Matthew Collings: Classic or Dud?

His style is ever so slightly irreverent which is what I like and his quote from last years Turner Prize about it being welcomed back like a girl returning from finishing school with an avante garde haircut was genius.

this is written terribly, please see also worst post ever thread. I'm ill, that's my excuse.

Having said that I only saw the last twenty minutes or so of the programme so I feel a bit like a politician commenting on Brasseye. To Collings' credit, I liked the tangental but sensible links between Rimbaud, Beckett, Richey Manic and the rest.

He did describe Richey as being the singer in MSP which did make me wonder if he got that wrong, what else did he get wrong?

He's one of those writers who writes in such a way that when you read them, you kind of read it in their voice. Like as if he's reading you a bedtime story. Only about Donald Judd.

He does, however, have an irritating habit of never ever using any quotation marks ever in his writing, which means sometimes things become a little unclear. But that's just a small thing.

I think it's great that a critic learned to write with the same slyly concrete, faux-awkward style that Warhol developed in his books, because I do consider Warhol one of the great prose stylists of the 20th century.

it's faux all over, and i hate it. i find it oddly patronizing. cf adam th1rlwell.

I'M WITH FAUX

Am impressed with your lone battle to KEEP ART CRIT REAL though Enrique.

'You can't just say anything you like,' Collings observes. 'You have to join in the official discourse. There are discourses for everything. But with art the discourse is incredibly tortured and unreal, and you have to get to know it over many years. At first you can't believe the phoneyness and unreality. It's like a bad film, set in the art world. It's so extreme, you feel sure everybody must be joking and that suddenly they're going to admit it. But they never do... Innovations in art often seem to be about calling the bluff of the discourse. The new often seems satirical almost. The discourse reels, then adapts. The new seems solemn.'

(eg "here's why: the bus stops right outside!")

This argument should get back to Collinges now.

anyone see the tuner prize coverage. once I found out the fella was 'dressed up' I suspected he would win. but i liked those pots anyway.

To be fair, they were nice pots, it's jus they had a bunch of shite scrawled all over them, and the dress was just horrible, very very ugly.

i guess we will be doing something on this at the mag any day now!! i don't really like his stuff either

sadly i missed the prog as i have tummyache and went to bed early! :(

only i couldn't get to sleep so here i am online instead

But the rest of his presentation ... hrm.

As Enrique says, his stuff about Goya was pretty offensive, but then again, I found Beavis & Butthead Chapman's Goya-clown things pretty offensive. It wouldn't be so bad, if I weren't mentally comparing Nigel Spivey's chapter on Goya and the 30 Years War (freaking harrowing) with Collings' (flippant and disrespectful).

I wanted Anya Gallaccio to win. Chocolate walls! Upside down trees! Can't remember which pundit waltzed in to say that she was 'a one note artist, it's hardly original to say we're all going to rot and die' but he was sooo wrong IMO.

I like the fact that pots can win, but not those particular ones.

Hey, like I said on the Turner Prize thread, I really liked his little examination of "what you are supposed to say about the TP, based on what class you are, and what paper you read". I thought that was ace.

I can agree with this -- despite MC's clear broadsheetness.

Lots of hand-waving and trying to bring statues to life by inserting quotations as to what they might be saying to us all today in the 1st EP of 'Civilization', but I really enjoyed last night's take on Ruskin.

I go really back and forth on Collings. Hello Culture was basically a formative influence on me. It was the first time I heard of Tom Friedman and Joy Division. A great programme, I loved when he interviews his mother about Primal Scream Therapy. But his Column in Modern Painters can be so snobbish, his wholesale endorsement of Clement Greenberg seems a bit too all embracing, liked a quote he said about art being too full of ideas. (Hello, 90% of living painters) but he is a bit too regressive in what he wants. It seems inevitable that he wants to turn into a Kenneth Clarke for our generation.

His Van Gogh programme was filled with way too much romanticism and biography to be taken really seriously, for a man so dismissive of ideas, I think he only really works when he talks about them.

i had no idea he liked the appalling greenberg.

He, like, worships him.

I actually believe in a lot of what Greenberg says, just because his theories are static, sexist and turn taste into dogma doesn't mean that the baby should get thrown out. But to adopt the whole thing seems like a meaningless slice of contrariness or simple blindness.

It was funny when he rubbished Jasper Johns though.

hmmm i don't think greenberg nowadays would see eye to eye with collings on much really. collings is way more open minded, greenberg would not have dug anyone like jeff koons or damien hirst. he thought duchamp was a fraud.

I can't see that if Hirst or Koons had come along now, Collings would necessarily champion them. Age conserves y'know. Not that championing either of them would put him in the Classic pile for me.

well, if they came along now they wouldn't really make much sense, their early stuff was in the context of the time it was first exhibited.

my point is that collings likes a waaay wider range of art than greenberg ever did and appreciates the ambiguities inherent in talking about the "purpose" of art. greenberg was like: "this is modernism, that's not modernism, it started here with cezanne, it's ending now with pop, etc, etc...
collings seems a lot more laid back in comparison.

Well, last I saw, Collings only really cares about painting (Greenberg), hates "ideas" (Greenberg), thinks that modernism was abandoned too soon (Greenberg), thinks we should only look at form (GREENBERG).

Also, I meant modern day Collings had he been around would not be as receptive as young Collings was.

I was big on the This Is Modern Art book, read it over and over. Had no idea they turned it into a TV series until last night. It's really good! Introduces a lot of the bizarre conceptual modern stuff and mainly asks relevant questions. I really enjoy his style, he seems to have definitive ideas about art but is flexible enough to come back around to some work he previously wrote off. This episode on minimalism is probably the best introduction I can think of to an otherwise strange and ephemeral concept:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXbiaWEq1Bc

It is really weird the digital artifacts that show up in some of those monochrome paintings due to youtube.

Here is what Collings is up to. Good for him.

In Margate. My cheeks are red. I am shaking. I popped into an exhibition that turned out to be the insane fever dream of an artist called Matthew Collins: ‘Drawings Against Genocide.’ The exhibition is described as ‘drawings… raising consciousness about hell…. Israel is the… pic.twitter.com/CO8Ee8eYLG

— Zoe Strimpel (@realzoestrimpel) March 21, 2026

Good on him. I feel like I judged him wrongly and harshly as being antisemitic about 8 years back. My brain was cucked by the Israel propaganda machine back then.

I think he’s cranky but Zoe Strimpel has been paying her mortgage by being offended by the_left for many years now and is a POS.

All that and she forgot to ask which one's for Leave

The drawing of an IDF colonial soldier crushing a skull seems comically evil until you realise this was a thing an actual guy did and took a selfie while doing it https://t.co/qAJ9OfFxYT pic.twitter.com/2BzlXASAZy

— Eleanora Ní Chualáın 🏳️‍⚧️🇮🇪 (@EleanoraStats) March 22, 2026