Welcome! My weekly podcast is a 5mins commentary on art or architecture in the news. My name is Roby, founder of an art and architecture tour organization in London, called Art Tours with a Theme - ART wiT. My contact details are: Instagram: artwit_london, FB: artwitlondon, Web: artwitlondon.co.uk.
ART Tours with a Theme - ART wiT
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15 episodes
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Podcast Overview
Welcome! My weekly podcast is a 5mins commentary on art or architecture in the news. My name is Roby, founder of an art and architecture tour organization in London, called Art Tours with a Theme - ART wiT. My contact details are: Instagram: artwit_london, FB: artwitlondon, Web: artwitlondon.co.uk.
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Publishing Since
7/23/2020
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Recent Episodes
November 11, 2020
Lockdown..Again!
<p>Hello this is Roby from ART Tours with a Theme and this is my weekly commentary on art and architecture in the news.</p> <p>In this blog I discuss about the closure again of museums and galleries in this lockdown 2 or red area, depending where you are based, even if some shops can remain open. Museums had to close regardless the extraordinary safety measures in place over the Summer, when they could reopen. I strongly disagree with this situation and I think they should have been allowed to remain open. I also want to suggest a couple of fantastic museum’s and gallery’s websites that still facilitate our art experience even if online, making it a full experience, almost if we were at their premises.</p> <p>In saying I disagree with the decision of closing museums in this phase, I want to report my experience. During the Summer, after the first lockdown, I visited the re-opened National Gallery, the British Museum, Tate Modern and I have never felt safer: masks were compulsory, visitors were limited per hour-slot, slots had to be booked in advance online, and there was a visitor’s route to allow for social distancing. I have also visited few private commercial galleries in Mayfair, where similar rules applied and where it happened I was the only visitor! Usually commercial galleries have very few visitors in general, so where’s the problem? I do not see the point in closing museums and galleries, especially because art experience can help with our mental health.</p> <p>I want here to point out what those museums and galleries have been doing online to facilitate our art encounter at the moment. The idea is not just just gazing at a painting, rather engaging with it, thinking around the themes and topics it represents.</p> <p>For example, I suggest go to tate.org.uk – there is a section called “art by theme”, which by the way inspired the name of my tour organisation! In this art by theme section, you can find very relevant themes today, for example Black Identities and Art. This section investigates how black history has been represented by white artists in the past and how instead contemporaneous black artists are suggesting to represent it. Another topic is Women and Art, which gives voice to women artists and their point of view. But you can also find a topic like Wellbeing and Art, Disability and Art, etc. All very interesting and engaging!</p> <p>Another suggestion from me is to enjoy the free online virtual reality tours many museums and galleries are offering. For example, go to Nationalgallery.org.uk, and enjoy their permanent collection from your sofa!</p> <p>Private commercial galleries can also offer great free exhibitions in VR. Go to GalleriesNow.net, an online magazine around global exhibitions, and sign up to the free weekly newsletter. You will receive the links to a number of global exhibitions, in London, Paris, in NY, with the VR link. All very handy!</p> <p>I hope online art experience can help navigate this new lockdown, keep safe!</p> <p>That’s all for this weekly blog! All my audio podcasts are available on 8 platforms under “Art Tours with a Theme”: including Apple Podcast, Google Podcast and Spotify. All my video-podcasts are in Instagram @artwit_london, Facebook: @artwitlondon.</p> <p>Thank you for listening and share this blog with your friends! Bye!</p>
November 3, 2020
Sean Connery & Girls - Film Posters!
<p>Hello and welcome to my weekly video-podcast on art & architecture in the news.</p> <p>One of the recent news is about Sean Connery and this blog is a tribute to his amazing career via the posters of his films. Are film posters art? Well, to me they are. Not only they are widely collected, but those images represent the context and the prevailing culture in society in those years. Think of the Bond girls, perhaps they can tell us something on the role of women in society and how it has evolved over time. All my video-blogs are in Instagram @artwit_london, Facebook: @artwitlondon.</p> <p>From 1962 to 1983 Sean Connery acted in 7 films as James Bond. Check out the film posters! In all of them Bond is represented as a masculine heterosexual character surrounded by a number of girls, all gazing at him, with him only looking at us. They are all extremely attractive and attracted by him. They are little dressed, at his feet and dimensionally smaller than Bond. They look like in ecstasy, enraptured by him and somehow controlled. Characters are drawn, rather than photographed and on a yellow, white or black background. This lack of context gives a cartoon-like dimension, as if outside reality, fruit of imagination. Was really the case? Were women in those years treated differently in society?</p> <p>Over time the same pattern repeats itself and for over 20 years the role of those girls remains the same: either vampire cat women to fight or good girls to protect. They seem loosers, manoeuvred by men, who remain the ultimate decision makers.</p> <p>If we look at the non-Bond movies of the same years, we finally see fully dressed female characters, drawn with the same height/ dimension as the character represented by Connery. Still something not right comes out: in Robin and Marian of 1976, the wonderful Audrey Hepburn, is a good girl who needs protection. In the same year, the poster for The Next Man, shows finally a woman with independent life, but the 2 big faces of that woman with the male character in profile ensure the usual pattern of man-controlling women.</p> <p>We need to wait until the 1990’s to see some change. In Medicine Man, actress Lorraine Bracco almost towers over Sean Connery and in The Avengers and Entrapment both Uma Thurman and Catherine Zeta Jones vindicate the past Bond girls with an attitude of self-determination. All well, until the poster of the final film before Sean Connery’s retirement in 2003, The League of the Extraordinary Gentleman. The only girl is prominent more for her cleavage than her actions. Ops!</p> <p>But all those films are fun for, aren’t they? Reality is different, isn’t it?..</p> <p>Goodbye Sean Connery, the Extraordinary Gentleman!</p>
October 26, 2020
Art Appropriation?
<p>Hello and welcome to my weekly video-podcast on art & architecture in the news.</p> <p>The news of this week is about a Banksy painting called "Show me the Monet", created in 2005, which has been recently sold at auction for more than double its estimated valuation.</p> <p>It is ironic, as the title Show me the Monet! plays with the wording ‘show me the money’, and money has indeed been shown.</p> <p>It represents an interpretation of the Water Lilies series by Monet, where the pond here becomes a polluted canal, with abandoned shopping trolleys and orange traffic cones.</p> <p>This exercise by an artist who reproduces somebody else’s art is called “art appropriation”, and this is our topic of the day. “Art appropriation”, is when art comes after other art already produced, which is used as inspiration and starting idea, and then adapted for other purposes and different messages. This is not plagiarism, as although the original artwork is clearly mentioned, it is not identically reproduced. This is something European artists have been doing for centuries.</p> <p>Could the Banksy painting exist without the original idea by Monet? Can this interpretation by Banksy be considered a tribute to Monet? Or has instead Banksy used the Water Lilies in an opportunistic way, just because he needed a famous painting to capture our attention? After all he needed just a pond, but he chose the most famous pond of the world. Was that to channel through a famous artwork his anti- capitalistic message against consumerism?</p> <p>My view is that not only he needed to denounce we are polluting and destroying nature, but perhaps he wanted to denounce we are destroying art itself, including the masters of the past, with an art market that only looks at money and not at Monet, the beauty and the values it represents!</p> <p>There are countless examples of art appropriation, for example the Rembrandt’s self portrait, with a striking pose borrowed from Titian’s unknown man. This use of art appropriation was an emulation, a tribute, a key technique in Europe from the Renaissance in 1300 to the second part of 1800’s. It was a way of learning a previous method, and creating an artist’s own style as a reply, as interpretation, of previous works.</p> <p>In other cases art appropriation had a fun connotation on top of a way to learn the past better. For example Picasso interpreted Manet's "Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe", which is itself a playful, mocking restaging of Titian's (or maybe Giorgione's) Concert Champêtre.</p> <p>More recently, we are witnessing playful photo recreations of iconic paintings as lockdown pastime. But this has also been done as remake by famous photographers who interrogate the power of images in our era, where we are bombarded by internet images without their original context, appearing as all the same, wi</p> <p>What is your favourite image? What does it communicate to you? Which famous and iconic painting would you buy as a replica for your home? Let me know your thoughts!</p> <p>This is Roby, from ART Tours with a Theme – ART wiT. I hope you enjoyed this podcast!</p> <p>This video is on FB and IGTV. The audio podcast is available on 7 platforms under “Art Tours with a Theme”: including Google Podcast and Spotify.</p> <p>Thank you for listening and share this blog with your friends! Bye!</p>
15 total episodes available
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- What is ART Tours with a Theme - ART wiT?
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This podcast updates daily.
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This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
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