Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

In love with words

No wonder Clive James thought he was writing his own obituary when he was interviewed by John Wilson for the Radio 4 series, Meeting Myself Coming Back (Saturday night). Wilson played him a clip from a recent Mastermind programme on which one of the Specialist Subjects was…Clive James. ‘I was halfway between being amazed and appalled,’ he told us. ‘I’m already being treated like some kind of historic monument.’ His mistake was to have agreed to do the programme in the first place. The series is made by the Archive on 4 team, whose job is to ferret around in the BBC’s repository of lost conversations, old achievements, forgotten soundtracks

Michael Tanner

Best of Britten

This week’s opera-going afforded one example of truly great art, and one of its plausible counterfeit. To deal with the latter first: no one can deny that Billy Budd is one of Britten’s most accomplished pieces, a virtuoso exercise in the use of large orchestral forces, and in restriction to male post-pubescent singers. And musically it is done almost complete justice in the new production by English National Opera, conducted with staggering ferocity, tenderness and occasional sluggishness by Edward Gardner. The chorus was the most lusty I have heard in the past 35 years at the Coliseum, with the opening of Act II sounding like the gathering of the Gibichungs

Friday

Steerpike Steerpike

The fishmonger speaks

‘The Stone Roses are more important than Picasso’ claims the over-hyped and over-paid fishmonger Damien Hirst. The Manchester indie legends, led by Ian Brown, have reformed and are set to play three packed homecoming gigs this weekend. People will probably still be talking about this in twenty five years, just as they will be about Pablo in quadruple that. Can the same be said of the UK’s richest artist? Mr Steerpike thinks not.

Douglas Murray

Gitta Sereny and the truth about evil

The death of the author and journalist Gitta Sereny earlier this month drew some strangely critical notices. One piece even tried to blame her for a current cultural tendency to claim people are not responsible for their own actions. Though this was a dissenting view, there was a more general seam of criticism which ran through many obituaries. The claim was, essentially, that Sereny grew too uncomfortably close to her subjects and even ended up on occasions sympathising with them or excusing them. It is probably on the basis of her biography of Albert Speer that most of the criticism has come. It is true that Sereny got close to

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

The vast picture show

The awards season may be over, but can I nominate Neil White for a gong anyway? He genuinely deserves one. After all, he’s the chap from Nottingham who watched all of the 600 or so films that were released into British cinemas last year — and then blogged about them at www.everyfilmin2011.com. You might question his sanity, but you cannot question his dedication: hours and hours spent in the dark of cinemas across the country, and then further hours translating his thoughts on to the internet. And now? He is repeating the process for the current year. The rest of us would find it difficult to follow Mr White’s bleary-eyed

Andrew Lambirth

Italian surprise

It’s a rare pleasure to find an unfamiliar artist of the 18th century whose work speaks to the contemporary mind as lucidly as Carlo Labruzzi (1748–1817). I had never heard of him before this show, being still in my playpen when the last Labruzzi exhibition excited the art world in 1960. Although celebrated in his day, he was largely forgotten in the 19th and for most of the 20th century, but it’s clear from this excellent exhibition that he deserves a permanent place in the history books. Not much is known about him beyond the meagre biography that he was born in Rome, the son of a weaver and finisher

David Blackburn

Culture notes: Our island story

There’s one exception to the sometimes trivial and artificial events of the Cultural Olympiad: Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands at the British Library (until 25 September). Where other shows emphasise London’s separateness, Writing Britain subordinates the capital to the geography, peoples and history of the British Isles as a whole. Writers have recorded Britain’s development over a millennium, from the Arthurian myths to the dark satanic mills, from polite society to the urban underworld, from the wild moors to the simple delights of home. Galsworthy’s original drawings of Soames Forsyte’s house at Robin Hill, the archetypal Englishman’s castle, is one of several memorable exhibits, which also include the manuscript of

Kate Chisholm

In full bloom

It’s as if James Joyce was writing for radio, as if he understood the potential of the new audio technology long before the BBC had begun to broadcast plays and poetry. All that freakish literary invention in his 1922 novel Ulysses suddenly begins to make sense when heard on air, spoken out loud, with sound effects to tell us where we are. If you’ve never read it, but are too embarrassed to admit this (like the academic guests at David Lodge’s dinner party who get caught out in a game of literary humiliation), you could have tuned in to Radio 4 on Saturday and become an instant expert on Joyce’s

Michael Tanner

Royal treatment

Welsh National Opera’s new production of La Bohème, which I saw last week in Birmingham, is striking in a variety of ways, but its outstanding feature is the conducting of Carlo Rizzi. One tends to think that of all operas Bohème can look after itself, and up to a point that is true. Bashed out metronomically on a pub piano, or dispersed underneath the arches at Waterloo, or most absurdly of all made into a DVD and set in ‘real’ locations, with actual snow falling, it remains inviolate, though that isn’t perhaps the first word to use in connection with anything Puccinian. Yet every now and then it gets the

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Lukewarm in Narnia

Off to Narnia. Director Rupert Goold has recreated C.S. Lewis’s permafrosted fantasy world in a circus tent moored in Kensington Gardens. And at the height of summer too. An impossible feat. But tons of cash, and many months of preparation, have been sunk into this effort. The show starts with The Wardrobe looming up in the middle of the stage, like a fat slab of mystery, a sort of Tardis perhaps, or the Kaaba at Mecca. Not much like a wardrobe, though. A child steps out and finds herself in a freaky kingdom run by a demented tundra-monger. Here she comes. Sally Dexter, playing the queen in a luminous white

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Hallucinogenic dream

One of the great things about working in a collapsing industry is the cornucopia of possibilities that begins to open up of all the stuff you could do instead. In the past 18 months I have toyed with becoming: a speechwriter, a radio shock jock, a YouTube cult, a think tank senior visiting fellow, a TV star, a corporate communications director, an internet entrepreneur, a self-help book author, a Buteyko guru, a truck driver at an Australian mine, a gold bug, a fixer, an after-dinner speaker, a stand-up comic, an MEP. Some of it might actually happen. So I think I have a pretty good idea what David Bowie was

Deborah Ross

Two’s company

So, another week, and another Judd Apatow comedy — The Five-Year Engagement — rolls into town, and blah-de-blah-de-blah and yet more blah-de-blah-de-blah although the difference this time, which I feel honour-bound to mention, is that I totally loved it. I laughed. I cried (twice; properly). It is funny, even though no one falls on top of an expensive wedding cake or brings down a giant display of china in a department store. It has emotional heft, with no frantic, last-minute drives to the airport, just a male and female lead who not only share actual, proper, bona fide chemistry — hallelujah! Praise be!— but are also allowed to go head-to-head

Thursday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Gary Barlow, ‘immoral’ OBE

Now, here’s a question. Should Gary Barlow be stripped of his OBE? There are a number of possible answers, including who the hell is Gary Barlow? Well, he was, or is, part of the useless singing ensemble known as Take That. And second, another question in response to the question: why did we give the idiot an OBE in the first place? He’s hardly Lennon and McCartney, is he? If we give Take That honours for their services to music then you might just as well give one to that chap who, a few years ago, was able to fart Jerusalem. But it seems that Barlow got his at least

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Jumping off buildings, with Simon Armitage

In 2011, the Southbank Centre hosted the Festival of Britain to mark its fiftieth anniversary. Not wanting to be outdone this year, they are staging the Festival of the World. Last night, Westminster’s arty crowd crossed the bridge to toast this ambitiously titled project.  The evening was worth the walk, with flowing Pol and also a impromptu compulsory poetry reading. Simon Armitage informed ex-ministers (like Tessa Jowell) and Lib Dem wannabes (like Don Foster) that poets were the real lawmakers with the ‘constituency of the heart, the chief whip of the head and constitution of imagination.’ Foster shut his eyes and even swayed slightly to take in the words. Visiting

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The schools revolution

This time next week, we’ll hold the third Spectator School Revolution conference, and it’s our best-ever lineup. If any CoffeeHousers are in the world of education, or know anyone who is, then I’d strongly recommend coming (more for details can be found by visiting spectator.co.uk/schools). The keynote speaker is Michael Gove, the education secretary, who needs no introduction here. But I’d like to say a little more about the others.   Michelle Rhee is best-known for her three years time as head of schools in Washington DC, where school reform is a battleground. She fired a thousand teachers in her time there, which made her No.1 on the unions’ target

Saturday

William Cook

Art and soul

Imagine you had £20 million to spare, burning a big hole in your pocket. What would you spend it on? You could buy a stately home or a private jet, but that would be so boring. Surely the nicest way to spend it would be to ask one of America’s greatest architects to build a new museum in your hometown, to show the world your favourite paintings. Now that really would be fun. For the man I’ve come to meet today, this is no idle fantasy. It’s the story of his life. Ten years ago, Frieder Burda invited Richard Meier to design a gallery to house his art collection, here

Robert Gorelangton

The master’s lost voice

There is hardly ever one of Noël Coward’s old plays not on tour or in the West End. Sometimes you think the commercial theatre would collapse without him. A ‘new’ Coward is therefore an event. Never performed or published, Volcano was written in 1956 when Coward was living permanently in Jamaica as a tax exile. The play is the result of his life out in the tropics well away from the Angry Young Men in their winklepickers who were ruling the roost back in Britain. What a life it was! After a hard day’s snorkelling, Noël would sit outside his house, sipping a cocktail served by a white-coated native, the

Andrew Lambirth

Red alert

Rumours of disaffection were widespread even before I had seen this year’s RA summer extravaganza (sponsored by Insight Investment). The usual complaints about the hanging and selection had doubled or trebled, not just from non-members but from the Academicians themselves, but the critic tries to keep an open mind for as long as possible. Unfortunately, my equanimity did not survive the first room. This year, the visitor enters the exhibition via the Central Hall, where a gallimaufry of work has been hung against bright red walls. Some of it survives this shock treatment, but other exhibits are disastrously affected. Is it insensitivity or spite that accounts for the hanging of

Giannandrea Poesio

Tales of the city | 16 June 2012

Last Wednesday two of the three live pooches that appeared in Pina Bausch’s Viktor did onstage what most dogs do when in a state of arousal. The incident, which elicited a great deal of audience laughter and repressed giggles on stage, would have amused the late Bausch. First seen in 1986, Viktor was the first of the many city-specific works that Bausch created and on which the current World Cities 2012 retrospective (at Sadler’s Wells and the Barbican) focuses. Viktor’s rhapsodic and episodic narrative comes from the theatricalisation of memories each member of the Tanztheater Wuppertal had of their experiences in a particular location. Viktor is about Rome, though not

Patrick Carnegy

Friends, Romans, Africans

There’s an honourable track record of versions of Shakespeare’s play presenting Julius Caesar as a dictatorial monster of modern times. In 1937 Orson Welles (playing Brutus) cast Caesar as Mussolini and staged many scenes like Nazi rallies. Despite a curmudgeonly critic dismissing the conspirators as looking like ‘a committee from a taxi-driver’s union’, the show was a huge hit and set in motion a train of similar readings. In Miami in 1986 audiences applauded the murderous disposal of Fidel Castro. At the RSC the following year Terry Hands directed a nakedly fascist Caesar, while in London in 1993 Caesar was played by a woman, thus supposedly representing the political assassination