Arts Reviews

Kon-Tiki is a dramatisation of Thor Heyerdahl’s 4,300-mile, 101-day journey across the Pacific by balsa-wood raft, which took place in 1947, and was a remarkable achievement, unlike this film, which so isn’t. True, it does what it says on the tin. There’s an ocean, and it’s traversed. There is jeopardy, most notably in the form of a big plasticky shark. But it’s played as such a straight-up-and-down, old-fashioned, formulaic adventure that it lacks any intimacy or feeling and almost can’t be bothered with its own characters. Consequently, it’s as bland as it is blond, and it is exceptionally blond. As styled by Th’Oreal, I guess you could even say. To

Janet Suzman’s throwaway comment about the theatre being ‘a white invention’ has attracted a storm of opportunistic derision. What Dame Janet may have meant was this. Theatre is gossip ceremonially presented. And the dramatic structures devised by the Athenians in the 5th century BC raised the form to such a pitch of excellence that the offspring cultures of Ancient Greece acquired a head start that has never been relinquished. A harmless footnote. But her timing was unlucky. A day earlier the head of Arts Council England, Peter Bazalgette, ordered the 670 arts bodies he supports to get their skates on and make a bigger push for ‘diversity’. He announced a ‘Creative

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,

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