Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

A Cirque to irk

Just as Les Mis was soaringly monotonous, Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away (3D) is soaringly pointless. No point to it whatsoever. I looked. I looked everywhere for a point, even under my cinema seat. (That’s how desperate I was.) But I came up empty-handed. It’s 90 minutes of sheer, total, utter pointlessness, as written and directed by Andrew Adamson (who directed the first two Shreks and the first two Chronicles of Narnia) and produced by James Cameron, who has made some good films, and Titanic. God knows what they were thinking of when they embarked on this. And boredom doesn’t even come near it. I experienced the sort of boredom

Mauvais goût

It was dinner at a prize-winning hotel in Burgundy. I looked, stupefied, at an awkward arrangement of trapezoidal plates, unaccommodating to food and unergonomic to both eater and plongeur. There was a water glass of triangular section and silly cutlery that would bring even Philippe Starck’s most empurpled morphological fantasies into the arena of commonsense. I thought wistfully about the simple charm of the old Duralex glass. The timelessly perfect round-shouldered Burgundy bottle’s unaffected handsomeness only served to make its table-top companions look all the more ridiculous. Modern France is in a terrible state as far as design is concerned. Renault’s peerless record of ingenuity is gone: it has not

Unacceptable faces

A play called Rutherford & Son gripped audiences in London 101 years ago. Set on Tyneside, it was the David Hare-style leftie hit of its season. It depicted the unacceptable face of capitalism, a face that belonged to John Rutherford, who rules the family glassworks by fear, hated by his workers and his children alike. It’s still a fresh, brutal-up-north story of a monstrous control freak devoted to work and money and nothing else. The show has a terrific twist at the end and it was an instant hit in London, went to New York and was widely translated. But it became a big news story when the unknown author,

Electricity

It was a bolt from the blue, she said. You mean it was love at first sight? I asked. But no, she meant that they ran past the same tree in a storm and were flung to the ground side by side — an introduction of almost Biblical significance. Of course he helped her up and took her to the clubhouse and that was how it started, But now, she complained, the electricity’s off and we’re left lying down in the dark.

Rod Liddle

Gerald Scarfe, anti-Semitic? No.

So, that Gerald Scarfe cartoon, then. I don’t like it much, but then I like cartoons which make me laugh, (and especially so if they have animals in them). McLachlan, Honeysett, Rowson et al – and on a daily basis of course, Matt. I’m always at a bit of a loss with those big cartoons in the broadsheets which are attempting to tell me something very meaningful and make me stroke my chin. This one made me averse because it seemed to encapsulate the shrieking hysteria of the metro-left; translated into words, it says: ‘Netanyahu is building walls out of the blood of murdered Palestinian innocents!’, which is exactly the

Lloyd Evans

Obsessed with Pinter

It’s the size of a Hackney bedsit but the ambience is cosily expensive. Sonia Friedman’s tiny office above the Duke of York’s Theatre in St Martin’s Lane has warm, pinkish lighting and elegant armchairs with thick, deep cushions. The dark wallpaper is obscured by framed posters of hit West End shows. Sprawled across the sofa there’s a touch of pure kitsch: a six-year-old poodle, snuffling and dozing, whose fluffy white forelegs are sheathed in the armlets of a scarlet tank top. His name is Teddy and he looks like the victim of a stag-night prank contentedly sleeping off his hangover. Opposite me sits Sonia Friedman — pretty, blonde, in her

Bring in the lawyers

When collectors want to purchase an expensive work of art, they contact their lawyers to write up a contract with the dealer, spelling out pages of contingencies and indemnity clauses. ‘We have a steady stream of business writing agreements for collectors and galleries,’ said Jo Backer Laird, a Manhattan arts lawyer and a former general counsel at Christie’s. ‘We didn’t see much of this just ten years ago.’ When someone believes he didn’t make enough money selling a work of art  — Lord Edward Spencer-Churchill for the sale of his Basquiat painting last year through the London dealer Gerard Faggionato; Ronald Perelman for the 2011 sale of a Jeff Koons

Seraphic misfit

This year marks the 15th anniversary of the Estorick Collection and it is fitting that Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), one of the most consistently popular of the museum’s artists, should inaugurate the celebrations. Although Morandi’s trademark still-life paintings of bottles and jars have been regularly shown in Britain (the last major show was at the Tate in 2001), the appetite for his work is unassuaged, perhaps because its delights are not revealed all at once. His work encourages repeated looking and gives something back each time, differently articulated. ‘The monk of the bottles’, as he was called, lived with his mother and three sisters in an apartment in Bologna, hardly travelling

Steerpike

Alan Rusbridger’s new playmate

Steerpike is back in this week’s magazine. As ever, here is your preview: ‘While losses mount at the Guardian, the editor, Alan Rusbridger, has fallen in love. He keeps ordering the sub-editors to find space for articles about his new Fazioli piano. Cheeky responses have appeared on the website. ‘We always wondered how you filled your days and how you spent your fortune,’ wrote one indignant hack. ‘Now we know.’ Faziolis cost at least £50,000 and a friend at the Wigmore Hall tells me professionals won’t go near them. ‘They’re for loaded amateurs who think a pricy instrument will make up for clumsy fingerwork.’ Rusbridger recalls an early tryst with

Word challenge

The first competition had 30,000 entries; the second more than 74,000. How many will be attracted to this year’s 500 Words challenge, launched by Chris Evans on his Radio 2 morning show on Monday? It’s open to any young person — under the age of 13 — to come up with a winning short story. To create a fiction that works as a vivid, compelling narrative in just 500 words, and no more, is no easy task. Shorter means crisper, sharper, edgier and more focused; no dead wood. That’s hard enough for a seasoned grown-up. The young writer must quickly learn how to stick to the point, to conjure up

James Delingpole

The hard sell

`The older I get, the less tolerant I become of being treated by television like a child with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. No offence meant to Dr Jago Cooper but, if I’m going to consider spending a valuable hour of my fast-diminishing lifespan watching a documentary about Lost Kingdoms of South America, the very last thing that’s going to persuade me is being importuned in the manner of those men with microphones at street markets trying to persuade me to buy an amazing labour-saving device I never knew I needed, the Radish-o-Chop. Probably, if I stopped to listen to the man, I’d find that the Radish-o-Chop was indeed an invaluable

Telling tales

I cannot tell you about all the things Steven Spielberg can and cannot do. I cannot tell you, for example, if he can make decent goblets from Quality Street wrappers or funny teeth from orange peel, as I can, but what I am able to say is this: he knows how to tell a story; where to start it, where to finish it, what to do with all those fiddly bits in the middle. And although Lincoln is a film that pays fantastically close attention to politics — not a negative per se, but unless you are on top of your American history you may occasionally find yourself scratching your

Orchestral tour de force

There is only one test that a performance of Verdi’s Otello has to pass: do you come out of the theatre drained, desperate at the suffering that human beings who love one another can nonetheless inflict, so that they torture or even kill the object of their love? Shakespeare’s play is about other things besides, indeed that may not be the major test of a production of it. But Verdi and his librettist Boito took a straightforward view of what is Shakespeare’s longest and one of his most complex plays, so that what they give us is what Leavis called ‘the sentimentalist’s Othello’, in which, taking the Moor at his

Lloyd Evans

Seeing the light | 24 January 2013

Meet Fenton. He’s a psycho. A year or so back he was banged up for murdering a preppy teenage girl in one of America’s less-enlightened southern states. Enter a campaigning congressman, John Daniels, who hopes to teach Fenton to read and write and to help him make something of his ruined life. The opening of Richard Vergette’s play is intriguing enough but a savage twist is on its way. Fenton rejects all the congressman’s overtures. Asked to recite the alphabet, he glares and grunts and spits out monosyllabic expletives. The only expressive medium for which he shows any talent is the flinging of furniture at high speed across the interrogation

‘I was very naughty when young’: Michael Winner dies aged 77

Journalist and film director Michael Winner passed away today aged 77. He was a popular diarist in the pages of The Spectator, with his most recent offering appearing in January 2010. In that column, he described the filming of his TV series ‘Michael Winner’s Dining Stars’, and mused about what might happen if it flopped: There’s a nasty Hollywood crew saying about artistes: ‘Bring on da puppets.’ That was largely the attitude of the production team. I’d have fired most of them. I know I’m not Leonardo di Caprio, Johnny Depp, Meryl Streep or anyone near the top of the star tree. But courtesy would have been appreciated. It was

Go with the flow

Last November Lutfur Rahman, the independent Mayor of Tower Hamlets, confirmed that the borough intended to sell a Henry Moore sculpture entitled ‘Draped Seated Woman’ (1958–9) that had been historically sited in the borough. Rahman’s reasoning was twofold: the sculpture was too expensive for the council to insure and the money raised from the work’s sale at auction, which could be up to £20 million, would ease the £100 million budget cut that Tower Hamlets is faced with over the next three years. The announcement elicited a strong protest from the arts lobby. Sir Nicholas Serota, Richard Calvocoressi (the director of the Henry Moore Foundation), Mary Moore (the artist’s daughter)

Line man

One of the pleasures of the critic’s life is to review exhibitions of work by artists who have been forgotten or overlooked, and to recommend them for general attention. I know some arts editors are only interested in fashionable or mainstream artists, but I’m happy to say that The Spectator’s editorial policy is altogether more wide-ranging. Hence this review of the unjustly neglected Randolph Schwabe (1885–1948), an artist who believed in the value of classical draughtsmanship, which he promulgated through a lifetime of teaching. German by origin (his cotton merchant grandfather settled near Manchester), he trained at the Slade, then studied in Paris and travelled in Italy before returning to

Rory Sutherland

My very own 1970s sex pest

To understand the Jimmy Savile affair, you had to be there. By ‘there’ I mean the late 1970s. At the time my school on the Welsh borders had its own very minor provincial sex-pest. I think every school did. Ours was known as ‘the 50p man’. Periodically he would approach a straggler on a cross–country run, or someone taking a walk (i.e. smoke) by the river, and expose himself, announcing, ‘If you touch this, I’ll give you this 50p.’ Even allowing for inflation, 50p was an offer you could easily refuse. So the schoolboy victim would scarper off, usually (perhaps not always) to relate the incident to general hilarity.  Every now