There was something perverse about the opening of Liza Lou’s show at White Cube in Hoxton Square on a wet Thursday evening. It was as quiet as I’ve ever known it inside, while outside, barred from drinking among Lou’s fragile works, a throng of people guzzled free beer on the other side of the street in the rain.
I come not to praise Jamie but to Shovl'im… Jamie Shovlin's new show of covers for unpublished books in the Fontana Modern Masters series would seem to have everything for the viewer who prides himself on his good taste: serialism, mathematics, intellectuals, paint applied by the artist himself. The shame is that it's all a hoax, and not in the manner of Shovlin's earlier projects concerned with fictional people: the maths is cod, the belief absent - even the pauses for thought are artificial.
As Damien Hirst’s Tate retrospective looms large on the horizon, the million-dollar question is whether the work has withstood the test of time. Will exciting and provocative sculptures like the pickled shark, which became an icon of Brit Art the minute it swam into view at the Saatchi Gallery in 1992, still send shivers down the spine, or has it become too familiar to arouse anything more than a yawn of recognition?
The first major retrospective of the videos, photographs and sculptures of Gillian Wearing is a deeply disturbing experience. Her videos can be just a few minutes, or as long as an hour, but are not sequential narratives. They can be dipped in and out of - unlike many video artists you do not have to acquiesce to her time scale. But take a lot of time: they are more than worth it, and repay repeated viewings.
Group shows can be strained: the rubric can be so narrow that it has to be stretched to accommodate the artists at hand. That is one reason why Haunch of Venison's new show, Mixed Media, is so pleasing: it features contemporary sculpture with an emphasis on the varied materials in use today, a capacious but not unlimited mission. The other reason is that the work is just damned good.
It’s hard to imagine a bad documentary on David Hockney. Hockney always gives good Hockney: the quotable sentences come thick and fast; his enthusiasm for his craft is never less than exhilarating, and like that other great British artist of his generation – Francis Bacon – he’s always been better at getting to the crux of why and how he makes pictures than any of his commentators have. And yet… But we’ll get to the “and yet” in a moment.
These are, we are told, David Hockney's landscape works, and in that they depict the outdoors - early Grand Canyons and LA scenes, Yorkshire from the Nineties to now - that is correct. As a description, however, it comes nowhere near encapsulating the mystical, profound, plain beautiful pictures presented at the Royal Academy.
Empty vessels make the most noise. That pithy old aphorism floated into my head a scant few minutes into the much-heralded new work by the undoubtedly talented, but here way off-beam, Hofesh Shechter. And again, a few minutes later. And again, and again, as something like 200 drummers filled the stage and bashed away in earnest polyrhythmy. At the end of the 80 minutes my watch was worn with checking.
While I'm still learning to disentangle my mezzo from my Meistersinger, I enjoyed a lot of the opera on offer in London this year, especially at English National Opera. Parsifal was perfect and Rameau's Castor and Pollux, while probably a little too Germanic in direction with its dancing amputated legs and unerotic nudity, was wonderfully sung. I especially enjoyed the premiere of Nico Muhly's Two Boys, whose internet-era set design suited its perverse modern "love" story.
Brace yourselves for pure Damien Hirst madness next year. As well as Tate Modern’s retrospective survey opening in April, there will be a “worldwide” retrospective of Hirst’s spot paintings opening next month.
The Gagosian Gallery will be hosting the global exhibition of Hirst’s jaunty but dull spot paintings across all of its 11 galleries, from Hong Kong to Paris, and from New York to London, as well as in Los Angeles, Athens, Rome and Geneva.