Latest news with #Rothko
Spectator
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
What's wrong with taking selfies in galleries?
There is nothing more glorious than an art gallery selfie. In the same way that hearing someone mispronounce Van Gogh lets you know you're dealing with an autodidact (the best!), so a gallery selfie suggests someone who doesn't quite belong in that space: someone who is ignorant of the etiquette of the art world and who is enjoying themselves because of, not despite, that. Complaining about taking selfies in galleries is so obviously a class thing (not to mention an age thing). Which is why it's so charming to see Tate Britain's director Alex Farquharson (whose name does not make him sound like a class warrior) enthuse about encouraging visitors to take 'Instagrammable pictures' of the gallery's work in an effort to entice tourists in. The rest of the art world is appalled, but I stand with Farquharson. Madrid's Prado Museum and New York's Frick Collection already ban visitors from taking photographs with phones. The director of Florence's Uffizi is threatening action against visitors 'coming to museums to make memes or take selfies for social media' after a man became so enraptured by Anton Domenico's portrait of Ferdinando de' Medici he tried to recreate the Tuscan prince's jaunty pose and accidentally fell backwards, tearing the 18th-century canvas. Surely that accident isn't nearly as offensive as the Just Stop Oil cretins deliberately spraying masterpieces with soup. While JSO's actions stink of entitlement, of Phoebes so spoilt by access to art they don't care if they stop everyone else seeing it, by contrast there's something rather sweet about someone so excited by encountering a painting for the first time that they're overcome by the desire to be part of it. Sure, selfie snappers can be irritating. I've sat in the Rothko room at the Tate irked at having my melancholy shattered by cheerful influencers pouting in front of the Seagram murals. And thought how ironic it was – since Rothko so despised the fashionable crowds he thought would see the painting at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York (which the series was commissioned for) that he decided 'to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room'. Still, such self-snappers are no more ignorant than the curators who once accidentally hung two of the Tate's Rothko paintings upside down. I've waited impatiently at the National Gallery for tourists to stop photographing their own faces so I might catch a glimpse of 'Sunflowers' and wondered what Van Gogh would think. Although given he was so frustrated by his obscurity he cut his own ear off, I suspect he might find the attention rather thrilling. After all, weren't his self-portraits just selfies in oil? And isn't all art some form of narcissism? Or masturbation, as Duchamp's 'Paysage Fautif' attests. There's something rather sweet about someone so excited by encountering a painting for the first time that they're overcome by the desire to be part of it I get a kick from how gallery selfies offer an original perspective on work. After the Carters (Beyonce and Jay-Z) used the Louvre to shoot their music video 'Apeshit' (watched more than 287 million times on YouTube), the gallery broke all ticket office sales records. But as interesting was how Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's choreography of that video cast new light on the gallery's collection, seen through a prism of power and race. The video's opening shot of the couple, posing either side of the 'Mona Lisa' in coordinated pastel suits, resumes at the end with them turning to face Da Vinci's portrait, establishing themselves as both on par with, and consumers of, the work. The selfie similarly shatters the barriers between high and low art. I frequently post gallery pictures on Instagram. I don't buy the idea taking pictures kills the moment; rather it cements it. Research by the Association for Psychological Science confirmed taking photos of an experience enhanced memories of visual encounters. In one experiment, researchers sent participants to tour a museum exhibition of Etruscan artefacts, allowing some to take cameras. Tested after about what they'd seen, it was those who'd taken photographs who remembered the objects most. Farquharson recognises this. 'I think it [a photograph] is a really important aide-mémoire for people… as much as our curators curate, our visitors curate too,' he said. Indeed, gallery photography has democratised art collecting, once exclusively a hobby for the super-wealthy. These days there are online curators such as Love Watts aka Jordan Watson, a New Yorker from Queens who built his 'collection' and reputation on Instagram by sharing images he liked. Now an international curator credited with disrupting and democratising the art world, his gallery-cum-club at Glastonbury Festival, Terminal 1, encouraged festival-goers to rave among artworks. You could miserably say gallery selfies are vapid, or you could embrace people sharing something they love. I plump for the latter because art after all was made to be seen. Clever curators know this, creating exhibitions with selfies in mind. At Frieze, a mirrored version of Time magazine's cover begged viewers to take a picture with themselves in the frame. The recent Electric Dreams exhibition at the Tate had a noticeably selfie vibe to its installations, and watching people snap pictures of themselves at the National Gallery's Face magazine show reminded me that whatever new thing young people do is always the object of derision before the mainstream co-opts it. Perhaps the ultimate example of the selfie being subsumed into art is Richard Prince's Instagram paintings, works made from selfies he took from other people's Instagram accounts – sparking a row over ownership and prompting model Emily Ratajkowski (whose own Instagram selfie was nicked) to write an essay questioning who owned her image. In a move she insisted was reclaiming it, she posed for a 'selfie' in front of Prince's picture of her picture, then sold an NFT of it. If Andy Warhol was still alive, he'd be equally selfie-obsessed.
The Guardian
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stop rushing through art galleries. Spend 10 minutes with just one masterpiece instead
On a recent Sunday afternoon, with a few hours up my sleeve, I decided: I want to see a Rothko. I wasn't in the mood to wander around the gallery, spending a couple of minutes with hundreds of pieces of art. I just wanted to find the Rothko at the National Gallery of Victoria, stand in front of it for 10 minutes, and then go outside again to enjoy the sunshine. We're extraordinarily lucky in Australia that the permanent collections at our state galleries are free to attend. Our public collections are just that: owned by the public, belonging to us, there for us to enjoy. When I was growing up, the Art Gallery of South Australia's kids program had a sort of hidden picture game where you had to find objects in various paintings around the gallery. More than anything, that program taught me that the gallery space was open to me. As an adult, I love a day planned around the gallery, and I can spend hours with the collection. I'll visit the same exhibitions again and again, noticing new paintings every time – or new things in paintings I've spent hours with previously. But there is beauty in building a visit around one work of art: popping your head into the gallery during your spare half-an-hour, to spend some time with an old friend. Mark Rothko is best known for his colour field paintings, large-scale canvases, swathed with colour. In these expanses of hues, Rothko somehow manages to capture the depths of our emotional worlds. The Rothko at the NGV is titled Untitled (Red), and was painted in 1956. The wall text features one of my favourite quotes from the artist about his work: 'I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on.' Standing in front of it during my recent visit, I found myself dwarfed by the painting. A thin dusky red barely obscures the canvas. Three squares of colour sit on top: a rich blood red, a light rose pink, and a terracotta orange. I stood close enough that it took up my whole field of vision; I stood back to take it all in at once. A few people wandered in and out of the room – in and out of my awareness – but I just stood there, quietly contemplating my emotions. A sense of peace, calm. Happiness researcher Arthur Brooks says that when you look at art, 'your perception of the outside world expands'. It unlocks what Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman calls our panoramic vision, where the gaze relaxes and widens to take in the peripheries. It is the opposite of the stress response, where our pupils constrict and our field of vision narrows. Art opens us up to the world. I think about this panoramic vision when I visit the Rothko; as I have many times in many galleries in front of many works of art. When you stop in front of one piece, you allow everything to slow down. It can feel like you're being subsumed, or embraced. Everything else fades away. You can exist fully in the moment: just you, and this work of art. I have my favourites at other galleries around the country. On a work trip to Canberra, I visited the Skyspace installation Within, Without (2010) by James Turrell at the National Gallery of Australia every sunset. The day John Olsen died I went to the Art Gallery of New South Wales to stand in front of his incredible painting Five Bells (1963). I'm always overwhelmed by the intelligence in the seeming simplicity of Emily Kam Kngwarray's Awelye II (1994) and Awelye V (1994) paintings at the Art Gallery of South Australia. I love the way different art works take over the Watermall at the Queensland Art Gallery, the water changing the shape of the art, as the art changes the shape of the water feature. I have only ever been to Perth in the height of summer, and so Mr Ngarralja Tommy Way's Warla, Flat Country (2021), which brings the heat of the desert into the gallery, is the work I most remember from my time at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Not every trip to the art gallery needs to be a huge outing. What a privilege – and a joy – it is to just go and spend whatever time you have to hand with one work of art. A painting, a sculpture, a video piece. Our public collections belong to us: we should remind ourselves of this by stopping by, even for 10 minutes, as often as we can.
New York Post
15-05-2025
- New York Post
This 55% off meat thermometer makes steak night idiot-proof
New York Post may be compensated and/or receive an affiliate commission if you click or buy through our links. Featured pricing is subject to change. Let me set the scene: It's a sweltering June evening in Sag Harbor. There's a linen-clad hedge funder pacing in front of you, a wife yelling about scallops, and you're wrist-deep in a vat of heirloom tomato water trying to plate a dish that looks like a Rothko. A few feet away, an ex-model-turned-wellness-influencer insists her wagyu be 'medium-rare but on the rare side,' which, for those playing along at home, is not a real temperature — just a polite way of saying, 'I want it perfect or I'll tell everyone you poisoned me.' This is when the CHEF iQ Sense Smart Wireless Meat Thermometer becomes less of a kitchen tool and more of a survival provision. Amazon The CHEF iQ Sense Smart Wireless Meat Thermometer is a sleek, Bluetooth-enabled cooking gadget that comes with three ultra-thin, dishwasher-safe probes and a compact base station. Each probe tracks temperature independently, so you can cook multiple proteins at once to different doneness levels. The real magic? It syncs with the CHEF iQ app to provide real-time temperature readings, estimated cook times, and step-by-step guidance to get restaurant-quality results with zero stress. It's designed to work seamlessly for oven, grill, air fryer, and sous vide cooking, making it a powerful all-in-one upgrade for amateurs and chefs alike. I've used a lot of meat thermometers in my time as a part-time private chef — some accurate, some pathologically wrong, most with cords that seem designed to tangle themselves (and me) into a crisis. That's why the CHEF iQ Sense Smart Wireless Meat Thermometer, currently 55% off on Amazon (just $99!), has me sweating like a roast under a heat lamp — in the best way. While I haven't personally tested this exact one, I can tell you this: the specs make it sound like the culinary equivalent of a mind-reading boyfriend. Smart, wireless, and complete with three ultra-thin probes, it lets you track multiple proteins without ever lifting the lid — or putting down your cocktail. This article was written by Kendall Cornish, New York Post Commerce Editor & Reporter. Kendall, who moonlights as a private chef in the Hamptons for New York elites, lends her expertise to testing and recommending cooking products – for beginners and aspiring sous chefs alike. Simmering and seasoning her way through both jobs, Kendall dishes on everything from the best cookware for your kitchen to cooking classes that will level-up your skills to new dinnerware to upgrade your holiday hosting. Prior to joining the Post's shopping team in 2023, Kendall previously held positions at Apartment Therapy and at Dotdash Meredith's Travel + Leisure and Departures magazines.
The Guardian
14-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Nigel Farage, TikTok and Lord Haw-Haw
Asking whether young people are viewing Nigel Farage's TikTok videos for the silliness of trivial content or their political message misses the point about the proven links between entertainment value and propaganda (Nigel Farage is a hit on TikTok – but are young voters listening or laughing?, 11 May). As the pollsters Ruth and Henry Durant noted in 1940 about Lord Haw-Haw's broadcasts to the UK, 'People tuned in 'to have a good laugh', but then, having acquired the habit, some began to think 'there may be something in what he says'.'Will StuddertBerlin, Germany As I stood in front of a Rothko at Tate Modern 22 years ago, our four-year-old ran up to it and I asked her what she thought. 'Too big!' she replied instantly, and ran off. She'll be starting her masters degree in fine art at Oxford University this October (The worst thing about the damaged Rothko is that it fuels the ban-kids-from-galleries debate, 11 May).Robert PedersenTotnes, Devon I once remarked to a pupil's father that I'd been impressed at how his son had handled a couple of disappointments. 'Just as well,' he replied. 'We're Everton supporters' (Letters, 13 May).Marilyn RowleyManchester Oh dear. I am a citizen of nowhere living in 'an island of strangers' (Report, 13 May). This is getting MarshallSalisbury I read Joseph Harker's article opposing low-traffic neighbourhoods (14 May) and wish him well at his next BricknellPlymouth
The Guardian
11-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
The worst thing about the damaged Rothko is that it fuels the ban-kids-from-galleries debate
The news that a child damaged a £42m Mark Rothko painting at a museum in Rotterdam last month had me wondering how I'd feel if my toddler was the culprit. The work, Grey, Orange on Maroon, No 8, sustained small, superficial scratches to the lower part of the painting during an 'unguarded' moment, which, while not a disaster, does mean it will have to be taken off display and restored. It comes less than a year after a four-year-old boy smashed a 3,500-year-old jar at the Hecht Museum in Israel. Honestly, I'd be mortified. Not embarrassed for my child, who is too little to understand, but because as his parent I had taken my eye off the ball. I would blame myself. I'd also be terrified I would be made to pay for it. I love Rothko. Standing in front of his paintings always feels, to me, like an almost religious experience. The emotion in his work is astonishing, transcendent. This story has brought out two categories of people that I'll admit I struggle with: people who don't get the work of Mark Rothko, and people who dislike kids. The thing about the first group of people is that their inability to connect with Rothko's abstract expressionism often seems to make them cross. They rarely say, with any humility, 'Oh, I don't really get it, but perhaps I need to see it in person', or 'I can see it means a great deal to some people, but frankly it leaves me cold.' Instead, they can be a bit crotchety and defensive, hence the predictable plethora of snark in relation to this story: 'Damaged? How can anyone tell?'; 'It looks like a child painted it in the first place'; 'It's just a bunch of rectangles'; 'Emperor's new clothes' etc, etc. As for the second group of people: it's the usual calls for children to be banned from public spaces. They shouldn't be allowed into galleries if they can't behave, and their parents should be made to pay – that sort of thing. Although these ostensibly seem like two very different, frankly contradictory, lines of thinking – 'modern art is rubbish' versus 'galleries are sacred spaces' – I have come to realise that these sentiments are interlinked. Children respond instinctively to art. They have not built up defences, or preconceptions about it, and the earlier you take them to galleries and expose them to different styles and mediums, the more open and receptive they will be to things that are experimental, unusual or transgressive. Their wild, expressionistic little souls are not bogged down by the fusty notion that good art has to be figurative. Have you seen their drawings? And they themselves are chaos personified. Like the splatters on a Pollock, they appear anarchic, but they have their own internal logic. Children explore the world through touch. My boy loves to scratch his fingers against woodchip wallpaper, to stand with his palms flat against the rough bark of a tree. Anyone familiar with kids will be able to imagine what went through that child's mind as they stood in front of Grey, Orange on Maroon, No 8. Something about the unvarnished, slightly chalky surface of the paint made them want to feel it. And so they did. Arguably, in doing so, they connected with the work of Rothko on a deeper level than many adults. I'm not being entirely serious, but what I do believe is that the people who love art the most have somehow managed to retain that childish spirit of openness and curiosity into adulthood, and that spirit is precious. We need it, especially, for the next generation of artists, which is why the gallery must remain an inclusive place. No museum or gallery would seriously consider banning children. On the contrary, they tend to be ridiculously kind and understanding about these accidents. 'Every museum and gallery thinks hard about how to balance meaningful physical access to artworks and objects with keeping them safe. I'd say most have the balance right, but accidents can still happen,' the curator and writer Maxwell Blowfield said in the aftermath of the damage. 'It's impossible to prevent every potential incident, from visitors of all ages. Thankfully, things like this are very rare compared to the millions of visits taking place every day.' Meanwhile, the museum that lost the 3,500-year-old jar used it as a 'teaching opportunity', and invited its four-year-old former nemesis back to the museum with his family to see how the repairs were going. There's a loveliness to that. Perhaps, rather than charge the parents, the museum in Rotterdam will get its insurance payout and do something similar. Either way, I hope that the child wasn't made to feel too bad. Perhaps it'll be a funny story that the parents tell someday, and I bet they watch their child a bit more closely in future. I don't want to add to the shame they are probably already feeling, but I do wonder if it's time modern parents had a think about rehabilitating the much-maligned toddler reins of the 1980s and 90s, even if just for occasional use. Some kids are fine in galleries, but others are whirlwinds who need keeping in check. My son loves running through Tate Modern, but to avoid him careening head first into the Joan Mitchell triptych, I'm wondering if I should pick up a pair before our next visit. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist. The Republic of Parenthood book will be published this summer
