Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Lindsay Johns

Trading Places at 30 – one of the funniest films of all time

Next month marks the 30th anniversary of the release of what is, in my opinion, one of the funniest films of all time: Trading Places. Starring comedic demigods Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd, together with Jamie Lee Curtis and Denholm Elliot, this 1983 critical and commercial success is an amusing and trenchant satire on race, class, money and the whole American dream. When a destitute street hustler Billy Ray Valentine (Murphy) unknowingly swaps places with pampered, prissy Wall Street commodities broker Louis Winthorpe III (Ackroyd) and takes over his privileged life as part of a one-dollar bet — a nurture versus nature scientific experiment conducted by the fabulously wealthy yet

Deborah Ross

Deborah Ross: If you don’t enjoy Saving Mr Banks, there’s something wrong with you

Saving Mr Banks tells ‘the untold true story’ of the making of the Disney classic Mary Poppins via the stand-offs between Walt and the book’s author, P.L. Travers, and it is not a taxing film. You always know where it’s going and, with its rather melodramatic flashbacks, there is no ambiguity as to where it is coming from, but neither matters as much as they should as there is just so much joy to be had otherwise. It stars both Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson (you spoil us, ambassador!), is smartly and deftly directed (by John Lee Hancock) and if you can’t get off on the composers, the Sherman brothers,

Michael Tanner

Opera review: The Barbican’s Albert Herring was a perfect evening

Of this year’s three musical birthday boys, Wagner has fared, in England, surprisingly well, Verdi inexplicably badly, and Britten, as was to be expected, has received the royal treatment. No one could have predicted, though, that the culmination of the celebrations would be as glorious as it was: a single semi-staged performance at the Barbican of what, in my minority opinion, is his operatic masterpiece, Albert Herring. Surely after attending it, or hearing it on Radio 3, that might become a majority opinion. For what this performance revealed was a work that is inspired throughout, has no longueurs, which are to be found in almost all Britten’s other operas, even

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Ben Miller interview: ‘Everyone was doing alternative comedy. I thought I’d distinguish myself by just telling jokes’

Ben Miller is wolfing down a pizza. I meet the comedian in a Cambridge restaurant where he demolishes a Margherita shortly before racing off to appear on stage in The Duck House, a new farce about corrupt MPs. The show is set in 2009. Miller stars as a Labour backbencher who wants to jump ship and join the Conservatives. But first he has to convince a Tory bigwig that his expenses claims are entirely legitimate. He’s not helped by his dim-witted wife, his corrupt Russian cleaner, and his anarchist son, Seb, who has sublet the family flat in Kensington to a suicidal Goth. The writers Dan Patterson and Colin Swash

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Martin Shaw’s flaws make him perfect for Twelve Angry Men

Strange actor, Martin Shaw. He’s got all the right equipment for major stardom: a handsome and complicated face, a languid sexiness, a decent physique and a magnificent throbbing voice. He sounds like a lion feeling peckish in mid-afternoon. At top volume, his growl could dislodge chimney pots. And yet he’s just a steady-eddy TV performer who does the odd stint in the West End. Why isn’t he Patrick Stewart or Anthony Hopkins? Perhaps his rhythm is too slow. Certainly, he lacks pep or sparkle, or a sense of mystery. You know what he’s going to do next because he’s just done it. And even then it wasn’t much. Warmth, innocence

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

Ditchling Museum’s guiding dream

The charming East Sussex village of Ditchling lies at the foot of the South Downs, its narrow streets lined with ancient houses and pubs. For much of the 20th century it was home to a community of artists and craftsmen, the most famous of whom are Eric Gill and David Jones, master and pupil. In 1985, two sisters, Hilary and Joanna Bourne, founded a museum to preserve and celebrate the wealth of local creativity. It is this museum that reopened at the end of September after a major overhaul and redevelopment by Adam Richards Architects. The results are very fine indeed: this is one of the loveliest small museums I

Tanya Harrod

Where’s the fun, Barbican? 

Pop Art Design, curated by the Vitra Design Museum and currently at the Barbican, opens with Richard Hamilton’s 1956 ‘Just what makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’. Made as a poster for the Whitechapel show This is Tomorrow, it’s a witty collage of consumer fantasies scissored out of magazines, reminding us that interest in popular culture among British artists operated as a humorous, semi-anthropological collegiate research project. In part, British Pop was a riposte to the lushness of American consumerism from a small island that had won the war but had lost the peace. Pop Art in the United States got under way later and many American Pop artists

Ariane Bankes

The Lisson show is so hermetic, sometimes we flounder for meaning

The title of the Lisson Gallery’s new show, Nostalgic for the Future, could sum up the gallery’s whole raison d’être. From its inception in 1967, the Lisson has championed the cutting edge, providing a British and European platform for the major conceptual and minimal artists from the States — Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin among them — and following that in the 1980s with its promotion of New British Sculptors such as Anish Kapoor and Tony Cragg. While this generation wittily subverted the material world to question our position within it, their heirs in turn seem more interested in querying the position of art in the world —

Laura Gascoigne

‘Squiggle, squiggle, ooh, good…’ Tate St Ives shows how sexy the octopus can be

One of the more exotic attractions at the 1939–40 World’s Fair in New York was Salvador Dalí’s ‘Dream of Venus Pavilion’, which behind its surreal façade — an architectural marriage between Antoni Gaudí and a coral reef — catered to the public’s aquatic fantasies of spume-born goddesses and topless sirens. Something similar is going on behind the cool modernist exterior of Tate St Ives. Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep is a bottom-trawler of an exhibition that dredges the depths of the human psyche for fishy fantasies. As the show’s catalogue points out, earth’s deepest oceans — the murky regions known, in descending order, as bathypelagic, abyssopelagic and hadal

Steerpike Steerpike

Did anybody expect the old Pythons?

You wait thirty years for a reunion and the moment one is announced, you wish the idea would shrivel up and die. Purists look away now. I’m not sure you are going to like the Monty Python reunion, announced today for 1 July 2014 at the soulless cavern that is the O2. Opening with an unfunny Boris impersonator, a bad joke about Meryl Streep, and a moderately amusing gag about Qatar winning the bid to host the show, things didn’t get any better. Not even with a cry of ‘nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!’ when the first hack to ask a question ‘just happened’ to be Spanish. The negative body

Peter Hoskin

Jennifer Lawrence is plain brilliant in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

In the future, everyone will have silly names. Some people will be called Haymitch Abernathy. Others will be Effie Trinket or Finnick Odair. And they’ll all live in various districts, numbered from one to 12. And because those districts rebelled against the ruling regime that one time, their children might be selected for an annual televised extravaganza called the Hunger Games. It’s a bit like school sports day, only bloodier. The kids have to kill each other with an excruciating variety of sharp implements. The winner is the one who doesn’t end up with a spear through their neck — and all glory be to them. Or at least that’s

Michael Tanner

Baroque opera shows vicious people can sometimes be happy — and we’re glad they are

Visits by English Touring Opera are always to be looked forward to, but this autumn it has surpassed itself with three baroque works, two of them masterpieces and the third a fascinating rarity, all performed by casts of astonishingly high calibre, and produced helpfully, resourcefully, with simple elegant sets, which are all that is needed, though they probably cost a thousandth as much as the eye-catching splurges that we often see in London. First up, anyway at the Arts Theatre Cambridge, was the rarity: Cavalli’s Jason (intelligent to translate the titles where possible, since all the operas are sung in English). Apparently, it was the 17th century’s most popular opera,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Finally — a play about insomnia that cures insomnia

Athol Fugard is regarded as a theatrical titan but I usually need a microscope to find any trace of greatness in his work. The Island is set in a South African prison camp in the 1960s. Two banged-up lags, John and Winston, are toiling in the noonday heat. The governor torments them with a Kafka-esque prank. They’re placed at opposite ends of a sandpit and given shovels and wheelbarrows. Each must amass a dune of gravel, which his colleague is forced to deplete. This backbreaking futility is supposed to grind their spirits into nothing. It fails. Released from punishment at sundown, they retreat to their cells where they express themselves

Clarissa Tan

Why doesn’t Doctor Who travel far from Britain? 

If I could go back in time, I’d watch Doctor Who from the very first episode. I wasn’t born in Britain, and with the 50th anniversary of the series hurtling towards us like an Earth-bound Tardis, I’m wondering if I might understand this cultural touchstone better if I’d grown up in the country, along with the show. But Doctor Who neophytes are in luck, because there’s a tiny loop in the time-space continuum whereby we can quickly catch up on Time Lord lore. To celebrate the 50th, the BBC has commissioned a host of programmes, many setting out to explain Doctor Who’s place as a British icon. This week there’s

Claudia Massie

Weaving the colours of music 

One loom, six metres in length, currently dominates the great, light-filled weaving hall of Edinburgh’s renowned tapestry workshop, Dovecot Studios. At its side sits Master Weaver Naomi Robertson, threading yarn from countless dangling bobbins between and around taut vertical strings, each dabbed with tiny, code-like markings. The tapestry, which is growing slowly upwards from the base of the loom, forms a spread of pinks, reds and golds, shifting horizontally through rich tonal ranges. The subject is as yet unclear. Given the intensity of the colour in this tapestry, it may seem surprising that its architect should be the painter Alison Watt, known for her bleached-out portraiture and paintings of white

Kate Chisholm

What Jackie did after JFK was assassinated

A surfeit of anniversaries this week reminded us that on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination, C.S. Lewis (born 1898) and Aldous Huxley (born 1894) also died. Three such different figures are hard to imagine — Kennedy, the wily politician, Lewis, the tortured academic, Huxley the cool intellectual. Lewis is the one whose image and personality don’t fit; a man who appears cast from a different age from Kennedy and also from Huxley, who you can well imagine wielding an iPod and Twitter account. Yet it’s the pipe-smoking, tweed-suited Lewis who has been given the celebrity treatment this week, while the coolly cynical Huxley has been silenced, with not a

David Blackburn

Mass destruction in an age of mass media

Catalyst: Contemporary Art and War at the Imperial War Museum North (until 23 February) is alone worth a trip to Manchester. The exhibition shows how artists living in the age of mass media have explored conflict in the age of mass destruction. The most successful works are not those that ‘make a statement’ but those which address the viewer, usually by embarrassing their indifference and inspiring empathy. Taysir Batniji’s ‘Gaza Homes’ is a set of mock estate agents’ particulars for bomb-damaged houses. Captions about ‘well appointed’ rooms, ‘airy living space’ and ‘beach access’ are a joke in bad taste. Yet Batniji’s satire is so much more effective than ‘Photo Op’

Kit Toda

Dining with a Picasso

We had decided to dine out with our latest Picasso. The Picasso sat at the head of our table. It looked at us both. We sat looking at each other. We did not move lest we realised, fork poised, that the naked, smudge-faced boy with the horse was drinking our wine.

Thursday

Niru Ratnam

Do you think this painting is worth $48.4 million?

Earlier this year a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, depicting two figures stoned on the hallucinogenic drug PCP, was offered for sale at Christie’s in New York. ‘Dustheads’ was given an estimated sales tag of $25–35 million. In the end, the hammer came down at $48.8 million, a sum that easily broke the previous record for the artist, $26.4 million, which was achieved last November. It was the fourth time in 12 months that Basquiat’s record price had been smashed, and confirmed the artist’s dominance of the contemporary market. Such record-breaking at auction tends to elicit valedictory statements from auction houses and Christie’s Loic Gouzer duly obliged: ‘“Dustheads” is pure, concentrated

Andrew Lambirth

The painter of poetry

The famous court case in which Ruskin accused Whistler of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’ continues to rumble through the public response to art in this country. The man in the street, the man on the Clapham Omnibus and most of the men who drive black cabs all like their art to be recognisable. (Perhaps women are less hidebound.) Their definition of skill is the ability to paint with photographic fidelity, and they prefer art to tell a story. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), leading exponent of ‘art for art’s sake’, painted pure visual poetry rather than the hard facts of detailed realism. His paintings are