meta reviews

Anish Kapoor

Royal Academy
until 11th Dec

Telegraph

"SOMETHING and nothing, form and formlessness, concave and convex, hard and soft, rough and smooth, inside and outside, slow and fast, presence and absence, colour and non-colour, reflection and absorption, surface and depth, clean and dirty, big and small, movement and stasis, austerity and excess, illusion and reality, creation and destruction: Anish Kapoor's joyful mid-career retrospective at the Royal Academy is a like an inventory of the possibilities of sculpture." "So far, you could say that for all his innovation, Kapoor is at least working with the materials and techniques of traditional sculpture. But in two other works in the show, he moves decisively into the realms of performance art. Not since the days when J M W Turner arrived at the Royal Academy on varnishing days to work in public with brush and palette knife on pictures he had submitted as mere dabs of colour, has Burlington House seen anything what remotely like what will go on in those galleries this autumn."

Independent

"The silliest work in the Anish Kapoor exhibition is a kind of shooting range. A cannon is aimed through one of the Royal Academy's ornate doorways. (The public are safely held back.) Every 20 minutes, an operator loads it with a bucketful of deep red gunk. It fires. The gunk hits the wall through the doorway, dribbles down, piling up at the bottom, with much spatter. This will accumulate over the next three months." "My favourite illusions – none here, I'm sorry to say – are the ones where an oblong is cut into a wall, and the inside space is painted so dark that it recedes into unfathomable depths. But then, seen another way, the depths come smartly up to the surface, and what you see is simply an oblong, painted flat onto the wall. Delightful!"

Time Out

"It's easy to be wowed by Anish Kapoor. Seductive shapes, shiny surfaces, bright colours and mysterious voids all add up to crowd-pleasing, sometimes tastefully inclusive art experiences. Add to that list his recent departures into theme-park thrills and public mega-sculpture and you have the identikit of everyone's favourite contemporary artist. Except Kapoor has tackled this latest show - and any such criticisms of aesthetic flatlining - head-on, including more new work than tried-and-tested old favourites, trying out big ideas fearlessly." "How has he ruined the RA abstractly, you may ask? Well, he's made it nigh on impossible for future artist-occupants to follow this installation with anything approaching its ambition, breadth or power. There's more to the show-stopping gun and train pieces than mere grandstanding, however, as the burgundy blubber in both darkly echoes the blood lining our Great British Empire's corridors of power and its slaveship hulls."

The Scotsman

"Anish Kapoor is not a bad artist by any means, but either he has been carried beyond self-criticism by the momentum of his own success, or else this exhibition is a huge lavatorial joke, a vast Naughty Fido, at the expense of the Academy and the public. The fact that it has been put on apparently without question and that members of the public pay to stand and solemnly contemplate a pile of fossilised turds indicates how far our critical standards have been eroded by the relentless promotion of bad art."

Evening Standard

"Both cannon and train have been exhibited before — in European galleries — for Kapoor can tinker with his jolly japes to fit with any circumstance. The one work that appears to be original and so far exclusive to the Academy is Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked — an accumulation of cement excreted by a computer-assisted piping machine that at best suggests the Sorcerer's Apprentice let loose in the kitchen of a pastry-cook but at worst vividly reminds us of the floor of the public lavatory in Baskale, the highest town in eastern Turkey, after months of extreme water shortage. That these repellent absurdities are mounted on timber pallets no more then a few inches apart, crowding the floor in ankle-scraping proximity, a menace to the infirm and elderly, should be of interest to officials concerned with health and safety."

The Times

"How else to understand the appearance here of an immensely phallic cannon, firing wads of red wax through an adjacent doorway onto the wall ahead? If the RA had a porn alarm, this thing would set it off. The ejaculating brute even has testicular-shaped canisters of compressed oxygen dangling from its loading end. The noise when it explodes is terrifying. Sculpturally, I cannot imagine a more crudely masculine spectacle than this brutal splashing of wads of sperm across the pristine gallery surfaces. The crowds will love it. It’s a phenomenal piece. We are in the presence of a very effective gallery operator."

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Turner Prize 09

Tate Britain
until 3rd Jan

Evening Standard

"This is simply the best Turner Prize in living memory. The diverse exhibition segues from the sensual abstractions of 34-year-old Scottish artist Lucy Skaer to the deluxe wallpaper landscapes of Glaswegian veteran Richard Wright, to the surrealist cabaret of Italian-born Londoner Enrico David, and finally, the haunting symbolism of materials in the work of the young odds-on favourite Roger Hiorns." "Hiorns is the first artist nominated for a project commissioned by London’s veteran independent funding-body Artangel, and it will be difficult for the judges not to give him the prize."

Guardian

"Much is always expected of the Turner prize show, and critics and the public alike give more weight to the exhibition itself than to the endeavours that have led the artists there in the first place. We linger over every element, looking for portents; every work and every artist gets a public autopsy. The show is a meat-grinder. How come it looks so ordered, so clean, so coherent?" "Hiorns's transformations have about them an end-of-the-world feeling. His show might be an anticlimax after Seizure, but, like much of his art, it is also at heart decorative. There is nothing wrong with this. There is ornament in Wright's work, too. In fact, there is a lot of labyrinthine creative thinking and highly crafted play in this year's show, which evidences no great change in artistic practice. It is business as usual." "Skaer's work feels to me a bit academic and formal, as if she is trapped inside the loops and feedback of her own thinking. David could have capitalised more on the drama: I wanted him to go further, though I like his installation a good deal more than many of his previous works. The humour and solipsism palls a bit. But Wright's quiet drawings work their way under your skin. Much more than murals or pictures on a wall, they charge the spaces they inhabit and make you see them differently. And seeing differently is one thing that art, and artists, are meant to do. Wright, then, to win."

Bloomberg

"Arts commentators may feel disoriented. Without the shock factor to discuss, what can you say about this year’s event?" "Hiorns is doing something similar to what Renaissance alchemists attempted to do. He’s interested in changing everyday objects into a completely different form. Not base metal into gold, but “planes into dust, brains into fudge.” His most spectacular work to date, “Seizure 2008,” in which an entire flat in South London was coated with blue-green crystals, is not on view. Hiorns is a strong contender for the prize." "Another artist with a good chance of winning, I suspect, is Richard Wright, who doesn’t paint on canvases but on the walls of buildings. The largest of his two pieces in the show -- audaciously titled “no title” rather than the more fashionable “untitled” -- looks at first glance like elaborate wallpaper. Look again, however, and it starts to fascinate. For a start, it’s not precisely a painting but a collage made of tiny fragments of gold leaf -- an intricate medium requiring great skill. It’s also impossible to tell exactly what it represents."

Financial Times

"The last place to see lively contemporary art right now is Tate Britain. The days when the grandees and enfants terribles of British art competed for the Turner Prize are long over." "Wright is a conceptualist, musing on the meanings, uses, markets, values for painting today. From the slim pickings here, I would be torn between giving the prize to him or to Hiorns for "Seizure". Both would be deliberately transient works with which to win the Turner; it is a sad reflection of the prize's now fleeting significance that they would thus be appropriate ones."

Times

"The single most irritating thing about the momentously irritating Turner prize is its inconsistency. From one year to the next, you simply cannot know if the latest version will be a turkey or a canary. Last year’s effort was so dreary, I hoped it would be the last. Put the old bird out of its misery, we cried in unison. Nobody could have imagined that, in 2009, the damn thing would go back to singing beautifully." "This mood that Skaer, Wright and Hiorns share — reticent, yet weighty — is so consistent that I am tempted to announce the arrival of a new movement: emotional minimalism, or emo art. The discovery of this tendency is what I will remember best about this fine Turner prize, which deserves to be won by the skilled optical surgery of Lucy Skaer."

Independent

"Actually, the politeness of this year’s prize is not a middle-aged illusion. The four shortlistees – alphabetically, Enrico David, Roger Hiorns, Lucy Skaer and Richard Wright – really are well behaved, their work having nothing to do with the schlock served up in Tate Britain from 1995 to 2005. That forgotten organ, the hand, features heavily in the submissions, and there is even an occasional appearance from the heart. The Turner has absolutely nothing to tell us about the kind of art being made today, but it does alert us, year by year, to the kind of choices made by art juries. Just as, in this chilly day of recession and terrorism, toad-in-the-hole has staged a comeback on restaurant menus, so solemnity and skill seem to have returned to the Turner Prize for the first time since Rachel Whiteread won it nearly 20 years go." "Skaer was one of the highlights of this art year for me, as she is of the 2009 Turner Prize show. So take your fivers to the bookies, and put them on someone else."

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Seizure

Harper Road
until 3rd Jan

Guardian

"Unexpectedly, it is at once clean and dirty. The crystals have a chemical, geometric purity, yet the overall effect is one of a space befouled. You wouldn't want to take a bath here: the bath is a mussel-bed of crystals, with a pool of coppery blue liquid, like a spill of fountain pen ink, evaporating in the bottom. These crystalline accretions are both fascinating and repellent; all this inorganic growth is alien and alienating, an invasion indifferent to life but also somehow like it."

Creative Review

"Most powerful of all is the installation's setting however - within this rejected and rundown late-modernist development (which is scheduled for demolition after the exhibition), Hiorns has created something unexpected and magical."

Time Out

"Last year, Hiorns took a flat in a derelict block and filled it with copper-sulphate solution until the walls grew a crust of blue crystals. He received the plaudits (and a nomination for the Turner Prize) and Artangel duly re-opened its doors. The spectacle of an interior covered in twinkling azure formations will leave you wearing blue-tinted spectacles for a day or two but will you understand what he’s done? The locals didn’t, as one boy yelped: ‘How much did they pay for all this? Is each crystal worth loads of money?’ He needed to know that ‘Seizure’ is about reclamation and regeneration, not bling or aspiration. So I told him."

Evening Standard

"At first, the brutalist courtyard with boarded-up buildings doesn't look too promising. But as you get nearer, you spot a group of fashionable young things exchanging their shoes for wellington boots and gloves." "You don't quite know what to expect as you cross the threshold of the dilapidated flat. But turn right and the blue hits you like a physical shock."

Sunday Times

"Your prime sensation as a visitor is that of the explorer. It’s like venturing into Tutankhamun’s tomb, or being the first into those time-capsule homes or forgotten sweet shops in boarded-up buildings. In all of those, though, there is evidence of human life, former activity. Here, there is something else. As Hiorns points out, even the artist disappears. The substance takes over and follows its own logic. It makes itself. That is the power of Seizure. We are in the presence of something both beautiful and incredibly powerful, a chemical and physical force. It doesn’t need us. It doesn’t know it’s there, or that we are in it, and what drives its formation is a power that will outlast us all. Hiorns reminds us of our own immense fragility."

The National

"Hiorns’s installation leaves you awestruck. What you see on the inside has a profound effect on what you see on the outside. The juxtaposition of menacing beauty and spent life is so unutterably strange that it works brilliantly. Seizure is paving the way for artists to utilise the capital’s forgotten spaces and to give value back to the worthless. His work proves that the spirit of creativity can flourish even in the most precarious of financial times."

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John Baldessari

Tate Modern
until 10th Jan

The Guardian

" A lot of works in this retrospective of one of the most influential artists of our time could easily be accompanied by recorded titters – just to break the mood of Tate severity and remind people they can laugh." "After burning all his conventional works, he set out to dispense with a coherent style or look, and to make art in which the idea alone matters. On his paintings appear texts written by a signwriter – including a quotation from critic Clement Greenberg saying art is about aesthetic impact, not ideas. Baldessari, of course, believed the exact opposite."

Time Out

"This chronological survey highlights Baldessari's influence not only on the general development of conceptual art but also on later generations of artists. For 'A Painting That Has Its Own Documentation' (1966), Baldessari inscribes the exhibition details of the work onto canvas, adding information for each subsequent show. Since 2000 Elizabeth Price has similarly engraved the exhibition provenance details onto her silver-plated 'Trophy'."

Evening Standard

"Like all good humour, there is much serious thought behind Baldessari’s work. He was among the first artists to combine photographs and words, and among the first to get his pictures painted by someone else. His subject is how we read images. It’s not all easily digestible, but it’s helped by exemplary, clearly written gallery wall texts. If you always wanted to know what conceptual art was but were too scared to ask, this is the show to see."

Wallpaper

"What one’s left with after the 14 rooms isn’t just a sense of how widespread Baldessari’s influence has been on so many of the best conceptual artists today but equally that so much contemporary conceptual art doesn’t come close to achieving the same level of wit, intrigue, imagination and appeal."

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Ed Ruscha

Hayward Gallery
until 10th Jan

Times

"But do you actually need to see these paintings? Part of their point is that they can themselves be reproduced. Once you have appreciated the stark clarity of the design, smiled at the visual gags (in “It’s Only Vanishing Cream”, for instance, the letters seem to fade even as you look), felt that trite uplift of spirit in front of the painting of the Paramount film mountain, why stay? The most rewarding part of this show will be the time that you spend thinking afterwards. Ruscha unsettles the world with his deadpan wit."

Time Out

"For the past five decades, Ruscha has worked in the space between words and images, exploring how words look and how we 'read' images. Hollywood mythology, The American Dream, religion, the sublime, cerebral sunset standoffs and cocktail hour hangovers are there to be unpicked in his cognitive and perceptual games. His is a doggedly hands-off art; indeed that's partly where the humour lies. Yet for a deadpan conceptualist, Ruscha has always been a great graphic designer (thanks in part to his early training as a commercial artist) and this survey blasts through combinations of colour, font and imagery that exhilarate even when the results tend towards the obscure."

Building Design

"Ruscha’s work is deeply rooted in his adopted home town of Los Angeles. Hayward director Ralph Rugoff wished to reinforce this in the exhibition’s design by “making the Hayward feel like California”." "It is an unexpected pleasure to see the Hayward laid bare in a spectacularly appropriate design decision. Breaking the restraints of the room format overcomes a simple chronological reading of the work, allowing snapshot comparisons between periods."

GQ

"But it's not all about tricks with words (Rugoff points out that 30 of the 78 works on view contain none) and riffs on Americana. Ruscha's recent monumental diptych 'Azteca/Azteca in Decline' (2007) is a marked visual departure. Inspired by a crumbling, painted concrete wall Ruscha encountered in Mexico City, the work is divided into two segments, each stretching over eight meteres in length. The first emulates the wall's original design—a vibrant fan of red, blue and green—the second imagines its time-lapsed collapse."

Daily Beast

"If language is what makes us human, then any exploration of its vulnerabilities is also an investigation of our own. The cityscapes and Silhouette paintings (with their blanks spaces for thoughts) might foreshadow that, but Ruscha’s slogans can also make you flinch. Witness Boss and Radio. The fonts are as plumply delicate as balloons or blisters, with one letter apiece being pinched by metal pegs, as if it is something alive that is being hurt. Upstairs at the Hayward, Words without Thoughts, is almost a concrete poem. The line itself is taken from Hamlet: “Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” Arranged in a circle, the font gets smaller and smaller until the letters disappear. The afterlife of words is Ruscha’s great obsession. As he has said, “At one time, I used to think that art was strictly visual, and you’re not supposed to go and dig deeper into messages. But now I believe it all has to do with tantalizing your memory.“"

Independent

"What connects these juxtapositions? Irony, surrealism, specialist history, a private memory? Who knows? And Ruscha has other tricks of obscurity. His phrases are plucked from some unimaginable context, like the charming faster than a speeding beanstalk. Figures are shown in such blurred silhouette that they almost retreat into invisibility (see the magnificent coyote in Howl), or likewise in a dazzling glare. Cartoon caption boxes appear, but with no words in them. They all go into the mix."

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Bunker

Barbican Curve
until 10th Jan

Guardian

"Time travel also seems to be on Robert Kusmirowski's mind. The Polish artist, whose talent for fakery goes back to a childhood spent forging bus passes, assembles what look like long-lost historic environments. His latest project, a simulacrum of a second world war bunker within the Barbican's Curve gallery, is grimly resplendent. Corroded metal doors mark the entrance to dank rooms strewn with old documents and 1940s food packets, all of it surrounded by a stretch of functioning rail track. But Kusmirowski's interests run to more than superbly produced stage sets. His most famous work recreated the kind of rail carriage that transported victims to concentration camps, pointedly installed within a former Jewish girls' school during the 2006 Berlin Biennial. Similarly, this meticulously realised bunker is a meditation on the history of the Barbican itself, which was built in brutalist concrete on a site flattened by air raids."

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Pop Life

Tate Modern
until 17th Jan

Independent

"This is a deeply superficial show, full of glitz and gloss, blingy as Moscow, neon-besmattered as the buildings of central Tokyo, noisy as a hypermarket. Everywhere you go there's racket of one kind or another – rap in the Keith Haring room, Japanese pop in Murakami's gallery – and a sense of crowd and bustle." "And after Warhol? This show exists to document what happened to some artists – not all, thank goodness – after his death. How artists learnt from him to promote themselves as brands; to manipulate the media; to be ever busier at the extremely serious business of making huge amounts of money."

Times

"There are several problems with this exhibition, one of which is its definition of success. Tate Modern seems to be promoting the measurement of art-world success by the prices achieved and gossip column inches secured by its superstars, by their ability to work the media machine and to play to audiences beyond the confines of the art world. If this really is art-world success, then Koons has it by the cartload. He has succeeded, possibly beyond his wildest dreams. I cannot help wondering whether Koons, when setting out to be an artist in his New York garret back in the 1980s, ever thought he would get away with an entire room at Tate Modern filled with billboard-sized colour photographs of himself, buffed, depilated and toned, engaged in hardcore, nothing-hidden sex with his porn-star wife." "But there is also a danger of being terminally humourless. Wit and subversive life are evident in abundance in many of the works gathered here, even if one worries for their future in the harsher marketplace of posterity. The Haring shop is great fun, and the Koons a source of guaranteed amusement. But the show should come with a warning to young aspiring artists: you do not have to insinuate yourself into the gossip columns, make big bucks, remove all your clothes and inhibitions, make love in front of a video camera, or dress up as a brightly coloured felt flower (as Murakami did) in order to succeed."

Time Out

"Discount the nasty stuff, of which Rob Pruitt's shallow attempt to rip up the race card is the most heinous example, and you'll find an entertaining and timely show that both provokes and pokes a hole in an already deflated bubble. Yet, just what is it that makes me feel so empty, so cheated? Unfortunately, that's where we're at - there's no beauty, transcendence or emotion, simply a lack thereof. In its place: a stance, a posture. It's all a put-on, about getting over, showing off. The contemporary art world's going to hell in a handcart, being driven by a cute Kanye West bear and pulled by Maurizio Cattelan's dead horse. But what a way to go."

Telegraph

"Other artists in Pop Life failed to realise the distinction Warhol drew between his public persona of amoral celebrity artist, and the deeply private man who worked hard and attended daily mass. When the British artist Cosy Fanny Tutti and the American Andrea Fraser actually engage in sexual acts for money and then show photographs and films of their actions as art, they justify it with the argument that both art and sex are commodities to be bought and sold, and the artist and the prostitute both provide a service for cash. But art is the formalised expression of experience, not experience itself." "For what Hirst did in that remarkable piece was to tear the veneer of decorum that, even after Warhol, somehow surrounded the making and selling of art. The artist and his work somehow fused in to one entity that perfectly embodied the decadent, greedy, and profoundly amoral world where art meets money."

WSJ

"Though the police have no business acting as art critics, they have made the ultimate critical judgment and shut down one of the four (and the least offensive) of the rooms displaying pornography -- the gallery containing nothing but Richard Prince's 1983 "Spiritual America," his re-photograph of a creepy photograph of the pre-pubescent Brooke Shields, nude and wearing a ton of too grown-up make-up." "Rubbish though most of this is, it's high culture compared to the exhibition's final room, which shows the garish, candy-colored, cutesy debris of the frontal assault on taste by the Japanese Takashi Murasaki, whose own New York factory, a successor to Warhol's factory, churns out this stuff at stiff prices." "It's salutary to remember that there are other strains of Pop Art -- think Allen Jones, Roy Lichtenstein, Patrick Caulfield, the Oldenburgs, Peter Blake. Not all pop artists agreed with Warhol that business was "the best art." Some commentators have made (what I think is) the perverse mistake of assuming that the sympathy of the show's curators is with Warhol: if so, the Tate's curators have undermined their own case. This show isn't a pat on the back for those who have sold out their art. As the excellent catalog points out, the transgressions of this kind of Pop Art (I'd label it Capitalist Realism) are counterfeiting, exploitation and prostitution -- and this show has plenty of examples of all three."

Guardian

"This overcrowded, manic exhibition is full of things to snigger and ogle at, to boggle the mind and to make one wish for saner days, old-style values and a bit of decorum. They're long past, and a lot of the art here is 20 or 30 years old, too. Warhol presides over Pop Life; in fact, there's far too much Warholabilia in an exhibition already stuffed to the gills. We know him too well now, even if he is key to understanding what happened to pop in the 1980s and 90s – long after it had had its historical moment in the late 1950s." "After all this, the young YBAs looks quaint. Gavin Turk's famous Blue Plaque (the artist's graduation piece from the Royal College of Art, which just tells us that Gavin Turk, sculptor, worked here), and his later self-portrait mannequin as Sid Vicious, can only have local appeal."

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Maharaja

V&A
until 17th Jan

Guardian

"It was the Rolls that ruined it for me. In the final gallery of this immense and often beautiful show stands a 1927 Rolls-Royce Phantom III commissioned by Maharana Bhupal Singh of Mewar. Nearby are photographs by Man Ray and jewellery by Cartier. Brittle 1920s pop music is piped in. What links all these objects is that Indian princely patronage supported them. But so what? They tell us nothing about India's cultural history." "On the way out, I found myself looking at the museum's great permanent collection of Indian art and wishing I had been given some intellectual tools to understand it, instead of wasting my time gawping at a classic car."

Independent

"Remarkable as all this is, it belongs more to the realms of social history than it does to art. I don’t mean to dismiss indigenous artistic traditions, but the mere use of precious materials and intricate techniques are not in themselves enough to raise an object to the realms of art. Even the miniatures here are nothing like as important as those from Jaipur shown at the British Museum last year, and in any case they are displayed not for their aesthetic merit but to illustrate the lives and pastimes of the maharajas. Then too, the design of Indian jewels, like Indian costume, hardly changes at all from 1750 -1914. I have little interest in gems or fabrics for their own sake- it’s what the artist or designer does with his raw materials that I want so see. And so, I only really began to have fun in this show in the last gallery which is devoted to the playboy Maharajas of the 1920s and 30 and their glamorous, decadent Maharanis. With tons of money and nothing whatsoever to do they started to spend as much time in Europe as they did at home. These are the Eton educated, drug taking, polo playing friends of Noel Coward and Cole Porter who had their jewels set by Cartier and Van Cleef, their clothes designed by Vionnet, and their furniture supplied by Jacques- Emile Ruhlmann."

Times

"This exhibition shows with great style how Indian rulers adapted to the shifting political alliances of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries up to independence, and how their patronage changed to fit with the prevailing powers of the day." "This is a very classy exhibition, displaying the V&A’s ability at its best, with the help of some rare loans, to tell the story of a complex and important political and cultural evolution through the objects it engendered. Prepare to be dazzled."

Londonist

"This is a generally illuminative and interesting romp through a region caught on the cusp of history -- a subcontinent temporarily stripped of the heft and bloodshed it carried under the Mughals and would again do so once the British were thrown off and Partition had done its worst. Archive film footage shows a fascinating insight into what was often a life of indolence for the Maharas, all pomp and circumstance yet denuded of real power and forced to kowtow to the Anglo-Saxon overseers: a pair of photographs show the Maharaja Saya jirao Gaekwad III of Bardoa in both traditional Indian dress and, in contrast, the buttoned-up English period clothing he wore on a trip to Parliament. In exploring India's frogmarch toward what Europeans considered modernity, this show is a success."

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Turner and the Masters

Tate Britain
until 31st Jan

Guardian

"Tate Britain's Turner and the Masters exhibition is a corrective to the idea that the artist was a protean genius. Here we have the worst of him as well as the best, the boring and striving, the overblown and journeyman bits as well as the sublime. He could never really paint figures convincingly, and this exhibition is full of them. I'd rather throw myself overboard than ship out with some of Turner's seamen. He tried his hand at jolly genre scenes – a dentist confronting his son about his debts, a blacksmith arguing with a client about his prices – as well as at conversation pieces. He even painted Raphael, arranging pictures in the loggia of the Vatican, in a fantastical scene in which the painter is dwarfed by the view of St Peter's Square beyond." "There are many Turners and many ways to think about him – Turner and light, Turner and Romanticism, Turner and the Industrial Revolution. Turner and the Masters is a tough, brilliant exhibition, and grounds Turner in his time, with all the anxieties and problems being a British painter in the early 19th century entailed. Turner was as worldly as he was sublime."

Telegraph

"Seeing Turner’s canvases side by side with those of Claude, Poussin, Titian or Teniers I began to think that he is like a virtuoso musician playing scores written by long dead composers. In each case he is faithful to the structure of the original but as he works, he interprets and improvises until the finished canvas could never be mistaken for anything other than a Turner." "I realise that in order for his pictures to be noticed under the impossible viewing conditions at the Royal Academy he needed to use strong colours and ever more inventive compositions. Even so, there are times in this show when Turner comes across as crass - and no artist defeated him more truly or more comprehensively than Watteau."

Time Out

"In pure landscape terms, Turner met his match in Claude Lorrain, whose work apparently reduced the cocky cockney to tears. His soft-focus version of Claude comes off all corny and romantic, while his narratives couldn't compete with Rembrandt's or Watteau's. Happily, Turner doesn't stay chocolate-boxy for too long - the final room of Claude slugging it out with Turner is bliss - and the show doesn't pop the bubble of his genius, but merely gives the assumption of his greatness a good, testing squeeze. 'Turner and the Masters', then, allows us to come to his appreciation afresh (away from a maestro whose name was taken in vain by the Turner Prize), even if the obvious conclusion is that there's none finer in the depiction of atmosphere and landscape than our own greatest of all time."

Financial Times

"This is a crowd-pleasing show that also has a hard-hitting contemporary agenda. Throughout, a visually splendid array of works by Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt and Watteau balances attempts to reposition Turner as one of us – a self-conscious, competitive artist, haunted by a sense of belatedness, who made pictures about pictures: a postmodern player." " A Tate coup reunites the marine painting “Helvoetsluys”, from Tokyo, with Constable’s “The Opening of Waterloo Bridge” for the first time since they appeared together at the Royal Academy in 1832. In response to Constable’s bigger, more luxuriant work, Turner on varnishing day added a single daub of red lead, fashioned into a buoy, on his grey sea. Its intensity, vivid against the coolness of the rest of the picture, made “Waterloo Bridge” look weak and fussy. “He has been here,” said Constable, “and fired a gun.” In this wonderful show, one hears the firing of many such guns."

Evening Standard

"The galleries in which hang his attempts to be, one after the other, the old masters of the 17th century, should be loud with peals of laughter. Do not, I beg you, believe that everything Turner did was wonderful (though this may well be one of Tate Britain's 39 articles), and do not be glum and solemn in this exhibition — instead, throw back your heads and let loose your merriment. The critics of his day did not shy from teasing Turner and right was often on their side." "To remind us of the Turner we adore, the exhibition gives us his Snow Storm off Harwich, with himself lashed for four hours to the mast; this is wind, water and imminent death, a swirling turbulence in which sea and sky are one, a vortex of the elements in which mature Turner is at his most menacingly sublime, precisely illustrating the business of his exceeding the successes of his mentors. Here the 17th-century Dutch marine painters' tradition of exactitude is subsumed into the freedom of handling we expect from Rembrandt and translated into feeling — “I did not paint it to be understood,” Turner is reported to have said."

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How It Is

Tate Modern
until 5th Apr

Times

"The experience is sombre, discombobulating and perhaps a bit sinister. But it is beautiful too — and not least when, as your eyes slowly adjust, you begin to discern the infinite subtle shades of grey or turn back to face the entrance and see other visitors vacillating nervously on the brink before, stepping into the engulfing shadows, they are transformed into stalking silhouettes." "It was the open space and the simplicity of Eliasson’s installation that appealed to him, Balka says, but he didn’t like the David Copperfield-style spectaculars of the artificial smoke. “I wanted to make sculpture in an honest way,” he says. “What is important is the honest material.” He chose steel that had been allowed to rust. “I built up the structure quite logically” he says, and then laughs. “With a space the size of this you need something to organise yourself and logic will do as well as anything." "“The Turbine Hall often feels like an indoor playground. I was thinking about how to create limits, to bring calm and quiet to the place, to discipline people’s gestures. I also wanted to create something like a photographic black hole,” he adds. “Every day millions of photographs are taken in London. I wanted to create a place, a situation, where people would not be able to take good pictures. Their experience will be more intense.”"

Telegraph

"As a sculpture, Balka’s work impresses. As a theatrical experience it’s a damp squib. But maybe I experienced the piece under the wrong lighting conditions. What was true at 9.30 on a sunny morning may feel very different late on an autumn afternoon, or worse, at night."

Time Out

"Entitled 'How It Is', there's also an anti-art-going message in this black hole, faced as you are with a giant full stop, like Malevich's 'Black Square' only enlarged to billboard size and three dimensions. Disappointingly, the pitch-blackness isn't black enough to really disturb and there are even cracks in the joins of the back walls, ruining the effect entirely. Just as that infernal bridge interrupts the view of 'How It Is', some careless execution mars its actual experience. In the spirit of critical integrity I came back later when the daylight had gone, but this was still not the daunting ne plus ultra of claustrophobic interaction I had dreaded, nor is the fear of nothingess - the horror vacui - anything new in art (op.cit. Malevich, cf. minimalism)"

Independent

"by the time we had stumbled against the rear wall and dumped our backpacks on the floor to make little Blair Witchy videos in the gloom, we realised that we were standing in what looks like a giant shipping container, the interior of its three remaining walls coated with a sort of velour. But Balka's installation should not be judged on the sum of those parts. Indeed, wandering up the ramp and into total darkness is deliciously bewildering. Blink a few times, let the eyes adjust, and the ghostly forms of other visitors hover in the distance. At first, it's tricky to tell whether they're an optical illusion, or perhaps even a memory. By the time you reach the back of the box and turn round, your powers of vision are restored, if only to see those entering behind you – arms outstretched, edging forward, blind silhouettes against the entrance."

Se7en

"I entered the box. Ahead of me I saw nothing. Blackness. A few white shoes shone in the near distance, but faded to ash as their owners stumbled onwards. Behind me was the grey, industrial wall of the Turbine Hall. Walking into the darkness was indescribable. It was like having your eyes closed for you. Like having a soft black cloth draped over your head. Dim figures appeared from time to time, ash grey and disorientated. I had no sense of body, or of time. 
And then I took my earplugs out. The sound in the box immediately brought me out of my reverie. A plastic bag rustled, a coke bottle sloshed. A Home Counties voice said, sharply: “Gerald!!!” The waddling footsteps of a running five year old peppered an echo through the blackness. Two giggling teenagers goofed around next to my right ear. An unseeable hand pushed me gently in the face, and there is a brief, embarrassed apology. A burst of laughter came from near the entrance. An adamant mutter, presumably from Gerald, declared “I don’t get this.” A tube of Smarties rattled."

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