Art has ceased to be beautiful or interesting — but we are more obsequious than ever to artists
Two ambitious volumes of interviews with artists have just been published. They are similar, but different. The first is by…
Luxury isn’t the opposite of poverty but the opposite of vulgarity - but don’t tell the V&A
Different concepts of luxury may be inferred from a comparison of the wedding feast of Charles Bovary and Emma Rouault…
The miracle of modern flight, by a 747 pilot with a poet’s sensibility
With Alpine wreckage still being sifted, this is either a very good or a very bad time to write about…
Cars are our cathedrals
Stephen Bayley hails the automobile – a miracle of technical and artistic collaboration – and mourns its demise
Grim, generous, decaying and hip: the paradoxical charms of Athens
My first visit to Athens as a student gave me a set of impressions that the present crisis has only…
The Spectator declares war on bad public art
Stephen Bayley announces the launch of What’s That Thing?, The Spectator’s award for bad public art
From classical to post-modern: a beginner’s guide
My career at school and after was greatly enhanced by a series of books called The Bluffer’s Guide to….These gave…
The art of Coke
The Coca-Cola ‘contour’ bottle is 100 years old. Stephen Bayley salutes a design classic
An armchair voyeur gets a glimpse into Nicky Haslam’s vast address book
Phaidon pioneered the modern art-book in 1936. The formula was: large format, fine production, exceptional plates, and essays by the…
The reopened V&A Cast Courts are a fabulous spectacle of Victorian theft and reverence
The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact…
The only way is Essex University
Stephen Bayley revisits the ambitious, and for its day visionary, campus that is Essex University for its 50th birthday celebrations
Jeff Koons’s latest achievement: a new standard in prolix, complacent, solipsistic, muddled drivel
Jeff Koons is, by measures understood in Wall Street, the most successful living artist. But he’s a slick brand manager…
Frieze Art Fair: where great refinement meets harrowing vulgarity
If you wanted to find a middle-aged man in a bright orange suit, matching tie and sneakers, Frieze is a…
My addiction to the bullet train
Stephen Bayley explains why he has become addicted to Japan’s Shinkansen
Ettore Sottsass, Jnr: more than just a funny name
Personally, I have always been sensitive about a credibility gap, a difference in prestige, between literary and visual cultures. More…
You want a glitzy new cultural centre in Backofbeyondistan? Don’t call Shigeru Ban
Shigeru Ban is the celebrated architect who refuses to become a celebrity. Thus, at 57, his career has run opposite…
The best exhibition of architecture I have ever experienced
Curtain walls, dreaming spires, crockets, finials, cantilevers, bush-hammered concrete, vermiculated rustication, heroic steel and delicate Cosmati work are all diverse…
The man who gave the world (but not London) the glass skyscraper
Modern Architecture, capitalised thus, is now securely and uncontroversially compartmentalised into art history, its bombast muted, its hard-edge revolutions blurred…
The most inspiring gift for your child this Christmas
One of the big differences between Frank Lloyd Wright and me is that, when he was nine, his mother gave…
Dear Simon Jenkins, please stop moaning about developers
When architectural preservationists meet at the tedious conferences and grim councils of despair that feed oxygen to their nihilistic and…
Is Richard Rogers still a rebel?
‘Lounge suit’ is normally a reliable signifier of supine gentility. But there it was on the invitation to Richard Rogers’s…
Adhocism, by Charles Jencks - review
Here, for time travellers, is the whack-job spirit of ’68 in distillate form, paperbound and reissued in facsimile (with some…
