Tate Modern exhibits "Surface Art"

"Eddie to the Art curator: “I just want to buy Art, I want to be surrounded with lovely things” - Absolutely fabulous


The work of Nigel Cooke - A large painting of a banana smoking a fag highlighting the best of British Art televised worldwide on the BBC. Sheena Wagstaff's slip of the tongue but I like him: "First of all he is a fantastic painter but secondly these very bizarre scenes are a kind of imbued with this very dark and almost gothic idea behind them and they are incredibility compelling."

Art is subjective?

Art is like religion when people begin to talk about taste, and so said I must launch right into a tirade about BBC Worlds’ long anticipated show called Destination Art. I have been waiting to see who will be featured on the programme, and this week the feature was home, ie: London. I was pleased to see Yinka Shonibare. I find his work biting, amusing and refreshing, sometimes all at the same time. It was also wonderful to hear the artist in his own words, which were very thoughtful and wise. I settled back to enjoy this precious half hour as oddly, art is not actually something that makes television watchable for most, and that is why I say with a heavy heart that Nigel Cooke’s work fell awfully flat being watched through a book that he provided as well as one or two medium shots of his actual pieces in the Tate Modern gallery space. This was particularly alarming because after a shaky first half, Mr. Cooke rallied with what he had to say to young and upcoming artists like myself, how to ‘make it’ in the world of art. But by far the biggest surprise was the curator of the Tate Modern herself. I must assume that not everyone is television savvy, or maybe the Americans do mediaso well that they leave everyone else to shame. I found her statements about the work we were looking at, not particularly strong. It led me to assume that her eye must be indeed sharper and keener than her tongue. No offence, television does stop some people in their perfectly rehearsed tracks when the thought of millions of people weighing your words become apparent. - Adele


Yinka Shonibare's copulating Mannequins - Conventional Dutch fabric of Indonesian patterns exported to Africa make up these headless mannequins dresses in eighteen century attire. (A black woman fucked over by a black man and subsequently sodomised by a white man)

Wagstaff's imperialist guilt: “....it also deals with a post-imperialist topic which is done elegantly, and where the work is seen within the context not just with his generation but the subsequence generations"

The BBC is attempting to get “with the AmPublish Posterican program” by producing programmes that are quick visuals interspersed with sound bits to keep their viewers interested. There are graphics, images morphing and music sampling in keep with the content of what is being shown. “Destination Art” is a series of short interviews with Artists and curators to predominantly publicize themselves.


Transcribed in Italics Tate Modern's chief curator Sheena Wagstaff speaks about the Artists

With this week’s broadcast of “Destination Art,” Yinka Shonibare and Nigel Cooke are interviewed and the Tate Modern’s chief curator Sheena Wagstaff projected clues to the gallery’s requisitions policy and she also reinforced to a worldwide audience what a farce British contemporary Art really is from her politically crafted interjection in order to give relevancy in contemporary Art.


From bad to worse. Why say anything: ".....her work similarly are representative of a very new kind of approach to Art making, drawing itself as an entity as a finished product is something ??? that characterizes a lot of contemporary arts now a days."