The worst art shows of 2008Richard Dorment vents his spleen about the art exhibitions and shows he loathed in 2008.
By Richard Dorment
Last Updated: 11:09AM GMT 22 Dec 2008
Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern: The way the pictures were hung 'amounted to an act of aesthetic vandalism' Photo: JANE MINGAY
1 Tate Britain's 'The Lure of the East' was organised by politically motivated academics determined to portray 19th century British painters working in the East as colonialist oppressors. Outrageously tendentious wall labels poured scorn on the work of artists who you could see with your own eyes treated the landscape, architecture and people of the Middle East with admiration and respect. For sheer intellectual dishonesty, I've never encountered anything like it in an art gallery.
2 `Impressionism and Scotland' at the National Gallery of Scotland was a complete mess. You know the old joke about the Holy Roman Empire being neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire? Well this show in included artists who were neither Impressionists nor Scottish and who'd never been further north than Hampstead. What were they thinking? Couldn't someone have pulled the plug when the show was still on the drawing board?
3 Truly terrible exhibitions in major London venues are rarer than you might think. But 'Laughter in a Foreign Language' flopped on so many levels the choice of artists, the quality of the art, the installation, the catalogue that as an exercise in curatorial self- indulgence it may go down in the history books as one of the worst shows ever staged at the Hayward Gallery. Incredibly, not one of the works by 30 international artists was even faintly amusing.
4 With the wonderful material the curators had to work with 'Rothko, The Late Work' at Tate Modern might have been a great exhibition. But the way the pictures were hung amounted to an act of aesthetic vandalism, a misguided attempt to turn the Abstract Expressionist into a proto-minimalist. Memo to Tate: new interpretations of much loved old masters are fine, but not if they involve the deliberate misreading of the artist's intentions.
5 I've had 'Richard Prince: Continuation' at the Serpentine on my conscience. In the months since I saw it, the awesome triviality of the American artist's work coupled with his total lack of real wit has slowly sunk in. I apologise for giving the show a less than scathing review.
6 Dominique Gonzalez-Foester's Unilever Commission for Tate Modern takes the prize for the worst single artwork made in this country in 2008. She combined enlargements of sculptures by other artists with rows of metal bunk beds to come up with a whimsical end-or-the-word scenario that was at once fussy, incoherent, and too precious for words.
7 For sheer chutzpah there was nothing to beat Antony Gormley's exhibition of 32 casts of his own body at White Cube Mason's Yard. Having milked this idea for the last 22 years, maybe the time has come for him to give it a rest.
8 Like every photography exhibition I've ever seen at Tate Modern 'Street and Studio: An Urban History of Photograph' was much too big, far too ambitious, and without focus or structure. With more than enough material here for two or even three exhibitions, it started promisingly but quickly descended into incoherence.
9 'Picasso and the Masters' at the Grand Palais in Paris was an expensive turkey of a show, the art world's answer to `Heaven's Gate'. Not only did it lack structure of focus, the curators were determined to make us see similarities between works by Picasso and paintings by the likes of El Greco and Degas that simply weren't there.
10 The Turner Prize 2008. The tedium.
