The panel, featuring eminent architectural historian Joseph Rykwert, experimental architect Nigel Coates and former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, will look at how urbanity grew to its present condition, where more than half the world’s population lives in

Hotel Diaries is a series of video recordings made in hotel rooms around the world between 2001 and 2007, all of which relate the artist’s personal experiences to the current conflicts in the Middle East in the 'found' film set of a hotel room. A selectio

Following the suicide of his lover George Dyer in 1971, Francis Bacon embarked on a series of paintings known as the 'Black Triptychs'. Hugh Davies, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, has described these paintings as the 'frenzied mo

Tate Britain symposia bring together experts and scholars to present new research or to discuss aspects of a particular exhibition or wider issues around visual culture. Symposia, sometimes with partner institutions, are a focus for new scholarship and de

New Brutalism championed materiality and a fascination with the harsh, the substantial and the rough. The discovery of ‘beauty’ in ‘ugliness’ arguably parallels Bacon’s ability to make stark images seductive, and indeed brutal, as he revelled in the textu

The Turner Prize has played a huge part in raising the profile of contemporary British art around the world. Dan Fox, filmmaker, musician and associate editor of Frieze magazine, gives an overview of Turner Prize 2008, considering the work of the four nom

Celebrated artist Andres Serrano became the centre of controversy in 1989 for Piss Christ, a graphic image that combined Catholic iconography and body fluids. The scandal that this work - alongside Mapplethorpe's homo erotic imagery - provoked, resulted i

Broadcaster and author Simon Schama gives us his perspectives on Mark Rothko. 'Rothko didn’t much care to be called an abstract artist; formalism smelled altogether too much of the decorative and he evidently had bigger fish to fry, especially in The Four

This panel discussion explores Mark Rothko's late work in the context of the 1960s, a time of historic turmoil when the practice of painting became increasingly contested. The speakers explore key issues such as series and seriality, and the existentialis

Psychoanalysis has been used to discuss visual pleasure and the significance of the gaze in the apprehension of art. Freud suggested that visual pleasure is also related to shame, the complex, universal and painful affect that connects subjects to social