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Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

The Spectator

Why Rocky rocks

DVD release of the week is Rocky Balboa, the sixth and final instalment of the boxing saga. Yes, I know the idea of the 60-year-old Sylvester Stallone climbing into the ring again is innately absurd, but all of the Rocky movies, including the first which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1976, have been completely ridiculous. That has been their popcorn magic, a classic example of the American Dream told in comic book idiom. Any film that includes lines like “what we’ll be calling on is good ol’ fashion blunt force trauma” and “let’s start building some hurtin’ bombs!” has my vote. Rocky Balboa has the added attraction of

Tuesday

Matthew Dancona

Poetic news

Tomorrow, I am taking part in the launch of Pass on a Poem, a terrific campaign to encourage the reading and enjoyment of poetry at the Oxfam Bookshop, 170 Portobello Road, London W11. Lots of other readings are set to take place around the country, but this one will feature such luminaries as P.D.James, Jon Snow, Richard Dawkins, Alex James, Joan Bakewell, and Mariella Frostrup – with yours truly making up the numbers. I have to admit that I haven’t decided which poem to read yet, but I’m down to a shortlist of two (Ted Hughes versus Emily Dickinson, ten rounds, two falls or a submission.) Entry is free but

Saturday

Mark Fisher

Counting the cost

An estimated one in three of the world’s six billion people will watch the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games. How will Britain fare in that global spotlight? Having committed more than £600 million to prepare our athletes and competitors, there’s not much more that the government can do on the haul-of-medals front. The Cultural Olympiad, which will present the best of our arts and culture, is another matter. Undoubtedly, Britain has some of the best museums and galleries, concert halls and theatres, and some of the finest artists in the world, so ours should, as Tessa Jowell hopes, ‘be better than any Cultural Olympiad that has ever been

Andrew Lambirth

Knight vision

Sir Peter Blake is much in demand. A popular figure since he rose to fame with his unforgettable design for the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album (1967), he has long been a spokesman for his generation and for the arts. His knighthood in 2002 brought a whole host of new requests and obligations, much of it figurehead stuff: his name on lists of patrons, or as the chairman of selection committees. To take these things seriously is time-consuming, and Blake has to be rigorous about preserving his hours in the studio, where typically he is busy on a number of projects at once. On the eve of a retrospective of his

Martin Gayford

Scraps of Van Goghiana

Having spent a chunk of my life living, mentally, in 1888 with Vincent van Gogh in Arles I find that I still have not completely left that place. The book is published, the paperback is out, my surrogate literary life is in another country and a different time — with John Constable and his wife-to-be in early 19th-century England. But still I find my attention sometimes wandering back to his little Yellow House in that dusty Provençal town. Here, then, are two little addenda to the story, scraps of Van Goghiana that have occurred to me since the text was finally proofread and published. One concerns the only meal that,

Mark Glazebrook

Can artists save the planet?

Given his interest in the merging of blue with green, David Cameron would presumably feel at home in the United Arab Emirates while Sharjah’s 8th Biennial is on. The Biennial’s title and theme is Still Life: Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change. I imagine that the first two words refer not only to the historic painting genre — a genre which reminds us of our mortality on the occasions when it includes the depiction of a human skull. The two words may also suggest sentences such as ‘Despite man’s destructive tendencies there’s still life on planet earth but we can’t take it for granted.’ Whether or not there is

Susan Moore

Aiming high and wide

‘It is a compelling moment in the art world,’ says Robin Woodhead, Sotheby’s executive vice president and chief executive, Europe and Asia. ‘There has been a fundamental change in the market worldwide. Growing numbers of people have begun to take an interest in art, and we see continuing effective economies and new emerging markets — China, Russia, India — creating wealth on a scale that is unprecedented.’ He adds, ‘History tells us that the nouveau riche inevitably acquire works of art as symbols of wealth, power and culture.’ So do his company accounts. Fresh from a New York evening sale of Impressionist and Modern Art which saw the second highest

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Leave well alone

Is the National Theatre a cemetery? Its administrators seem to think so. Last week they decided to cover the Lyttelton fly-tower with a sort of vertical putting green which gives the NT bunker a completely new look: no longer a stone-circle of squatting oblongs and failed turrets laminated with slow-drying cow-dung. It now resembles a moss-encrusted tombstone. Interesting choice. And inside the mausoleum there’s a new version of an ancient war film by Powell and Pressburger. I love the opening premise of this movie but I’m less keen on the rest of it. A doomed airman falls in love with a radio-controller just as she’s attempting to steer his plane

Michael Tanner

Vintage quality

Second Movement: Triple Bill; Angela Gheorghiu; Pelléas et Mélisande Second Movement is a young opera company which gives singers who have graduated from their college but are not yet on the opera house circuit a chance to demonstrate their gifts, and in unusual repertoire. Since standards at Second Movement are evidently very high, it also gives enterprising opera goers, supposing they manage to spot one of the company’s rare and unobtrusive adverts, an opportunity to see things they might easily spend a lifetime without encountering. Last week, in the London Film Studios in Mercer Street, there was a triple bill, all of which would have been news to almost anyone.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Trouble and strife

There’s a really horrible stage you go through as a writer when you’re working on a new novel, and I’m in the middle of it right now. It’s called the ‘research and planning’ stage and what you do is spend lots of time reading relevant books, watching documentaries, visiting museums, travelling abroad, interviewing interesting people, surfing the net, idly contemplating, searching Amazon to see whether there are any more relevant research books you haven’t yet bought. I’ve made it sound almost fun but the reason it’s not is that while all this is going on you feel terrible. At the back of your mind is the suspicion that it’s really

Kate Chisholm

Frank exchanges

You may have caught an extraordinary programme of interviews with Peckham’s Lost on Radio Four a couple of weeks ago. Winifred Robinson (of You and Yours) went to meet some of the teenagers of that notorious south-east London parish, and also their parents. At one point she found herself talking to the father of the boy now in jail because he was the leader of the gang who brutally killed Mary-Ann Lenehan. (She bled to death from 40 stab wounds after being sexually assaulted; her friend survived, but only just.) There was a chilling moment as Robinson probed and needled, trying to get out of him something more than the

Saturday

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The thinking man’s punk

Sometimes you absolutely know, beyond the gentlest breath of a doubt, that you’re not going to like a person; something you’ve heard, or read about them, has tipped you over into a flinty conviction that they’re not your type. I took a preconception of this sort with me to meet the cult film-maker Julien Temple. He’ll be arrogant, I thought, full of humourless guff about rock festivals and his days documenting the lives of the Sex Pistols (Sex Pistols Number 1 [1977], The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle [1980] and The Filth and the Fury [2000] — though all three films were good). I carried my conviction with me along

Andrew Lambirth

Timber treatment

With the Grain: Wood Sculpture by David Nash; Jeffery Camp — Rubicon In the foyer of Lewes Town Hall is a sculpture by David Nash called ‘Shrine’, made from American Redwood, a lapped and sheltering piece half-turned in on itself, as if in meditation. It’s placed here to welcome the visitor and to signpost the exhibition from the street — to suggest to anyone peering in at the door that something strange and different is afoot in these august public offices. And august they are, as you will see as you process up the impressive and intricately carved late Tudor staircase, into a long corridor hung with photographs of Nash

Richard Cork

In the labyrinth

Nothing might seem more idyllic than Fragonard’s large, manicured paintings of playful seduction. Executed in the early 1770s for Madame du Barry’s Pavilion at Louveciennes, they celebrate the erotic rituals enacted by aristocratic lovers in the grounds of an opulent estate. The young woman and her equally well-groomed suitor dart, gesticulate and embrace among overflowing flower-beds dominated by classical urns and statues. But by the time Yinka Shonibare has finished with them, in an elaborate and unnerving installation at the new Musée du quai Branly, all their carefree poise is replaced by a macabre alternative. The context provided by this museum, recently created to house some of Paris’s great ethnographic

Michael Tanner

Polar exploration

Opera North’s new production of Janacek’s Katya Kabanova is the most moving I have seen, though it is not the best produced, best sung or most consistently cast. There are two things that make it indispensable to a lover of this wonderful work: the first is the brilliant, perceptive and thought-provoking essays in the programme by Stuart Leeks and, especially, David Nice. The second is the overpoweringly penetrating conducting of Richard Farnes, who shows with every opera he conducts that he is as versatile and deep a conductor as any alive today. What Farnes realises about Katya is that it is the opera in which the two poles of Janacek’s

Charles Spencer

Distant days

As the super soaraway Spectator becomes ever more style-conscious and glossy, I like to think of ‘Olden but golden’ as a monthly oasis for the scruffs, drunks and wasters among the readership. It is, of course, possible to be all these things while presenting a glamorous façade to the world. The smart society hostess may well be a secret Janis Joplin fan who in the privacy of her own bedroom drinks Southern Comfort from the bottle and howls drunkenly along to ‘Ball and Chain’. That slick-suited, impossibly rich hedge-fund manager, heading for the City in his chauffeur-driven car, may secretly long to be Keith Richards, not just because Keef is

Simon Hoggart

Miracle worker

Now and again someone recommends a programme, and you’re very glad they did because it’s the kind of show that television ought to make often and only rarely does. I Believe in Miracles (BBC2, Tuesday), a This World documentary, was like that — just the right length at 40 minutes, and as packed with good things as a Christmas cake. The producers followed Ken, confined to his wheelchair by strokes, and his daughter Susan, who had given up work to care for him, but who suffered herself from debilitating migraines. They joined a coach party from Garstang, Lancashire, to Lourdes, where Dad hoped to walk again. The journey was horrible,

Tuesday

The Spectator

The New Yorker on Banksy

This week’s New Yorker has a fascinating profile of the graffiti artist Banky. He’s one of those people you either love or hate. This quote gives you a flavour of where he’s coming from: “I don’t think art is much of a spectator sport these days,” he began. “I don’t know how the art world gets away with it, it’s not like you hear songs on the radio that are just a mess of noise and then the d.j. says, ‘If you read the thesis that comes with this, it would make more sense.’ ” Do read the whole thing.

Monday

Stuart Reid

The meaning of life

Andrew Ferguson is one of America’s most accomplished conservative writers, but he is barely known here. That’s a pity because his sceptical pen would appeal to many English readers. The other day, on behalf of the Weekly Standard, he attended a panel discussion on the politics of Darwinism at the American Enterprise Institute. The theme before the panel was: “Darwinism and Conservatism: Friends or Foes?” Ferguson’s report is a model of wit and clarity. The cracking pace is set by the first sentence:  “They only had two and a half hours to settle some knotty questions–Does reality have an ultimate, metaphysical foundation? Is there content to the universe?–so they had

The Spectator

The Gordfather

“Barzini’s dead. So is Phillip Tattaglia — Moe Greene — Strachi — Cuneo — Today I settle all Family business.” Remember that scene in The Godfather, where Michael Corleone tells his soon-to-be-executed brother-in-law that the Corleones have settled all their vendettas in a bloody spree of vengeance? That’s what Westminster feels like this morning. The Gordfather has seen them off: all of them. Milburn, Blunkett, Johnson, Clarke, Miliband, and now, unexpectedly, Reid. He has settled all Brownite Family business. He is the unchallenged Don. But – of course – we know from Godfather Part II that blood quickly begets blood, that feuding abhors a vacuum.  In today’s Guardian, Jackie Ashley