Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Ian Pace

The political polyvalency of modernism

The late Sir Roger Scruton often pronounced in a harsh manner on modern architecture and modern music, perceiving in various work an assault on bourgeois culture and a break with tradition. Back in the 1950s, music critic and CIA agent Henry Pleasants (a station chief in Bonn) delivered if anything a more scathing view of the ‘agony’ of modern music, arguing that it had severed its connection with the idioms bequeathed by the human voice. It might seem natural that opposition to the iconoclasm of artistic modernism would go hand-in-hand with a relatively conservative politics. Furthermore, knowledge of Nazi attacks on Entartete Kunst suggests a clear disjunction between far right

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

A very good place to start if you want to understand China: Mark Kitto’s Chinese Boxing reviewed

In so far as it acknowledged them at all, the Chinese Communist Party has blamed ‘infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces’ for the recent anti-lockdown protests. It’s an accusation laden with historical baggage. Modern China’s history with foreign states, especially the Europeans, hasn’t generally been a happy one. For many Chinese, the collective memory is still raw. The most mutually traumatic episode in this history is probably the Boxer Rebellion, when thousands of foreign delegates were besieged in Beijing by Chinese rebels for 55 days. The siege eventually ended with an allied rescued mission which sacked the city, the soldiers raping and killing the Beijingers who were left. This

Zoe Dubno

Illuminating and depressing: Fiasco – The AIDS Crisis reviewed

Fiasco is a podcast series on Audible that dives deeply into episodes in recent American history. It takes listeners through the smaller moments. Often those that, within the larger epoch-defining events, have been lost to history. In the first season, for example, which centred on the Bush v. Gore election, the opening episode is devoted entirely to the international custody imbroglio of Cuban-born Elian Gonzalez. This case – which saw President Clinton allow Gonzalez to be removed from his relatives in Florida and sent back to his father in Cuba – contributed to Al Gore’s loss of the Latino vote in Florida and thereby cost him the presidential election. Other

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

If Ravel’s Boléro makes you yawn, you’re not really listening

Only boring people are bored by Ravel’s Boléro. True, the composer – the slyest of wits – left his share of booby traps for the uncomprehending; take his comment, in a letter to Paul Dukas, that ‘I have written only one masterpiece, Boléro. Unfortunately there is no music in it.’ Yet Ravel was a sublime colourist; a master of the instrumental palette who makes Stravinsky’s orchestration sound coarse by comparison, and Boléro is one long twist of a fabulous kaleidoscope. Even its notorious repetitions are a red herring. Take the full score as a whole and you’ll struggle to find two bars that are identical (there are a couple at

Laura Gascoigne

Brueghel’s peasant paintings were the D.C. Thomson comics of the 17th century

‘Psst! Someone’s coming!’ the skinny man with the ragged breeches and the bandaged jaw warns his fat companion out of the corner of his mouth. The two men, busy bundling sticks in a wood, look around apprehensively while a third man up a ladder attacks a tree with a billhook. The three of them are clearly up to no good, and we’ve caught them at it. The focus of an intriguing little exhibition at the Barber Institute, ‘Two Peasants Binding Firewood’, c.1604-16, (see p31) was once thought to be by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but as it’s one of several copies from the same workshop it has since been reattributed

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

I’m very touched that Christine and the Queens has changed her name to Redcar

Grade: B+ We are all very touched, up here, that the esoteric French artist formerly known as Christine and the Queens has changed her name to Redcar, in honour of our once vibrant beachside steel town. Perhaps she was impressed by the newish ‘vertical pier’, or enjoyed a nutritious meal in the Light of Asia. Or, better still, maybe she is planning to adopt a whole bunch of East Cleveland nom de plumes and will next call herself Liverton Mines, or Boosebeck. She may, of course, just mean a red car. Héloîse Letissier (her born name) is very good at simple, naggingly catchy, woebegone synth pop. The simpler the better

John Phipps

An all too brisk and too narrow history of eugenics: Radio 4’s Bad Blood reviewed

Like so many of history’s great catastrophes, the story begins with an eccentric Victorian Englishman. Francis Galton was a maker of maps and compiler of tables; ‘Whenever you can, count,’ was his mantra. Galton was the first man to plot a weather map and the grandfather of forensic fingerprinting. His quixotic mania for quantification would lead him to try and draw up a ‘beauty atlas’ of the United Kingdom based on his own observations. In a footnote to one of his books, he expressed the need for a new term for the ‘science’ that obsessed him most: ‘We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock.’

Sam Kriss

Why bother calling it White Noise when it’s just another Noah Baumbach film? White Noise reviewed

These days, everyone who was knocking around a few decades ago predicted the internet. Marshall McLuhan famously predicted the internet in 1962. Orson Scott Card predicted the internet in 1986. Even David Bowie is supposed to have seen it coming. But I think Don DeLillo really did prophesise our 21st-century technological reality in his 1985 novel White Noise. White Noise is about a lot of things (mostly, it’s one of the funniest novels ever written about death). But something weird keeps happening in the gaps. Characters are interrupted by the TV, by the radio, by a market researcher who keeps phoning them up to ask about the exact blend of

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The acting rescues it: National Theatre’s Othello reviewed

Crude eccentricities damage the potential brilliance of Othello at the National. Some of the visual gestures seem to have been approved by crazies from the neo-fascist fringe. The Moor is first seen doing a work-out with a punch bag but he doesn’t strike the bag, he grabs a broom handle and uses it to perform some fancy martial arts moves. The action starts and Othello is accused of spiriting Desdemona away from her father’s house and seducing her by trickery or witchcraft. During these scenes he’s stalked by a mob of extremists who dangle nooses and threaten him with daggers. That’s just silly. Othello is the foremost warrior in Venice.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Fascinating, plausible ideas undermined by Netflix: Ancient Apocalypse reviewed

Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse has been described by the Guardian as ‘the most dangerous show on Netflix’. What? More dangerous than the undigested, neo-Malthusian eco-propaganda that it serves up in its collaborations with Sir David Attenborough? More dangerous than its notorious movie Cuties, whose portrayal of hypersexualised children prompted a worldwide ‘Cancel Netflix’ campaign? The Guardian’s main beef is that by flirting with speculations outside mainstream archaeology – Atlantis, giants, the survivors of the great flood and so on – the show ‘whispers to the conspiracy theorist in all of us’. But oddly enough, I found the opposite to be true. In fact, there were times when I felt as

Oliver Basciano

‘What happened in Russia can happen anywhere’: Pussy Riot interviewed

As she recalls a decade of infamy, Maria Alyokhina wanders one of the many anonymous apartments she has lived in since escaping Russia six months ago. ‘We didn’t expect a criminal case, we didn’t expect imprisonment, we didn’t expect international attention. We didn’t expect how many people would support Pussy Riot, would go to the street in balaclavas. We could never have predicted that.’ Alyokhina and Pussy Riot, a loose feminist collective who perform in brightly coloured balaclavas, came to international attention in February 2012 with their ‘punk prayer’, a guerilla music performance in Moscow’s orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Plugging in an electric guitar to an amp, they

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

Quiet yet beautiful – and there’s plenty of sex: Lady Chatterley’s Lover reviewed

If you’re of my generation, I expect your first encounter with D.H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the (well-thumbed) book passed around school and then maybe Ken Russell’s full-frontal, hut-shaking, 1993 television adaptation starring Joely Richardson and Sean Bean at his most Sean Bean. (‘I wan’ yer, m’lady.’) But this Netflix version doesn’t play it as high-toned smut or as a pop-culture joke. It’s more in keeping with Lawrence’s alternative title for the novel, Tenderness, and it’s more a gentle, affecting, immersive love story than a sex story although there is plenty of sex in it. You’re not about to be short-changed there, m’lady. It’s more a gentle love story

Daisy Dunn

An author speaks out against social censorship: The Reith Lectures reviewed

‘The Age of Anxiety’, W. H. Auden’s book-length poem, has always been described as strange, and difficult. It is an eclogue, but set far from the countryside, in a bar in New York, in the middle of the second world war. It looks like a modern script on the page but metrically it sounds more like Old English. The text flits between conversation and inner thought and is steeped in Jungian philosophy, mysticism and mirrors. Puritanism has bred the assumption that ‘good people’ do not need free speech When I first read it in my twenties, I gave up on trying to understand it and simply allowed the words to

Michael Hann

Why I love Rod Stewart

Reader, I let you down. But I did so for the right reason: for love. On a night when all of London’s music critics were at the Royal Festival Hall for Christine and the Queens, I deserted my duty. But, honestly, I don’t regret it. The reports back from the RFH suggested some baffling melange of performance art, am dram, experimental pop and gender identity, wrapped up in a concept piece about red cars. Not me. I’ll stick with Rod, a man so comfortable with his gender identity that he’s a byword for male libido. Rod is a man so comfortable with his gender identity that he’s a byword for

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Mesmerising and eye-opening: Courtauld Gallery’s Fuseli and the Modern Woman reviewed

It’s not until you see this exhibition of drawings by Henry Fuseli that you realise that most artists have really not done anything like justice to women’s hair. Fuseli was obsessed with it, particularly that of his wife Sophia, a former artists’ model 20-plus years his junior. Hers was wildly extravagant even by the standards of the time – late 18th, early 19th century. For most art buffs, Fuseli, one of the most idiosyncratic artists of his age, is best known for ‘The Nightmare’, his lurid Gothic painting of a curvaceous sleeping woman with a demon squatting on her belly, shown in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1782; the drawings

James Walton

A dismaying exercise in nostalgia: Simon Schama’s History of Now reviewed

For those who consider themselves traditional liberals (full disclosure: such as me) Sunday’s first episode of Simon Schama’s History of Now may have felt like a somewhat dismaying exercise in nostalgia. As Schama ran through a familiar anthology of 20th-century liberalism’s greatest hits, we were taken back to a happier, more recognisable world of clearly demarcated goodies and baddies where democracy would inevitably mean the triumph of our own beliefs and there was little that couldn’t be fixed by art ‘speaking truth to power’. The programme’s starting point, as you might imagine, was the Spanish Civil War, described by Schama as a ‘great battle between democracy and autocracy’ – rather

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

An unexpected heartbreaker: Elf the Musical, at the Dominion Theatre, reviewed

Elf opens with an unbelievable premise. Buddy was abandoned as a baby and adopted by Santa’s elves and he spent a happy childhood making Christmas gifts in their factory at the North Pole. The action begins when Buddy decides to track down his real father in New York, but when he arrives he finds a community sunk in greed and cynicism. He’s horrified to learn that everyone exploits Christmas for financial gain. His dad, Walter Hobbs, turns out to be a bullied publishing executive who has no time to spend with his wife and his lonely younger son. Buddy’s mission is to restore love to this broken family and to

Richard Bratby

The sonic equivalent of a Starbucks Eggnog Latte: ENO’s It’s a Wonderful Life reviewed

Whoosh! A digital starburst, a sweep of orchestral sound and the stage of the Coliseum is alive with dancing, whirling snowflakes. Floating in the heavens is the soprano Danielle de Niese; below her in the darkness, the truss bridge that we all know – because we’ve all seen It’s a Wonderful Life – is where the turning point of the story will occur, a couple of hours from now. That being the case, the only question is how composer Jake Heggie, librettist Gene Scheer and director Aletta Collins are going to close the circle and get us there. It’s evident from the off that they’re not going to stint either

Sam Kriss

Why ASMR is evil

In 1954, the psychologist James Olds made a few ordinary rats the happiest rodents that had ever lived. He had directly wired an electrode into the rats’ brains, plugging into the septal area, which he believed might have something to do with the experience of pleasure. When he passed a small electric current through the electrode, the rats seemed to enjoy the experience. If he buzzed the rats only when they were in a particular place, they’d keep returning there, as if they were asking politely for him to do it again. So he tried handing over control of the experiment to the rats themselves. Olds gave them a lever:

Wednesday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Repellent: Paramount+’s Tulsa King reviewed

TV currently abounds with ‘I thought they were dead’ revival projects: series in which your favourite 1980s movie stars are given a new lease of life and you are reminded – with luck – how much you loved them. Kevin Costner is doing very well in Yellowstone; Ralph Macchio is milking the Karate Kid legacy for all it’s worth in Cobra Kai; Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow had a decent run in The Old Man. Now it’s the turn of Sylvester Stallone in Tulsa King. But I shan’t be hanging around for the second episode. My main problem with it is the flawed premise. Stallone’s character –Dwight ‘The General’ Manfredi