Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

Bizarre visions

If you want to see how myths arise from misunderstandings, the Tower of Babel provides a textbook example. In ancient Assyrian babilu means ‘door of God’ and thus correctly describes the Babylonian ziggurat erected to the god Marduk by Nebuchadnezzar II and later seen in ruins by Herodotus. But in Hebrew the word bâlal means ‘to confuse’, hence the confusingly different account in Genesis. In this version, men come together in the cradle of civilisation to build ‘a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven’ as a monument for posterity, lest they be ‘scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth’ — and God, sensing that ‘this is only

Harry Mount

The hate of the new

The title of the new show at the Palazzo Strozzi is a little confusing. Most of the artists in Italy in the 1930s weren’t beyond fascism; they were in it up to their necks. They didn’t really need much persuading by Mussolini to come up with pictures like Luciano Ricchetti’s 1939 painting ‘Listening to a Speech by the Duce’: enraptured, bare-footed Italian peasants in headscarves sit dangling babies on their knees, hanging on Il Duce’s every word. Today lots of Italians still don’t like to admit it, but much of Florence, and Italy, were really rather keen on Mussolini, and Hitler, too. A fascinating little exhibition of official watercolours at

Rhalli Burton

Blurring boundaries

Each of the Buddhist monks’ faces tells a variation on the same story. One simmers with fury, another sags with despair, a third is locked in a stoical gaze. The sign they are holding is written in Mandarin — its message the latest piece of sadistic invention by the Red Guards promoting Mao’s Cultural Revolution. ‘To hell with the Buddhist scriptures, they are full of dog farts.’ This is just one tiny photograph in the Barbican exhibition Everything Was Moving (until 13 January 2013). The project takes a gargantuan bite into world affairs in the Sixties and Seventies, so that through the eyes of 12 photographers we revisit such provocative

Kate Chisholm

Serious listening

‘Shhhh! Listen!’ Peter White demands of us, his listeners. ‘You’re about to enter into a blind man’s world.’ White, who for years has presented the In Touch programme on Radio 4 on Tuesday nights and who is now a stalwart on You and Yours, has become such a finely attuned listener that he can tell whether a day is damp not by colour of the sky that he cannot see, or by smell, but by checking out what he can hear, the tick, tick, thump of raindrop on leaf as drizzle slowly envelops the street. In The Listeners (Radio 4 Extra, this Saturday) he takes us on his audio journey

Olivia Glazebrook

Falling about and apart

One of the many pleasures of television is that it allows us to forget our manners: we can treat it with an impolite offhandedness that would not be considered sociable — or sensible — in the run of everyday life. This isn’t a vicarious enjoyment of bad behaviour that we see on screen, but an actual enjoyment in loosening our own collars: when I watch television I can be fickle (a one-night stand with Downton Abbey), greedy (a Simpsons triple-bill), blunt (‘That sweater is repulsive’), or lazy (Nigel Slater’s Dish of the Day instead of the real thing) without guilt or consequence. ‘Relaxing in front of the telly’ means giggling,

Peter Hoskin

Shrub of life

You know how it is: you wake up in your knock-down corrugated shack, surrounded by chickens and dogs and pigs, before staggering out into the morning sun to press the animals against your ear, listening to their heartbeats. No, sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. You probably don’t know how it is, and neither did I before watching Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild. But this is what this film does to its viewer right from the off. It depicts a world so vivid and immediate that two dimensions naturally become three, without the need for any fancy Hollywood stereoscopics. It is, actually, our six-year-old heroine Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis)

Michael Tanner

Dazzling Donizetti

The Met Live in HD series for 2012–13 got off to a brilliant start with a new production of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, the most warm-hearted of comedies — in fact, a work so genial that I’m always surprised it doesn’t lapse into insipidity. This production by Bartlett Sher made that seem less of a danger than usual, because although it would be an exaggeration to say he had rethought the piece, he did make it into a more three-dimensional work than usual, Donizetti edging more towards Bellini and away from Rossini, whereas Don Pasquale is the other way round. There are fewer laughs in Sher’s production than you might expect,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Westminster playground

Wow. This is a turn-up. Politicians and actors rarely see eye-to-eye. Thesps regard Westminster as sordid, petty, corrupt and corrupting. Politicians, for their part, like to dismiss the theatre as pretentious, irrelevant and fake. So here’s a play that brings them together. This House, written by James Graham, and directed by Jeremy Herrin, is a triumph on many levels. It takes the most squalid and depressing era in recent political history —1974–1979 — and turns it into a frothy and hilarious melodrama. James Graham’s inspirational idea is to use Labour’s fragile majority as his sole dramatic motor. We’re in the whips’ office and we watch Harold Wilson’s backroom boys as

Susan Moore

A step away from buying toothpaste

Fifty years ago it was not possible to bid at auction via the telephone — that first historic telephone bid was made for a Monet at Christie’s in 1967. Now the auction house’s Great Rooms, and indeed every other international saleroom, is lined by banks of telephones and digital screens, and absentee clients may also bid from anywhere in the world online, live through an interactive bidding portal or via iPhone and iPad apps. It seems that one moment advances in technology allowed Elizabeth Taylor to sit by her pool in Bel Air in her swimsuit and bid on the telephone for Duchess of Windsor diamonds in Geneva, the next,

Giles Waterfield

Fact and fantasy

Britain’s country houses were constantly in the news a generation ago. In 1974 The Destruction of the Country House, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum curated by Roy Strong, Marcus Binney and John Harris, offered a dismal chronicle of the houses that had disappeared in the past century. It proclaimed their importance to the national heritage, boldly urging that country house owners ‘deserve consideration and justice as much as any other group within our society as they struggle to preserve and share with us the creative richness of our heritage’. This invocation bore fruit in the mid-1980s when Kedleston Hall, Calke Abbey and Weston Park, all threatened with

Anthony Howell

Sermon | 18 October 2012

Son, never boast of the bird you have done. Masters of the art of crime never serve A scrap of time. They may shit on everyone. They keep their noses clean. A fable says, There was a crooked horse who kicked an ass For being an ass, and down the line He got stitched up by his mule.  Here’s the moral: Never disapprove, never harbour a scruple. Cater to all tastes.  One will help you rob A bank-vault if you let him rape a little boy. A ritual murder binds people together. Where’s the chick as close as an accomplice? Differentiate between being and appearance And become as far as

Thursday

Susan Moore

Back to the future | 11 October 2012

Two pop-up art fairs border Regent’s Park in London. To the south is Frieze London, an edgy fair-cum-fairground offering the thrills and spills of the latest and most innovative trends in global contemporary art. Launched a decade ago, it was unique among ambitious international art fairs in proving an instant and overwhelming success. Last year some 68,000 visitors walked through its doors. This year sees the launch of Frieze Masters, sited at the northern end of The Broad Walk, also running 11–14 October. Frieze Masters sets out to offer a fresh perspective on historical art — paintings, works on paper and sculpture — by highlighting the eternal dialogue between the

Andrew Lambirth

Picturing Dickens

In this Olympic year, when we feel less guilty than usual about promoting and celebrating all things British, it is appropriate to be lauding our greatest writers. Shakespeare is commemorated at the British Museum, but what about Dickens? Unbelievably, in what is after all the bicentenary of his birth, the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street is closed. Thank goodness the Watts Gallery has had the initiative to mount an exhibition devoted to Dickens’s relationship with art — at least somewhere the spirits of Phiz, Dolly Varden and Little Nell may disport themselves with Olympic pizazz in a museum setting. That is, if you think Little Nell would be up

Francesca Steele

Wheels of change

Bicycles can be powerful images in cinema. Like the 1948 masterpiece Ladri di Biciclette, Wadjda, the first film ever to be filmed in Saudi Arabia, is about a child and a bike. But whereas two wheels in Vittorio De Sica’s brutally neorealist film represented the shackles of poverty, here they embody freedom. Or at least the whisper of it. Wadjda, which will be screened at the London Film Festival on 11 and 14 October, has at its helm Saudi Arabia’s first female director, Haifaa Al-Mansour. This is a feat not just because this is a country where women are not allowed to drive (Al-Mansour often had to hide in a

Kate Chisholm

Teen spirit

A vital sign that radio is so much more vibrant these days than tired old TV is the way the networks are rebranding themselves, extending their range, developing their programme base. On Radio 1 on Monday night Keeping Mum took on the subject of young adult carers in a feature that could easily have been on Radio 4. Greg James, the Radio 1 DJ, hosted, but he was soon overshadowed by his young co-presenter, Pippa Haynes, who last year was recognised as a Radio 1 Teen Hero in a celebrity bash at Wembley Arena. Pippa, now 18, looks after her mother, who has spinal injuries, and her mentally ill sister,

Deborah Ross

Don’t look now

I don’t know quite what I was thinking when I went to see this film as it is full of everything I personally hate. Low-life gangsters. Drugs. Violence. Liberal use of ‘pussy’ and the c-word, which I loathe so much I cannot say it myself. My son, when he was little, once overheard it somewhere and asked me what it meant and I said it was a sort of German bundt cake, but crispier, and for years I lived in terror he would be presented with a German bundt, but crispier, and exclaim, ‘Wow, great c-word!’ — but this isn’t about the film, is it? So, the film. Yes, it’s

Steffen Huck

Meltdown in Valhalla

What begins with the borrowing of some capital ends 14 hours later with cataclysmic disaster. It is a drama thousands and thousands in the western hemisphere watch these days — from Seattle to New York, from London to Milan, and from Munich to St Petersburg. Ticket prices are high, although sponsorship money flows in luxuriant quantities hand-in-hand with public subsidies; after all, the show (which originally was intended to be produced only once, the set consumed for ever in the last scene’s flames) is notoriously expensive to produce. The show in question is, of course, Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, arguably the greatest and surely the longest piece in the

Michael Tanner

Accentuate the positive

How should you feel at the end of a Ring cycle, before — at any rate if you’re a reviewer — starting to list the pros and cons? Nothing very simple, obviously, but some kind of exaltation, of however confused or complex a kind. Famously Wagner had severe problems with the conclusion to the cycle: in the very first version he had Brünnhilde freeing the Nibelungs, including Alberich, and leading Siegfried and Grane up to Valhalla, where the gods, too, were to survive. Drastic modifications ensued, so that by the time he arrived at the version of the text that he set to music, there is no mention of the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Rickety Racine

High ambitions at the Donmar. Artistic supremo Josie Rourke has chosen to direct one of Racine’s more impenetrable dramas, Berenice. The play introduces us to the emperor Titus, a besotted weakling, and his lover, Queen Berenice, an ageing sexpot from Palestine. Berenice wants to become Titus’s official squeeze but the xenophobic Romans don’t care for asylum-seeking adventuresses seducing their rulers. So Titus sends Berenice packing. She’s reluctant to go and she hangs around while her ex-lover, Antiochus, hovers in the wings awaiting developments. This is the position at the start of the play and, 90 minutes later, not much has happened although a lot of feelings have been discussed in

Wilko Johnson

Get Your Kicks on the B1014

He comes most nights — I hear his car pull up Outside and catch the glancing blur of lights Through curtains. Drinking Nescafe, we watch The Epilogue, laugh at the priest, then think Where to drive that night — we catalogue The usual suggestions and arrive At the same decision as usual. The road lies straight, lamps stream like amber flames Shot down the wind as we accelerate; Our talk of girls and cars, our journey’s end The all-night filling station’s ROBO-SERVE Coffee machine. That’s it — we talk until We’re bored and then drive back. It’s a routine Which kills night after night, yet always when We move, cabined,