Takashi Murakami- Mr. Cloud.
He used to meditate between the orientalism of the west and the fetishizing of western progress found in Japan. With the mushroom cloud deaths head bunny (1) he asked Japan if they could make anything cute, with My Lones[…]

Days of plenty: autumn brings blessed relief from the sluggish summer art season. I spent this weekend trawling the still-sunny streets of London for exciting new stuff. And found it. The greatest thrill is finding a new artist who’s doing some[…]

I have a US Pocket Book edition of Jeeves by P.G.Woodehouse. I am not sure what Jeeves it is, I am pretty sure there wasn’t a Woodehouse book just called Jeeves, but it is certainly Jeeves and Bertie in their inimitable fashion; the latter gett[…]

It was the major cultural fashion immediately before Romanticism: big mistake. Two-and-a-half centuries later, the look of the 18th century pretty remains the default setting for “datedness”. The Classical Revival buildings, the flouncy c[…]

The Essential Human Torch
Is this the most oxymoronic comic title ever? Was there a less essential Marvel superhero title in the so-called Silver Age of the ’60s? I often forget that the Torch even had a solo career. The odd good villain does s[…]

Damien Hirst has a new show at the White Cube, and Adrian Searle has the knives out for it. This is one of those bad reviews which has made me keener than ever to see the show itself. I’m not at all impressed with the last paragraph, in which A[…]

There is an essential dilemma when reviewing popularisations of specialist subjects. If I know enough about X to determine whether this introduction to X covers the ground throughly and accurately, without omission or distortion or misrepresentation,[…]

Freaky Trigger, September 2003: what is there for Brown Wedge readers? There’s Jerry the Nipper on Paul Morley, Al Ewing interviewing up-and-coming comics artist Dom Reardon, and me writing about – among other things – continuity in[…]

There are no links up over on the right hand side of this page. This isn’t some grand we-stand-alone gesture. Apart from anything else, we don’t stand alone. I can’t offer any excuses except to say that I haven’t done anything[…]

Yoko Ono-Cut Piece
Yoko Ono doing the cut piece (she sat on stage, people cut her robes off) in 1961 was scary shit, this was before the second wave really begun, and the fears of violence against women were not discussed very loudly.
That’s […]