Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

The sofa that became a work of art

Last week on Front Row (Radio 4) the singer Joyce DiDonato recalled the advice she gave the new graduates of the Juilliard School, just about to embark on their professional careers in music. It’s a hard life. They’re asked to be perfect, which of course is unattainable. She wanted to encourage them to keep going, to persist in pursuing their art, despite the inevitable phases of discouragement and disappointment. Because, she says, art has the power to build bridges across cultures, religions, political divides. ‘It teaches empathy.’ She was referring particularly to musical art, but what she was saying applies also to radio. The intimacy and immediacy of listening create

Peter Scupham

Mynheer Wouwermans

From the long ride, fresh trees licked by enough blue light to cross-patch antique trousers, we come at last past casks head-dressed with tulips to this puzzling concourse where white signs agree to open a house decked by strangers with an attentive love. ‘Mynheer, do you remember? Yes, twenty-five years.’ Our polls are whiter than old snow but your children are fresh as paint, rocking softly to a lullaby sung by a Dutch doll in a carved bed. Shall we make solemn playtime, hiding our wiser faces in crimson velvets, rusty tassels? Over there, in the English pub — the Wagon and Horses — a soft tom-tom thicks the air

Peter Hoskin

20,000 Days On Earth: is Nick Cave the missing link? Or the next stage in evolution?

Inspired by Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never (2011), Katy Perry’s Part of Me (2012) and One Direction’s This Is Us (2013), Nick Cave has released a documentary about himself. No doubt he wanted to prove that this old dog has new tricks. The whole movie is shot in candy-crushed 3D to appeal to the emteevee-ohmigod generation. He talks about how great it was to work with Rihanna and Ludacris: ‘The thing about thoseguys is…’ Nah, sorry, I’m just kidding with you. None of that is true, apart from the bit about Nick Cave releasing a documentary about himself. It’s called 20,000 Days on Earth. And, much like the man himself,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

If you have teenage boys who loathe the very idea of theatre, send them to The Play That Goes Wrong

It’s taken a while but here it is. The Play That Goes Wrong is like Noises Off, but simpler. Michael Frayn’s cumbersome backstage farce asked us to follow the actors’ personal stories as well as their on-stage foul-ups, and the surfeit of detail proved a bit of a brain-scrambler. This is a badly rehearsed thriller played by useless amateurs on a disintegrating set. Good clean knockabout. Some of the background information is puzzling. The troupe calls itself the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society even though polytechnics no longer exist. And their decision to put on a creaky 1920s murder mystery seems a little perverse. Aside from the booby-trapped props and collapsing

Connie Bensley

Mr Dixon

I can’t think of anyone else still alive who knew him, and could reminisce with me about his special kindness, his panache — (ice-white shirts, cufflinks which, looking back, were just a trace too gleaming) his well-known love of the stage and his dramatic tours round the domain he cherished — the Department of Dental Products. I think of him with affection, even love. He gave years of his life to sales graphs and managerial meetings. He settled me soothingly at my first typewriter and when we sat next to each other at the firm’s Christmas party, he said: Don’t call me Sir, we’re off duty now, and I think

Tuesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Tom Cruise deserves our support and pity

These are your lives. Yard Theatre, until 4 October Tom Cruise. That’s the big offer from a newish venue, the Yard Theatre, lurking on the fringes of Hackney Wick. The 80-seat space is located in an upwardly mobile sprawl of discarded warehouses and asset-stripped factories reinvented as artisan boozers. You can get there by train, cab or bike but the best people arrive by canoe. They tether their fibreglass tubs beside the Olympic Stadium and stroll along the canal overlooked by the knotted weirdness of the AcelorMittal Orbit which resembles a giant treble clef made of bubble gum. Inside, the venue is sensibly arranged in a horse-shoe configuration. The stage is roomy

Monday

Geoff Brown

Is Anna Nicole’s absurd life worth our while? Not as much as Otello’s

Otello ENO, in rep until 17 October Anna Nicole Royal Opera, in rep until 24 September So how did London’s two big opera companies launch their new seasons last week? Not perhaps in the way you might expect. Decked with pink balloons and the acrid smell of popcorn, the Royal Opera House waved the garish contemporary flag with Mark-Anthony Turnage and Richard Thomas’s Anna Nicole of 2011, revived before a youthful opening-night crowd attracted by specially subsidised tickets. It was left to the friskier English National Opera to offer a new production of sober mien and an audience containing some people who dressed up. Standard repertoire, too: the opera was Verdi’s Otello — filled

Friday

Stephen Bayley

Four-wheel-drives are to ISIS what longbows were to the English at Agincourt

What exactly, I found myself wondering, would jihadists do without modern four-wheel-drives? Car ads are customarily shot on the French Riviera’s Grande Corniche or on a very particular road in Tuscany that all art directors know. But the sight of 43 brand new and coruscatingly white Toyota Hiluxes rolling across the infernal Syrian-Iraq border added a hard-edge nightmare venue to the ad-man’s soft-focus dreamscape. If there’s a micron of comfort to be had from the horrors of the Middle East, it’s that the medievalising ISIS has a keen admiration for the consumer goods their despised enemies manufacture. In an earlier conflict, The New York Times called the same Hilux ‘the ride

Thursday

Alasdair Palmer

Michelangelo’s vision was greater even than Shakespeare’s

It is 450 years since the birth of William Shakespeare. The anniversary has been hard to avoid in this country, which is entirely appropriate. Shakespeare helped to shape not only our language but also our conception of character and our understanding of the human condition. Our experience of love, of facing death, of loss and of glory, contains echoes of Shakespeare, even if we hardly ever read him or see his plays. It is also 450 years since the death of Michelangelo. That anniversary has hardly been noticed here — although Michelangelo had as great an impact on visual arts in the West as Shakespeare has had on its literature.

Daniel Jackson

How independence will impoverish Scottish culture

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_11_Sept_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, Tom Holland and Leah McLaren discuss how we can still save the Union” startat=50] Listen [/audioplayer]An explosion of confetti will greet the announcement of Scottish independence. This isn’t another one of Alex Salmond’s fanciful promises, but an installation by a visual artist named Ellie Harrison. She wants Scotland to become a socialist republic. She has placed four confetti cannons in Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery. They will only be fired in the event of a Yes vote. Most artists in Scotland favour independence. Harrison’s installation is typical of the pretentious agitprop they produce. This isn’t a uniquely Scottish problem. ‘Nationalist’ art is by definition functional: it promotes

Andrew Lambirth

The Imperial War Museum finds a deadly place to display first world war masterpieces

The Imperial War Museum has reopened after a major refit and looks pretty dapper, even though it was overrun by hordes when I visited (it was still the school holidays). There’s a new and effective restaurant, inevitably, but also a new sense of spaciousness. I am not concerned here with weapons of mass destruction, merely with the record of the damage they inflict. They keep the art up on the third floor of the museum, and currently have a major display devoted to the first world war, which they claim is the largest of its type for nearly a century. It’s full of expected names, shown in some detail. But

Connie Bensley

Sometimes it’s Better to Give than to Receive

I can see your teeth clench with rage at the gift I have pressed on you, which manoeuvres you into the role of grateful recipient of my unctuously offered, expensively wrapped and poisonously unwelcome offering. It’s hard to say if you are smiling or snarling as you turn to extol the wrapping paper.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Can the Scots really be as small-minded, mistrustful and chippy as Spoiling suggests?

Referendum fever reaches Stratford East. Spoiling, by John McCann, takes us into the corridors of power in Holyrood shortly after a triumphant Yes vote. We meet a foul-mouthed bruiser named Fiona whose strident views and vivid language have propelled her into the public eye during the referendum battle. Her reward is Scotland’s foreign ministry. The most obvious and striking thing about Fiona is her personal ghastliness. A coarse, petulant show-off, over-endowed with self-belief, she has no wit, geniality or political intelligence. Asked how she feels about the birth of Scotland’s liberty, she rasps out her reply like a seagull with tonsilitis. ‘Rebirth!’ Her mistrust of Westminster is deeply engrained. ‘They’re

Peter Hoskin

Ignore the simplistic politics, Pride will make you laugh and cry

1984 and all that. Which side were you on? The side of Margaret Thatcher, her hairdo and person standing rigid against a rising tide of industrial activism and British declinism? Or the side of the miners, socking it to the Tory scum and their jackbooted adjutant, Johnny Law? There’s no doubting which side this new movie Pride is on. It’s about a curious episode in community relations when a group of gay people from London decided to fundraise and rabble-rouse on behalf of the striking miners in Wales. It starts with a shot of a red banner — ‘Thatcher Out!’ — hanging from a council-block window. And it ends with

Kate Chisholm

Warhol’s ‘time capsules’ contain everything from toenails to previously unseen paintings worth millions

‘I don’t know what I think,’ says Lenny Henry, echoing what many of us who were listening were probably also puzzling over. ‘Part of me thinks it’s art by the sheer fact that an artist has decided that something like this should happen for the amusement and intrigue of his fans…’ Henry was at the museum in Pittsburgh dedicated to the life and work of Andy Warhol. Among the collection, now displayed on seven floors of an old warehouse converted into a glittering catacomb of Sixties and Seventies style, are 610 boxes, dated and sealed by Warhol and designated by him as ‘time capsules’. These, though, are not the kind

James Walton

Now for the really tricky question: can Only Connect survive BBC2?

For some of us, the biggest TV question of recent weeks hasn’t been how Newsnight is doing without Jeremy Paxman, British drama’s fightback against American competition or even the treatment of Diana Beard by the editors of The Great British Bake Off. Far more important is whether a small BBC4 quiz show can survive a move to BBC2 with its heroic defiance of almost all television fashions intact. Since 2008, Only Connect has been the obvious place to head after University Challenge on a Monday night. Host Victoria Coren Mitchell achieves a neat balance between mild self-satire and an unashamed pride in the show’s cleverness. (More oddly, she also pretends

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Russell Brand is duller than even the grimmest political interview

I have just spent a few moments in bed with the popular comedian Russell Brand and I have to say that I enjoyed it hugely. We did not have full penetrative sex, sadly, and when I say ‘in bed with’ I mean it sort of figuratively, or vicariously. What happened is that I watched Russell’s latest address to the world, which he delivers regularly from his bedroom — complete with those by now familiar mangled, high-camp estuarial vowels, tortuously pretentious grammar and infantile, uninformed narcissistic political opinions. Russell sits on the bed and tells us about the state of the world, man, and how it’s all, like, shit, and this stuff

Catherine Ormell

A Theatre Supper

I don’t know why it’s become important to me: the idea of a theatre supper at home? Maybe it’s a methodology for life that after decades of practice we can make it what we wish it to be: modest yet appetising, practical yet with an element of excitement pending? After so many supermarket visits made on foot or online, when the whole scene palls, and there are queues at the local eatery and we feel we are just jades pecking at the window… then our new-found theatre supper gives us a clue via an authentic half-bottle and Jansson’s Temptation. We might actually go to the theatre this time. Or not.

Colin Falck

Left

Who is there left that you can talk to? Days go by. ‘Friendless, deserted’ (The Beggar’s Opera?) — left in the lurch (what lurch?) — you languish. Time to make plans to die? You box up some age-stained letters, set aside more stuff, but your heart’s not in it. Tomorrow will be soon enough. Another of your thoughtless friends falls off the perch. Those language-teachers, those sergeant-majors, those not-quite-wives — how old they must all be now! And those types at school: grumbling, frowning, living their boxed-up lives — Mr Cartwright-Brown would be a hundred and thirty-nine. All gone… Time to wait out our world’s decline? (Wait even longer and

Peter Scupham

Out of Reach

Think of a hand-slip, a spun summit bothered by mist, the whirr and thrum of dark metals, a stranded face minding a gap which widens, widens, leaves one candle to burn in silence, late summer wings to char on glass, unspoken words to spell their spells forwards, backwards — fine fruit to hang in armouries of thorn for the devil to spit on.