: empty religious references and smoking

• “It’s just masturbating and calling it artwork”: a New York art student literally wanks into vials as part of an exhibition. He previously walked around New York carrying a giant crucifix and smoking a cigarette (see above).

• In another battle with disappearing public art, Britain’s murals are in danger.

• Last week Marina Abramovic told Elle about her plans to make a movie about the life of James Franco.

• Is ready-made art more powerful than painting? Jonathan Jones asks another stupid question on The Guardian’s art blog. Ready-mades and paintings can both be equally powerful, it is not just ready mades that mirror rather than replace the world.

• There is a horse meat arts feature. Take this quiz by Art F City at The L Magazine!

• Stop complaining about your hard life at art school, whining about a deadline that means you can’t go out in Peckham tonight and you have to live in your parents’ suburban mansion for a year after graduating. Last week, Inocente, a documentary about a young homeless artist won an Oscar, and man will it make you feel like a brat. Here is an interview with Inocente Lzucar about her life, and the win.

• Everyone is going wild for Kyur8 (pronounced “curate”), a new app that lets you create digital zines. Even Paddy Johnson kind of likes it.

• Ai Wei Wei gets a stageplay, and there is a hashtag in the title.

• Tracey Emin, writing for The Sun?

• Open Culture link you to Tarkovsky films online for free.

• MUST WATCH VIDEO: rapper RiFF RaFF giving a tour of Miami Art Basel

• Animal New York asked you to send in your Vines for their #veryshortfilmfest, and you did.

• “Women don’t paint very well”, says asshole Georg Baselitz. He continues, “As always, the market is right”; also incorrect. I don’t know how I missed this interview, published in the Independent in early February.

• Guys, Tumblr isn’t just for stoners who adorn their pages with GIFs of A$AP Rocky and scenes from Pulp Fiction. HyperAllergic have announced The World’s First Tumblr Art Symposium! The idea came from Ben Valentine’s “Tumblr as Art” essay, published last year, which started asking questions about Tumblr and what it meant for art, looking at net artists like Rafaël Rozendaal, An Xiao,  Alli Miller and Giordano Matteo.

• Manet’s Olympia has not left Paris since it was given to the French state in 1890. Until now.

• So last week I told you all about the Banksy mural that went missing from Wood Green, London and turned up at an auction house in Miami. Well now the piece has been mysteriously withdrawn from the auction, after much public discussion.

• In other Bansky news, a dubious press release (since disappeared from the Internet) reported that Bansky had been arrested, and the Internet swallowed it up. It was a hoax. The Huffington Post have made you a Twitter reaction round-up.

• It is Art13 this weekend in London! It costs £11 to go, which is annoying. I’ve got two free tickets if anybody wants them. Send me a message @artweeklylondon.

• “Postgraduate Studies will be ‘domain of the wealthy” says the Independent. Duh. Gareth Thomas, a labor MP and former higher education spokesman for the party says “The British economy needs its postgraduates more now than at any time before”. Why don’t you stop charging us 9 grand a term at University and then we might be able to think about it, Gareth. In a separate report by the National Union of Students that literally just reports common sense, we are warned that the “current fees structure is in danger of putting off poor students from going on to postgraduate studies because of the debts they have already incurred.” I had to turn down a masters at the Royal College of Art because of the debts I had already incurred, and that was when University fees were less. Sky high fees widen the gap between rich and poor, and discourage people from learning, which makes my blood boil, and actually makes me really sad. “The courses would be just for rich and international students, it argued”. Go spend the day at Sotheby’s and you’ll see that this is already true.

• Ergh, Olivia Bee is 18 and really successful. I wonder if I was that self assured when I was 18. Probably not, I was still using MSN messenger.

• I have never seen John Gossage’s ‘The Pond’ (1986) photographs before and I love them. Here they are, with a excerpt by Robert Adams from ‘Creative Camera, 30 years of writing’. Maybe it is because the implicit stillness of his photographs remind me of Richard Long, one of my favourite land artists.

• ‘Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns’ opened last week at the Barbican, and I can’t wait to see it. The Independent’s Adrian Hamilton credits the show as an exhilarating tale of friendship.