ThePlagueYears: Iconic buildings...in London!?

One of the many Internet rabbit holes I have been happily disappearing down during these Covid times is The Guardian's "Art Weekly" newsletter.

I receive it in my email box, but you can also find it on the Web here (although you do have to register, for free, before you can access it.) It's curated by Guardian art critic and author Jonathan Jones, and includes brief blurbs about exhibitions and news Jones thinks are important, and links to the galleries and exhibits featured.

It's rare I don't find something to pique my interest. In this past week's newsletter, Jones linked a virtual tour of an exhibit at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, part of the multi-site National Museums Liverpool organization, featuring finalists and winners of the John Moores Painting Prize, a major art award in Britain.

A couple of things of note. The virtual tour is done better than some I've seen that use Google Street View (this one was made using 3D capture technology from Matterport), but it's still far from perfect. Using the exhibit's Street-View-like 3D effect, navigating the rooms by dragging with the mouse can be a bit balky.

You can also select from thumbnails of each painting shown on a scroll-bar below the main window (see above), and supposedly go automatically to that item. It too is a bit balky, though. I sometimes had to click a painting's thumbnail a few times before it would deign to display it. And then I'd constantly be dragging the display up, down or side to side to get it to display an undistorted view of the painting.

What I'd really like is a virtual tour that lets me "walk" through the gallery rooms in 3D to get an impression of what it would be like to be there, but then click on items I'm passing to display a full-screen high-resolution static image of the piece that I can zoom in and out on.

I don't understand why that's not what's being done in these virtual tours - or if it is, why I can't figure out how to access the static images. It can't be because it costs too much to photograph each work properly in situ. I do it all the time when I'm in galleries or on the street, using a hand-held camera with no additional lighting, and get perfectly adequate results.

The other thing about the Walker exhibit is the quality of the paintings. My overall impression: meh.

They appear to be organized into groups based on style. The first several paintings were what you might loosely call "expressionist," paintings by finalists who want to make vaguely representational art but who have explicitly rejected all the technical achievements of the last 500 years of painting. Perspective? Three-dimensionality? Draftsmanship? Bah! (See sample screen above.)

I did eventually find some paintings that seemed to be made by adults with some training in technique and were carefully crafted. But there weren't many I felt much of a connection with - although that may have more to do with the shortcomings of the virtual exhibit than the paintings themselves. Here's one I did like.

Mother by Christopher Hanson (2018)

Yes, of course, it's a very old style of painting, scarcely "modern" at all. But it has depth and emotion, and it was painted with skill and artistry, something I couldn't say about a lot of the entries.

The other item that drew me was an exhibit by the Greek-American artist Lucas Samaras. I'd never heard of him, but he's been around since the year dot - well, the year 1936 anyway. Eighty-five seems an advanced age at which to be fooling around with digital photography. But that's what he's doing in the images in this exhibit at the Pace Gallery.

It's called Gestures and Constructions and it's based on photos Samaras took of emptied-out New York during the pandemic - then digitally altered in slightly or very bizarre ways. Examples of both categories follow.

Prices? Keep in mind they're not massive objects. Most are only 14 X 14 inches. Go on, guess.

$12,000! And many have already been sold.

I set out on my afternoon walk today with the idea of photographing some more of my favourite buildings downtown. They didn't all work out really well, but some are not bad.