Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

The pirates of Glastonbury forced me to consider the wisdom of crowds

There are things which fashion can teach us. Real things. Not just things about puce after a heavy lunch, or the invariable inadvisability of headwear. Things about choice, and belief, and about how we approach the world. Consider this. Last weekend, slaloming through the Glastonbury fudge, I kept seeing people who were dressed as pirates. They ranged from the modest (earring, bandannas, the faintest hint of pantaloon) to the full Johnny Depp (eyeshadow, dreadlocks, triangular hats). There is an established tradition, I know, of people seeing all kinds of things at Glastonbury, from wizards in caterpillar suits to haute cuisine in a charred fajita full of muddy pork. The pirates,

Alistair Duncan

Kristin defrosted

Kristin Scott Thomas has a bee in her bonnet. Actually, she has several bees in her bonnet. It’s more like a beehive than a bonnet. ‘British cinema is at death’s door,’ she rages. ‘Funding is a real issue. But people just aren’t making the right decisions about what gets made.’ I’m speaking to her at her home in Paris, in theory to discuss her latest film, the French thriller Tell No One. But talking about French films has got us talking about British films and talking about British films gets her hopping mad. It’s all to do with America. It’s so difficult to get financing for films in Britain, she

Andrew Lambirth

An odd bunch

Artists’ Self-Portraits from the Uffizi The Uffizi is to Florence what the National Gallery is to London, and part of its astonishing collection is devoted to a unique array of self-portraits, housed now in the Corridoio Vasariano. This long corridor, which links the Palazzo Vecchio to the Palazzo Pitti, was designed by Giorgio Vasari, artist, architect and grandfather of art history with his classic Lives of the Artists. The self-portrait collection was begun in the 17th century by Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici, and has been added to ever since, but its documentation has never been precise. Thus there are two self-portraits by Guercino in the collection, both disputed by scholars,

Angela Summerfield

Mountain people

John Ruskin (1819–1900) was Britain’s leading authority on art in the 19th century, and his voluminous writings had a profound influence on both artists and public appreciation. The process of art, according to Ruskin, was one that should be founded upon the truthful perception of nature, and landscape art and its practitioners, notably Turner, were the focus of his prescriptive ideas. A work of art was not about replication or, at the other extreme, artistic expression, but an artist’s ability to respond to and capture the form, colours (hue) and tones of Nature, as perceived at certain times of day, or under key atmospheric conditions. As art was a celebration

Robin Holloway

Heaven before your eyes

Scripts like sheep, marks dancing out of the ears; but amidst the academic year’s most frazzling fortnight there have been five successive events in Cambridge of pure ecstasy — pleasure more spiritual than carnal — chaste, severe, poised to ‘bring all Heaven before your eyes’. Thanks to collegiate generosity, the viol-consort Fretwork, finest of its kind, has enjoyed a term’s residency at Sidney Sussex, and just crowned it with evensongs in four other college chapels, each with its distinctive choir, style, building, acoustic, dipping a toe into the sea of 17th-century church music that uses this four-, five-, six-voiced ensemble to support the singers, and adding a rich selection of

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Handful of women

At The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder I had to suspend my disbelief so hard that my brain chafed. Mr Pinder is an ordinary south London labourer who likes marrying, getting divorced and keeping the divorcees at home. Curtain up and he’s living with three former wives — and a new young filly has just cantered into the yard. The women rub along OK and accept that each gets just one night a week with the epic seducer. Only Mr Pinder isn’t epic, nor is he much of a seducer. He’s a sentimentalist who likes nattering and cuddling. Wife number one is a childless long-suffering depressive and it’s easy to

Deborah Ross

Shrek goes soppy

Oh, for heaven’s sake, now they’ve gone and ruined Shrek, and I hate them for it. Indeed, may those responsible be damned to the eternal fires of hell. Failing that, may they at least wake up one day with their feet on the wrong way round and an elbow for an ear. How dare they? How could they? I so loved Shrek: noisome, lousy, foul-breathed Shrek. Shrek of the bottom-fumes so noxious they could wilt flowers. Not too far removed from your average bloke, then, but wasn’t Shrek kind of lovable, too? And cute and funny? And didn’t you love Donkey? ‘Parfait, parfait, everybody loves parfait.’ That’s Donkey from the

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Who dares and wins

Doctor Who (BBC1, Saturday) has been particularly brilliant of late and I think Spectator readers should know. There were moments in the first two new series where one might reasonably have gone, ‘Yeah, but it’s still not a patch on the original.’ But as series three draws to an end, I don’t think there can be any more doubt: the new Doctor Who is the greatest British TV sci-fi series since Quatermass. Where did it go so incredibly right? My personal theory on this — based on wishful thinking, mainly — is that it has to do with the episode in the first series called ‘The Empty Child’. If you

Kate Chisholm

Books at bedtime

The last thing Winston Churchill (or Ramsay MacDonald, for that matter) would have thought of discussing before taking power as prime minister was the kind of books they read to their children, or took to bed with them after a hard night’s slog wading through government papers. But such are the times we now live in that Gordon Brown felt compelled this week to disclose to Mariella Frostrup that his favourite children’s book was an illustrated fable by Julia Donaldson. (For the uninitiated she writes books like The Snail and the Whale and The Gruffalo, whose square-jawed visage has already become so familiar to families with young children.) Frostrup interviewed

Thursday

The Spectator

Cui bono

Why do we have to pay between £3.50 and £5.40 to book tickets for the theatre on the internet? Most people are unable to turn up in person to book seats — the only way to avoid the extra cost.  If a theatre has, say, 600 seats, and over half are filled by people booking over the internet, then more than £1,000 per show is generated. Where and to whom does this money go?

Wednesday

The Spectator

What’s the next Brown surprise?

Iain Dale reports that Ed Balls was understandably gloating about the defection of Quentin Davies last night at a Fabian Society reception last night and promised his audience that, “There’s more to come – as I know.”

Saturday

Henrietta Heald

Lord of the crags

There is a corner of Northumberland, in the valley of the River Coquet, where the climate has been changed for ever by the actions of one man. In the mid-1860s, William Armstrong set out to transform vast tracts of raw, bleak moorland into what he described as ‘an earthly paradise’ and by the time of his death in 1900, at the age of 90, he had planted over seven million trees and shrubs on an estate of more than 1,700 acres. Armstrong’s intention had been to recreate a rugged Himalayan landscape of rocks and streams and cascades — a damp valley environment that, as it happened, was well suited to

Andrew Lambirth

A Pevsner for paintings

There is a remarkable project of great enterprise and diligence in progress throughout the land — a plan to catalogue all the oil paintings (as well as those in acrylic or tempera) in national collections. This gigantic task is being undertaken by a charity called The Public Catalogue Foundation, which is publishing its findings in single volumes dedicated to different areas of the UK. The aim is to give a county-by-county account of pictures in museums and other public collections. As I write, I have in front of me half a dozen of the Foundation’s catalogues: West Yorkshire: Leeds; Cambridgeshire: Fitzwilliam Museum; East Sussex; North Yorkshire; Suffolk and Imperial War

Roderick Conway-Morris

Sins of commission

‘They order, said I, this matter better in France.’ It is the norm at the national pavilions (a record 76 nations are present this year) for a new commissioner to be appointed for each edition, who selects the artist, or artists, to represent their country, or heads a committee that does so. A dozen years ago, France reversed this process, selecting the artist first, who then named their own commissioner. Sophie Calle, this year’s French artist, found hers by advertising in Libération (the Gallic Guardian). Her extensive floor-to-ceiling installation of texts, photographs and videos was triggered by an email from her lover announcing he was dumping her, which ended ‘Prenez

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Summer froth

Midsummer. Holidays loom. Migrations are being pondered and planned. Right now the English theatre-going middle classes are yearning for August, for Tuscany, for the pine-scented South, and for the sunbeds where they’ll sprawl and doze all summer smeared in perfumed lard and turning the colour of teak. Lovely. The West End is ready for these adjustments and from now until September it’ll provide what the British film industry has to supply all year round — cultural room-service for Americans. You start to wonder why Americans go abroad at all. Perhaps to discover how unadventurous they are, how closely they cleave to the known, the familiar, the homely. This year’s lucrative

Simon Hoggart

Redemptive power

Sex, the City and Me (BBC2, Sunday) might just as well have been called ‘All Men Are Bastards — based on a true story’. Sarah Parish played Jess, a horrible person, a fund manager who is better at her job than all the men around her. She was offensive to them, offhand to her husband — a music journalist, which here signifies: ‘When men aren’t being bastards they’re so drippy they’re a waste of space anyway.’ She is rude to waitresses, which, in the simple code used in most television drama, identifies ‘truly horrible’. Then she gets pregnant, and through the redemptive power of motherhood becomes a very nice person

Tuesday

The Spectator

Ageism Watch

The departure of Nick Ross from “Crimewatch” is a sad victory for the worst kind of criteria now being applied in television. Nobody disputes the importance of appearance on screen – it would be odd if it were otherwise – but Ross is scarcely senescent and looks a pretty sprightly 59 year old. Having dined with him once, I can attest to his charisma and brains. He talked with great animation about the book which he will now, presumably, have time to write on law and order. But, if the Standard is right, and he was shown the door because of his age, the BBC is asking for trouble. Its

Sunday

Matthew Dancona

An interesting day out

Back from Interesting 2007, a daylong festival of creativity in the Web 2.0 world at the Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, and organised by the peerless Russell Davies (check out his always stimulating blog). Amongst the many ideas and  concepts given an airing: the links between the Muppets and Ibsen; ‘foot candy’ for those who understand the awesome changes in city life; ‘toyetics’; and I did a turn on Orson Welles in the age of YouTube which included a somewhat risky impersonation of Al Pacino. The things I do in this job. Great fun.

Saturday

Henrietta Bredin

The man who sheds light on the music

David Belasco was a pioneer in the field of stage lighting, passionate about creating realistic effects, the most famous of which occurred in his one-act play Madame Butterfly, during which the action slowed to an almost total halt for a 14-minute, lovingly rendered dawn sequence. Puccini saw the play in London in 1900 and rushed backstage afterwards to find Belasco and make an immediate bid for the rights so as to turn it into an opera. Being a man much impressed by technical innovation, Puccini was especially struck by the dawn lighting and went on to incorporate the episode in his opera, as the culmination of Butterfly’s night-long vigil, waiting

Andrew Lambirth

More means worse

The Royal Academy Summer Show boasts that it is the world’s largest open submission contemporary art exhibition, but this year it focuses on invited artists and distinguished foreign visitors. Thus it neglects both the Academicians, its real strength and raison d’être, and the until now faithful corps of British artists who submit year in, year out. As more and more non-RAs are rejected — or, possibly worse, are accepted but not hung — and while many of the RAs themselves are sidelined and crowded together, the nature of this exhibition is changing for the worse. It needs to be said from time to time that the Academy would not exist