Britain at the Venice Biennale
May 30 2013
Video: Telegraph
Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph gives Jeremy Deller's exhibition in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, called English Magic, four stars out of five:
Does English Magic work as “art”? In a sense, that’s almost beside the point. Here is a sequence of tough and uncompromising statements skewering the forces that Deller feels are blighting Britain. You could interpret the exhibition as an indictment of our entertainment-obsessed media culture, which, in the artist’s book, does not sufficiently hold Britain’s rich and powerful to account.
Whether or not that’s the case, English Magic contains some uncomfortable home truths that need to be expressed. You don’t come to Deller looking for life-changing aesthetic experiences. But it's hard to resist the strength of his ideas, or the persuasive nature of his democratic politics.
