Naked Emperors: Criticisms of English Contemporary Art

This selection of Brian Sewell's criticism from the London Evening Standard is his first collection to be published in nearly twenty years and has been selected from his art reviews of exhibitions by English contemporary artists. Most first appeared in the newspaper for whom he has written regularly since 1984. The reviews are gathered chronologically under artist or institution and discuss nearly every important contemporary English art exhibition for the past quarter of a century. Besides being a record of one man's developing response to the explosion of blockbuster contemporary art shows and multi-millionaire artist escapades of the past two decades, the reviews' sequence also reveal how much this often maligned critic did, at first, wish the new art establishment well. How he came to see so much as dross or fiddle-faddle is written with such knowledge, style and humour, readers will also come to understand why mugs with 'Brian Sewell is Fab!' are still on sale in gallery gift shops.