Reaction
There was a very diverse reaction to the show. Adrian Searle, art critic of The Guardian called it "dreadful" and Tate Chairman, Paul Myners denounced it as "a travesty". "Young British Artist" Gavin Turk advised in a BBC interview that people should try to see the show.
The sexual and violent content of some of the paintings was commented on. Mark Lawson on BBC Radio 4 warned, with particular reference to a painting by Joe Machine of two sailors having anal sex, that the paintings might cause controversy, as they were "certainly not ... conventional" but contained "very bold and explicit images".
Susan Mansfield in The Scotsman said they were "far from traditional or conservative" and "as shocking as anything Jake and Dinos Chapman could produce", adding "the Stuckists have a strong philosophical base". Simon Pia, another writer in the same paper, predicted the group would be "the next big thing in art".
A review in the inflight magazine Velocity evaluated the work as "a worthy argument for painting as the fundamental medium of artistic expression ... a refreshing willingness to be understood in today's world of oblique messages." The Sunday Times saw the presence of the work in an established national museum as "another step on the road to critical acceptance", as did the museum review site 24hourmuseum: ""They’ve spent years fighting the establishment. Now ... the Stuckists have been invited to join it."
Read more about this topic: The Stuckists Punk Victorian
Famous quotes containing the word reaction:
“An actor must communicate his author’s given message—comedy, tragedy, serio- comedy; then comes his unique moment, as he is confronted by the looked-for, yet at times unexpected, reaction of the audience. This split second is his; he is in command of his medium; the effect vanishes into thin air; but that moment has a power all its own and, like power in any form, is stimulating and alluring.”
—Eleanor Robson Belmont (1878–1979)
“More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which, because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)