Banksy Fraudsters

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Rude Britannia

The newest exhibition at Tate Britain in London is a grand celebration of Britain’s taste for the “naughty but nice”. Rude Britannia takes a look at comic art, all the way from saucy postcards, to the savagery of political cartoons. Rude Britannia: British Comic Art is at Tate Britain (020 7887 8825) from 9 June to 5 September 2010. A series of three BBC4 programmes, Rude Britannia, will begin on 14 June.

Donkey Do !!

Visitors to the beaches of Weston-super-Mare this summer will not only be able to enjoy the famous donkey rides, but will also have the chance to take part in a new donkey-themed town attraction. The Grand Pier has launched a scheme to brighten up the town with a trail of life-sized, decorated donkey statues. Local businesses are invited to sponsor each of the donkeys, with the money raised going to Children in Need and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Local artists will design the donkeys and paint them with the cost of the work being sought from local businesses. The initiative – which will see the colourful resin donkeys dotted around the town centre and seafront – is being organised to mark the 200th anniversary of tourism in the seaside resort and the re-opening of the Grand Pier in the summer. “We want as many businesses as possible to sponsor a donkey to help create an exciting event in the town,” Helen Ritchie, Grand Pier marketing manager, told local papers.

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@ - Honoured by Museum

For the French, it may always remind them of delicious escargot, but for most everyone else the @ symbol has come to embody the age of the Internet and its constantly evolving language. In honour of the little squiggly’s potency, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced on Monday that it had added the @ symbol to its architecture and design collection, citing its “design power.” The @ symbol, currently used every day by millions around the world in email addresses, text messages and on twitter.com, is thought to be ancient, the museum said, possibly dating back to the sixth century. Because the symbol is not a concrete thing but an abstract idea, it has changed meaning many times in the course of its existence.

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Missing Van Gogh

A newly authenticated Van Gogh has gone on display 35 years after a discredited art collector bought it in Paris, convinced it was painted by the famed Dutch master but never able to prove it. Le Blute-Fin Mill was painted in 1886, according to Louis Van Tilborgh, curator of research at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It was bought in 1975 by Dirk Hannema, who was known as a brilliant museum curator but a fool when buying for his own collection. When he died in 1984 he claimed to have seven Vermeer’s, several Van Gogh’s and a few Rembrandts. He was right only about this painting, which went on show yesterday in the Museum de Fundatie in the town of Zwolle.

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Artist Rooms to return

The widely-praised Artist Rooms has announced its 2010 national tour, taking iconic works by contemporary artists to 21 British museums and galleries, from Llandudno to Fort William. Apart from Edinburgh, Liverpool and London, all the locations are new.
Now in its second year, Artist Rooms originated in 2008, when art dealer Anthony d’Offay gifted his imperious collection to the National Galleries of Scotland and the Tate for a fraction of its current value (£26.5 million instead of £125 million). His offer decreed that the works be arranged not by thematic exhibitions, but rather as artist rooms – to provide visitors with a sustained encounter of an individual artist’s work. This, along with the stipulation that the works be accessible to new audiences across the country, resulted in the Artist Rooms 2009 tour.  The exhibitions proved successful, with 372 works reaching approximately eight million people nationally, more than 700,000 of whom were outside of London and Edinburgh. The 2010 tour should prove as popular.

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Artist’s ‘missing’ landscapes

Paul Nash show reveals artist’s ‘missing’ landscapes

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Exhibition at Tate

Chris Ofili’s intensely coloured and intricately ornamented paintings are on show at Tate Britain in a major survey of the artist’s career that brings together over 45 paintings, as well as pencil drawings and watercolours from the mid 1990s to today. One of the most acclaimed British painters of his generation, Ofili won the Turner Prize in 1998 and represented Great Britain at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Ofili has built an international reputation with his works that bridge the sacred and the profane, popular culture and beliefs. His exuberant paintings are renowned for their rich layering and inventive use of media, including balls of elephant dung that punctuate the canvas and support them at their base, as well as glitter, resin, map pins and magazine cut-outs.

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Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective

This exhibition celebrates the extraordinary life and work of Arshile Gorky (c.1904-1948). Along with Rothko, Pollock and de Kooning, Gorky was one of the most powerful American painters of the twentieth century, and a seminal figure in the formation of Abstract Expressionism. The exhibition includes paintings and drawings from across his career, and a handful of rarely seen sculptures.

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Banksy unmasked!

Elusive street artist to appear on film for the first time… but will he reveal his true identity? He has remained anonymous and elusive while becoming one of the most famous artists in the world. And now graffiti artist Banksy has pulled off a movie project which shows him on film and speaking for the first time - but critics are divided on whether it gives any further clues to the man behind the stencils. The street artist, who has never confirmed his identity, will premiere his film Exit Through The Gift Shop at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday.

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