Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

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

Adam Taylor

Zeteticism

Whatever savants say, the world is flat, not round; the ships that crowd the bay are for its limit bound. Their cargoes likewise, all consigned to one address, at the world’s waterfall plunge into nothingness. The brightwork, the white sails unfurled against the sky, the million knots and nails for such a voyage, why?

Sunday

Sebastian Payne

Philip Seymour Hoffman found dead in New York

The Oscar-award winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has been found dead,  aged just 46, in his New York apartment this evening. According to reports, he appears to have died from a drug overdose. Hoffman was known to have battled  substance abuse for several years. Hoffman was popular with The Spectator’s critics. Last April Clarissa Tan wrote that Hoffman gave a ‘stellar turn’ as Robert Gelbart in A Late Quarter. As well as finding his directing debut Jack Goes Boating ‘sublime’, our film reviewer Deborah Ross was particularly impressed with Hoffman’s performance  in The Master — writing that Joaquin Phoenix and Hoffman gave ‘two of the most blistering performances you will see for an unspecified time period’: ‘Hoffman, meanwhile,

Friday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

How else would one depict conflict between Sunnis and Shias?

I don’t know if you’ve seen this letter to this week’s edition of the magazine, from a person called Chris Doyle. He is a member of the ‘Council for Arab-British Understanding’ and has taken exception to last week’s cover cartoon. He objects that the drawing of ‘two bearded, large hooked nose, weapon-wielding men’ was a stereotypical way of depicting a possible war between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Yes, you utter idiot. That’s what cartoons do. They look for the easily definable, so that they might have a meaning to people. Would you have preferred the cartoon to be of two people with average sized noses dressed in lounge suits and

Thursday

Liz Anderson

All the fun of the fair | 30 January 2014

The Works on Paper annual fair runs from 6 to 9 February at the Science Museum. Its name is a bit of a giveaway: all art must be on paper. There is a huge range of work on display: early, modern and contemporary watercolours, prints, posters and photographs — from the late-15th century to the present day, with prices ranging from £250 to £75,000. So whether you want to buy a Japanese woodblock print, a series of studies by Edward Burne-Jones or one by Stanley Spencer, a drawing by Picasso, Cézanne or Ben Nicholson, South Kensington is the place to go.

Kate Chisholm

Radio 3 needs to stay relevant, and world music is just the ticket

When my colleague Charles Moore first began accusing Radio 3 of becoming ‘babyish’, and talking down to us as if we’re too ignorant to understand anything complicated, I had to agree. The constant twittering between items, the gimmicky brainteasers and Classical Top Ten are irritating. Those emails and texts from clever-clogs listeners determined to show off what they know, or have performed themselves, or seen on stage are as annoying and pointless as Christmas round-robin letters. But these are all merely sideshows, not the main performance. The real test for the station is whether our musical palates are still being tested, educated, stretched. What we really need to care about

Clarissa Tan

Jeremy Paxman’s Great War is great. But is 2,500 hours of WW1 programming too much?

Why are we so fascinated by the first world war? As its 100th anniversary approaches, we’re already mired in arguments about whether for Britain it was a ‘just war’ or a ‘pointless sacrifice’ of millions of lives. I don’t see why it has to be one or the other. Surely this huge and horrific event held elements of both, and more. If ever there was a time when glory ran alongside absurdity, when courage marched lockstep with catastrophe, this was it. We’re looking back at the Great War as if it were a mental exercise — should it or shouldn’t it have happened? But maybe our fascination is emotional as

Andrew Lambirth

John Craxton was more gifted than the Fitzwilliam show suggests

It is often said of John Craxton (1922–2009) that he knew how to live well and considered this more important than art. Perhaps there is a certain truth in this, but if he really believed it, did he have any business in being an artist? And an artist he undoubtedly was, by temperament and sensibility, as well as by the rich endowment of natural talent. Of course, letting it be known that you think life more important than art is a very good cover for that most debilitating (and paradoxically productive) of besetting fears: self-doubt. Craxton had it in large measure, and it is probably this quality that accounted both

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Sam Mendes’s King Lear is a must-see for masochists

Directors appear to have two design options when approaching a Shakespeare tragedy. Woodstock or jackboot. Woodstock means papal robes, shoulder-length hair and silver Excaliburs gleaming from jewelled belts. Jackboot means pistols, berets, holsters and submachine-guns. Sam Mendes sticks the jackboot into King Lear in an attempt to find ‘a modern understanding of the story’, as he puts it. What this ‘modern understanding’ reveals is that Shakespeare’s opening scene allows the dramatic focus to move between the personal and the political with invisible fluency. Mendes destroys this asset by laying on a televised show trial. Lear’s daughters, surrounded by scowling commandos, are arraigned at miked-up tables as if accused of treason.

Deborah Ross

Can Lance Armstrong squirm? We don’t know because The Armstrong Lie doesn’t make him

Alex Gibney’s The Armstrong Lies is fascinating as far as it goes but it may not go as far as you would like, and may not ask the questions you would like. It’s a documentary portrait of the American cyclist Lance Armstrong: seven-time winner of the Tour de France, worldwide symbol of physical courage (having survived testicular cancer in his twenties), founder of the Livestrong Foundation, which has raised millions for cancer sufferers, and something else. It’ll come to me in a minute. Talk among yourselves. Oh, yes. Cheat. Also, liar. He lived a cheating lie, all day, every day, throughout his sporting career. He lived a cheating lie even

Michael Tanner

Your best YouTube operatic experience ever

Anyone who frequents the internet will have come across YouTube and soon learned that what may have been planned as a quick information-seeking visit turns into several happy hours, as tempting suggestions are made as to what you might also be interested in seeing; another thing leads to yet another; and that is the afternoon gone. There is no more alluring — and of course, one insists to oneself, educational — primrose path than tapping into how a particular operatic aria has been sung by a variety of performers over the decades, so that what started out as a comparison between, say, Anna Netrebko and Renata Scotto as Mimi turns

Robert Gorelangton

The ‘detestable, bombastic, egocentric’ detective — Hercule Poirot lives on

With all the enormous fuss over Sherlock on the telly, David Suchet’s recent retirement from Poirot should not be forgotten. What an incredible innings! The actor finally hung up his patent-leather shoes after a quarter-century of playing the sleuth in 70 stories. The case is not closed for fans, however. Agatha Christie’s Belgian brainbox — to whom a speck of dirt on a cuff is more agonising than a bullet wound — has already returned. He is on stage in the form of Robert Powell, famous for once playing Jesus of Nazareth. The play is Black Coffee, Christie’s first play and the only one with Hercule Poirot in it. Poirot,

Kate Bingham

Tulips

My love arrived with tulips, ‘ten for a fiver’, picked up from the supermarket at the end of the street. Fresh off the plane, perhaps he would have preferred to wash his hands but stood in his coat in the kitchen watching me cut through the cellophane and crush the stems with the stainless heel of the bread-knife. All across Holland trucks were going to and fro between the flower farms and distribution facilities rocking their harvest to sleep over good Dutch tarmac so every bunch could be in store before it opened its eyes, and even as I filled the vase, people on nights were dumping crates of slender-headed

Gwyneth Lewis

Ornithology

‘The Wood Thrush can sing a duet by itself, using Two separate voices,’ as opposed To the whip-bird, one cry, two creatures And nothing between them no, not even if you listen On Point Sublime we are one, we are one