Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Alistair Elliot

The Old Man Comes Out With an Opinion

This long orchestral piece records a day the composer spent one summer meditating in Dibnah’s yard on the sounds of dereliction, or possibly the dereliction of sound: the settlement of rust, the flake and drift toward the earth of forged and hammered things, the creak of shiny flanges in the wind, and the occasional crash of martial metal as boys dribbled a biscuit box along between the ornamental tetanus hedges of Fred’s Versailles, parterres of ferrous oxide. Sometimes I wish that Fred’s new crush-compactor had crumpled the composer (violin solo) and his jalopy (piano, timpani) in one bright ingot, multicoloured foil (cymbals), and hoyed the lot in the canal (a

Tuesday

Sebastian Payne

How much does a degree improve your lifetime earnings?

What do you say to an arts graduate? Hamburger and fries, please. It’s an old joke but one that still rings true as students consider the value of a university education. A new survey from the graduate recruitment site Totaljobs.com today suggests that 40 per cent of graduates are still looking for work six months after graduating, whilst a quarter are still unemployed a year later. The news isn’t much for those who manage to bag a job – the latest ONS’ employment figures suggest that nearly half of graduates who have found work are in jobs that don’t require degrees. But even if the student of today takes the

Thursday

David Blackburn

Take a look at John Maynard Keynes’s armchair

Discoveries: Art, Science and Exploration at Two Temple Place (until 27 April) is like a giant cabinet of curiosities. Maps, gizmos and memorabilia are spread across two floors of this glorious high-Victorian building on the Embankment. There are drawings from doomed polar expeditions, bones and teeth of fish from the Woodwardian Collection (see above), early botanical diagrams, hoards of medieval gold, the loot of empire (the Sufi snakes-and-ladders board in ebony and mother-of-pearl is memorable) and John Maynard Keynes’s armchair. The exhibits are drawn from the eight museums of the University of Cambridge. Much is made of the fact that this is the first time the university’s museums have collaborated

Clarissa Tan

So long, Scandinavia. Bonjour, Benelux! 

So long, Scandinavia. Bonjour, Benelux! BBC4, your subtitle-friendly channel, has filled the hole left by Nordic-noir The Bridge with Belgian crime drama Salamander (Saturday). At first, I thought this might involve a series of murder mysteries set in Flemish country houses, all solved by a dapper English detective called Horace Parrot. Not to be. Salamander is a 12-parter that kicks off with a break-in at the very heart of evil, a private bank in Brussels. The robbery eventually lands incorruptible police investigator Paul Gerardi (Filip Peeters) in the midst of a dangerous conspiracy, as he is chased by all manner of crooks keen to protect secrets they’d kept in their

Peter Hoskin

Bury every copy of Monuments Men in mines across Europe, so George Clooney can try again

You know that old quip ‘I’m not just a pretty face’? I always thought it was meant to be said tongue-in-cheek, with an undertone of self-deprecation. Surely it’s not for those literal instances when a really beautiful person does something really, really smart. It’s for when those of us on the middle-to-lower rungs of the loveliness ladder have flashes of minor inspiration. And so, ‘I’m not just a pretty face.’ Like a joke. Hahahahaha. But what would it mean if George Clooney — ol’ salt-and-pepper-spit-curl George — said ‘I’m not just a pretty face’? The reason I ask is that he, or at least the character he’s playing, does just

Giannandrea Poesio

Bach is made for dancing

It appears that J.S. Bach’s music is to theatre-dance what whipped cream is to chocolate. Masterworks such as Trisha Brown’s MO, George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco and a plethora of less-known, though equally acclaimed compositions owe a great deal to the giant of baroque music. Wayne McGregor is the most recent addition to this illustrious roster of successful Bach-inspired dance-makers with Tetractys —The Art of Fugue, which world-premièred last Friday. Set, as the title implies, to Michael Berkeley’s orchestration of The Art of Fugue, played on the piano by Kate Shipway, the new work stands out for the intensity of the dialogue between music and dance. Linear beauty dominates a majestic

Anna Picard

Manon Lescaut is twerking — should we applaud or shudder? 

Last seen clambering over the MDF wheelchair ramps of Laurent Pelly’s Royal Opera House production of Jules Massenet’s opéra comique, Manon the minx, the ‘sphinx étonnant’ of Abbé Prévost’s 1731 novel Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, reappears in two guises as part of Welsh National Opera’s Fallen Women season; as the heroine of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut and the antiheroine of Hans Werner Henze’s Boulevard Solitude, both directed by Mariusz Trelinski. The connection between her story and La traviata, the third opera in WNO’s season, is deeper than a coincidence of job descriptions. In La dame aux camélias, the source for Verdi’s opera, Marguerite’s lover, Armand, buys

Andrew Lambirth

‘Castiglione: Lost Genius’ loses his genius in a sea of brown

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609–64) was, I must admit, unknown to me until I visited this show, the only Castiglione I was properly aware of being the one who wrote The Book of the Courtier published in 1528; clearly not the same man. The artist Castiglione was a tempestuous character, always losing his temper and getting into fights. He tried to throw his sister off a roof and is said to have committed murder; perhaps more importantly for his artistic career, when he was at the height of his popularity in Genoa, he slashed to shreds a painting commissioned for the Doge of Venice, and fled the city in which he

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Putin: ‘Oi, Europe, you’re a bunch of poofs’

Sochi 2014 is the least wintry Winter Olympics ever. Yes, there’s a bit of downhill shimmying going on in the slalom. And a few figure skaters are pirouetting around the rink. Midair daredevils, with their feet lashed to planks of bendy plastic, are performing spectacular twirls and somersaults and crashes. And there are speed freaks on tea trays racing down ice-packed gulleys in tribute to the Hadron Collider. But the real action is off-piste and off-chute. It’s a political grudge match. Two implacable foes are angrily denouncing each other as shameful and perverted barbarians. The Hope Theatre’s verbatim drama, Sochi 2014, taps into this febrile mood with a documentary history

Roderick Conway-Morris

What Emperor Augustus left us

The symbol engraved on Augustus’ signet ring was a sphinx. Julian the Apostate described him as ‘a chameleon’. He seized power declaring himself the saviour of the Roman Republic, but in the process abolished it. He ruled as an autocrat but maintained the fiction that he was no more than the Republic’s First Citizen — and left as his legacy a new system of imperial government that was to continue for another 400 years in the West and until 1453 in Constantinople in the East. This year marks the 2,000th anniversary of Augustus’ death in 14 AD, on the 19th of the month by then named in his honour. His

Michael Henderson

And the prize for most fatuous awards ceremony goes to…

‘Prizes are for boys,’ said Charles Ives, the American composer, upon receiving the Pulitzer in 1947, ‘and I’ve grown up now.’ He was using humour to make a serious point, but it would be lost on many people today. Never has there been a lusher time for self-congratulation; when all, as in Alice in Wonderland, must have prizes. Not all prizes are bad. Nathan Filer, who collected the Costa last month for his first novel, The Shock of the Fall, was granted the kind of recognition that evades most first-time authors. The Costa, formerly the Whitbread, has a reputable tradition that values quality of writing above commercial considerations. Good for

Bernard O'Donoghue

Meeting in the Small Hours

He was there again in the small hours: not this time in a dream, but in a dream of dreaming. Even so the two of us looked aside, stuck for something to discuss that was not a matter of life and death, so we fell back on football and the elections. Then suddenly he started talking: talking as he’d never talked in his life. He knew it wasn’t wise to take up cigarettes again at the wedding the day before; and driving back the engine misfired once, or twice. And then I started talking too. I told him about two other recurrent dreams: the first that I was smoking again

Thursday

Niru Ratnam

How to fight back when ‘public art’ is not for the public

In recent years contemporary art and regeneration have gone hand in hand. Works such as Antony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’ have been visible and celebrated examples of regeneration. So when, last year, Southwark Council decided to sell Elephant and Castle’s seemingly unloved Heygate Estate (above) to Lend Lease for development into new homes, it seemed inevitable that public art would be utilised. Artangel, the country’s most respected public art commissioning agency, announced plans for a work by the artist Mike Nelson that would take the form of a pyramid made from the estate’s building materials as it was dismantled. James Lingwood, Artangel’s co-director, stated that ‘the project would mark

Kate Chisholm

Some things are better heard on radio, than seen

A double dose of BBC1 drama at the weekend (Silent Witness, Casualty) left me wondering whether there’s a link between the falling crime figures announced last week and the levels of blood and bestiality now showing nightly on TV. With so much violence available at the switch of a button, who needs to create their own? (Bear with me, the connection with radio will soon become apparent.) What surprised me was not just the amount of violence but also the lack of any real motivation. It was all completely unbelievable (in spite of the best efforts of the make-up department) and meaningless, and as a consequence mind-numbingly dull. Which is

James Delingpole James Delingpole

How did Colonel Gaddafi get away with such evil for so long?

What a vile piece of work Colonel Gaddafi was. For some of you, perhaps, this will be a statement of the glaringly obvious. But I suspect there will be many others for whom, like me, this week’s Storyville documentary on the barbarity of his regime — Mad Dog: Gaddafi’s Secret World (BBC4, Monday) — was something of a revelation. Sure, we’d all heard about the funny stuff: the time John Simpson went to see him and he farted noisily (Gaddafi, not Simpson) through the interview; the ridiculous outfits; the bullet-proof Bedouin-style tent that he insisted on bringing on his last world tour, complete with live camels to graze decoratively outside.

Deborah Ross

Dallas Buyers Club – Matthew McConaughey gives the best performance of anyone’s career

Although you’ll have heard that Dallas Buyers Club is fantastic and Matthew McConaughey gives the performance of his career, I know you won’t believe it unless you hear it directly from me so here you are: it is fantastic and Matthew McConaughey gives the performance of his career. In fact, it may be the best performance of anyone’s career. It’ll blow your tiny minds. It blew my tiny mind. ‘That blew my tiny mind,’ I even said afterwards, so it has to be true. Dallas Buyers Club is based on the real story of Ron Woodroof, a difficult hero. Ron, when we first encounter him, is attending a rodeo and

Michael Tanner

Don Giovanni at his unsexiest

Every time there’s a new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni I have to ask the same question: why is this opera, which 50 years ago was considered an unqualified masterpiece and an invariable success in the theatre, now always a wretched failure when it is staged? I would hesitate to say that the new production by Kasper Holten is the worst I have seen, since the competition is so intense. But it certainly ranks among the worst, and is all the more infuriating because a mainly excellent cast has been assembled. Anyone who longed for the previous production, by Francesca Zambello, to be supplanted will be saying, ‘Come back, all

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A World Elsewhere hints it’s about Bill Clinton. But it’s about Al Gore

Why, oh why, the producers ask, are the national press so reluctant to cover the London fringe? The snag is that a national paper has to justify a report about a play produced in a Deptford yoga studio, or in a Wandsworth priest hole, to readers living in Liskeard, Inverness, Great Yarmouth and Carlisle. Rather than changing the habits of the newspapers, the producers might change the way they select plays. A few years ago, a modest little venue in Hoxton mounted a satire called The Death of Margaret Thatcher. The national papers dispatched their finest critics and they were joined by political commentators from around the world. The play

Andrew Lambirth

‘Uproar!’ The Ben Uri gallery punches above its weight

Last year saw the centenary of the London Group, a broad-based exhibiting body set up in a time of stylistic ferment in the art world as an independent alternative to the closed shops of the academies. Formed from the amalgamation of the Allied Artists’ Association and the Camden Town Group, it boasted such notable founder members as Lucien Pissarro and Walter Sickert, while Jacob Epstein is credited with naming it. Inevitably, the London Group has gone through innumerable highs and lows in its 100-year history, yet the mere fact that it still exists is testament to the enduring need for such an independent collective. The Ben Uri, itself an outsider

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

If Philip Seymour Hoffman wasn’t happy, what hope is there for us?

Celebrity deaths have no decorum. From Elvis on his toilet to Whitney face down in her bathtub, their last moments sit alongside their songs, or films, or their drunken stumbles out of nightclubs. Kurt Cobain, my teenage idol, had been dead from a shotgun blast to the mouth for — what? Days? Hours, even? — before the newspapers started running photographs of his Converse-clad feet visible through the doorway of the shed in which he died. Fans would pass them around. Weird, really. If a favourite uncle dies in his bed, you don’t go asking your cousin for a Polaroid, do you? Within a day of the death of Philip