S01E01 I Am A Genius
"I am a Genius" shortlists Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol for the "genius" category. Each of them in his own way changed the definition of what Modern art is, says Collings: "With Picasso it...
This Is Modern Art
S01E05: Hollow Laughter
"Hollow Laughter" is all about Modern art jokes. This should be pretty interesting but it turns out that a lot of the "jokes" are based on text. One artist (Richard Prince) actually built a career out of copying jokes from joke books onto, first, pieces of paper, and then more elaborately onto canvas when the initial venture proved successful. Another (Piero Manzoni) did well financially by putting 30 grams of his own faeces in cans, and labelling and signing them. Sarah Lucas turns up again here with a wax finger on a plinth. Fluxus, Andre Breton, George Maciunas, Guy Debord. Yawn. Sigh. Duchamp reappears, this time showing that "blankness, indifference and contempt" can win out in the end. Sean Landers and Magritte are mentioned. Martin Kippenberger gets about eight pages. Und so weiter. (I don't know what that means. An elderly German man says it in a novel by Willa Cather and it sounds nice.) The chapter ends with four more pages of Richard Prince's so-called jokes.
Overview
This Is Modern Art was a six-part TV series written and presented by the English art critic Matthew Collings. It was broadcast in 1999 on Channel 4.
The series won several awards including a BAFTA. It became popular both because of its sometimes jokey and sometimes thoughtful explanations of the work and attitude of a new wave of artists that had recently been publicized in the British mass media, and because of its author's witty and irreverent, though clearly highly informed, commentary style. Collings went on to create several more TV series and programmes for Channel 4, including Impressionism Revenge of The Nice, Self Portraits The Me Generations and This Is Civilisation.
Episodes
S01E02 Shock! Horror!
"Shock, Horror" opens with Damien Hirst's vitrines of cut-up cows and goes on to an in-depth and welcome discussion of Goya. On to Francis Bacon and back to the Chapman brothers, Picasso's Guernica, Gilbert &...
S01E03 Lovely Lovely
"Lovely, Lovely", examines the idea of beauty: is it still a valid idea in Modern art? Collings goes to town on Matisse, takes a jab at Picasso for parodying one of Matisse's nudes, touches on...
S01E04 Nothing Matters
"Nothing Matters" is devoted largely to Minimalism, starting with Martin Creed's roomful of white balloons, followed by Ad Reinhardt's Black paintings; then sculpture by Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and Robert Morris; all-white paintings...
S01E05 Hollow Laughter
"Hollow Laughter" is all about Modern art jokes. This should be pretty interesting but it turns out that a lot of the "jokes" are based on text. One artist (Richard Prince) actually built a career...
S01E06 The Shock of the Now
"The Shock of the Now" begins with a feeling of hope. But by now the author himself has doubts and can no longer totally reassure us that all is well in the Modern art department....
