In the past ten years museums of modern and contemporary art have proliferated around the world. New institutions have appeared in Los Angeles, Venice, Doha and Beijing. Even Camden has seen a burst of activity — the Dairy Art Centre opened in April of this year, spread over the 12,500 sq ft of a former
I am standing on the deserted shop floor of a Victorian mill in Wakefield, with the industrial history of Yorkshire spread out before me like a map. Down below, the River Calder, once so busy, is now a leisurely, peaceful place. Children play beside the water. There are fishermen on the banks. It’s a lot
Gregory Doran has famously long glossy locks and is widely known to be a nice guy and an incurable Shakespeare nut. He has now taken over the reins at the Royal Shakespeare Company, with which he’s been associated for 26 years, working on both sides of the footlights, first as an actor and then a
São Paulo has a concert hall that London’s orchestras would kill for. It was originally a railway station, a mighty space bounded by Corinthian pilasters in the style of a French palace, built by Brazilian coffee barons. Now the tracks are buried beneath 800 seats on the main floor, plus another 700 on the balconies
In my career as a music hall artiste I travel the world, mostly in the Dominions, the United States and the cleaner countries of Europe. Aside from giving incalculable pleasure to thousands of people, I love, on my days off, to visit picture galleries: usually the porticoed kind, in search of those overlooked little masterpieces
Why are clever-clever people so rude about Birmingham? Bruce Chatwin dismissed his hometown as absolutely hideous, Kenneth Tynan called his birthplace a cemetery without walls. Britain’s second city has always been belittled, not least by those who’ve left it, and now the old slights have been revived in the current debate about HS2. Never mind
A dark afternoon in December, aged about ten, I was in a class waiting for double geography. Mr Blake breezed in, told us to put our books away and, as a treat, he read us a story. It was ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, the famous ghost story by M.R. James.
Strict bylaws in Edinburgh prevent you from buying off-licence booze after ten at night. You can, however, buy all the sauce you want from ten in the morning. (This may explain why alcoholism is so rare up here.) When midnight tolls, Festival revellers pour forth and fill the air with chanting and singing of variable
Few come to Edinburgh in August for the art but this year they should. The line-up for the official Art Festival is impressive and, happily, rich in painters. Foremost among them is Peter Doig, whose semi-retrospective No Foreign Lands is the main event at the Scottish National Gallery (until 3 November). Doig was born in
Manet’s paintings were regularly rejected by the Salon, yet he continued to submit them and declined to exhibit with the Impressionists, who regarded him as a father figure. Even when his works were accepted by the Salon, they were routinely received with outrage among both critics and the public. This response baffled him. When his
David Haig is one of those actors who can’t escape the visual identity of his characters. He’s the sad suburban salaryman. He’s the pasty-faced petty bureaucrat. He’s the bungling office curmudgeon with a volcanic temper. He just looks that way. Except that he doesn’t. I barely recognise the suntanned Bohemian figure who strolls up and
The best way to view some of the world’s greatest works of art is to go nowhere near them. Like other celebrities, the most famous paintings are hard to get close to and there are few less spiritual experiences than being cattle-prodded as part of a crowd through an overpacked exhibition. You may visit in
Gosh. I wouldn’t mind being Peter Nichols. Eighty-six this month and still enjoying the easy domesticity and professional stimulation he’s benefited from since the 1960s when he was propelled to stardom by his play about raising a disabled daughter, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. He lives in a penthouse flat in north
Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) spending review rounds always work like this: officials choose three figures of increasing severity and ask those they fund to model what would happen should their funding be cut by the corresponding amounts. The organisations duly devote considerable resources to trying to work out what they could cut
We meet in the late afternoon at a jazzy little bistro near the Old Vic. I hadn’t quite prepared myself for the sheer visual impact of Anna Chancellor. Imposingly tall and wearing a simple glamorous frock, she rises to greet me. The dispositions of her face — the dimpled chin, the high cheekbones and the
One day in Berlin, I saw the rerun of the RA’s Young British Artists exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin’s equivalent of Tate Modern. After that, I saw a superb retrospective of Lyonel Feininger at the Neue Deutsche Galerie. In the evening, I ran into the onlie begetter of the YBA show (which, with the
As soon as the battle of Bosworth was won, Henry VII’s politically astute mother sent him appropriate clothing for his state entry into London. A king was expected to look like a king, having ‘a prerogative is his array above all others’. Sumptuary laws policed the system under the Tudors, with everyone — in theory
William Empson believed that ‘the arts are produced by overcrowding’. But, as 20,000 invited guests and 4,500 accredited journalists surged through the pavilions of the Giardini and Arsenale on the 55th Venice Biennale’s preview days last week, it was more a case of overcrowding being produced by the arts. Over the past 20 years the
You might expect a chief executive of English Heritage to look quite English, and Simon Thurley certainly does. He has the pale eyes, and fine bones, of the English upper classes. He has the clipped vowels of the English upper classes, too. In his nice pink shirt, in his nice white office, in a nice
To be a folk music fan in Britain today is to be jangling the keys to a cultural palace. For a variety of reasons, we seem to have produced the most brilliant young musicians in decades — but the rest of the world has always seemed rather more excited about the fact than we are.
