Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Finneas has little to offer without his sister Billie Eilish

No truth is more self-evident than that there are those whose best emerges only when they are paired with others: Lennon and McCartney, Morecambe and Wise, Clough and Taylor. And it’s perhaps even harder for a behind-the-scenes collaborator to step out in their own right. Jack Antonoff, for example, is one of the creative powerhouses of modern pop: he co-writes and produces songs for Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and Lorde, who plainly regard him as intrinsic to their success. His work probably reaches more ears than any other songwriter on Earth. But when he writes and produces those songs for himself? The magic vanishes. The band he fronts, Bleachers,

A dancing, weightless garland of gems: Stephen Hough’s piano concerto reviewed

Stephen Hough’s new piano concerto is called The World of Yesterday but its second ever performance offered a dispiriting glimpse into the world of tomorrow. A couple of minutes into the finale Hough stopped playing and the orchestra fell silent. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he explained. ‘My iPad is going crazy.’ A murmur of sympathy, mingled with laughter; then Hough signalled to the conductor Mark Wigglesworth and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and they carried on, this time without mishap. But we’d seen it happen, and until last week I’d have told you it was inconceivable. This wasn’t some rash experiment: professional musicians have been using electronic scores for well over a

Cartoonish, sub-Armando Iannucci comic caper: Mickey 17 reviewed

Mickey 17 is the latest film from the South Korean writer-director Bong Joon-ho, who won an Oscar for Parasite and made Snowpiercer and Okja. It’s a dystopian sci-fi satire starring Robert Pattinson twice over (all will be explained) but while it initially kicks some decent ideas around, it eventually descends into a cartoonish, sub-Armando Iannucci comic caper with, as far as I could ascertain, nothing fresh to say. It’s not the biggest disappointment I’ve had in my life but it’s up there. The film is set some time in the future and Pattinson plays Mickey 17, a crew member on a space-colonisation mission who, in the opening sequence, has fallen

A blast: Leigh Bowery!, at Tate Modern, reviewed

Tate Modern’s latest exhibition is a bizarre proposition on so many levels. Its subject, the Australian designer, performer, provocateur and club scenester Leigh Bowery, was by all accounts inescapable in London for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. Standing at well over 6ft and weighing 17st, he would have been a conspicuous presence on the capital’s streets even had he not adopted the berserk sci-fi drag attire that became his signature aesthetic. He appeared on TV, at Sadler’s Wells and in a ponderous suite of portraits by Lucian Freud. His life could be read as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, but he was not an artist in any conventional sense

The fixation on sport at boarding schools is the reason the country is failing

As a teenager, I very nearly went to boarding school after falling in love with the architecture, the greenery and the sense of freedom. What ultimately put me off was the school’s obscene fixation with sport and my discovery that I would be expected to run around those fields not just once or twice a week, but every single day.  Listening to How Boarding Schools Shaped Britain, a three-part series on Radio 4, I am not convinced that all this sport isn’t the reason our country is failing. Over two-thirds of our Prime Ministers and half of all holders of offices of state went to boarding schools – and a

Paul Wood, Matthew Parris, Ian Buruma, Hermione Eyre and Francis Young

34 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Paul Wood reads his letter from the Vatican (1:17); Matthew Parris warns Conservatives from embracing causes that could lose them as much support as they would gain (7:31); reviewing Richard Overy’s Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan, Ian Buruma argues that the atomic bombs were not only immoral, but ineffective (15:35); Hermione Eyre examines the life and work of the surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun (23:03); and, Francis Young provides his notes on Shrove Tuesday (29:12).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Real artists have nothing to fear from AI

Christie’s is making digital-art history again – or at least trying to. Between 20 February and 5 March, it is hosting Augmented Intelligence, the first major auction dedicated solely to AI-generated art. This follows a series of headline-grabbing stunts, including the first major sale of an AI-generated artwork in 2018 – ‘Portrait of Edmond de Belamy’ ($432,500) by the Paris-based collective Obvious – and the first NFT sale by a major auction house,  Beeple’s ‘Everydays: The First 5,000 Days’, which shattered expectations (and good taste) by selling for $69 million in 2021. With the NFT bubble – which Christie’s played a significant role inflating – having burst in 2022, its

An exhilarating, uneven survey of an outstandingly eccentric British surrealist

Ithell Colquhoun was always a bit of a mystery surrealist. Her greatest hit is the unsettling, dream-like ‘Scylla’ (1938), a painting of two towering cliffs, which could equally be thighs in the bath. The prow of Odysseus’s Argo peeps through them. The pubic hair is seaweed, and there are shells, but, as far as discernible, no crabs. The point of view of the painting is that of the titular monster Scylla, lying in wait. It’s witty and disturbing; mythic and domestic. A British surrealist high point, frequently anthologised. This aside, her name was relegated to lists. She was at Dali’s lecture in London in 1936 when he got his head

James Delingpole

I think I’ve found the perfect TV series

Drops of God is one of those gems of purest ray serene that cable TV prefers to keep hidden in its deep unfathomed caves because it thinks you want something more lowbrow. Try finding it by accident: you won’t. When I looked for it on Apple – which doesn’t have all that many shows – I had laboriously to type in its name. It wasn’t offered to me in the recommendations. If I hadn’t been tipped off by my friends Candy and Diarmuid, I would never have seen it. I had been lamenting, as I often do, the dearth of stuff to watch on TV that doesn’t put you through

Pamela Anderson is a thing of wonder: The Last Showgirl reviewed

The Last Showgirl stars Pamela Anderson as a Las Vegas dancer who has reached the end of her career (too old). And she is wonderful, a revelation. I’d like to say I saw it coming but I did not. Did you? When she was doing all that bouncing in slo-mo along the beach in Baywatch did you ever think: Pammy’s going to make a fine dramatic actress one day? But she’s better than the film itself. It would be flimsy without her – plus her own backstory adds a whole other layer. ‘What you sold was young and sexy,’ her character is told at one point, ‘you aren’t either any

Spreads emotions like jam: Festen, at the Royal Opera House, reviewed

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera Festen opened at Covent Garden earlier this month, and reader, I messed up. I broke my own golden rule with new operas: don’t do any homework, don’t try to memorise the plot, and whatever you do, don’t revisit the source material. The aim is to experience the new work on its own terms. That’s hard enough, given the PR onslaught that precedes any Royal Opera première – the way the classical establishment circles the wagons, and the unspoken consensus that certain living composers (including Adès, Benjamin and Turnage, though not Judith Weir, curiously) are simply too big to fail. But no: I rewatched Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998

Lloyd Evans

Shakespeare as cruise-ship entertainment: Jamie Lloyd’s Much Ado About Nothing reviewed

Nicholas Hytner’s Richard II is a high-calibre version of a fascinating story. A king reluctantly yields his crown to a usurper who wants his violent revolt to seem like a peaceful transfer of authority. This delicate, complex narrative is presented as a boardroom power struggle in corporate Britain. Snappy suits for the dukes and princes. Commando uniforms when they take to the battlefield. Jonathan Bailey (Richard) starts as a swaggering, coke-snorting yuppie who dreams of extending his realm overseas with someone’s else money. Disaster strikes, the crown slips. Calamity sharpens his awareness and he becomes a lyrical philosopher who laments the bewitchments and pitfalls of power. Bailey’s charming, easy-going Richard

In defence of deaccessioning

There’s more than a grain of truth in the popular caricature of a curator as a mother hen clucking frantically if anyone gets too near her nest – not that her eggs are about to hatch, let alone run. The recent threat of the British Council to ‘deaccession’ – to put it more bluntly, sell – its 9,000-strong collection of British art has caused a predictable flurry in the curatorial world. Doesn’t the British Council know that public art collections are sacrosanct and must be preserved for all time? When I was director of Glasgow’s museums and art galleries, I remember talking to my committee about my long-term plans for

Lloyd Evans

Tedious and threadbare: Unicorn, at the Garrick Theatre, reviewed

Unicorn, Mike Bartlett’s new play, involves some characters in chairs discussing a sexual threesome. That’s the entire show. Polly (Nicola Walker) is a drunken crosspatch who wants to spice up her loveless marriage to Dr Nick (Stephen Mangan) by bringing a blonde lesbian into the bedroom. Nick, a dithering twerp, doesn’t care if it happens or not and he lets his gobby wife talk him into it. She’s desperate for a bit of girl-on-girl action because she detests straight men (apart from Nick) and she dated women before she got married. It’s not clear why Nick puts up with this charmless windbag who treats him like a naughty spaniel and

How to write a piano concerto

My Piano Concerto, The World of Yesterday, began with an email during one of the darker days of the pandemic: would I like to write a score for a movie about a concert pianist writing a piano concerto. As I looked at my concert diary, blank but for Zoom calls, it seemed like a wonderful way to keep me busy. I’d never wanted to write a piano concerto (how to begin?) but the characters and outline of this film gave me a handle: an ageing Austrian baroness and a young American composer in the early 1930s; she commissions him to write a piece and invites him to compose it at

The White Lotus is off to a shaky start

The White Lotus, now back for a third series, could perhaps be best described as Death in Paradise for posh people. Most obviously, this is because its plots revolve around murders in an idyllic location – only with a far bigger budget, a much starrier cast and several episodes per story. But there’s also the fact that it follows the same pattern every time. So it was that season three began this week, rather like its predecessors, with some lovely scenery, a dead body and a caption reading ‘One week earlier’. After that, we duly watched a bunch of rich, good-looking Americans arriving at a luxury White Lotus resort where

Jenny McCartney

Soothing and glorious: Fashion Neurosis reviewed

Sometimes the mind needs to take a break. And I can’t think of a better stopping-off place than the soothing, gloriously bonkers discussions on the Fashion Neurosis podcast, hosted by the British fashion designer Bella Freud. Its premise is that Freud, daughter of Lucian and great-grand-daughter of Sigmund, encourages guests to recline on her couch and talk over any and every aspect of their relationship to fashion. Her mellifluous, affirming manner is much more soft soap than wire wool, but this is not territory that requires a Robin Day, and the concept proves a surprisingly fruitful route into family history, personal stories and high-grade gossip. The pool of guests is