Oculus Rift. It sounds like something from a science fiction novel, and in many ways it is. Its release this week is the first stirring of a future stuffed with virtual reality headsets. The hope of its Californian engineers and their bitcoin backers is that we, the consumers, will soon use them to spend a
A feature film about priests who abuse children is being released on 25 March. Which happens to be Good Friday. Geddit? The sacrifice of the innocents. A conspiracy of religious hierarchs. Hand-washing by the secular authorities. I’m sure I can think of some more analogies if you give me time, but that’s enough to be
This is the first exhibition I’ve been to where the Prime Minister joined the hacks at the press view. A week after the Irish general election, the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, came to the biggest show in Ireland devoted to the centenary of the Easter Rising. Kenny’s presence at the press launch just goes to show
When the Japanese conductor Masaaki Suzuki leads his forces in a performance of a Bach cantata, does he worry that the non-Christians in his audience will face the fires of Hell? That seems a bizarre question to ask any conductor of Bach’s music, especially one from Japan, where only one per cent of the population
Religion remains a surprisingly popular subject for plays. It’s partly because there’s already a core of theatricality there, in the rituals, the dressing-up and the little shibboleths of piety. In one way or another, religion involves performing. And religion plays the role of Hogwarts in Harry Potter — an enclosed world, a game with rules.
‘I like ordinary people,’ says the extraordinary photographer Martin Parr, pushing a few high-concept smoked sprats around his plate at St John, the Smithfield restaurant. Parr is Britain’s best-known photographer, but he is no acolyte of celebrity. Like the Italian anti-designers, his Seventies contemporaries who wanted to dull the sheen of modernism by elevating the
One of the more obscure winners in recent years of the Berlin film festival’s Golden Bear was a version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by the esteemed Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio. The film, called Caesar Must Die, consisted of prisoners staging the Roman drama in their own high-security jail in Italy. The most dedicated Shakespearean
On 7 February 1506, Albrecht Dürer wrote home to his good friend Willibald Pirckheimer in Nuremberg. The great artist was having a mixed time in Venice: on the one hand, as Dürer explained, he was making lots of delightful new acquaintances, among them ‘good lute-players’ and also ‘connoisseurs in painting, men of much noble sentiment
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/fightingovercrumbs-euroscepticsandtheeudeal/media.mp3″ title=”Stephen Bayley and Posy Metz from Historic England discuss public artwork” startat=1206] Listen [/audioplayer]There are, as adman David Ogilvy remarked, no monuments to committees. (That’s not quite true; Auguste Rodin’s ‘Burghers of Calais’ — you can find a version in Victoria Tower Gardens — is somewhat collectivist in subject matter.) But there are
‘Edvard Munch, I cannot abide,’ wrote Nikolai Astrup in a letter to his friend Arne Giverholt. ‘Everything that he does is supposed to be so brilliant that it doesn’t have to be more than merely sketched.’ Near contemporaries, Munch and Astrup were both innovative and admired painters but while Munch is today one of the
At the Louvre the other day there was a small crowd permanently gathered in front of Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’. They constantly took photographs of the picture itself, and sometimes of themselves standing in front of it. No such attention was given to the other masterpieces of French painting hanging nearby, including many by
Like Black Rod and the Poet Laureate, screenwriter Andrew Davies occupies one of the most colourful and arcane offices in public life. He is Pornographer-in-Chief, a title that was first bestowed by the journalist Paul Johnson on the boss of Channel 4, Sir Michael Grade. Davies has assumed the mantle by virtue (or vice) of
I remember the shock, like a jolt of static electricity. One day, between taking my degree and beginning my first job, while looking through a 16th-century book about numerology that had once belonged to John Dee in the British Library, I came upon an annotation in his own neat italic hand casting up the numerical
One of the stranger disputes of the past few weeks has concerned a Victorian figure that has occupied a niche in the centre of Oxford for more than a century without, for the most part, attracting any attention at all. Now, of course, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign is demanding that the sculpture — its
Until a decade and a half ago, we had no national museum of modern art at all. Indeed, the stuff was not regarded as being of much interest to the British; now Tate Modern is about to expand vastly and bills itself as the most popular such institution in the world. The opening of the
A young Polynesian woman lies outstretched on sheets of a soft lemon yellow. She is wrapped in deep blue cloth, decorated with a golden star. Beside her bed sits a hooded figure, apparently an older woman, holding a baby. In the background is a huddle of resting cows, suggesting that the setting is a barn
‘I will do something sooner or later,’ wrote Beatrix Potter in the secret diary she kept in a private code. It was March 1883 and 16-year-old Potter, still mostly confined to the nursery of her parents’ house in South Kensington, had made a second visit to the Winter Exhibition of old masters at the Royal
In the basement of a busy café in Hockley, Nottingham, which may not have known exactly what it was letting itself in for, a young woman is loudly dissecting an unsatisfactory lunch: ‘Deep in my heart I know I love chips.’ In another basement a few hundred yards away, lit by a single floor lamp,
It’s extraordinary that it took civilisation so very long to discover the benefits of putting little wheels on suitcases. We knew how to fly before we realised it was no longer necessary to huff-and-puff baggage by hand. Even odder, steam and electricity were well understood before anyone got around to developing the ingeniously simple pedal-and-crank
One day Julia Margaret Cameron was showing John Ruskin a portfolio of her photographic portraits. The critic grew more and more impatient until he came to a study of the scientist Sir John Herschel in which the subject’s hair stood up ‘like a halo of fireworks’. At this point, Ruskin slammed the portfolio shut and
