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New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Ben Lewis's rating
Reader rating
Website: http://www.tate.org.uk
Sensual abstraction: Black Alphabet (2008) by Lucy Skaer
I am the eggman: Absuction Cardigan (2009) by Enrico David
This is simply the best Turner Prize in living memory. The diverse exhibition segues from the sensual abstractions of 34-year-old Scottish artist Lucy Skaer to the deluxe wallpaper landscapes of Glaswegian veteran Richard Wright, to the surrealist cabaret of Italian-born Londoner Enrico David, and finally, the haunting symbolism of materials in the work of the young odds-on favourite Roger Hiorns.
All the artists have been critically acclaimed in Britain and across Europe. Collectively they underline how the Britart of British art has been dissolved into a new fantastic internationalism, yet perhaps distinguished by its paradoxes of eccentricity, informality and precision.
Lucy Skaer softens the rigorous forms of Pop Art and Minimalism with natural history. There’s a black abstract painting in which you can eventually see the skeleton of a whale, while next door she has dramatically placed a giant whale’s skull, which can only be mysteriously glimpsed through slits in partitions.
Enrico David is a Retro-Modernist fogey, one of a number artists engaged in an idiosyncratic revisiting of early 20th-century art.
On a black podium he seems to assemble a cast of characters from a long-forgotten Surrealist performance in Berlin circa 1929. Egg-like forms with human faces sit on sledge-runners, knees bent. There’s an angry woman in a basket drawn in homage to the erotic Art Nouveau illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, and an elongated soft-toy of a human figure that recalls the reclining nudes of Picasso in the Thirties.
The impenetrable imagery feels as if it has emerged from the smoke of an opium pipe.
Richard Wright’s work, applied in gold leaf directly onto the gallery wall, looks at first like a cross between a florid print from Liberty’s and an intricate Rorschach test. Close inspection reveals what might be a cascade of waterfalls or army of flying angels. The decorative work hovers between abstraction and figuration in a mode popular with artists today.
The widespread contemporary art tactic of remaking familiar forms in symbolic materials has been overdone in recent years — I’ve seen one too many heads made of frozen blood — but Roger Hiorns reinvigorates the formula. Hiorns is nominated primarily for Seizure, a brilliant installation in which he turned the interior of a south London council flat into a crystal cave with copper sulphate.
At the Tate, a gorgeous slivery dust lies in peaks and valleys on the floor like a lunar landscape — it turns out the grey powder comes from a pulverised Jet engine. On the walls, the artist has made sculptural forms out of resin mixed with brain matter, a conceptual circle — the execution by hand of an idea, in the material that produced the idea! — which generates one of those pleasing mental short circuits that contemporary artists love. Hiorns is the first artist nominated for a project commissioned by London’s veteran independent funding-body Artangel, and it will be difficult for the judges not to give him the prize.
Until 3 January 2010 (tate.org.uk).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
What's that story of the 'emperor's clothes? How short a time will this be forgotten- next year?
- Edwin, beaconsfield bucks
This nonsense is the culmination of a long trend that started in the early 1960s. At that time a strong appetite for equality arose and traditional excellence of craftsmanship in art, and other things, was rejected as elitist; amateurism was embraced as egalitarian. People wanted to look at a painting, believe they could do as well and thus feel validated. To serve this vanity art has remained essentially technically amateur ever since and look what what we've come to; such is the folly that it seems that the justification for a supposed work of art is now more important than the work itself. But it's a con that suits all involved: the 'artists' sell their shoddy work, the critics earn a living by talking drivel and the buyers kid themselves that they're cultured and hip. The only casualty is truth and yet that's what art was always supposed to be about.
- Richard Kennard, Welling
this is without one of the best pieces of art i have ever seen the amount
of time and effort that has gone into this wonderful piece of art is beyond
comprehension, all those years of studying how to draw and paint has
certainly opened my eyes .
next year instead of wasting my time drawing and painting i shall just send
in a pair of old boots and a pile of old rubbish and hopefully pick up the cash
prise.
- Pat Squires, london
Is this the kind of work that future generations will be admiring in the way that we do the old masters'? Hardly, It's a freak show, justified by copious spin, that enables charlatans, both so-called artists and spurious critics, to perpetrate a lucrative scam - a triumph of
twaddle over talent.
- John, Dartford
