1 min
What Makes an Artist 'Great'? The Gallery Companion
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- Visual Arts
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thegallerycompanion.com
Shortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. Subscribe to receive exclusive weekly content at www.thegallerycompanion.com
In this week's episode I discuss the Yoko Ono exhibition showing at Tate Modern in London at the moment. It is a huge show spanning a prolific creative life over more than fifty years, and frankly any contemporary artist that has a retrospective of this size in one of London’s biggest public art galleries is surely worthy of serious consideration.
Ono is a much maligned and misunderstood figure in the popular culture of the past half century because of her marriage to the musician John Lennon. She’s the incarnation of the idea of female manipulation: a siren who lured Lennon away from the lads and broke up his band The Beatles. All nonsense of course, but because of this narrative she has been the target of possibly the worst, most vitriolic criticism that any female artist has ever received. The misogyny and racism directed at her over the years has been extreme; it’s the kind of abuse that makes me rage against the machine and the oppressive structures of our capitalist, patriarchal system.
So I was already primed to embrace her career’s work and come away thinking how underrated Ono has been. And I really tried. But the speed at which I walked through the exhibition spoke volumes. It's not that there was nothing of interest, but her really good works are few and far between. And it made me ask once again a question that I don’t have an easy answer to, which is what makes an artist ‘great’?
If you’d like to access the full podcast you can subscribe to it on my Substack publication at thegallerycompanion.com. A subscription gets you a podcast and email from me every Sunday and access to a lovely community of artists and art lovers from around the world.
The Gallery Companion is hosted by writer and historian Dr Victoria Powell. It's a thought-provoking dive into the interesting questions and messy stuff about our lives that art explores and represents.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thegallerycompanion.com
Shortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. Subscribe to receive exclusive weekly content at www.thegallerycompanion.com
In this week's episode I discuss the Yoko Ono exhibition showing at Tate Modern in London at the moment. It is a huge show spanning a prolific creative life over more than fifty years, and frankly any contemporary artist that has a retrospective of this size in one of London’s biggest public art galleries is surely worthy of serious consideration.
Ono is a much maligned and misunderstood figure in the popular culture of the past half century because of her marriage to the musician John Lennon. She’s the incarnation of the idea of female manipulation: a siren who lured Lennon away from the lads and broke up his band The Beatles. All nonsense of course, but because of this narrative she has been the target of possibly the worst, most vitriolic criticism that any female artist has ever received. The misogyny and racism directed at her over the years has been extreme; it’s the kind of abuse that makes me rage against the machine and the oppressive structures of our capitalist, patriarchal system.
So I was already primed to embrace her career’s work and come away thinking how underrated Ono has been. And I really tried. But the speed at which I walked through the exhibition spoke volumes. It's not that there was nothing of interest, but her really good works are few and far between. And it made me ask once again a question that I don’t have an easy answer to, which is what makes an artist ‘great’?
If you’d like to access the full podcast you can subscribe to it on my Substack publication at thegallerycompanion.com. A subscription gets you a podcast and email from me every Sunday and access to a lovely community of artists and art lovers from around the world.
The Gallery Companion is hosted by writer and historian Dr Victoria Powell. It's a thought-provoking dive into the interesting questions and messy stuff about our lives that art explores and represents.
1 min