Digby Warde-Aldam

At the end of last week, I caught a budget flight to Milan to see a woman. As soon as I arrived I was bundled into a Fiat Panda and sped southwards for Bologna’s annual art weekend, its events ranging from the reverential to the ridiculous. In the latter camp was MAMbo’s John Giorno retrospective,

I met the Tate’s outgoing director Maria Balshaw only once, back when she was in Manchester running both the Whitworth gallery and the city’s municipal art museum. She was given to management-speak and annoying soundbites – she more than once described herself as ‘feisty ’ – but she’d done a superlative job. She was charismatic

Two years ago I was flown to Reykjavik to interview the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson. It was a weird old trip, booked in at 48 hours’ notice, but Ragnar was consistently charming and generous. Indeed, the only slightly touchy moment came when I asked him about his 2012 video installation The Visitors, a berserk

Everyone loves a private view, and I am no exception. I don’t know how many hours I must have spent trudging around central London’s art galleries in search of warm white wine – my social life doesn’t extend much beyond the confines of that circuit to be honest. Lately, however, I’ve been to some dreadful

Taking place every October in Regent’s Park, the Frieze fair is probably the biggest event in London’s art calendar. It is also, as a spectacle, by far the least enjoyable. With works crammed into cubicle-sized booths, and punters battling a crossfire of air kisses and the palpable stress ricocheting around the flimsy partitions, I struggle

So, the Turner Prize: where do we start? It’s Britain’s most prestigious art award, one that used to mean something and now attracts little more than indifference. Taking place every year, it grants £25,000 to a winner chosen from four shortlisted artists, all of whom are obliged to display work together either at Tate Britain,

August is always a crap month for exhibitions in London. The collectors are elsewhere, the dealers are presumably hot on their heels, and the galleries are filled with makeweight group shows staged to hold the fort until the end of the holidays. This year, however, even events of that kind are thin on the ground:

Last month, I got the train down to Margate to interview the Egyptian-Armenian artist Anna Boghiguian (b. 1946), whose exhibition The Sunken Boat: A glimpse into past histories was about to open at the Turner Contemporary. Long story short, the conversation did not go well: Anna reacted to my questions with some irritation, swatting them

If you’ve been reading the more excitable pages of the arts press lately, you might be aware that the London gallery scene is having one of its periodic ‘moments’. A fair few spaces, mostly concentrated around Fitzrovia, have sprouted up since the pandemic, notable for their bacchanalian openings and tantalisingly gnomic Instagram posts. Their online

A little under a year ago, it emerged that builders working on the redevelopment of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing had discovered an unusual time capsule embedded in a pillar they had been instructed to knock down. It contained a letter signed by Sir John Sainsbury, who, along with his brothers, had thrown the museum

Not many artists engage in the maintenance of a private militia, and it seems fair to assume that those who do may be bound to polarise. The Scottish poet, sculptor, ‘avant-gardener’ and would-be revolutionary Ian Hamilton Finlay was just such a figure: and boy, did he polarise. To his fans, he is a cult figure

Tate Modern’s latest exhibition is a bizarre proposition on so many levels. Its subject, the Australian designer, performer, provocateur and club scenester Leigh Bowery, was by all accounts inescapable in London for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. Standing at well over 6ft and weighing 17st, he would have been a conspicuous presence on

You have to hand it to the curators of this excellent survey of Francis Bacon’s portraits. Not only have they alighted at an obvious but under-explored vantage point from which to reconsider this most mythologised of postwar painters, securing some serious loans to make their point, they have also dared to open their show with

You could be forgiven for assuming that the citizens of Paris weren’t exactly bursting with joy at the prospect of this summer’s Olympic Games. They’re annoyed at everything: road closures, public transport price hikes and – would you believe it? – the prospect of their country being taken over by extremist cranks before the month

The other day, I went to see a nouveau riot-girl band called Claire Dance play in a disused factory in Bagnolet on the edge of Paris. They were great: the kind of sonic kick in the nuts I’d been waiting more than a decade for an all-female band to deliver. I half-wondered whether it was

The time that elapsed between the fall of the Paris Commune and the opening of the first proper impressionist exhibition amounted to less than three years. Over the course of that period, the city had witnessed the collapse of the Second Empire, suffered a siege at the hands of the Prussian army and seen vicious

Should you visit Malta this spring, you may notice something decidedly weird is afoot. Across the public squares of its capital, Valletta, performance artists are blocking busy thoroughfares and causing havoc on packed café terraces. The Hospitaller and British military forts that dominate the capital’s famous harbour, meanwhile, are full of dysfunctional installation work, while

Within the first ten minutes of last night’s televised Turner Prize ceremony, someone had twice declared that the award was a ‘concept’. I must say, this was news to me: I’d always believed it was an award for contemporary art that existed to create a buzz around young artists who otherwise couldn’t get arrested. More

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time Guggenheim Bilbao, until 1 November Jeff Koons: Retrospective Guggenheim Bilbao, until 27 September Manhattan in the late 1970s early 1980s was, by all accounts, a pretty scary place. It was caked in graffiti, lawless, and in certain areas, almost emptied by the so-called ‘white flight’ to the suburbs. It was,

I once went out with a girl who jabbed me in the ribs every time I mouthed the phrase ‘conceptual art’. It hurt, but I got her point. The C-word, you see, is a tricky one. All too often, it conjures up terrifying images of ‘explanatory’ texts that take 5,000 words to communicate precisely zilch.