Articles

Our on-line knowledge resource comprises critical articles on the arts which foster diverse views and stimulate learning. The essays below inform, critique, contextualise and draw attention to current art practices across the world.

Can I touch it? Interactive Art in the Information Age

Can I touch it? Interactive Art in the Information Age

By William Fairbrother. Time elapses and the proliferation of interactive art accelerates. Unlike other types of artwork, this species depends on human interaction to come alive. Its emergence has gone in tandem with the Information Age, a period characterised by...

On Orphans and Eden

On Orphans and Eden

I can do what only a true artist can do - pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web. Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire.  1962 Limit of Bearable Lately our...

Art and Discourse in Romania

Art and Discourse in Romania

By Giulia Damiani. The following interviews were conducted with three artists based in Romania: Larisa Crunțeanu, Marta Jakobovits and Cătălin Petrișor. With different approaches and media, their work show the compelling range of art practices thriving in the country....

Daniel Buren Celebrates the First Ten Years of Madre Museum in Napoli

Daniel Buren Celebrates the First Ten Years of Madre Museum in Napoli

By Maria Pia Masella. To a journalist asking the meaning of IN SITU in regards to his work, Daniel Buren (b.1938, Boulogne-Billancourt) replied “…quite simply, ( an IN SITU work is) a work which not only has a relationship with the place in which it finds itself, but...

Allegoria Sacra

Allegoria Sacra

By Ekaterina Askarina.   Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself; a representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or...

On Breads and Identity

On Breads and Identity

By Ekaterina Askarina.   Contemporary Russian artists comment on the term ‘national identity’ as quite an artificial construction. It is hardly applicable to the country, which once occupied one sixth of the world's continental territory, on which numerous and...

The World Goes Pop

The World Goes Pop

This is not about the first wave of pop- says one of the curators of the exhibition on Pop Art just opened at Tate Modern. Not an exhibition on Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton, and Roy Lichtenstein or any of those “Anglo-Saxons” who back in the sixties ridiculed the new...

Collections: from Keynes to the Empress Farah Pahlavi

Collections: from Keynes to the Empress Farah Pahlavi

Art Collectors Anton and Annick Herbert The Herbert Collection of Anton and Annick Herbert is considered to be one of the most important collections of Western avant-garde art in the world. It highlights work between the pivotal historical years of 1968 and 1989 which...

Scratching surfaces: Kapoor at Versailles

Scratching surfaces: Kapoor at Versailles

Since Jeff Koon’s debut in 2008, the palace of Versailles has annually invited an artist to display work in its grand surrounds. This year is the turn of 61 year old Bombay born, British artist, Anish Kapoor. Unlike previously commissioned artists, he has decided not...