The Telegraph: The best and worst art shows of 2013

Found a pretty funny articles on Telegraph website:

The best art shows of 2013

1. Barocci: Brilliance and Grace, National Gallery

^{'Rest on the Flight into Egypt'. Before 1573 by Federico Barocci, © Scala / Art Resource}

Achingly beautiful paintings and drawings by a 16th-century Italian artist who emerged as both heir to Raphael and precursor of Caravaggio.

2. Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum, British Museum

^{A garden fresco originally found in the House of the Golden Bracelet in Pompeii, Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompeii}

This show about daily life in the 1st century AD was all the more powerful for leaving death and destruction until the very end, so that when it came it was sudden, violent and unforgettable.

3. George Bellows: Modern American Life, Royal Academy

^{Stag at Sharkey's, 1909, George Bellows Photo: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection}

British audiences at last had a chance to see the bravura painting technique and probing intelligence of an artist that one contemporary described as an adherent of the “wallop” school.

4. Ice Age Art, British Museum

^{Ivory: A sculpture of a female bison, found at Zaraysk, Russia; about 20,000 years old. Photo: The Zaraysk Kremlin Museum}

Have you ever read a gallery label that identified an object as the “oldest known portrait of a woman” or the “oldest known ceramic figure?” Most amazing was that art made 40,000 years ago could be so beautiful.

5. Turner and the Sea, National Maritime Museum

^{The Wreck of a Transport Ship (1810) by JMW Turner Photo: © Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon}

Faultless survey with most of the great man’s most important maritime paintings shown side by side with his sublime watercolours.

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And the worst art shows of 2013 ...

1. Art Under Attack, Tate Britain

^{Spectators in front of 'Piano Destruction' by Raphael Montanez Oritz, which is actually about a piano being destroyed, not art. Photo: Christopher Pledger}

Something’s wrong when half of the curatorial team may not know what the word “iconoclasm” is usually taken to mean and the other half believes that the destruction of works of art is ‘a creative process’.

2. Mexico: a Revolution in Art, 1910-1940, Royal Academy

^{National pride: 'Carnival in Huejotzingo' (1939) by José Chavez Morado}

Shoddy curating and poor research left visitors with little idea of the wealth of talent that existed in Mexico before or after the war. There were second-rate paintings by first-rate artists and other works by some artists who never lived in Mexico.

3. Australia, Royal Academy

Chosen without critical intelligence and with virtually no attempt made to discriminate between what was original and what was warmed-over imitations of European art, it failed on every level.

4. Grayson Perry’s Reith Lectures, Radio 4

^{Grayson Perry: 'his lectures were a triumph of style over content' Photo: BBC/Richard Ansett}

Nothing new, little of interest to say about what’s happening in art today, Perry’s four radio talks had the analytical subtlety of a comic book and the organisational logic of a pinball machine.

5. Witches and Wicked Bodies, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

^{Bewitching: 'The Call of the Night' (1938) by Paul Delvaux}

Well-intentioned but still tedious.