Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Tom Holland

Of gods and men

Over the stupefyingly long course of Egyptian history, gods have been born and they have died. Some 4,000 years ago, amid the chaos that marked the fragmentation of the original pharaonic state, an incantation was inscribed on the side of a coffin. It imagined a time when there had been nothing in existence save a single divine Creator. ‘I was alone in the emptiness,’ the god proclaimed, ‘and could find no place to stand.’ Nevertheless, beside him, he could feel the gods that were yet to exist. ‘They were with me, these deities waiting to be born. I came into being and Becoming became.’ The gods emerged, to reign first

Claudia Massie

Hanging offence

Modern Scottish Men, a new exhibition celebrating the achievements of male artists in the 20th century, opens next month in Edinburgh. Men only; no women. Bold! Only joking. That show would never happen today. How could it? Where would an exclusive, specifically male-only exhibition be tolerated these days? A women-only show, on the other hand, would be fair enough; we need to point out that the wee dears can paint too. And so we have Modern Scottish Women: Painters and Sculptors 1885–1965. Should we perhaps be feeling patronised, ladies? The recent death of Brian Sewell has again thrown up his old allegations regarding the inferiority of women artists. ‘Only men

Stephen Bayley

Intelligent design | 29 October 2015

Peter Mandelson, in his moment of pomp, had his portrait taken by Lord Snowdon. He is sitting on a fine modern chair. Mandy would no doubt have been aware of the ancient historic associations, through bishoprics and universities, that chairs have with power. Since it is a chair much admired by architects, Mandy also looks quite cool, although these things are relative. The chair and its footstool are known as Eames Lounge 670 and Eames Ottoman 671, and they were first manufactured in 1956 by Herman Miller of Zeeland, Michigan. Curved plywood shells are veneered with Brazilian rosewood, upholstered with shallow black leather-studded cushions and supported, at a meaningful tilt

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Unreliable evidence

I hadn’t really thought much about pixels before, despite spending a large portion of my day looking at them. After all, a pixel is just a tiny unit in a digital image, and we all tend to look at the bigger picture. But how about this: this humble unit has now become a key feature of drone warfare. Drone-fired missiles have reportedly been developed that can burrow through targeted buildings, and leave a hole that appears smaller than a pixel on publicly available satellite images. This means that drone strikes are often invisible to groups who try to monitor attacks, such as NGOs or the UN. As Eyal Weizman, an

Fred Johnston

Bone Scanning

Perhaps like Superman I will see through walls now that I’ve tanked up on isotopes lighting bruise-blue veins and sparking neon from suspect bones the camera, smoochy as a lover will map out the secret places where little bumpy evils lurk jigsawing until I am like a find in a dig and there it is, the whole of me in middle-age nothing for a lover to caress a Hallowe’en thing with the ugly quiet of the dead. Give this clatter of razor-white calcium a name even as its anonymity claims its non-identity a figure polished up from a mass grave a chip in the skull where the bullet went in

Ismene Brown

Wherefore art thou Romeo?

You always remember your first time, don’t you? And in ballet one imagines that Juliet wants to remember her first Romeo as a thunderclap. So the Royal Ballet’s director Kevin O’Hare, for reasons best known to himself, gives the most exciting new young star the Royal Ballet has seen for years the role of Juliet and…Matthew Golding as Romeo. And so it was that Francesca Hayward’s mesmerising debut in this most prized of all Royal ballerina roles will be remembered as a bomb exploding in a vacuum. This Juliet will have to hunt for a new Romeo to find her match; she will have better nights to remember than that

Alexandra Coghlan

Irish ayes

It’s Halloween, and right on lightning-flash cue enters an operatic ghost story exhumed from the grave of long-since-buried works. You couldn’t hope for more discerning grave-robbers than Wexford Festival Opera, however, who have long made it their mission to bring forgotten operas back to life. Mascagni’s Guglielmo Ratcliff is a proper blood-on-the-tartan gothic thriller, all duels, doomed lovers, fainting heroines and family curses, with a score as fleshy with tunes as the composer’s more famous Cavalleria rusticana — think Lucia di Lammermoor without the fey bel canto warblings. So why so long neglected? There are no musical mad wives lurking in Guglielmo Ratcliff’s attic, but there are more than a

Deborah Ross

Shaken, not stirred

Spectre is the 24th film in the Bond franchise, the fourth starring Daniel Craig, the second directed by Sam Mendes, and the first at not much of anything. Nothing new to report, in other words. It probably delivers what the die-hard fans want, but it is not like Casino Royale or Skyfall (no one talks about Quantum of Solace, by the way, because it’s assumed everyone involved was drunk) as it doesn’t deliver to those of us who never liked Bond, but then discovered that we did. Where has Bond’s interior landscape gone? Where is his woundedness? Where is the emotional heft? Who might we actually care about here? At

James Delingpole James Delingpole

DVF worship

Girl is back for half-term so I’ve been able to watch nothing but crap on TV this week. Some of you will say, ‘Oh come on! You pay the bills, so you get to control the remote.’ But that’s not how things work when you’ve got a teenage girl at home. Especially not one whose ankle you have been responsible for breaking. So crap, I’m afraid, is what I’m going to have to review. Not, it must be said, that the crap has all been crap. House of DVF (E! Online), for example. I’ve mentioned it before and the reason I’m mentioning it again is the matchless insights it offers

Kate Chisholm

Battle fatigue

Can anyone explain this sudden enthusiasm for Agincourt, that unexpected victory over the French, now being celebrated, or rather commemorated, on radio, on digital, online? It was so weird to switch on Radio 4 on Sunday morning (which just happened to be St Crispin’s Day, the day on which the battle was fought) to discover that even Sunday Worship was being devoted to commemorating one of the bloodiest battles in that most bloodthirsty period. The service, old-fashioned Matins, came from the Chapel Royal at St James’s, and apparently the priests, choristers and vestrymen from that chapel were singing on the battlefield alongside Henry V in October 1415, when the English

Ian Harrow

In Other Eyes

Someone to trust with parcels, because he’s ‘always in’; the character who locks the gate at night and lingers to make that one-too-many joke; who isn’t sure sometimes what has issued from the opening of his mouth; whose wet shoe lets out a squeal as he fills the kettle with a rising note; one of those lonely bigots, perhaps — remnant of a lost or withered habitat — part of the daylight burial of the living old.

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: the novel that John Lennon might have written (plus: martian poetry)

The latest challenge was to submit an extract from a novel written by a rock star of your choosing. I was pleased that Adrian Fry went for that genius storyteller Tom Waits although, as Morrissey’s recent stinker demonstrates, being able to write decent song lyrics is no guarantee of literary success (the Guardian’s Michael Hann spoke for many when he described the pope of mope’s novel as ‘an unpolished turd of a book, the stale excrement of Morrissey’s imagination’.) Many of you simply strung song lyrics together to create a narrative, which, while expertly done in many cases — ‘It was 11:59: she felt blue as she looked out of

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Repetitive but compelling: Giacometti at the National Portrait Gallery reviewed

One day in 1938 Alberto Giacometti saw a marvellous sight on his bedroom ceiling. It was ‘a thread like a spider’s web, but made of dust’, an object that was both ‘very, very fine’ and in constant motion, like a snake except that ‘no animal’, he thought, had ever made such movements: ‘light and sweeping and always different’. This was, you might say, a revelation of the beauty that lay in extreme thinness and fragility. In Giacometti: Pure Presence at the National Portrait Gallery you see that process of attenuation occurring, in different ways, again and again in his art. In a bronze bust of his younger brother Diego, from

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Spectre: less coherent, less fun, and with a swiz of a Bond girl

Quite the oddest sensation last night at the first public screening at the Odeon, Leicester Square, of the new James Bond movie, Spectre, was being at the heart of a really big gathering where no one had a mobile phone. All the smartphones were confiscated at the door for fear of piracy and the spectacle of London’s finest not knowing what to do with their hands was quite something; some people positively talked to each other. The downside was the scrum at the end to retrieve them. The other odd thing was the feeling of being a bit out of sync with the rest of the gathering. At the same

Michael Tanner

What’s the point of the Met’s new Otello?

The new production of Verdi’s Otello at the Met, with set designs by Ed Devlin, did make me wonder, as I watched it in the Cambridge Picture House, why they had bothered, since in no respect does it improve on many traditional productions. The sets are kind of sumptuous, but then what looked like a solid wooden or stone building turns out to be perspex, with neon lighting, and liable to slide around for no obvious reason. The costumes are suitably period, lavish, spotless. From the cinema-goer’s point of view, the most irritating thing is that the camera remains almost always on the person singing. This is especially exasperating in

Niru Ratnam

Cut funding to sport (which we’re no good at) and give it to the arts (which we are)

This morning Art Review announced its ‘Power 100’, a list of movers and shakers of the international art world. Last year the list was topped by Sir Nicholas Serota who beat off the likes of Larry Gagosian, Ai Weiwei and Jeff Koons. The reason behind Serota’s position was Tate’s considerable international influence across Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Art Review’s editor Mark Rappolt says, ‘it operates an institution as a network of patrons and interests that spread far beyond the limits of its physical building.’ Serota has slipped down the rankings a little this year but he’s been joined near the top by the dynamic directors of the Serpentine, Hans Ulrich

Katrina Naomi

Mentor

for Marisa Foz del Barrio You divorced on the first day it was legal, were imprisoned three times as a Communist under Franco, still dyed your hair blonde and – at the age I am now – still lived with your parents’ bourgeois furniture (those impossible beds), the drapes and porcelain from another era, one you’d rebelled against but kept close by, as if to understand yourself better. I think of you sitting under your father’s army awards, a carpet-style brocade over the table and over your knees, a lamp at your feet, like an old woman, your rollie constantly giving up in the green ash tray. And me, curled

James Walton

The Last Kingdom is BBC2’s solemnly cheesy answer to Game of Thrones

The opening caption for The Last Kingdom (BBC2, Thursday) read ‘Kingdom of Northumbria, North of England, 866 AD’. In fact, though, an equally accurate piece of scene-setting might have been ‘Britain, Saturday teatime, the 1970s’. The series, based on the novels by Bernard Cornwell, has been described in advance as the BBC’s answer to Game of Thrones — and, as various thesps in furs and long beards began to attack each other with swords, it wasn’t hard to see why. Yet, apart perhaps from the level of the violence, the programme’s real roots seem to belong to less sophisticated (and less expensive) shows than that: the kind set firmly in

Kate Chisholm

What’s it like to talk at length to a serial killer?

‘I’ve never met a human being who doesn’t appreciate being listened to, being taken seriously,’ said Asbjorn Rachlew, the Norwegian homicide detective who one afternoon in the summer of 2011 found himself listening to Anders Breivik, who had just killed 77 people in a shoot-out on an island near Oslo. His job, Rachlew explained, was to get Breivik to talk, but not ‘by faking it, through manipulation etc.’. You have to show real concern, he said, to get the information you need, because you have to remember that suspects, too, like Breivik, are also traumatised. ‘Banging the table and screaming etc. doesn’t help communication…’ Rachlew’s frankness, his plain speaking, as

Deborah Ross

Self-pitying, despairing, often delusional: the real Marlon Brando

Listen to Me Marlon is a documentary portrait of Marlon Brando that has him burbling into your ear for 102 minutes, but if you have to have someone burbling in your ear for 102 minutes — and there is no law saying it’s obligatory — you could do a lot worse. This isn’t one of your regular documentaries. There are no talking heads, and it’s not blah-blah-blah and then he did this and then he did that and then his BMI got ridiculous, and so on. Instead, it is based on the hundreds of hours of personal audio tapes Brando made in his lifetime, which haven’t been heard until now,