Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Friday

Clarissa Tan

Special K

There’s a K-Pop Academy in London. Students go through a 12-week course and learn not only the finer points of PSY-style hip-hop, but also Korean cuisine, fashion, history and traditional music. Not everyone can attend — as with Hogwarts, one must be chosen. Applicants submit an essay to the Korean Cultural Centre and 30 students are picked each term. Once you have been selected, the course is free. I am invited to the Academy’s ‘graduation’ ceremony, where the students — all teenage girls, from all ethnic groups — express their love for all things K-Poppy. They adore Korean dance, Korean soaps, wearing the hanbok or Korean national dress. ‘I can’t

Kate Chisholm

Heart of the matter | 28 December 2012

Looking back can be fatal and is usually ill-advised, inducing a nostalgia that can only blight what lies ahead. Let’s risk it, though, reliving those radio moments of 2012 (avoiding the Jubilee and the Olympics) when words took shape and became visceral. Most memorable (perhaps because most recent) was John Humphrys’s grilling of his boss George Entwistle on the Today programme on Radio 4. The air crackled with pent-up feeling, as Humphrys, like one of Eddie Grundy’s ferrets, went after Entwistle. ‘You should go, shouldn’t you?’ says Humphrys, after we had heard the then DG admit that he hadn’t seen the newspaper story which exposed the flawed Newsnight investigation. The

James Delingpole James Delingpole

On the bias

It must be ten years now since I risked life and limb to brave the Cresta Run, go fox hunting and be driven round a racetrack by Lord Brocket in a Ferrari for a Channel 4 documentary on the British Upper Class. In the heady few minutes following its first transmission I thought it would mark the beginning of a glorious TV career. But TV never happened for me and oftentimes since I’ve wondered why. The short and obvious answer is that I’m crap — which may be true, but that never stopped a thousand and one other TV C-listers you could name. What I think it really boils down

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Age limit

Michael Grandage is homeless. After a near-faultless decade in charge of the Donmar Warehouse, he now reinvents himself as a roving thesp, a buskined vagabond, a theatrical mendicant wandering the byways and the turnpike lanes and ushering his troupe of all-stars into any pen that will accommodate them. It’s a medieval conception. The strolling players. His team of celebrity vagrants has taken a 15-month lease on the Noël Coward theatre where its residency kicks off with Privates on Parade, a 1977 play by Peter Nichols, examining life in an army concert party in Malaya in 1948. In shorthand, it’s the BBC sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum  without the spitting

Deborah Ross

Trading places | 28 December 2012

The trouble with this adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Booker prize-winning Midnight’s Children, aside from the fact it is a mess and a muddle, is that it goes on and on and on and on. And on. And on. And then, just when you think it has to be over, it goes on some more. If it were up to me, I would charge film-makers for every minute — £1, say; let’s not be greedy — over 90 minutes that I’m kept in the cinema for no good reason. In this instance, as the film comes in at two and a half hours, I think I’m owed £60 (plus VAT and

Michael Tanner

Talk of the devil

In one of his finest essays, Gore Vidal recalls that when he worked as a scriptwriter for MGM the Wise Hack always used to advise his toffee-nosed team that ‘shit has its own integrity’. If crap is what you’re producing, make sure there are no signs in it that that’s what you think it is. Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable fails that test, I think, as do the rest of his operas. And at the Royal Opera, where a new production by Laurent Pelly, shared with Geneva, is on display, there are plenty of indications that no one involved takes it seriously either. When the curtain rose on knights in medieval

Paul Henry

A flock of bells…

A flock of bells takes the air and you come to me, out of nowehere and I smile, knowing you’ll visit me always, that this is how it will be till the last thread of an island slips through a bell-ringer’s hands and they put me in the listening earth.

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

The art of Christmas

One of the most important and enjoyable Christmas decorations in our house is the profusion of Christmas cards. I am fortunate to number quite a few artists among my friends, and a good percentage of them make and send their own Christmas cards. Most of these tend to the secular and celebratory, but the range of image and technique is what really stands out. Literally, in the case of the sculptor Ann Christopher (born 1947), who makes wonderful little constructions of flexed and frayed silver card often decorated with stars, which balance three-dimensionally on the mantelpiece, like geometric Christmas trees. Other artists send small paintings — the abstract painter Edwina

Maurice Riordan

Turkeys

emerge from the orchard. There now Aunt Kit says, pouring us lemonade. It’ll be another scorcher. The bronze birds drop wing, shake caruncle and snood engorged with purple blood, and rattle in full barding. My prize cock’s gone lame! He lifts each ringed foot singly, slowly — to shoot the short film frame by frame. In rue Ortolan I hear the chorus of gobbles roll across the mossed cobbles from distant Ophir.

John Hartley Williams

Men’s Wear

From the Woolrich Elite Concealed Carry line Shawn Thompson bought two shirts. He wrote on his blog: ‘The clothes I used in the past to hide my sidearm looked pretty sloppy and had my girlfriend complaining.’ The line includes the sort of vest that includes a stealth compartment. The wearer can appear to be warming his hands while gripping a pistol in a holster. Says a spokesman for Woolrich: ‘The bad guy gets a glimmer of fear wondering “Are they packing, or not?” ’ Not everyone is a fan. Howard Walter, 61, a salesman, said he preferred to carry his colt and a couple of knives and two extra magazines

Clarissa Tan

London’s high life

You can take a five-minute flight across the Thames on something called the Emirates Air Line. It’s a cable-car ride between North Greenwich and the Royal Docks that’s sponsored by the Gulf carrier. Much else on the ride simulates a plane trip — the tickets are called boarding passes, and when you ‘take off’ from either side of the river there’s a large digital screen showing cheery people waving you off, as at an airport. As I embark from the southern bank, a bunch of ‘Butchers from South London’ bid me goodbye. The cable cars, however, are called gondolas rather than, say, ‘cockpits’ or ‘cabins’ — and once up in

Kate Chisholm

Dream team | 12 December 2012

It’s like being a fly on the wall (or maybe an earwig) at one of those fantasy dinner parties where a group of people who intrigue, infuriate or fascinate us are brought together just so we can see how they will get along. 6 Music, as a Christmas treat for listeners, has put Bradley Wiggins and Paul Weller behind the same mike and given them a record player (definitely not a CD; these two are seriously vinyl) and two hours of airtime to fill. What’s the favourite lyric you’ve ever written? Bradley asks Paul. Quick as a flash, Paul replies, ‘Two lovers kissing amongst the scream of midnight.’ Not quite

Olivia Glazebrook

Food, glorious food

Despite a wet summer, the recent crop of food programmes has been prodigious: six episodes of Nigellissima, eight of Nigel Slater’s Dish Of The Day, six of Lorraine Pascale’s Fast, Fresh and Easy Food, 40 of Jamie’s 15-Minute Meals and 25 of Hugh’s Three Good Things — truly a basket of plenty. Two cooking competitions (The Great British Bake Off and Masterchef: The Professionals) have dished up a total of 34 episodes; Heston Blumenthal has hand-reared seven bloated and inedible turkeys (Heston’s Fantastical Food), and Yotam Ottolenghi (Ottolenghi’s Mediterranean Feast) has concocted, in the kitchens of Morocco, Istanbul, Tunisia and Israel, four unexpectedly delicious treats. This may seem like a

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Male bonding

Both these plays are about concealed sexuality. Straight, by D.C. Moore, is based on an American indie flick named Humpday. The play has one of the funniest openings you’ll ever see. We’re in a flat occupied by suburban nonentity Lewis and his wife Morgan. Lewis’s old college mucker, Waldorf, has come home after seven years in Mongolia and he cheekily decides to announce his return to western civilisation by inserting his unsheathed tumescence through the letterbox. Lewis doesn’t see it. His wife does and she has to persuade him that she isn’t hallucinating. The gate-crashing phallus symbolises the play’s theme of male eroticism thrusting itself uninvited into soporific domesticity. Waldorf’s

Michael Tanner

Jumping the gun

2012 has been an undistinguished year in opera, at any rate in the UK. A combination of cutbacks and the promise of stops being pulled out next year for the bicentenaries of Verdi’s and Wagner’s births and the centenary of Britten’s has led to the big companies counting on our anticipation. Except that, in the case of Wagner, though oddly not of Verdi, the gun has been jumped. We have already had the Royal Opera’s Ring, four cycles of it in just over a month, so that there will be no staged Ring in London next year, only a concert version. It will be left to Longborough, for those who

Stephen Bayley

In the worst possible taste

What are the rules of taste at Christmas? How might the fastidious chart a neat path through this garish and cluttered carnival of unreflective consumption? How might dignity be maintained in this tinselled and glitter-balled waste of space? Actually, how might we design it better? Nicky Haslam once and quite correctly, without a flicker of irony, advised me that ‘coloured lights are common’. There is value in such advice and we will return to this refreshing idea a little further down the page. Germans and Americans have a peculiar historic hold over our imaginations at this time of year. It was Victoria’s earnest German Prince, Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha,

Deborah Ross

Tiger feat

Wow! Just: wow! Life of Pi may be the most ravishingly beautiful film I have ever seen. It’s stunning. It’s gorgeous. Its visual inventiveness made me want to weep for joy. It is magical realism made magical and realistic. The palette of colours is extraordinary. You will feel you are in the sea and above the clouds and as if you are on a boat with a Bengal tiger too. Wow! Just: wow! But, weirdly, while enraptured by its look, its emotions never seemed especially pressing, and as for the spiritual journey, it didn’t exactly float my own particular boat. Is it saying a belief in God always makes life

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

Heavenly hands

The Hepworth has been garnering plaudits right and left as a new museum to be welcomed to the fold, and my first visit to this monolithic structure with its feet in Wakefield’s River Calder exceeded all expectations. Designed by David Chipperfield Architects, the ten linked blocks that make up this new suite of galleries are spacious and light-filled with excellent views out to the river and town. Restaurant, education centre and offices are on the ground floor, and upstairs the art comes into its own. At the top of the stairs is a room of six classic sculptures by Barbara Hepworth (1903–75), whose name the museum has taken since this

Laura Gascoigne

Imperialist ambitions

In 1997, the Russian Academy of Sciences gave the names Hermitage 4758 and Piotrovsky 4869 to two small planets discovered 500 million kilometres from earth. The signal honour paid to the State Hermitage Museum and Boris and Mikhail Piotrovsky— its dynastic succession of directors — heralded a new era of post-Soviet expansionism for the former Imperial museum: from now on, the sky would be the limit. Since then, the Hermitage has opened branches in London, Las Vegas, Amsterdam, Kazan, Ferrara and Vyborg. More than a goodwill gesture, the St Petersburg museum’s overseas expansion has been a way of getting its collections seen. At home in Palace Square there’s room to

Stewart Conn

Field Marks

The bulk of what I retain I learnt through him, from that trek to Flanders Moss in the hope of seeing a grey shrike on a blackened tree-fork, to a pair of hen harriers whose upward glide made him beam with pleasure. His first ringing-trap dismantled (it attracted vermin), he designed and built one that bears his name on the Isle of May; while in the cottage we shared, coffee-mugs and cigarette-butts cleared, and like as not whisky glasses from chess the night before, he’d set up his carousel of colour-slides to display the field marks of various species — pointing out such features as eye-stripes and wing-bars, nesting habits