Hatchet jobs

Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Fun to write, fun to read

This review of Tennyson's second book by John Wilson Croker almost stopped thin-skinned Tennyson from publishing again. Byron and Shelley blamed Keats's untimely death on Croker's review of 'Endymion'.

www.quarterly-review.org

John Wilson Croker on Alfred Tennyson - from Spring 1833 - The Quarterly Review

Poems by Alfred Tennyson Reviewed by John Wilson Croker (from Spring 1833) EDITOR’S NOTE: The original QR always disliked the new poetry that emerged in the first half of the 19th century as a reaction against the stately poetry of … Continue reading →
www.quarterly-review.org

Tennyson and Keats were revenged, ofc, by Croker becoming a footnote in their biographies.
 
sufi

sufi

lala
Good to see somebody, anybody, casting a critical eye on Banksy for a change
For the Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones, all this is a sign that Banksy “has gone establishment”.
“He’s become a national treasure, and that’s not a good look for a street artist,” Jones said. “Our collective obsession with these new cutesy images is not a good look for us either. It’s a bit pathetic really.
“These bland silhouettes of animals would not be out of place in the Royal Academy summer exhibition. What’s provocative, insightful or interesting about them? Is anyone really excited to see which animal comes next?”
Jones said there was obviously a place for beautiful art that made us happy but doubted whether anyone would turn to Banksy for that.
“He does crude stencils without nuance. These animals are no exception. They give you nothing visually, just a social media buzz. He makes images to talk about, not art to reflect on. He is the enemy of sensitivity, the philistine’s revenge, an artist for people too lazy and narcissistic to open themselves to real art.”
For Jones, the best thing Banksy could do next was “quit monkeying about, retire and reveal who he really is, because these insipid stencils have nothing to say or to show us. Or perhaps we’ve all got it wrong and this is a commercial teaser campaign: in a few days Banksy will announce his new tropical soft drink or clothing brand.”
Click to expand...
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
The reviews of films and games they used to do on SomethingAwful were great to read, but I don't know if they're really what we're looking at here because they were always of low-budget garbage products that no sane person would ever enjoy. It's generally more enjoyable to read a comprehensive demolition of something that's generally highly regarded, or at least popular.

Neil Kulkarni's thermonuclear hatred of @luka's all-time favourite artists Oasis is the kind of thing I mean.

neilk.substack.com

On Oasis & The Gallaghers

Not into Oasis. I prefer music. Just wanted to note a few things.
neilk.substack.com neilk.substack.com
 
vershy versh

vershy versh

Well-known member
@craner might enjoy this one:

theideasletter.substack.com

Malaparte!

Oct. 17, 2024
theideasletter.substack.com theideasletter.substack.com

In an afterword to the NYRB edition of Kaputt, Dan Hofstadter reports that Lino Pellegrini, a young journalist who was Malaparte’s driver during his wartime travels, “recalled that the first part of Kaputt was originally drafted with the conviction that Hitler would win the war… Later, seeing how the wind was blowing, Malaparte rewrote the manuscript.”

This should be appalling, probably, but the quiddity of Malaparte is such that it also seems hilarious, consistent with the absence of moral inflection that gives Malaparte's work its macabre comedic drift. For despite the dire, desperate, atrocious situations Malaparte conjures up in his books, his narrative poker face, his unexcited stare at things that should be unbelievable but really aren’t at all, transmit a repulsive but irresistible sense of cosmic absurdity. Pellegrini's disclosure unravels Malaparte’s dramatic introduction to Kaputt, “The History of a Manuscript,” the exciting saga of a secretly written exposé of Nazi insanity, parts of it dispersed across Europe via diplomatic confederates, some chapters sewn into the lining of the author’s coat by a Russian peasant girl, its final chapters secreted in the double soles of his shoes. This tale is diverting as a straight preface, but finding out it’s bullshit raises it almost to the level of genius.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
As mentioned in the other thread, I'm reading a compendium of Brian Sewell hatchet jobs directed at the post-60s/contemporary british art scene. It's incredibly entertaining, and in a way liberating to read learned invectives against freud/hockney/aurbach/kapoor etc., who I've only ever read being praised in print.

I'm sure you can access most of them on the standard's page, here's one I was guffawing over last night

David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture, Royal Academy - review

Extravagant claims are made for the master draughtsman's gigantic paintings of the Yorkshire countryside but the truth is revealed by their ghastly gaudiness
www.standard.co.uk www.standard.co.uk
 
Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
My Mum managed a nursing home in London 00’s and Mr Sewell was one of her favourite regular guests - he had friends in the unit

Brought flowers for staff weekly, top booze for friends, she said he was a delight of anecdotes and grace, read for blind patients etc

People hear the affected voice but he seemed, at least in one very public setting, to be highly generous and convivial in a unit where none of the patients were leaving alive
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
"He took LSD as a young man, describing it in 2007 as a drug "for people of my age. It's wonderful. The one thing you could not do, however, was drip it into your eyeballs. It sent you absolutely bonkers."
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
sufi said:
Good to see somebody, anybody, casting a critical eye on Banksy for a change
Click to expand...
Sewell

"Any fool who can put paint on canvas or turn a cardboard box into a sculpture is lauded. Banksy should have been put down at birth. It’s no good as art, drawing or painting. His work has no virtue. It’s merely the sheer scale of his impudence that has given him so much publicity.”
 
Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
Bansky started out making fliers up here, tons of old DiY ephemera and paper roach material for other rigs, have a folder of such in the loft. Enough to embellish a pension at any rate

Probably gone a decade or more by the time you hit town
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Auerbach is held in awe for painting without pause, every day of every week, every week of every year, for over and over scraping paint from his canvases and rebuilding on the shadowy stains, for demanding hundreds of sittings for his caricatural portraits, for grunting, groaning and throwing paint about, for all this psychotic behaviour is interpreted as genius. It is nothing of the kind – it is no better evidence of genius than the obsessively repeated behaviour of animals confined in zoos, but the confinement in Auerbach’s case, to the bailiwick of Camden Town and Primrose Hill, is selfinflicted. Would he have been a better painter had he, like Bomberg, travelled to see the dry harsh light of the Holy Land and the rich colours of southern Spain? I doubt it, for Auerbach sees only Auerbachs. Auerbach does not paint Primrose Hill, Mornington Crescent or Camden Town, nor does Auerbach paint portraits – Auerbach paints only Auerbachs.
Click to expand...
www.artsy.net

Frank Auerbach | Primrose Hill (1971) | Artsy

From Tate Britain, Frank Auerbach, Primrose Hill (1971), Oil paint on board, 114.1 × 139.3 × 11 cm
www.artsy.net www.artsy.net
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Positioning the [Lucien Freud] exhibition so has, in their circulation, resulted in a gross interruption of the galleries, for so many visitors want to see the Freuds and care not a damn for the permanent collection that they queue to get into the room like sheep waiting to be dipped. Once in, they slip into the trance-like state of visitors to the Rothko room in Tate Modern and, as Roger Fry once put it, vibrate in harmony with the exhibits – and very little could be more ridiculous than a gaggle of white-haired readers of The Oldie transported into Never-Neverland by contemplation of the more than life-size penis and raw red testicles of David Dawson, Freud’s once sheep-farming model and assistant.
Click to expand...
assistant-of-the-german-british-painter.jpg
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
[Leon Kossof's] assertion that a finished painting emerges from constant activity is the justification of the head-banger; his coy plaint that he never quite knows what he does nor how he does it, is less a claim to divine inspiration than a frank admission that he is in control of nothing and wholly in the hands of hopeless chance as he piles on the paint, puddles, muddles and confuses it until he has the option of scraping it off and throwing it away or roughly drawing outlines on it to persuade us that within the congealing mass he has discerned the ectoplasmic image of a subject. It is an activity as intellectual as seeing faces in the fire, figures in the clouds, or fancies in a Rorschach blot.
Click to expand...

Leon-Kossoff-From-the-Early-Years-600x770.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top