Arts Reviews

It will come as no surprise that something in the news has Piers Morgan deeply troubled. For the past two days, Morgan has been incandescent over the Met Gala and its dress code. In a column for MailOnline he claims that, as a Catholic, he has become a victim of cultural appropriation due to fancy dress outfits worn to a party by celebrities. The Gala, a fixture of the New York social season at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is well known for the theme it sets, and this year it was ‘Heavenly Bodies’ – inspired by the Roman Catholic Church. The Gala was held to launch an exhibition of

Which was your favourite outfit then, for the Met Gala on the theme of Heavenly Bodies – Catholicism and Fashion – the images of which are everywhere right now? Madonna was true to form with a heavy black mantilla, channelling a Sicilian widow, and Anna Wintour’s dress was, apparently, Cardinal Chanel – though if I may be pedantic, a Cardinal’s colour is scarlet, not white (that’s for the Pope). But Elon Musk, the Tesla man, was pretty good with a kind of reverse clerical suit…white, with a black dogcollar. Frankly, an awful lot of people missed the point of the thing, the theme being Sunday best, loosely interpreted as going

As the curtain opens on the second act of Don Pasquale, I hear a rustle of discomfort. Donizetti’s opera has not been seen at La Scala since 1994. Its restoration, on the orders of a new music director, sets off a critical flutter and Davide Livermore’s new production, set in the Cinecittà film studio during the 1950s dolce vita, seems designed to tweak the Roman nose of national vanity. Italy is supposed to be a serious country these days, burying buffoonery and hedonism among the Coliseum ruins. Even Silvio Berlusconi is seen as an archaeological relic, not to be disturbed. So Riccardo Chailly’s embrace of opera buffa in his first

‘My Acropolis,’ Auguste Rodin called his house at Meudon. Here, the sculptor made a Parthenon above Paris. Surrounded by statues of ‘mutilated gods’, he cast himself as the Phidias of the age. His collection was part cabinet of curiosities, part charnel house. He bought Nile crocodiles and Peking ginger jars, painted sarcophagi and chipped red-figure vases. Crowded among his 6,000 Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Assyrian, Chinese and Japanese objects were his own plasters, bronzes and clay models: hands by the hundred, legs vast and trunkless, arms beckoning, fidgeting, reaching. Isadora Duncan set up her ‘Dionysian’ dance school nearby to teach Hellenic rhythms. In the catacombs of the Rodin Museum of Meudon

The first thing you notice is the frumpy tweed overcoat. Realistic bobbling. Fussy check. Bit pedantic, bit GCSE. Then the smooth, dull face. Enough wrinkles, modelling, to define age, but not really enough to examine character with any realism. She’s hard to read. It’s not the face of someone happy to be here. It’s more the face of someone enduring small talk. Maybe she’s being mansplained to? The unveiling of Gillian Wearing’s statue to suffragist Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square is no doubt a cause for celebration. For if the suffrage movement was about anything it was about the right of iffy female artists to be allowed to make mediocre,