Sunday, February 17, 2013

The exhibition is all doomy and deathly and obscure. It's not for normal people. It's for the artworld. ...Usually I flit amongst the artists who do the more jokey and ironic type of exhibition... But this one doesn't beat around the bush with japes and cleverness and banality, like Jeff Koons, but just goes straight for death and the body and sickness and millennial fears. Probably to normal people the smirky art and the death art are all the same old onions, and, if so, I kind of know what they mean. But anyway King Death is Joseph Beuys and Queen Death is Louise Bourgeois. King Smirky is Jeff Koons and Prince Smirky is Damien Hirst. So this is definitely a Beuys and Bourgeois type show. Long faces all round. -Matthew Collings from Art of the Moment (Modern Painters, Autumn, 1995) From a review of the Rites of Passage exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London

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