Matthew Collings on Tracey Emin's "My Bed"

"What is it? A manufactured saintly relic: the great power it memorializes or stands for is Saint Pain, Saint Class, Saint Gender, Saint Femininity, Saint Abjection, Saint Ethnicity (English mother, Turkish father), and, of course, Saint Victim. Her devil muses are Drunk, Raped, and Can't Spell."

Matthew Collings ["God Save the Queen," Modern Painters, November 2008]

Mary Magdalene, Seductive Sinner/Repenter

"Every genuine work of art may have a good moral drawn from it, but, of course, in doing so much depends on interpretation and on him who draws the moral. Thus one may hear the most immoral representations defended by saying we must know evil, or sin, in order to act morally; and, conversely, it has been said that the portrayal of Mary Magdalene, the beautiful sinner who afterwards repented, has seduced many into sin, because art makes it looks so beautiful to repent, and you must sin before you can repent."


G.W.F. Hegel [Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, 1820s]

Urs Fischer's "Holes"

"When it comes to installation art, he is prone to an efficient form of spectacle: he simply has very large holes cut or dug in the walls or floors of galleries, museums and the occasional art fair booth, usually to startlingly beautiful effect. Implicitly Duchampian yet marvelously experiential, these pieces have seemed to signal the end of installation art, like monochrome paintings sometimes seem to forewarn the end of painting. Add nothing, just use the space and the architecture, dummy."


Roberta Smith ["Exploration of Space," The New York Times, October 29, 2009]