The Sleepwalk of the West

According to the Pop Life exhibition at Tate Modern: Andy Warhol claimed “Good business is the best art.” Tate Modern brings together artists from the 1980s onwards who have embraced commerce and the mass media to build their own ‘brands’. Hmm. I was under the misconception that “good business” was Coke, Microsoft, De Beers, Haliburton, [...]

I cracked. I just had to do it. Desperate, to cling to something tangible, to some proof that it hadn’t been a demonic prank, or glimpse into the echoing abyss… I bought the catalogue for the Voids exhibition. Now the 500 page black hole sits there on my table, inert, ignoring me. Gingerly approaching the [...]

Remarkable “morale images” have been published, taken by an English photographer after the war in 1918. The vast perspective-compensated tableaux required up to 30,000 newly returned US servicemen, each acting as a black – or white – dot. They are stunning, humbling photographs. And yet… isn’t there always the hint of something a little terrifying [...]

From the exhibition Vides (Voids) at the Pompidou Centre, Paris: A quite exceptional event, “Vides” (Voids) is a retrospective of empty exhibitions since that of Yves Klein in 1958. In almost a dozen rooms of the National Museum of Modern Art, it assembles in a totally original manner exhibitions that showed absolutely nothing… Despair besets [...]