I went to Late at Tate on Friday to see the Turner Prize show and cruise the beautiful people.
While I was there, I popped into the Turner in Venice show, which really didn’t impress me. It’s not often I leave an exhibition feeling disappointed, but there just didn’t seem to be enough content to justify a special exhibition. Maybe I’m just biased because I’m not a huge Turner fan.
I really liked the Turner Prize exhibition, particularly Grayson Perry‘s ceramics and the Chapman brothers‘ etchings.
Which reminds me, I wrote a review of Damien Hirst, Romance in the Age of Uncertainty at the White Cube and never posted it. I really liked Heaven Above, Hell Below (pills and flies on canvas). Devotion and Rapture (butterfly-wings on household gloss on canvas) were incredibly pretty but I felt guilty for liking them, as if I was encouraging him to kill more insects by doing so. Guy liked Pray, another butterfly-wings/canvas number, but it didn’t do anything for me. I would have gotten a lot more from the exhibition if I’d been able to remember more about how various saints died but overall I was impressed by the modernisation of the lives of the saints. At a time when fewer than 3000 (or whatever the final number of deaths from WTC, Sept 11 was) is deemed more important than the number of lives taken in war in a foreign country, it’s interesting to remember how familiar we can become with other real deaths.
Definitely not a show to see with a hangover, btw, especially if you’re a vegetarian.