The auctioneer clutched the Sotheby’s lectern, rocking his sharp-suited body to some silent beat. “And lot number four is the Flora Yukhnovich, I’ll Have What She’s Having, this wonderful painting,” he announced, “lot of interest in the picture, wonderful thing here.” The wonderful thing, a tousle of baby blue spiked with millennial pink, duly appeared … The millennial artist who struck art-market gold
The perfect shot takes time. In 1976 – a few years after he’d left Tokyo for New York, by way of art school in LA – Hiroshi Sugimoto walked into a cinema in Manhattan’s East Village. The price of entry was a dollar; the place so ramshackle that nobody noticed him unfold an antiquated bellows … Hiroshi Sugimoto: it’s hard to look away from this staggeringly inventive show
In spite of a giant spam sandwich, burned-out Jag, and several plaster casts of the artist’s close friends in which cigarettes have been jammed up their orifices, Sarah Lucas’s Happy Gas is as funny as lead. In a corner of Tate Britain’s upper galleries, an animatronic hand jerks up and down, titled Wanker (1999). Across … Sarah Lucas: about as rebellious as paper doilies
What do you get when you combine a bust of the late Queen made of thumb tacks, a balloon dog wrapped in Tunnocks Teacake foil, and a toy-bright painting by the reliably silly Joe Lycett, titled I drink a crisp, cold beer in a pool in Los Angeles while Gary Lineker looks on in disgust … The RA Summer Exhibition is back – with the usual no-hopers and dearth of ideas