Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Deborah Ross

On the money

The Big Short is a drama about the American financial collapse of 2008. It talks you through sub-prime mortgages, tranches, credit-default swaps, mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations …and, yes, I just bored myself to tears typing that list. I had to prop my eyes open with matchsticks typing that list. I would even propose that I was more bored typing that list than I’ve ever been in my whole life, which is saying something, as I saw Monuments Men. And, previously, I would have proposed that there is no way you could ever make any of the above fascinating or compelling or sexy, let alone scathingly funny. But The Big

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Class of ’83

No one remembers this now but there really was a period, not so long ago, when the Eighties were universally reviled as the ‘decade that style forgot’. For a time it got so bad that none of us survivors could even bear to look at old photos of ourselves: mullets, feather cuts, Limahl-style bleaching, pastels, legwarmers, unflattering suits so boxy they made you look broader than you were tall… But try telling this to the kids today and they won’t believe you. The Eighties, as far as they’re concerned, are so achingly, incredibly, bleeding-edge cool that there’s no way their parents could possibly have lived through them and, ‘Oh, by

Alistair Elliot

A Day Off

Well, I’ll go window-shopping in Larousse for seeds of words. Strangely, they’re not for sale — you help yourself to what the worlds produce. Here are the conic sections, there the whales, the art, the musical instruments, the wigs…. My search is stopped by a picture of the sarigue, Didelphis, a marsupial of the west, with young. O Marianne Moore, come, look! She curves her ‘long prehensile tail’ right back towards her neck — it’s like the pantograph of an old tram — the little ones climb on, lift their own small prehensile tails, attach, and off they ride to bed. See, one’s still trying to get on. Wait! Wait

Tuesday

Ismene Brown

I’m having trouble finding an anti-woman conspiracy in dance

I’m bemused by the outburst of claims that female choreographers are under-represented, held back, or discouraged by ‘institutionalised sexism’ from unveiling their contributions to the richness of British dance. Only a fortnight ago I was thinking about what to write for my first 2016 piece, and this was the very question on my lips. Why was English National Ballet doing a special all-women choreography programme in 2016 as a protest statement when so many of the best things made in dance last year and the previous year were by female choreographers? But I decided I’d keep that powder dry until ENB come to the stage. However, this weekend Luke Jennings,

Francesca Steele

Dull and impenetrable: Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Assassin reviewed

Fans of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon be warned: this is not that. Never have I watched a film where the title so belied the tone and pace of the story. For The Assassin is slow, glacially so, and although it really is exceptionally gorgeous to look at – every frame is a sort of cross between a Turner landscape and a Chinese handscroll, all silver birch horizons and Bacchic waterfalls – I expect a few too many ticket-buyers, enticed by rave reviews and the film’s director prize at last year’s Cannes, will be quite taken aback by how dull and impenetrable they find it. That was not a flippant ‘all

Monday

Michael Tanner

What a tawdry piece it is: Met Opera Live’s Les pêcheurs de perles reviewed

Les pêcheurs de perle Met Opera Live This is the first production at the Metropolitan of Bizet’s early opera for a century, and it isn’t hard to understand why. What a tawdry piece it is, the kind of thing that might have been written deliberately to get Edward Said’s goat. Musically it contains one gem, the unforgettable duet for baritone and tenor, unforgettable any time you’ve heard it for at least a week. Bizet obviously knew when he was onto a good thing, for he recalls the tune countless times in the course of the opera. It has no motivic significance, but since he seems unable, in this opera, to

Thursday

Christopher Howse

Away with the angels?

I remember the shock, like a jolt of static electricity. One day, between taking my degree and beginning my first job, while looking through a 16th-century book about numerology that had once belonged to John Dee in the British Library, I came upon an annotation in his own neat italic hand casting up the numerical values of the letters of his name. The total he wrote down came to 666. John Dee (1527–1609) was a magus, but we must not think that this made him a loony witch. An early Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, teaching Greek, he acquired a reputation for learning in mathematics, navigation and astronomy. But his

Martin Gayford

Disciple of Duchamp

Michael Craig-Martin has had a paradoxical career. He is, I think, a disciple of Marcel Duchamp. But the latter famously gave up painting in favour of something more conceptual — ready-mades and whatnot — whereas Craig-Martin began with Duchampian concepts. He once exhibited a glass of water on a shelf together with a claim that he had mentally transformed these, by a kind of transubstantiation, into an oak tree. Then he metamorphosed himself into a still-life painter. As his current exhibition at the Serpentine demonstrates, for nearly 40 years Craig-Martin’s staple subject-matter has been everyday tools, gadgets and accessories. An early example, ‘Vertigo’ (1981), consists of elegantly pared-down line drawings

James Walton

Compliance order

Never a man tortured by self-doubt, Derren Brown introduced his latest special Pushed to the Edge (Channel 4, Tuesday) as a fascinating psychological experiment about the dangers of ‘social compliance’ — our willingness to do what authority figures ask, however morally dubious. In fact, much of what followed was a weird, and itself rather morally dubious, mix of Candid Camera, Fawlty Towers and something pretty close to entrapment. But from time to time, it also proved, annoyingly enough, a fascinating psychological experiment about the dangers of social compliance. The central aim was fairly straightforward: to see if a member of the public could be persuaded to shove a stranger off

Kate Chisholm

Chance encounters

Some might say that Jeremy Corbyn is cloth-eared, tone-deaf, socially inept but on Monday morning, as the death of the pop artist David Bowie scrambled the agenda on Radio 4’s Today programme, he was as graceful and twinkle-toed as Bowie himself. The opposition leader had been invited on to the ‘big slot’ just after the eight o’clock bulletin to talk about his ‘shock’ reshuffle last week. David Cameron and the Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, had already provided their rent-a-quote verdicts on Bowie’s life and death. Nick Robinson asked Corbyn for his thoughts. Quick as a flash, he responded, ‘Does that mean I’m joining the great and the good…?’ Before

Ismene Brown

Off the page

Dance has its own archaeological periods, and 2016’s schedules are confirming what 2015 indicated — that the era of dances with scientists is over. If you’ve an aversion to digital fidgets and have felt left out in recent years, you will wallow in stories galore this year. There are big new ballets coming about The Odyssey, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre; of which Mark Bruce’s boldly miniaturised The Odyssey, launching into Britain’s county theatres next month before fetching up at Wilton’s Music Hall, is a most alluring prospect. Last year we saw from both Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon, the Royal Ballet’s master-stylists of crisp abstract ballet, an enthusiastic rush to reinvent

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Gallows humour

It begins with a sketch. We’re in a prison in 1963 where Harry Wade, the UK’s second most famous hangman, is overseeing the execution of a killer who protests his innocence. The well-built convict effortlessly shrugs aside two burly but incompetent prison officers. ‘I’m being hanged by nincompoops,’ he laments. One of them helpfully points out that if he’d followed his instructions he’d ‘be dead by now’. Do these arch quips make you quiver with mirth? If so you’ll enjoy Hangmen, a slapstick comedy thriller by Martin McDonagh. The scene shifts to Oldham in 1965. Capital punishment has been abolished and the retired Wade has taken over a pub in

Deborah Ross

Endurance test

The Revenant is a survival-against-the-odds film that so puts Leonardo DiCaprio through it I bet he was thinking, ‘I wish I was back on that boat that went down.’ He is mauled by a bear. Viciously. He is buried alive. He eats still-throbbing, blood-dripping raw liver, and quite forgets his manners. (Wipe your chin, man; there’s never any excuse.) He cauterises his own wounds, falls off cliffs, spins down rapids, slits open a dead horse and sleeps within for warmth. The film recently triumphed at the Golden Globes — best film, best director (Alejandro G. Iñárritu), best actor (DiCaprio) — but all I was thinking was, ‘Oh God, please let

Michael Tanner

In two minds

There are some operas, as there are some people, that it is impossible to establish a settled relationship with, and in my case Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is one of them, in fact by far the most pressing one. I never know in advance how I’m going to react to it, and to some extent the actual performance I see is not the determining factor. I’d like, just once, to see the play and find out how I reacted to that. For Debussy offers such a vivid and sometimes perplexing counterpoint to Maeterlinck’s words that one’s reactions to the characters and their actions are always in flux — at least

Roy Kelly

Act of Faith

This winter morning between seven and eight, half a white moon still present, a ghost not shining on plentiful frost and mid-January, in the weeks when Christmas might as well be a lifetime ago, distant as dreams or fate; when journalists shore up columns by defining all the factors converging annually to load some blue Monday with the most misery. And waiting on the landing a fortnight too long decorations, boxes of lights, bauble heirlooms, time-travellers tissue wrapped to be put aside, a loft storage act of faith that all will abide another year, one more Christmas, our rooms blessed with what’s known, fresh each time like a song, or

Fiona Wilson

The Lost Word

I know it cold, the scene in the woods, the grey-toned sky, and snow— the sudden clearing in the underbrush through which a fox now steps, her auburn brush a-ziggety-zagging, as if she would erase her trail, though her tracks in the snow are already lost in the layers of snow now spackling the hemlocks, the woodrush, the blackthorn and bracken, the half-seen woods, the snow-brushed woods.

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Moving statues

One of the stranger disputes of the past few weeks has concerned a Victorian figure that has occupied a niche in the centre of Oxford for more than a century without, for the most part, attracting any attention at all. Now, of course, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign is demanding that the sculpture — its subject having been posthumously found guilty of racism and imperialism — should be taken down from the façade of Oriel College. The controversy is a reminder of the fact, sometimes forgotten by the British, that public statues are intensely political. This was clear — until quite recently, at least — when one drove into the

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Coming up for air | 7 January 2016

Gosh what a breath of fresh air was Andrew Davies’s War & Peace adaptation (BBC1, Sundays) after all the stale rubbish that was on over Christmas. There were times when the yuletide TV tedium got so bad that I considered preparing us all a Jonestown-style punchbowl. That way, we would never have had to endure Walliams and Friend nor the special time-travel edition of what everyone is now rightly calling Shitlock. Sherlock has a terminal case of Doctor Who disease. That is, it has become so knowing, so self-referential, so — ugh! — meta that it no longer feels under any obligation to put in the hard yards needed to

Kate Chisholm

Good cop, bad cop

One of the most shocking items of recent news has been the bald statistic that the number of people shot by law enforcement officers in the United States last year was 1,136. Not died by gangland shooting, domestic violence or terrorist attack. But killed by those who are meant to be preventing such deaths. Many of them are black or Hispanic. As if on cue, the World Service this week launched a documentary series to find out why this is happening. What are the deep structural issues that give rise to such inequalities of experience and opportunity in the (supposed) Land of the Free? The first episode of The Compass:

Richard Bratby

Double trouble | 7 January 2016

It’s scene five of Kasper Holten’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Michael Fabiano’s Lensky is alone with a snow-covered branch and his thoughts. Well, not quite alone. At the other side of the stage stands the man he is about to face in a duel: his friend Onegin, who’s apparently arrived ahead of the appointed time and is listening to every word of Lensky’s anguished soliloquy. Except he isn’t: this is the Onegin of the present, looking back on a tragedy in his past. Or possibly imagining it? He can’t, after all, have heard Lensky’s words, for the practical reason that he wasn’t there. Can he? Oh, is that