Arts Reviews

Today, Rivals returns for a second series on Disney+. The first series was that rarest of phenomena: an adaptation that didn’t hate its source material. Sure, the producers decided to cram the plot with more subtle-as-a-sledgehammer politics than appears in the actual book, but you could tell they revered Jilly Cooper and the world of Rutshire and wanted to do it justice. Cooper executively produced the first series but must have been away on some days (I can’t see her let a well-heeled huntswoman pronounce the Beaufort hunt "Boh-fore" rather than "Boh-fuht," particularly when a major scene in the book hinges on the pronunciation of "Belvoir").

“All art is propaganda,” wrote George Orwell, “but not all propaganda is art.” Upon this subtle distinction rests the success or failure of whatever art we see at the Venice Biennale.  The Most Serene Republic’s exercise in art-world Olympics is propaganda by design. A garden of national pavilions – small buildings in various styles as you might find in a zoological park – presents exhibitions that compete with one another for a “Golden Lion for Best National Participation.” Here, in the murky parkland of the Giardini in the city’s eastern Castello district, nationalist and anti-nationalist passions mix with art-market imbroglio into a sordid spectacle. Just how bad will it be this year? To discover the answer is why we keep coming back.

MAX JONES: “What do you think of the Beatles as artists and people?” BOB DYLAN: “Oh, I think they’re the best. They’re artists and they’re people.” —Melody Maker, March 1965 For more than 60 years, people have been fascinated by the connections between Bob Dylan and the Beatles. All were born during World War Two. All loved the music of Little Richard and Elvis Presley and Eddie Cochran; all were blues fans swept off their feet by rock and roll. Dylan was a Minnesota boy who early in his life became the avatar of the American folk scene, and then a protean man containing multitudes, both musically and otherwise.

Grade: C– Kanye? No, I can’t, quite. I will always quietly overlook the idiotic political sensibilities of the conformist millennial legions who comprise our pop charts – the keffiyeh-clad Hamas wannabes, the BLM halfwits, the greenies, the men-can-be-women wankpuffins – in order to let their music be judged on its own merits, free from boomer political disdain. But songs such as “Heil Hitler” and all those swastikas? Well, they are just a stretch too far for me. The man is an abject moron. Some will say, so what? There have been loads of abject morons down the years in pop. Why draw a line in the sand for Kanye West? Good question. And it turns out it’s not his fault.

HBO Max is the latest streaming channel trying to lure you into yet another of those subscription contracts you only remember having signed up for about three years later when you’re trying to work out why you are so skint. Its showpiece series is The Pitt which attracts ten million viewers per episode and has been called “the best medical drama on television in years.” This is a category of excellence I find about as enticing as “most amusing form of cancer” or “most ineradicable variety of testicular lice.” But, just for you, I watched to see what the fuss is about.

When so much contemporary art is riven with obscurity and angst, it is disorienting, at first, to encounter something as straightforwardly enjoyable as Hockney’s latest exhibition. Aged 88, the artist went out into his garden in Normandy with his iPad to make a visual diary of the year 2020. A hundred or so of the iPad sketches he made have been put together here, blended into a frieze, a walk-through panorama of the seasons rendered with Vivaldi-like virtuosity. As we move along the curve of this 90-meter frieze, we see nature through Hockney’s bright yellow spectacles. He distills the garden to its dramatic essences. The chill mist of winter is numinous, the dormant trees skeletal, the spring blossom riotously delicate, the blue sky bluer than blue.