Blimey!: From Bohemia to Britpop : The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Blimey!: From Bohemia to Britpop : The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst Details
From Library Journal This unusual volumeApart art history, part journalism, and part diaryAoffers a crash course on the Pop Art scene in London from roughly the Sixties onward and does so with intelligence and humor. Collings has spent his life in this artistic environment, and he writes with an insider's ease. In an engaging mix of anecdote, critique, and discussion, he presents a somewhat wild potpourri of the lives, unusual habits, and creations of such individuals as Damien Hirst, John Stezaker, R.B. Kitaj, and David Hockney, to name only a very few. Along the way he takes a look at various trends from Shock Art to Pop to the School of London, including the philosophies of each as well as a descriptive sampling of the works of their various adherents. Lavish illustrations range from the beautiful to the strange to the shocking. Don't let the breezy tone fool youAthis book is filled with a wealth of solid information. Recommended for all contemporary art collections.ACarol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more
Reviews
I recommend this for the photos, almost completely. And I do not mean the cover photo where the author, Matthew Collings, has chosen to put a huge picture of himself with an eye-trapping bullseye painting behind his head. This mystified me, till I read the incredibly disorganized, ungrammatical account Collings writes, really more of a reminiscence than a history. Along the way he attacks the brilliant R.B. Kitaj and the rest of the School of London(including those such as Bacon and Freud) as "a bunch of oldsters exhibiting their charcoal life drawings and stuff." Incisive commentary that. Collings must make Robert Hughes tremble. Basically this is one huge self-promotional book, but generously illustrated with works of Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin and others from the infamous and brilliant SENSATION show, and contains, in spite of its obnoxiously chatty style, many interesting anecdotes about the London art world. One can almost piece it together despite the annoying narrator. The current London art scene is beautifully dangerous and the SENSATION Show(and I hope its catalog goes into print in the US soon)may be, in the end, as influential as the 1913 Armory Show, so it deserves study. Art needed back some kind of edge. The book is an OK intro to the subject and the photos alone justify purchase.My only other complaint is the constant recurrence of those completely nightmarish perversions of conceptual art, the "living sculptures"(or charlatans, as I like to call them) Gilbert and George, laced oddly throughout the book for no apparent reason. What do they do? In a nutshell, they go about and place themselves in context, in photos or live. Why they think they're interesting wherever they're placed, or make a place interesting by their presence, is beyond me, but they've apparently made a great deal of loot from this. Go figure. John Roberson
