BREAKING NEWS: Van Goghs back on display after targeting
Attacks on two Sunflower paintings — but works back on show within 3 hours
— In partnership with Arts & Culture podcast
This edition also features: V&A’s South Asia overhaul | Antwerp’s major museum collaboration | “Senseless” vandalism of Ai Weiwei’s work
Happy Friday.
The Turner Prize exhibition opened this week, for its 40th anniversary edition. Did you notice? Did you care?
The critics reviews for this year’s showing have been mixed. Some have enjoyed it. The Guardian’s Adrian Searle thinks it is “filled with moving cultural collisions and humour.” Eddy Frankel in Time Out says “these artists are doing something important.”
The Evening Standard also praised it. But while Nancy Durrant “really enjoyed it” the kicker might be the fact she says she often dreads the arrival of the Turner Prize each year. “It all became a very dour affair indeed” she said.
And that’s the feeling that persists each year the Prize rolls around. No one seems to care much for it any more. No one thinks it can regain its 1990s relevance. The only way is down?
Laura Freeman in the Times really didn’t like Tate Britain’s 2024 Turner — “Incomprehensible and adolescent” — it was her follow up column that captured the writing on the wall for me. “20 years of flops show why this art prize has had its day” was the headline.
“A total revamp or retirement” is her remedy. Or — “it wouldn’t be the worst thing if some entrepreneurial disruptor with money to spend on the arts set up a rival prize.”
Which did get me thinking. I’ve written in this newsletter recently about what art can learn from sport, and if there’s one common theme in sport of recent years, it’s deep-pocketed stakeholders funding breakaway leagues and tournaments. This is often to inject some much-needed new life into certain sports — and to inject some cash into their bank balance of course.
There’s Michael Johnson’s new athletics league. There was the (aborted but popular with many) European Super League in football. And most famously there’s the (very controversial) LIV Golf league funded by Saudi Arabia.
Maybe it is time for a new UK Art Prize to compete with Tate’s limping competition?
A rich patron could offer a massive cash prize, and bring art to the media and public’s attention again like in Turner’s glory days. Chanel have been splashing the cash to museums in recent years — how about the Chanel Contemporary Art Prize? Saudi Arabia have fully integrated itself into British boxing, could they do the same for British art?
These options might not all be workable or desirable, but they would get us talking about contemporary British art again. Let’s face it, it’s unlikely the 2025 Turner Prize will.
— maxwell
ps. Apologies this is landing in your inbox late. Normal service will resume next week.
— In partnership with Arts & Culture podcast
Hollywood’s heritage hit
How do you make a 900-year-old building feel modern?
One way is to have a $2 billion box office smash film at your venue.
That’s what St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh did, as one of the locations for a spectacular scene in Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War. (Paul Bettany’s Vision gets smashed through the cathedral’s wall in case you were wondering).
It’s just one way St Giles has engaged with contemporary audiences recently. And 2024 marks its 900th anniversary.
All their activities are explored in the new episode of the Arts & Culture podcast, where the Association for Cultural Enterprises’ Tom Dawson speaks to Stephen Preston, Deputy Head of Heritage and Culture at St Giles Cathedral.
The in-depth chat also covers the cathedral's architectural changes, the impact of the Edinburgh Fringe, and its role during Queen Elizabeth's lying in state.
It’s a valuable listen for anyone navigating an historic site in the modern world.
Listen here — for free! — or wherever you get your podcasts.
Need To Know
Sunflowers shine again
Two Van Gogh Sunflower paintings have been attacked at the National Gallery by Just Stop Oil activists. Soup was thrown over the works in the Poets and Lovers exhibition, and it happened just an hour after two others were jailed for similar action in 2022.
The National Gallery has said the two masterpieces were removed and an expert has assessed and that they are unharmed. Both paintings went back on display this evening, and the exhibition reopened. Three people have been arrested.
The attack came after two activists were sentenced to two years and 20 months in prison respectively for targeting one of the same works in the same venue. On sentencing the judge called their actions “idiotic” and that one of the defendants’ mitigation address was “ludicrous, self-indulgent, and offensive”.
Unlike that previous attack, one of the vandalised paintings is on loan. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has lent its Sunflowers for the first time in a century. (Read more)
V&A to overhaul gallery
The South Asia Gallery at the V&A is to be fully overhauled in a £4m project that will introduce modern and contemporary South Asian art and design into the displays for the first time.
The Museum has just been granted the first of two stages of funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to proceed with their plans, with the full cash application coming at a later date. The hope is to transform the displays and interpretation, and to integrate technology to reshape the visitor experience.
A highlight of the revamped space will be the The Kochi Ceiling, a painted and carved 19th century wooden temple ceiling from South India that will be conserved, reconstructed and suspended at height above visitors. It’s not been displayed for 70 years.
Director Tristram Hunt said the new gallery — due to open in 2028 — would “engage with a new generation of British, global and diasporic communities.” (Read more)
Anniversary in Antwerp
A landmark collaboration between four Antwerp museums opens tomorrow, as part of the commemorations of one of Europe’s most famous painters. Marking 75 years since the death of James Ensor, a city-wide celebration kicks off with four exhibitions connected to the man who revolutionised European painting and was Belgium’s first Impressionist.
The highlight is a major at show at KMSKA, which holds the largest Ensor collection in the world. In Your Wildest Dreams: Ensor Beyond Impressionism presents — for the first time — Ensor’s work alongside the European Impressionists he fiercely competed with. Monet has come from the Met, Manet from the National Gallery in London, plus many more.
At a preview this week, the KMSKA Director told me that the collaboration’s aim is to have the four museums “reinforce” each other and to attract international visitors. Carmen Willems said Antwerp now offers “four reasons to go.” And Ensor “deserves” wider global recognition too, she added. (Read more)
News from the UK
Fantastic Mr Wes 🎬 | The first museum exhibition on the career of film maker Wes Anderson will open at the Design Museum in 2025. The huge show will follow Anderson’s first experiments in the 1990s right up to his recent Oscar-winning flicks, and will feature original props, costumes and behind-the-scenes insights. Next year the museum will also host shows on London’s 1980s Blitz club, and a century of swimming and swimwear. (Read more)
Artificial art 🗞 | The London Evening Standard relaunched as a weekly newspaper, and it featured a new exhibition review from notorious art critic Brian Sewell — who died in 2015. It was written by AI — ofc — as part of the paper’s ‘attempt’ to provoke discussion about AI and journalism. Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones called it a “hateful way” to remember one of the paper’s most famous writers. “Blank and inert. There’s no sense of a living eye looking at stuff” he said. (Read more)
Shuttered (too) soon 🏴 | The People's Story Museum in Edinburgh — which tells history of the city’s working class residents — has unexpectedly shut, before local councillors voted on whether to mandate its closure to save costs. The council needs to cut spending amid a £26.7m overspend, and wanted to close the museum for 7 months. But it emerged it’s already shut due to budget constraints before official approval. "People are really outraged” a local tour guide said. (Read more)
News from around the world
Italy 🇮🇹 | A curator has blasted a "reckless and senseless act" of vandalism after a man walked into a preview of a new Ai Weiwei exhibition and smashed a large, porcelain sculpture, leaving museum guests and the artist stunned. A 57-year-old Czech man was arrested after the incident at at Bologna's Palazzo Fava. Curator Arturo Galansino described the suspect as "an habitual troublemaker seeking attention by damaging artists, works, monuments and institutions". (Read more)
Chile 🇨🇱 | “The damage is irreversible.” That’s the assessment of a top archaeologist as he released drone footage of the destruction caused by desert racers to ancient carved artworks in the Atacama Desert. “It’s a tragedy,” said Luis Pérez Reyes, director of the Regional Museum of Iquique. The footage shows that hundreds of vehicles over years have carved tire marks into the 3,000-year-old Indigenous artworks. (Read more)
Ireland 🇮🇪 | Cork's Crawford Art Gallery is officially closed for nearly three years as it embarks on a major expansion. Director Mary McCarthy described closing day as “bittersweet” adding that it “will be deeply missed” — but the €29m project will “make all the bits of it that people love even better.” She urged the public to continue supporting the gallery, including through seeing artworks in their temporary homes at the Cork Public Museum, Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery, and Hillsborough Castle in Co Down. (Read more)
Australia 🇦🇺 | Tasmania's Supreme Court has quashed a lower court’s decision which prevented Mona Museum barring men from seeing an installation known as the Ladies Lounge. The new ruling found the work qualified for an exemption from anti-discrimination laws under a section that allows discrimination if the intention is to promote equal opportunity. The artist and curator behind the work Kirsha Kaechele (and the wife of Mona’s millionaire owner David Walsh) said the new verdict “demonstrates a simple truth: women are better than men.” (Read more)
Best of the rest
Dotting the e’s| Westminster Abbey’s memorial to the Brontë sisters has featured a huge error for 85 years. It’s finally been corrected. They “deserve to have their name spelled correctly” the historian behind the move said. (More)
Not joking | Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn takes a midnight stroll through the Louvre in a new video collaboration promoting both Gaga’s new film and album, and the museum’s fools in medieval art exhibition. Now that’s some PR coup. (More)
Blockbuster sales | The Courtauld’s blockbuster Monet show opened today. It was officially the gallery’s biggest exhibition pre-sale in history. To meet demand they’ve added late night openings. (More)
👀 Last week’s most clicked news story | Michael Craig-Martin’s huge retrospective at the Royal Academy opens, but it’s not impressed the critics
— Today’s edition took 7 hours to write. Donate so I can treat myself to a pint 🍻