Jonathan Monk
British artist and photographer (1969- )
Jonathan Monk (born 1969, in Leicester, UK) is an artist living and working in Berlin.
Life and career
Art practice
Monk questions the meaning of art using conceptualism in a way that Ken Johnson in The New York Times called "sweet, wry and poetic". Monk's work frequently questions (if not outright undermines) the art world's conventional means of controlling contemporary art's distribution and value. One example was when he gave an artist's talk for the Dia Art Foundation in 2014 and arranged for every attendee to receive a free Jonathan Monk collage, each of which had been placed on the venue's seating beforehand. Another example is the series Receipt Drawings in which he goes out to dinner and makes an original drawing on the receipt, which he then sells to the first bidder on his Instagram account for the price of the meal.
In an interview with David Shrigley, Monk says: "Is it or is it not or can it or can it not be?
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Jonathan Monk” as british artist and photographer (1969- ). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as british artist and photographer (1969- ). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1281182. VIAF identifies the subject as 168977152. The Library of Congress control number is nb2004017033. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1969 and 2014.
A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Jonathan Monk” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.