\nThere's a narrowness to what [Ron Mueck] does that is the opposite of good art's complexities. For this exhibition the entire upstairs of the grand salon-style neoclassical gallery has been turned into a modern space, containing just 10 sculptures. They have whole rooms to themselves. A big woman in bed, her face so sad. A gigantic hairy man. The new work that is the exhibition's talking point: an outsized sculpture of a newborn baby girl, a bloody, wrinkled colossus of a brand new person.
\nMueck would have to be a very good artist to justify this extravagant presentation. As it is, the emptiness of the rooms is crushing – white sad spaces with no ideas in them. That's the bedrock of my dislike of Mueck: his work is brainless. It insists on the gut and provides the head with nothing at all. This won't work. Art happens in our minds: we see, the mind makes sense of what it sees – or, with art, can't quite make sense of it – and the gap between perception and prior experience is where originality, newness, comes into existence. Art is cognitive before it is "emotional". Any work of art that rests its claim to attention solely on "gut feeling" is a bully.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Apologies to anyone who's lost their lunch at the sight of this … I've seen many pictures of this dreadful "sculpture" and it's one of the most hideous human models I've seen anywhere. Here's...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-ch","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=761"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42322,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761\/revisions\/42322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Picture](\"http:\/\/image.guardian.co.uk\/sys-images\/Arts\/Arts_\/Pictures\/2006\/08\/09\/ronmueckAGirlMM372.jpg\")
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