Debt woes and a sprawlingly diverse programme haven’t stopped this year’s Dubai art fair from showing some exhilarating art – just don’t expect any nudity

Much more exciting than the recent completion of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa (renamed at the last minute as a shout out to Dubai’s creditors in Abu Dhabi) was the relatively uncelebrated opening of the first sections of Dubai’s metro system. The idea of the “public” has never been prominent in Dubai, but that may be starting to change. The city’s incredibly diverse ethnicities, used to encountering one another only in strictly hierarchical service situations, are now being squeezed together in rude proximity for the first time. The only nationality I did not see on the crowded train, as we glided along elevated tracks beside Sheikh Zayed Road were Emiratis.
 
I start with the metro because it’s an unsung triumph for a city that you’d be forgiven for thinking – if you read the Daily Mail – or indeed certain commentators in this venerable publication – that this hubristic Babel of a city is slipping into the Persian Gulf like something out of Roland Emmerich’s 2012. Thanks to bailouts from its big brother in Abu Dhabi, it isn’t. And, sorry to say, its confidence – or at least defiance – is starting to return as a result. Even its art fair (who buys art with this economy?) enjoyed a surprisingly successful fourth edition in the Disney-like luxury of the Madinat Jumeirah Hotel last weekend.
 
Art Dubai is not like western art fairs: it doesn’t have the quality that connoisseurs are accustomed to at Basel or London’s Frieze. No works featuring nudity or obvious political content are allowed (of which more later); there is an exclusive “women’s day” for the sheiks’ wives to roam around and add to their burgeoning collections; and it has more accompanying exhibitions, installations, talks, tours, prizes and passion than one person could possibly absorb. In short, it feels like Dubai is trying to prove something here. Perhaps that it does indeed possess the culture that it’s derided for lacking?
 
Out of 72 galleries, the art has come from 31 countries – mostly from what Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, Dubai’s leader, calls the Central World: the Middle East and Asia, of which Dubai still wants to be capital.
 
So someone like Javier Peres, the hip LA and Berlin gallerist who’s right at home at a fair such as Art Basel Miami Beach, felt like a fish out of water the first time he participated in Art Dubai. “I had to look up where the United Arab Emirates was on Google before coming here,” he said. “I admit my stupidity.” By the second day, though, he had already made more money than he did at the recent Armory Show in New York, mostly by selling a few Dan Colen paintings. As for the rest of the works on show, mostly from the Middle East, Peres said: “I don’t know how to look at it. If I respond to it instinctively, with my gut, fine. But I don’t understand it.”
 
That’s true of a lot of art in galleries such as ATHR from Jeddah or even the Middle East-dominated New York gallery Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller (which reported such rapid sales that “we haven’t even had time to invoice”). But, amid the newness of the fair, there are moments of familiarity. A squat toilet by Iranian artist Behdad Lahooti is an obvious homage to Duchamp’s urinal, except Lahooti has charged his with political meaning by covering it with conjugations of the verb “to be free” in Farsi. Tehran’s Aaran gallery sold the piece on the first day for $4,700 to French collectors.
 
Over at the Third Line gallery, Dubai’s local powerhouse, a diptych of black holograms by Babak Golkar create the illusion of a circuit around the Ka’aba; the piece is called From God to Malevich. At Sfeir-Semler gallery, which has branches in Hamburg and Beirut, Etel Adnan’s stunning, Andreas Gursky-style photographs of the Golan Heights are loaded with anger and cold-eyed beauty.
 
As a western visitor to the fair, then, it’s hard to put aside familiar frames of reference. But the lesson of Art Dubai might be that such regional groupings and divisions are increasingly irrelevant, anyway. artists everywhere share similar influences, and work in multiple locations. We all dip in the same pool.
 
This might also explain why Art Dubai has managed to survive the fact that several heavy-hitting galleries that attended last year, such as Haunch of Venison and New York’s L&M, chose not to return this time around: the collector base is sufficiently broad to absorb local difficulties. “We don’t fear the crisis,” says gallerist Ulrich Semler. “It’s not important for us, because we sell to England, the US, Turkey, Saudia Arabia, Lebanon. We don’t have any local collectors.” However, plenty of new faces graced the fair for the first time this year – sheiks, ultra-wealthy collectors from the Middle East and Ukraine, and the US mega-collectors Don and Mera Rubell.
 
Still, the variation in quality here is massive – excitingly so. Hunar, which was Dubai’s first fine art gallery, opening in 1998, displayed among lyrical paintings of horses and mysterious dishdasha’d figures a bronze bust of Sheikh Maktoum by British sculptor Carolyn Morton. It was commissioned, according to the gallerist, as a tribute. Only if appropriated by someone such as artist Jeff Koons – it seems like the kind of kitsch/sincere object he’d love – would it accrue the level of conceptual value expected at most art fairs. In the meantime, it’s a healthy challenge to have to swallow art that is made with no other purpose than pure glorification.
 
Another local gallery, Isabelle Van Den Eynde, showed a big, sloppy, jovial painting by the young Iranian Rokni Haerizadeh, of a chaotic picnic in the middle of a busy roundabout. I assumed – or wished – that this thrilling scene, reminiscent in spirit of Manet’s paintings/edouard-manet-music-in-the-tuileries-gardens”>Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862) or Jean Dubuffet’s The Busy Life (1953), was in Dubai. Here is the vibrant public life, the cross-contamination, that the city has been allergic to. But it actually depicts Tehran, not Dubai, on the 13th day of the Persian New Year, when everyone eats together outdoors.
 
The gallery was also showing work by Haerizadeh’s brother Ramin. Or at least it did, until Dubai’s state censors – the same guys who diligently black out nipples from issues of the Sun destined for British tourists – removed it from the fair. They also slapped a big white sticker over the hundreds of issues of the art fair’s daily newspaper that featured Ramin’s work.
 
I took a break from the fair to visit the Haerizadeh brothers in their 42nd-floor penthouse at Dubai Marina, overlooking the artificial archipelago that is the Palm Jumeirah. The duo arrived in Dubai last year, shortly after appearing in Charles Saatchi’s exhibition Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East. The provocative nature of that show earned them a visibility they’d never had before in Tehran – including threats that were convincing enough to make them leave immediately for Dubai.
 
“We came here as exiles,” Ramin says. “And now we have a problem with censorship here as well.” The work in question was a political collage in which the Shah’s wife, Farah Pahlavi, pays a benevolent visit to a classroom. Instead of school children, though, Ramin had inserted multiple images of himself, with his massive beard, wearing a chador and gleefully munching on pieces of paper with the empress’s image on it.
 
Several gallerists privately warned journalists against overestimating the importance of censorship in Dubai. But the significant tragedy of the Haerizadehs’ situation is that Dubai, which is potentially a beacon of relative freedom and opportunity for the Middle East and Asia, has become so unstable for them. If Rokni’s brilliant new series of paintings depicting the torture currently going on in Iran’s prisons were discovered in his studio, he’d have to go into exile again – this time to London. “We are thinking of becoming fugitives,” he half-jokes.
 
In March 2008, a year after Art Dubai began, the newly-formed Dubai Cultural and Arts Authority announced plans for some permanent cultural infrastructure for the emirate. Khor Dubai was to be a 22km tract of culture, boasting 14 theatres, 10 museums (including a Museum of Middle Eastern Modern Art), 11 galleries, nine libraries, seven “cultural icons”, seven arts and cultural institutes, and an opera house. All of this is now in deep freeze.
 
That’s part of the reason why Abdul Raheem Sharif turned his modest old house (they do exist in Dubai) into The Flying House, a spontaneous, overflowing mini-museum for local artists to display and preserve their art in the absence of a proper institution to do it for them. Local artist Hassan Sharifi’s works dominate: he obsessively accumulates Arte Povera-type junk and stores it on shelves and in glass cases. It will be a shame when this place, and the delightfully unpretentious Dubai Museum in the old town, which features historical dioramas and relics, are inevitably superseded by some starchitect mega-museum.
 
What Dubai is left with in the meantime is actually much better: a burgeoning grassroots cultural scene in the industrial Al Quoz district, which will soon be accessible from the fair by metro (admittedly with a couple of taxi transfers). Young galleries like the Third Line, Carbon 12, Traffic and Ayyam are all sticking out the crisis here. “Dubai has always been the little guy,” says Hetal Pawani, director of Jamjar, a gallery studio space and sometime yoga venue. Pawani is one of the city’s apparently limitless supply of ambitious, self-confident young women who are basically running the art scene here. “We’ve always been bottom up,” she says, “and then the policy would emerge later. There’s a clear distinction between Dubai and Sharjah, with its biennial and art museum, and Abu Dhabi, which has its big plans.” (These bring for a cultural island featuring franchises of the Guggenheim and the Louvre.) “In Dubai,” says Pawani, “we have to do things ourselves.”

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If only more public artworks could be like The Burghers of Calais, a powerful monument to everyday heroes

It’s great to be able to celebrate a genuinely powerful and moving public sculpture. There have been so many disappointments, and that’s a gentle way to describe the ugly, stupid stuff our cities have become cluttered with since public art became a British obsession of the noughties. The recession has slowed it down a bit – I haven’t heard as much about it lately, anyway – but the torrent has not ceased: we still have Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle to look forward to.

But this is not the work I wish to praise. No, I want to take a moment to point out Britain’s most poignant and beautiful work of modern art in a public place. It is Rodin’s sculpture The Burghers of Calais and it stands in the gardens west of the Houses of Parliament. Have you stood and looked up at this tender masterpiece recently, its dark figures framed against the gothic honeycomb of Westminster?

Perhaps only tourists see it, but actually you can walk here in a few moments from Tate Britain. It’s worth the stroll. The medievalism of the architecture that looms over it sets the scene nicely: when Calais was besieged by the English king in the 14th century, six townsmen gave themselves over as prisoners, believing they were to be executed in return for the city’s salvation. In the event, they were spared, but Rodin’s sculpture portrays the moment of their martyr-like sacrifice: it is a poem to surrender. The emaciated bodies, tattered robes and, above all, the wonderfully delicate and melancholy gestures and poses of the figures express a strange and captivating mood of self-negation.

With this sculpture, designed in the 1880s, Rodin proved himself the greatest European sculptor since Michelangelo and Bernini. Indeed, the soft feeling of surrender it evokes is comparable with Michelangelo’s Dying Slave in the Louvre. Yet, in Rodin’s hands, this is disconcertingly modern art.

Rodin’s masterpiece is sculpture as history painting, and it serves in London as a monument to humble, everyday heroes. It is true and it is beautiful. If only more public art rose to its level.

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Now 63, the grande dame of 1970s performance art is spending three months in silent vigil at at New York’s Moma alongside a major new retrospective of her work. James Westcott sits down to see if he can hold her gaze

Last week, the 63-year-old queen of performance art Marina Abramović, dressed in a flowing dark-blue dress, and looking extremely pale, sat down at a small table in the towering atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She will be there, motionless and silent, every day during museum opening hours for the next three months. This is the duration of her retrospective, The artist Is Present – the first career survey Moma has ever given to a performance artist – which is taking place concurrently up on the sixth floor. In the atrium, Abramović is making the title of her exhibition literal. And members of the public can share in her presence by sitting in the empty chair opposite her and engaging in silent eye contact for as long as they want, or as long as they can.

“I have to be like a mountain,” the artist told me a couple of days before going into her “big silence” for the performance. She will go home every evening when the museum closes, but, in order to sustain her meditative state, she will not speak until 31 May. “The atrium is such a restless place, full of people passing through. The acoustics are terrible – it’s too big, too noisy. It’s like a tornado. I try to play the stillness in the middle.”

While I was talking to her, Abramović was anything but still. Her habitual anxiety and jovial hyperactivity – so different to the formidable power and placidity she has demonstrated in 40 years of extreme acts of endurance – were in overdrive. “People don’t realise it is pure hell sitting so long,” she said in her thick Serbian accent, while fidgeting. Cramps will set in after an hour or so. Her bum will begin to hurt. But she will ride out the pain. “The concept of failure never enters my mind,” she insists. To insure against it, a masseuse, a nutritionist and a personal trainer will visit her apartment before and after each day’s work.

My meeting with the artist was the first time I had seen her in a year, in which time I had finished writing her biography. Her verdict on the book, now that it’s finally out (after three years of intensive interviews and research, and four years before that spent working as her assistant, a position I quit in order to start writing) was this: “I will never let anyone write my biography again.” We both laughed, even though she was deadly serious. I began dreading the inevitable moment when I would sit opposite her at the table a few days later.

But Abramović’s conclusion was also validating: the book was always meant to be both intimate and critical, and it was not written at her behest, or subject to her approval. However, it did rely on her total co-operation. I came to think that the process of writing the book was like her 1974 performance Rhythm 0, in which she stood totally passive for six hours while members of the public were allowed to do whatever they wanted to her. Chains, feathers, a Polaroid camera, olive oil, razor blades, an axe, a rose, a bullet and a gun were among the objects set out on a table nearby. She surrendered control of her biography to me without knowing what the result would be; she simply had to trust that I would not put the gun to her neck, as someone did in Rhythm 0.

Before queueing to sit opposite Abramović on the opening night of the performance, I checked out the retrospective. It’s a cacophonous, mercifully unpious treatment of her often ultra-serious work. It opens with videos, photographs and objects relating to her first performances in the early 1970s. In these, the svelte and self-conscious young artist performed acts such as stabbing knives repeatedly in the gaps between her splayed fingers, often missing and stabbing her hand instead (Rhythm 10, 1973); lying down in the (empty) middle of a burning five-pointed star, symbolic not only of the occult but of communism in her native Yugoslavia (Rhythm 5, 1974); and, in 1976, brushing her hair with increasing violence while repeating the mantra: “Art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful.” Abramović, always obsessed with her physical appearance, was probably not being that ironic.

Why did she do such things? I later came to think of them as the artist’s revenge against the givenness of life. Growing up under dictator Jospi Broz Tito and the domestic regime of a militaristic mother, body art was a way for Abramović to create rules even more extreme than the ones she found herself subjected to. In that way she could demonstrate a different kind of freedom. Her performances were also irrepressible expressions of her natural theatrical bent, and her craving for attention and devotion. It’s impossible to disentangle the narcissism from the public service in her work; the diva from the high priestess.

At Moma, most of Abramović’s work (which includes live performance pieces as well as documentation) is taken from her 1976–1988 collaboration in love and art with the German artist Ulay, here remade by a troupe of devoted young artists. A couple stare and point at each other without moving (a remake of 1977’s Point of Contact), another motionless couple sit back-to-back with their hair braided together (Relation in Time, 1977), and another two stand and face each other naked in a doorway (Imponderabilia, 1977). You can pass between them, but Moma has neutered the confrontation of the original by placing the performers so far apart that you barely brush against them.

But there’s a bigger problem than Moma’s institutional prudishness: these re-performances cannot invoke the conditions – the audacity, trauma and charisma – of the original pieces. Abramović’s work is inseparable from her and Ulay’s history and magnetism. The pieces seen here seem to sap the originals of their unpredictability and strangeness.

The Ulay phase of the retrospective includes photos of Nightsea Crossing, which is Abramović’s inspiration for this three-month-long sitting. In the 1980s, she and Ulay sat opposite each other, locked in eye contact and without moving, for a total of 90 (non-consecutive) days in museums around the world. If, in the first part of her career, she was masochistically confronting herself, and in the middle part she was confronting Ulay; since 1988, she has been directly confronting the public, though with an emphasis on physical presence rather than pain. The House With Ocean View (2002) is another prototype of her new performance in the atrium: the artist lived for 12 days without eating or speaking on three raised platforms in a gallery; her only nourishment was sustained eye contact with members of the audience.

So there is an irresistible force of historic logic behind what’s going on in the atrium. And history revisited Abramović on the opening night, as a parade of fellow performance artists sat with her: Tehching Hsieh (the undisputed king of endurance, legendary for his one-year performances in the 1980s), the Austrian feminist (and friend of Marina’s) Valie Export, and Joan Jonas, perhaps the only artist of Abramović’s generation to continue with performance art after the 1970s.

In between each of these sitters, Abramović looked down and closed her eyes, resetting her gaze and gathering energy. When she looked up again, sitting opposite her was none other than Ulay. A rapturous silence descended on the atrium. Abramović immediately dissolved into tears, and for the first few seconds had trouble meeting Ulay’s calm gaze. She turned from superhero to little girl – smiling meekly; painfully vulnerable. When they did finally lock eyes, tears streaked down Abramović’s cheeks; after a few minutes, she violated the conditions of her own performance and reached across the table to take his hands. It was a moving reconciliation scene – as Abramović, of course, was well aware.

As a steady stream of people sat down opposite Abramović, it became clear that she was trying to engage with them all on a personal level, mirroring their posture and the varying intensity of their gaze. She was being anything but a mountain – and her frailty made an already difficult performance even more exhausting. But the apparent nightmare of the piece is an illusion: what could be better than three months of sustained eye contact with a public hungry for connection? What more fundamental human activity could there be?

After 90 minutes of queueing on the opening night, it was finally my turn to sit opposite the artist. I was immediately stunned. Not by the strength of her gaze, but the weakness of it. She offered a Mona Lisa half-smile and started to cry, but somehow this served to strengthen my gaze; I had to be the mountain. After about 10 minutes, I started to relish our unspoken dialogue. Then, suddenly and involuntarily, my head dropped. It was as if Abramović had sent me a laser beam, and the moment was over.

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The Museum of Modern Art’s show of the Alice in Wonderland film-maker’s art overflows with his distinctive creations, but the organisers have wasted an opportunity to take him out of his rabbit hole

Gallery: Tim Burton at Moma

“That’s the big deer from Edward Scissorhands,” a woman in the sculpture garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art tells her friend, pointing at an outsized topiary stag based on the one in Tim Burton’s 1990 film. “And I recognise this one from Beetlejuice, when the furniture tries to eat [the characters],” she adds, gesturing at a large, pointy, painted sheet-metal piece that bears a passing resemblance to something from Burton’s 1988 movie but is in fact Alexander Calder’s 1959 sculpture Black Widow.

The attribution might have been wide of the mark but at least a connection was made between Burton and a larger artworld. The peculiar thing about Moma’s Tim Burton show, which has been running since November and continues to the end of April, is how little effort its curators have made to glance backward or sideways to place Burton’s work within a broader context.

Burton has a distinctive sensibility, consistently expressed with wit, imagination and macabre charm, but he is not an obvious candidate for a blockbuster show at one of the world’s most prestigious art museums. Part of the exhibition’s job is surely to offer an argument about why he should be given a platform alongside the likes of Claude Monet and William Kentridge, both of whom also have shows at Moma at the moment, and how his work fits into and enhances a larger cultural narrative. This the exhibition does not do.

Instead, it gives us Burton, Burton and more Burton. You can see why: the man is plainly prodigious and each of the hundreds of pieces on show has its own reasons to be admired – from early Mad magazine-influenced cartoons and public-service posters created by Burton as a teenager in Burbank, California, to props and production work from his movies (Edward Scissorhands’s leather-switchblade costume, The Nightmare Before Christmas’s Jack Skellington figure with his two dozen spare heads). There are also nine new pieces created for the show, from a giant inflatable “Balloon Boy” in the main atrium to the monster’s maw through which one enters the exhibition proper.

The bulk of the work on show consists of drawings, the vast majority offering individual vividness while remaining consistent with Burton’s overall sensibility: there are monsters, aliens, fairgrounds and suburbia; creepy-sympathetic figures that are sharp-toothed, spindly-limbed, bristling with stalks and spirals but often bulbously top-heavy or buxomly dominatrixy. Stark black-and-white stripes alternate with splattered palettes of riotous, even fluorescent colour.

This consistency is striking and limiting. There’s really not that much difference in sensibility and technique between Burton’s latest works and the paintings of alien invasions or monstrous animations created during his adolescence. Impressive stuff for a teenager, no question, but it leaves the show feeling awfully samey. Even the novelty value of glimpses of early or uncompleted projects is qualified by a feeling that if we never saw Burton’s Hansel and Gretel or Little Dead Riding Hood, we can probably imagine how they would look without much difficulty. Nor, a couple of installation pieces notwithstanding, does the show give you the feeling of being in Burton’s world yourself in the way that, say, the unsettlingly immersive 2007 David Lynch exhibition at Paris’s Fondation Cartier, with its disorienting red curtains and grinding industrial soundtrack, did.

All the more reason, then, for the exhibition to look beyond the contents of Burton’s metaphorical garage. There are obvious connections to be made here: with other popular illustrators, such as Charles Addams, Edward Gorey, Ralph Steadman, Ronald Searle and Maurice Sendak; with ideas of childhood, sexuality and outsiderdom that could easily encompass the Grimms, Poe and Freud; and with cinematic movements such as German expressionism and classic monster movies. A Moma film season running in conjunction with the show, called The Lurid Beauty of Monsters, juxtaposes Burton’s features with just these kinds of cinematic reference points (Nosferatu, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, Tex Avery cartoons, etc). But the response to the main exhibition is a bit like the response you might have to many of Burton’s characters: have you thought about getting out a bit more?

He was the anarchist of 1980s design, but the technical wizardry in his current London show feels over-polished and out of touch

Unless you die young, it’s difficult to be a hero for ever. Heroes are commercialised. They succumb to what Norman Mailer called “exhaustion of the will”. Or they simply go out of fashion. And that’s what happened to Ron Arad – or at least, that’s what we thought had happened. But the Israeli-born, London-based designer of bold, sculptural furniture has never been more ubiquitous. In the last year, a major retrospective of his work has bounced from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, recently landing at London’s Barbican.

Arad is one of the design world’s few nameable stars. Most people will probably know his Tom Vac chair (1993), a rippled plastic armchair on steel legs that once abounded in cool restaurants. Or perhaps his bestselling Bookworm bookshelf, a flexible ribbon that holds your books in a spiral. But these are merely the outward signs of his commercial success. He also works as an artist, selling one-off pieces for sometimes hundreds of thousands of pounds, and as an architect and teacher. Over the last decade he has been hugely influential at the Royal College of Art, where he was head of the Design Products department until last year. Arad wasn’t interested in teaching people how to be professional industrial designers: he wanted to teach them how to think for themselves, and a generation of designers graduated wanting to work just as he did – as a designer-maker, free from the technical constraints set by manufacturers.

To understand Arad the hero, visitors to the Barbican show should head straight up to the mezzanine galleries to soak up his early work from the 1980s. There they’ll find a stereo and speakers encased in concrete, which look as though they’ve been hauled off a building site or hacked from a sea wall. Can you imagine a rougher envelope for all that delicate technology? So much for the precious, garish styling of the designer decade. Arad, recently graduated from the Architectural Association, had broken out of architecture to do his own thing. His work was raw and muscular, but also rich and clever.

It all started with an old leather car seat bolted to some scaffolding pipes. The Rover chair (1981), an emblem of Britain’s fading car industry spliced with some DIY high-tech structure, was an instant punk icon, the furniture equivalent of the Sex Pistols’ ransom-note typography. Before Arad had even noticed any connection to the prevailing counter-culture, Jean-Paul Gaultier was knocking on his door to buy six. He went on to hammer metal into clunky thrones such as the Tinker chair (1988), and turn looped steel sheets into a parody of your auntie’s upholstered armchair in the Well-Tempered chair (1986). It was visceral stuff, and what’s more, it looked like he was having fun.

Fast forward two decades to this show, and you see the Rover chair again – except this time it’s made of flawless chrome. The sheer shininess of it epitomises everything that went wrong with design in the noughties. Galleries were falling over themselves to produce ultra-expensive limited editions for a growing collectors’ market buoyed by the economic bubble. You want your chair in Carrara marble? You got it. The bling world of design-art was too often about expense for the sake of it. It was an upgrade of materials, but not of imagination.

None of that is Arad’s fault. He had been blurring the distinction between design and art for decades, and we should thank him for it. It’s not boundary-crossing that’s the problem, it’s the fact that the edginess of Arad’s work has been replaced by a flabby, over-polished mannerism. It’s too slick. Take a series of recent rocking chairs called the Voids (an apt name): no doubt they are technically impressive, but whether they’re made of tiger-stripe acrylic or lacquered aluminium, there’s no disguising that the designs are utterly vacuous. His architecture is even worse – this exhibition gives him so much credit for also being an architect that you wonder whether the curators have actually looked at these buildings. They’re heinous: scaled-up, self-indulgent gewgaws.

Arad has been an early adopter of new materials and technologies – he used rapid prototyping (a method of 3D printing using plastic resin) to make a series of fruit bowls, and he incorporated text messaging into a chandelier for Swarovski – but often abandons them before he’s achieved anything of substance. The show is a celebration of his magpie ingenuity, but you won’t find much under the surface. Arad’s work is all technique. It’s pure expression through materials, form and movement. That means you can only judge it using taste. One of his giant rocking chairs (he loves rocking chairs) or overblown bookcases will bring someone a sudden jolt of pure joy, while the person next to them will yawn. He’s the design equivalent of Marmite.

The superbness of it all is part of the problem. It’s so bombastic that it doesn’t leave you any room to be you – Arad is too busy blinding you with who he is. There is no sociological dimension to his work; it’s not about people, it’s about him.

The reason why this show feels out of touch is that we’ve moved on. Sure, Arad helped erode the boundaries of design, but which boundaries are we interested in? If design is going to rediscover its sense of purpose, it has to crossbreed with other disciplines, from biotechnology to healthcare. The most interesting contemporary designers are already crossing those thresholds; Arad, though, feels like he’s been left far behind.

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The legacy of modernism is all around us. But to find the true power of modern art, we have to look to the past …

Modern art. I used to know what those words meant. Modern art began with Manet and the discovery of flatness as a value in painting. It reached a new clarity of purpose with Cézanne and exploded into full existence in Picasso’s 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon… or, if I remember The Shock of the New, it began with the Eiffel Tower and the motor car …

I am talking, of course, about modernism – the art movement, or constellation of art movements, that is widely held to have ended in the 1960s. When I was a student, the fashionable term for what came afterwards was postmodernism. That fell with The Late Show. And now? Well, we all say “modern art” and mean anything from Duchamp to Ryan Gander.

When I realised a few years ago that people no longer had any reference to the history of modernism in mind when they said “modern art”, I was shocked. I blamed it on Tate Modern for adopting such a grand name and then filling its opening displays with the brashly new back in the early noughties. But since then it has become clear that modern art, in its current sense of the art of today and its direct antecedents, is here to stay. It’s understandable when we are so obviously living in modern times, in a world hurtling towards a new future every day. This is tomorrow. If modernism dreamt of a utopia, it’s here.

But, when I personally say “a great modern artist”, I still probably mean an artist who worked before 1960. We may have modern art, but modernism (RIP) still sets the bar higher than most of our own moderns dream of.

And this is the problem that dogs the art critic in the 21st century. Our glibly high evaluation of today’s art, casually calling it “modern art” as if it could ride roughshod over the achievements of the last century, and we could cherry pick modernism’s history to find phoney lineages for whatever we want to plug, is a massive lie. The arts in the period between 1880 and 1920 reached heights of achievement unseen since the Renaissance. The avant garde in its prime was all greatness, all glory. With the best will in the world, and however much we find to admire and to hope for, our time is mannerist in comparison. Modern art? I wish it would come back.

 The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would like to syndicate content from or to this blog, or if you simply enjoy art and would like to get in touch, please leave a comment! This article has been kindly provided by: Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk

Goodwin’s quietly powerful portraits of London Underground staff capture the mystery and melancholy of life in the capital

Ordinary faces look back at you from posters at London Underground stations, drawn in intense black lines, almost like forests of wiring. There is a hum of represssed energy, as if you were approaching power lines on a wasteland. There is also a solitude, a silence in the portraits that reach out, with their eyes, to you the stranger … and then you’ve moved on, carried by the crowd, the connection is lost.

Dryden Goodwin’s portraits of London Transport staff are the latest – and some might say the most conventional – in the series of artworks commissioned by Art on the Underground. Goodwin made drawings of 60 underground workers. They’re engaged, emotional, hardworking sketches. For those who need a bit of video to make them feel they are seeing some proper modern art, he has also made films of the drawing sessions. For me, though, what’s interesting is the vision of London this artist is pursuing; these drawings continue the themes of solitude in the crowd that made his 2008 show at the Photographers’ Gallery so quietly powerful.

It is an old-fashioned London he is drawing, more reminiscent of the 1950s city of a Frank Auerbach than the happening metropolis of now. Both Londons are mythic, of course. There is no one, fixed truth of London; this city is both a heaven and a hell, depending on your point view. But in contemporary culture, the point of view is almost always remorselessly upbeat and promotional. Goodwin’s London is a more melancholy, mysterious place whose streets, in these winter days, we actually seem to walk. They’re gripping, thought-provoking and evocative of life in the big city.

 The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would like to syndicate content from or to this blog, or if you simply enjoy art and would like to get in touch, please leave a comment! This article has been kindly provided by: Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk

Modern art prints on canvas allow you to use your imagination and create real masterpieces and completely under your control exactly the way you want it. Do you want to know how to achieve this? If you want to succeed, then you will have to follow some simple rules. The process itself is a simple one, but you need to obtain some knowledge in order to create and achieve a real masterpiece to be proud of. It takes time and patience but after all your efforts you will be satisfied and happy with the final result. So, let us start from the very beginning. What have you to do in order to create your own canvas print in order to lift the decor of your place and thus providing a rather better look to your house or flat? It is not just a modern piece of glossy or chic art, but a chance to develop a great variety of images or canvases as you see fit. The first step is to select a suitable photo or set of photographs. You can use an old black and white picture or contemporary electronic version of an image. When a suitable the photo is found and you are ready it`s time to turn it into canvas art prints so we need to look for a canvas service provider. There are a great variety of online companies offering their help and services. Here is important to make the right decision and choose the best company. The key is to look for one that offers qualitative canvas and methodology. Be ready for checking all peculiar details, once you have decided, give the company a call and consult with the professionals. You can express your own vision and ideas and they can suggest and modify accordingly. Of course, you can if you so wish do all of this by contacting the company online, upload the photo file and provide all necessary information about what you want and who you are. It is easier to avoid all mistakes and misunderstandings, if you have a specific requirement to give them a call they will undoubtedly help you thorough anything you don`t quite understand. Get to know your providers listen to their suggestions about the prints and make sure they use the best canvases and inks. We do suggest careful thought be given to the size and dimensions you wish to use. This often depends on the design and size of you room that you are going to hang the final canvas in. There are many different dimensions of canvases from 8-inch square to far larger ones such as the likes of a 58inch by 100inch. Decide what empty spot in your room you want the canvas to engage in and choose wisely. Be careful as sometimes a canvas print can lose its charm due to it being placed in the wrong location or not suitable atmosphere for the canvas theme on display. So, think twice about choose once. Add your energy, efforts, desire into art prints on canvas, and then it will be a canvas masterpiece and will reflect your ideas, aspiration and vision. It will be the child of your imagination. When all details are thought out and considered the canvas art prints will be ready, you can then enjoy your creation as well as share this joy with relatives, friends and other guests of your house. Create and design your own place for where you live! About the Author/Author Bio Are in a rush to obtain a right gift for the coming Christmas Holidays? The Original Canvas Company is happy to sort all necessary things for you. We offer art prints on canvas at reasonable fee. Article Source: http://www.articlesphere.com/Article/Canvas-Print-is-Your-Ideas–Your-Thoughts–Your-Vision/192828 Rate Article Related Videos How to Properly Throw a football Fix the Annoying Cell Phone Buzz in your … Fix the Missing Tags in your MP3 Files Island Fresh Gourmet in St. Thomas Virgin Islands Harbour Island, Bahamas More “Visual Arts” Related Articles Listed below are more articles related to the above article from the “Visual Arts” article category. People interested in the above article “Canvas Print is Your Ideas, Your Thoughts, Your Vision” are also interested in the related articles listed below: Many people love what they do. I would like to talk about the passion for graphic arts. The persons who have worked for many years in the printing industry, the persons who had professional achievements in graphic arts certainly became fascinated by this field. This article is a short introduction to shunga, the mysterious erotic art of Japan. 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Drawing is one of the most economical forms of art and is very easy to get started. You really do not need much. For the absolute beginner, all that is really needed is a number 2 pencil and piece of cheap scrap paper. Eventually though, you will probably want to purchase quality supplies as you become more experiences and start producing finished drawings. This article will provide you with an introduction to some of the more popular drawing materials and accessories available to todays artists. Just like an actor who steps into his role the moment that he enters the stage, the painter has to find the mental switch that turns him into the painter as soon as he picks up the brush. Once you know how to do that the magic really starts and anything can happen. That’s when painting becomes art. Pencil drawing is a subject we all study at school. Many people forget the pleasures associated with this gentle and inexpensive medium until much later in life and this is because in today’s modern and erratic society, we are just too busy to take up drawing and painting as a hobby, so the ambition to one day become an artist lies on the back burner until we have more time to enjoy our creativeness.   Canvas Print is Your Ideas, Your Thoughts, Your Vision By Expert Author: Travis Olague | Article Abstract Word Count: 584 words | Views: 2 view(s)

 The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would like to syndicate content from or to this blog, or if you simply enjoy art and would like to get in touch, please leave a comment! This article has been kindly provided by: ArticleSphere.com: Arts And Entertainment | Visual Arts [expanded by feedex.net]