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Title: Blimey!: From Bohemia to Britpop : The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst by Matthew Collings, Matthew Collins ISBN: 1-901785-00-9 Publisher: 21 Publishing Ltd Pub. Date: 01 January, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Corr!
Comment: Matthew Collings is extremely aware of the zeitgeist. His criticisms can be so accurate that it hurts. To get a broad overview on the phenomena of Brit Art I really can't reccommend it enough.
Rating: 3
Summary: Lightweight but fun
Comment: The chattiness is fine. I haven't seen Collings on television but I can imagine how he'd be entertaining there. I wondered about his motives a few times when Collings' own paintings showed up deep in the background of photos -- obviously he's so deep in this world that he may have some agendas. But the overall impression is certainly friendly and the few artists he dismisses are big enough to take it. It's a fun book you can read in a couple of hours. The only problem then is remembering any of what's been said.
Rating: 3
Summary: EXCELLENT VISUALLY, INCREDIBLY SELF-STROKING OTHERWISE.
Comment: 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
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Title: Art Crazy Nation: The Post-Blimey London Artworld by Matthew Collings ISBN: 1901785084 Publisher: 21 Publishing Ltd Pub. Date: 01 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: This Is Modern Art by Matthew Collings ISBN: 0823053628 Publisher: Watson-Guptill Pubns Pub. Date: 15 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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