Arts Reviews Archives

Monday

1 Dec 2014

An art award that actually rewards talent

Before I was asked to go out and cover it, I’d never heard of the Vincent Award for contemporary art. It’s a big deal in the Dutch art world, apparently, a sort of pan-European answer to the Turner Prize. It was set up by a charitable foundation with some deeply serious intent or other, and takes place around Holland every other year. The deal is that 50,000€ is awarded to – and I’m more or less directly quoting the literature here – a stimulating mid-career artist building a discussion platform. It is also, we are told, ‘Europe’s most prestigious art prize’. Are your bullshit detectors sounding off yet? Sure enough,

Thursday

27 Nov 2014

Lara Prendergast

Does Allen Jones deserve a retrospective at the Royal Academy?

It has been a vintage season for mannequins. At the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, an exhibition called Silent Partners looks at the relationship between artist and mannequin, from function to fetish. In London, the Royal Academy is hosting a retrospective of the work of British artist and Academician Allen Jones. Jones, who is now 77, became obsessed with mass-produced imagery of eroticised women. As the show makes clear, he never really got over it. During the 1960s, Jones emerged as a leading pop artist. His contemporaries at the Royal College of Art included Patrick Caulfield and David Hockney, but he was expelled after a year. His big break came in

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

How Hollywood is killing the art of screenwriting

Writing is dead. Long live writing. What do I mean when I say writing is dead? That’s a whole other article, but in brief: cinema killed the novel, email killed the letter, CGI killed cinema and Twitter killed email. The good news is that, despite this bloodbath, writing is actually alive and well and living in Texas. And the reason I know that is that I was there at the end of last month. The Austin Film Festival, where I had a script in the competition, is the only major film festival in the US that focuses primarily on the writers (as opposed to directors or actors). The result is

Digby Warde-Aldam

The Turner Prize shortlist is the worst in its history. Who should have won the award? Nobody

What were you thinking? What? What? What? This is the question I’d ask the people who selected the artists for this year’s Turner Prize. The first time I visited, I thought I must have missed something – perhaps I just wasn’t in the right mood. Surely no arbiter in their right mind could’ve let such hectoring, cultural studies-sanctioned guff slip through the net? So I went again. And nope. I was right the first time – and then some. My first Turner Prize was in 1999, and hyperbolic though it sounds, what I saw there changed the way I thought about nearly everything. Yes, it was showy, sensationalist, in-yer-face. But

Hannah Price

Is theatre more left wing than other art forms? Yes – and so it should be

A couple of nights ago a question arose in our post-show discussion. It is a question I am familiar with. I run Theatre Uncut. We commission writers to create short plays that explore social or political issues. We then release these plays, rights free, to be performed by anyone anywhere for a limited period and stage them in leading theatres across the country. So far this year 328 groups in 25 countries have downloaded the plays. While we don’t advertise our own political persuasion it is pretty obvious to which side we lean: we were set up in response to the cuts. We use the word ‘social’ believing that society

Niru Ratnam

‘Painting is total idiocy’ says Gerhard Richter – and he has some new paintings to prove it

Gerhard Richter has got a website. This is odd in itself – artists only usually have websites when they are young and not represented by a commercial gallery. They then proudly drop their websites when they get signed up to show that they are not in the grubby business of having to promote themselves. Gerhard Richter is 82 and arguably one of the few artists to combine huge commercial success (his 1968 work Domplatz sold for £24 million at Sotheby’s) with critical adoration. This is not the only thing that is odd about his website. The artist is known for the variety of styles he has used in painting, from

Deborah Ross

Paddington review: put your mind at rest – no one gets marmalade up the bum

‘Please look after this bear,’ reads the famous label hanging round Paddington’s neck, and this film does that, admirably, handsomely, endearingly, lovingly and not at all sexily. Such a furore, when the film was awarded a PG instead of a U certificate for ‘sexual references’ — oh no! What have they done to the bear? — but it was just the BBFC being somewhat over-enthusiastic, as it would later admit, when it downgraded it to ‘innuendo’. Still, I wanted to put your mind at rest, wanted you to know the bear is safe and this isn’t Paddington: the Sex Pest or anything, even though that’s a film I’d probably quite

Lloyd Evans

The National’s latest attempt to cheer us up: three hours of poverty porn

Bombay is now called Mumbai by everyone bar its residents, whose historic name (from the Portuguese for ‘beautiful cove’) has been discarded for them by their betters. Near the airport a huge advertising board bearing the slogan ‘Beautiful Forever’ overlooks an alp of discarded junk where homeless paupers crouching in tin shacks toil and slave around the clock to earn a meagre bowl of grey, rat-licked gruel. Welcome to the National’s latest attempt to cheer us all up. The verminous scrapheap teems with cocky adolescents, witty thieves, evil moneylenders and struggling mums. Their stories interweave but the main thread involves a foul-mouthed clash between some shirty Muslims and a crippled

Alexandra Coghlan

ENO’s Gospel According to the Other Mary: great music weighed down by a worthy staging

Terrorism; East-West diplomacy; nuclear war: John Adams’s operas have poured music into the faultlines of 21st-century global politics, and the tremors have been significant. Simply staging The Death of Klinghoffer recently was enough to see the Met picketed on charges of anti-Semitism. While The Gospel According to the Other Mary isn’t going to start any riots, Adams’s latest work marks a turning point, both in the composer’s music and his social mission. No longer content to comment and observe, Adams turns his gaze to the story of the Passion — reclaiming and rewriting the originary narrative of the Christian West. Yes, Gospel is a companion-piece to Adams’s 2000 opera-oratorio El

James Delingpole

Don’t sneer at I’m a Celebrity. The show is teaching us to become model citizens

One of the great benefits of having teenage children is that they force you out of your fuddy-duddy comfort zone. There was no way, for example, that the Fawn and I were ever going voluntarily to watch I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! because we’re snobby old farts who only like history documentaries and University Challenge. But Girl decreed otherwise. That’s why, unlike many of you, but like most of the nation, I am now able to comment knowledgably on how well Michael Buerk is doing, who Tinchy Stryder is, why it was a sensible idea to choose world superbike champion Carl Fogarty to undertake the first bushtucker

Kate Chisholm

Was this Christian pioneer of radio evangelism a fraud?

She was the sequinned star of the airwaves back in the 1920s, the first preacher to realise the potential of the wireless, long before Billy Graham and co. But who now has heard of Aimee Semple McPherson, the radio evangelist? Born in 1890 and raised on a farm in Canada, she was converted as a teenager by a Pentecostal preacher whom she married and joined on his missionary travels. When he died she took up preaching herself, moving to Hollywood and becoming enormously popular as a great healer of the sick and saviour of souls, dressed up for the part in a long white figure-hugging gown adorned with a huge

Anthony Thwaite

Language

And when I landed in America, aged ten, I knew the language was the same. And yet At once the alien words confronted me Like tests I must perform before I passed: Gotten and cootie and the way they said ’erb, and the different gas, and turning on The faucet. That first Christmas, presents wrapped In something called excelsior, just bits Of wood-shavings. I learned fast, but still baulked Later at sniggerings over those secret words Too bad to be explained: jamrag — a pad Of cotton-wool I saw, stained, on the road; And, inexplicably worse, the taunt Thrown at a boy just down the way from

Kieron Winn

First Day of Spring in Bath

Quick-flowing creamy light and all cohering: Faux fanes in gardens, Nash and Wesley’s shades, Gold, gaily weighty houses, rocketing sky, And open hillside turning as I turn, All witnessed through ancestral engineering, Small canny bones and inward fine parades We had no part in, choiceless ear and eye Meting out pleasure I could never earn.

Wednesday

26 Nov 2014

Apollo Magazine

Apollo Awards 2014: Digital Innovation of the Year

This article first appeared in Apollo magazine Apollo’s new Digital Innovation of the Year award commends organisations harnessing digital technology to advance access to, or knowledge of art. The winner will be chosen from the shortlist below and announced in the December issue of Apollo. Find out more about the Apollo Awards. After Dark Tate Britain, London For five nights in August, four robots equipped with cameras roamed the galleries of Tate Britain and live-streamed their journeys to a microsite. A few of the robots’ online observers were also allowed to log in and manoeuvre them by remote control. The project was conceived by London-based design studio The Workers, winners of the first IK Prize (Tate’s

Tuesday

25 Nov 2014

Damian Thompson

What is the truth about Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor and ‘Team Bergoglio’?

A couple of days ago John Bingham, the excellent religious affairs editor of the Telegraph, broke a story that is only now filtering out. I hope he’ll forgive me if I wonder whether he realised just what a big story it was. Bingham wrote: Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the former leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, helped to orchestrate a behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign which led to the election of Pope Francis, a new biography claims … [The book] to be published next month, discloses that there had been a discreet, but highly organised, campaign by a small group of European cardinals in support of Cardinal Bergoglio. The Great Reformer, by

Thursday

20 Nov 2014

Martin Gayford

David Hockney interview: ‘The avant-garde have lost their authority’

‘I just stay here and do my thing,’ David Hockney told me soon after I arrived at his house and studio in Los Angeles this August. ‘I’m not that interested in what happens outside. I live the same way as I have for years. I’m just a worker.’ Hockney has been labouring prodigiously for more than 60 years now, since he entered Bradford School of Art at the age of 16. ‘There is something inside David,’ his assistant Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima noted, ‘that drives him to make pictures.’ In the summer of 2013, after a series of disasters — including a minor stroke and the terrible death of a

Laura Gascoigne

Are the British too polite to be any good at surrealism?

The Paris World’s Fair of 1937 was more than a testing ground for artistic innovation; it was a battleground for political ideologies. The Imperial eagle spread its wings over the German Pavilion; the Soviet hammer swung above the Russian Pavilion; and the Spanish Pavilion unveiled Picasso’s shocking monument to the civilian dead of the bombed city of Guernica, raising the clenched fist of the Spanish Republic in the capital of non-interventionist France. Not everyone was convinced by ‘Guernica’ as art. Anthony Blunt in The Spectator commended Picasso’s political gesture but dismissed the painting as ‘the expression of a private brainstorm’. Piqued on the artist’s behalf, the British surrealist Roland Penrose,

Richard Cork

The story of the first painting to sell for over a million pounds

Nothing could have prepared the art world for the astounding moment in 1970 when, at a Christie’s sale on 27 November, the world auction record for a painting smashed through the million-pound barrier for the very first time. It was Velázquez’s portrait of his assistant Juan de Pareja, and in the week leading up to its sale the international press became excited about the possibility that it would beat the previous record of £821,482, paid in 1961. I had recently become the art critic of the Evening Standard, and its enlightened editor, Charles Wintour, asked me to write a special article about this Velázquez portrait. Propped up on a chair

Damian Thompson

No one in the Bible has been as elaborately misrepresented as Mary Magdalene

How would the real Mary Magdalene have reacted to her posthumous reputation? Not very kindly, one suspects. Our only historical source, the New Testament, does not even hint that she was a prostitute, and she’s unlikely to have been placated by Christians telling her: ‘It’s OK, we think you were a reformed whore.’ No one in the Bible has been so elaborately misrepresented. In addition to not being an ex-prostitute, Mary of Magdala was not Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who anoints the feet of Jesus with ‘about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume’ and then wipes it up with her hair. Nor was

Penelope Houston

The Spectator’s original review of The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols

This review first appeared in The Spectator on 15 August 1968. In the United States The Graduate is already as much a phenomenon as a film. Critics have been treating it as an essential communiqué from the war between the generations; box- office takings are climbing towards the ultimate heights occupied by Julie Andrews and The Sound of Music; across the campuses they seem to have stopped identifying with Clyde Barrow and to be claiming as their own Benjamin Braddock, little Yankee brother of the Morgan who was a suitable case for treatment. Actually, though The Graduate is utterly unlike Bonnie and Clyde as a film, it is perhaps not