Arts Reviews

Many of the mediums from which art is made have been around for a long time. People have been painting on walls, for example, for about 40,000 years. Similarly, figures have been fashioned out of stone and metal for millennia, and still are. But if there is one ancient medium you might think was now definitely over and out, it would be tapestry. But no! In this era of artificial intelligence and omniscient Google, the ancient practice of painstakingly twining coloured wool into pictures is undergoing an unexpected revival. The latest contemporary artist to give tapestry a go is Chris Ofili. His exhibition Weaving Magic at the National Gallery gives

Much has been said about the endless photographic mediocrity of the digital age. The infinite glossy ads, the stream of cheap tourist snaps and sea of selfies. You’d forgive a young photographer for feeling disillusioned. In a world where 2 billion images are uploaded to the internet every day, how can you ever be original? What power is there even left in photography? Spread over the east and west wings of Somerset House, the Sony World Photo Awards (open until 7 May) answers these questions at full tilt. The pictures in this mammoth exhibition were selected from over 220,000 online entries from 183 countries  – amateur and professional. As an

These days, Aubrey Powell is a genial 70-year-old who can be found most mornings having breakfast at his local Knightsbridge café. But in the late 1970s, he did something that surely no other human being has done before or since. He photographed a sheep lying on a psychiatrist’s couch on a beach in Hawaii. Its coat had been treated with Vidal Sassoon products, and it was sedated with Valium because it was scared of waves. So what on earth was he up to? The answer — as anybody who recognises Powell’s name will guess — was creating one of the 373 album covers that his company Hipgnosis designed back when

Gemma Arterton’s new film, Their Finest, is about second world war propaganda. Her character, who is bookish and sensitive, is allowed — because of war — to write film scripts. She discovers two girls — two ordinary, pale, unhappy girls — who steal their father’s boat and sail to Dunkirk for the rescue. She thinks this story will swell hearts: and so she, and her collaborator (Sam Claflin), make a British Casablanca about Dunkirk. They know there must be loss, or nothing has value. I marvelled over two things in Their Finest, even as I dislike the title. First, how the pale, unhappy girls are transformed, for the film inside