Somerset House
Charismatic, powerful and raw: Patti Smith, at Somerset House, reviewed
There are certain long-established rules for describing Patti Smith. Google her name and the words ‘shaman’ and ‘priestess’ and you’ll…
It’s time to free art from being ‘interactive’ and ‘immersive’
The American artist and critic Brad Troemel once pointed out that art galleries have all turned into a kind of…
The supreme pictures of the Courtauld finally have a home of equal magnificence
When the Courtauld Gallery’s impressionist pictures were shown at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2019, the Parisian public…
How the Beano shaped art
Stuart Jeffries on the cultural influence of the comic that said it was good to be bad
Mother nature is finally getting the art she deserves
Exhibitions about fungi, bugs and trees illustrate the depth, range and vitality of a growing field of art, says Mark Cocker
Meet Congo, the Leonardo of chimps, whose paintings sell for £14,500
Three million years ago one of our ancestors, Australopithecus africanus, picked up a pebble and took it home to its…
How capitalism killed sleep
What can you make a joke about these days? All the old butts of humour are off limits. No wonder…
Comparing Peanuts to existentialism is an insult – to Peanuts
For the hundredth, possibly the thousandth, time, Lucy van Pelt offers to hold the football for Charlie Brown so he…
What's that thing? Britain's worst public art
Bad public art pollutes our townscapes. Stephen Bayley names and shames the worst offenders as he unveils the winner of The Spectator’s inaugural What’s That Thing? Award
Even Corbyn would find Thomas More’s Utopia too leftwing
Thomas More’s 1516 classic is a textbook for our troubled times, says William Cook
Center Parcs Longleat – a stealth socialist utopia on Lord Bath’s estate
Center Parcs Longleat is a holiday village in a forest in Wiltshire, on Lord Bath’s estate, so you can never…
‘This stuff goes on being alive’: Maggi Hambling on the power of painting
Maggi Hambling on Rembrandt, Twombly and the power of art
The future of the album lies in the gallery
The album is not what it was. It still exists, in record collections, as part of the torrential streaming of…
The most preposterous restaurant to have opened in London this year
Somerset House, a handsome Georgian palace on the Thames, was once the office of the Inland Revenue, and the courtyard was…
