One of the special features of the British Library’s Breaking the News exhibition is a large-scale panorama, created by designers Northover&Brown. Objects and graphics have been placed into flowing pictures of networks, places and people, tracing the changing ways in which we have discovered the news over five centuries, from town squares to what ElonRead More
Category: Exhibitions
Beautiful news
Two years I wrote about an exhibition of the remarkable infographics of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and said that I was working on an exhibition of infographics myself, due to be shown at the British Library in August 2020. Then fate intervened.Read More
Making an exhibition of ourselves
Here’s some breaking news for you… On 22 April, and running until 21 August 2022, the British Library will be hosting a major exhibition on the history of news in Britain. Entitled Breaking the News, it will (according to the press release) spotlight the role news plays in our society, exploring issues of choice, interpretation,Read More
75%
At the start of the current exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt, you are told that 25% of the people on the planet play video games. I am one of the 75%. I do not play video games; indeed, I do not think I have played a video game of any kindRead More
R.U.R.
According to the BBC’s handy calculator, Will a robot take your job?, there is a 38% chance of my being replaced by a robot at some point in the future. Out of a list of 366 jobs, based on research by Oxford University, a curator (or archivist) comes in at number 206 of jobs atRead More
Earth air water
Contrary to conventional wisdom, I like to judge a book by its cover. If the cover looks good, then the results inside tend to be good also. The better the content, the more inspired the jacket designer must feel. Certainly this has been my rule when judging the use of paintings for book covers. IRead More
David Jones and the matter of Britain
To Pallant House Gallery at the weekend, in Chichester – the first time I’ve been to this rather fine gallery made up of a Queen Anne house with modern extension. It’s primarily devoted to modern British art, with fine examples of Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, David Bomberg, Ivon Hitchens, Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Michael Andrews,Read More
On Margate sands
Few railway stations can offer a grander view of the town that they serve than Margate. As you step out of the station, the full sweep of the bay opens up before you: the low waves ebbing over flat sands, a great line of amusement parlours, shops and hotels following the leftward curve of theRead More
Every picture tells a story
Just under thirty years ago I went to a tiny cinema, the name of which escapes me, somewhere off Piccadilly, London, to see a dramatised documentary about the Irish painter William Scott. It was directed by the painter’s son, James Scott (who had won an Academy Award in 1983 for the Graham Greene short filmRead More
A day on Cybertron
Last Saturday I was on another planet, or so I expected to be. Specifically I was at a Transformers convention in Birmingham. Just to make things clear, I am not a fan of plastic robots that convert into cars, nor of the bombastic films that have been made about them. I do, however, have aRead More