Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

This will hurt

When reviewers call a work ‘important’ they mean ‘boring’ and ‘earnest’. And in those terms Shipwreck is one of the most ‘important’ shows I’ve ever seen. It’s not a play but a series of monologues and conversations spoken by a group of American liberals stuck overnight in a rural farmhouse. ‘It’s a red zone,’ they shudder when they learn that they’re in a Republican county. They pass the night carping loftily about the faults of Trump’s campaign and of his presidency between the inauguration and his dismissal of James Comey on 9 May 2017. It’s unclear why this arbitrary time period is chosen, and by ignoring more recent events the

Kate Chisholm

Points of view | 28 February 2019

Is it me or are we now faced (or perhaps I should say fazed?) much more often by stories in the news that test our moral and ethical principles to the limit, forcing us to question ourselves and what we think to such an extent that it becomes impossible to be sure of what is right? I can never understand the high-minded righteousness and full-blown convictions of the panellists on Radio 4’s Moral Maze, who each week are given a topical issue and who then spend 45 minutes tossing it about, testing the pros and cons and questioning a group of often baffled witnesses who are invited on to the

Tuesday

Toby Young Toby Young

Bohemian Rhapsody’s Oscars win is a triumph over snobby film critics

Midway through Bohemian Rhapsody, the big screen biopic about legendary Queen frontman Freddie Mercury that won four Oscars on Sunday, we see a montage of the critical reviews given to the group’s 1975 song of the same name. Queen had put it out as a single and it wasn’t expected to be a success. At six minutes, it was twice as long as most top 40 hits and its bizarre blend of opera, pop and hard rock was like nothing anyone had ever heard before. “Pompous and overlong,” concluded one music critic. “All flash and calculation without soul,” opined another. “A song that should be sunk to the bottom of the

Monday

Dominic Green Dominic Green

Oscars 2019: does Green Book deserve to be called ‘lying white guilt trash’?

It was a big night for Rami Malek and the Green Book team, and a big night for me too. My palms, closely shaved for the occasion, were sweatier than usual. My tux, freshly laundered and let out, suddenly tightened when the nominations were read out. I was afraid I’d be publicly humiliated, but it turned out that I was a winner. Yes, my Oscar tips were pretty accurate this year — until they weren’t. I thought I’d factored more racial tokenism than a Bernie Sanders campaign video, and more political gesturing than a fundraising disco for the Democratic Socialists of America. But I got the balance of tokenism wrong. I thought ‘All the

Friday

David Cox

The diversity agenda is killing cinema

The film world is atoning for its crimes against diversity. On screen, strong women are supplanting Disney princesses. Superheroes, once uniformly white and male, are turning multicultural. Gay intrigue is edging out heterosexual romance. Away from the camera, bankable stars force studios to employ minority personnel by adding ‘inclusion riders’ to their contracts. Film-makers must repent ancient mis-speaks, beg forgiveness and denounce peers accused of transgressions. Abuse allegations against Woody Allen may be unproven, but actors who have taken his shilling disown him and donate their tarnished earnings to #TimesUp. Unsurprisingly, the current awards season reflects these rectifications. Of the eight nominations for best picture Oscar, six boast diversity credentials.

Thursday

Roger Scruton

Home truths | 21 February 2019

The creation of a commission to examine beauty in new building created a stir in the media, with the chairman subjected to a hate storm of unusual turbulence even by the standards that he regularly has to endure. Hate storms arise when powerful interests are threatened, and this was no exception. There is hardly a person in this country who is not aware of what Milan Kundera has called the ongoing ‘uglification of our world’ and who does not hope that something might be done about it. No one I talk to denies the need for a large number of new houses. But they all hope that this need can

Laura Gascoigne

Small wonders | 21 February 2019

When Henry VIII died in 1547, he left a religiously divided country to a young iconoclast who erased a large part of its visual culture. In a brief six years the government of Edward VI effectively whitewashed over England’s native heritage of sacred art, leaving a country already reliant on foreign painters for its royal portraits bereft of an artistic identity. Artistically speaking, Tudor England was the sick man of Europe — and the signs of recovery, when they first appeared, were tiny. Nicholas Hilliard, born in the year of Henry VIII’s death, paradoxically owed his art education to his family’s Protestantism. The son of an Exeter goldsmith swept up

Martin Gayford

Art and life

Diane Arbus saw mid-20th century New York as if she was in a waking dream. Or at least that is the impression you get from the exhibition of her early photographs at the Hayward Gallery. She was attracted to people on the margins of society — or, as she roundly called them, ‘freaks’: fairground performers, assorted human oddities and individuals with non-standard bodies such as ‘Miss Makrina, a Russian Midget, in her Kitchen NYC’ (1959). Arbus famously observed of such individuals: ‘They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.’ However, Arbus could make just about anybody — or thing — appear unaccountably strange. An old couple on a park

Claudia Massie

Lines of enquiry

A cataclysmic storm is unfolding. Dense, thunderous lines of black chalk sweep rapidly around the paper in frantic curls of awesome energy. Rocks tumble beneath the irresistible force of an engulfing flood. Cloud and rain, vapour and water, both churned by the same punishing vortexes, become almost indistinguishable. The scale is hard to judge until you glimpse, in the foreground, a hilltop fortress, dwarfed and ruined by the relentless inundation. Man and his monument, both powerless in the face of almighty nature. It’s a terrifying scene of chaos and one that Leonardo da Vinci revisited numerous times in his final years. Facing his own mortality, he produced a series of

David Hockney As Told To Martin Gayford

On Van Gogh and Rembrandt

Being in the south of France obviously gave Vincent an enormous joy, which visibly comes out in the paintings. That’s what people feel when they look at them. They are so incredibly direct. I remember in some of his letters Vincent saying that he was aware he saw more clearly than other people. It was an intense vision… [H]e must have been doing some very concentrated looking. My God! After working for a long time, I get very tired eyes. I just have to close them… Photographs of those fields around Arles that Van Gogh painted wouldn’t interest us much. It’s a rather boring, flat landscape. Vincent makes us see

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Blurred vision

All About Eve is Cinderella steeped in acid rather than sugar. Eve, or Cinders, is a wannabe star who uses a powerful theatre critic (the Buttons character) to help her win fame by overcoming two Ugly Sisters represented by a movie goddess, Margo Channing, and her film-director boyfriend. This fairytale was filmed in 1950 with Bette Davis as Margo and it remains a widely loved classic. Ivo van Hove’s version is torn between the 1950s and the present day. Result: a mystery. Margo is clearly being stalked by Eve but instead of referring the poor girl to a psychiatrist, she hires her as an understudy. Somewhat rash! Margo seems oddly

Kate Chisholm

Friendly fire | 21 February 2019

With the upsurge of listeners to Classic FM (now boasted to be 5.6 million listeners each week) and the imminent launch of a new commercial station, Scala Radio, dedicated to classical music and fronted by the former Radio 2 DJ Simon Mayo (who has said about his new home: ‘Some of it will be familiar, some new and exciting but all timeless, beautiful and all absolutely relevant to today’), Radio 3 badly needs to regain our attention. Last weekend’s focus on Berlioz, ‘The Ultimate Romantic’, could have been such an opportunity, but either because of funding cuts or a confusion about its purpose (to find new audiences, to teach or

Dominic Green Dominic Green

The real RBG

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is too ill to sit on the Supreme Court. When she saw On the Basis of Sex, a hagiography written by her nephew, she must have thought she had already gone to heaven. Directed by Mimi Leder to the highest TV-movie standards, this prequel to the obsequious 2018 documentary RBG will appeal to all purchasers of the grovelling 2015 biography, Notorious RBG. The real RBG totters across the last frames of this movie like the laminated ghost of American liberalism. Such idolatry diminishes Bader Ginsburg’s achievement, the unpicking in 1971 of the first of 178 laws discriminating against you-know-who on the basis of you-know-what. But this film

James Walton

Let’s twist again

What’s the best way to start a six-part thriller? The answer, it seems, is to have a bloke of a certain age pottering about at home when he’s suddenly and shockingly murdered by asphyxiation. You then roll the opening credits, forget about the dead guy and introduce the main character, who’s asked to take part in some sort of mission — and agonises about whether to accept or to leave the whole series somewhat stranded. At least, this is exactly what happened in both of this week’s big new Sunday-night dramas: BBC1’s Baptiste and Channel 4’s Traitors. In Baptiste, the pre-credits murder was of an apparently harmless shell-collector in Deal

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Dancing up a La Mancha storm

The trouble with Don Quixote is Don Quixote. Whenever the doddering, delusional Don is onstage, tilting at windmills, riding his straw-and-sawdust nag on wheels, jousting with bedposts, our spirits and sympathies suffer. Quixote’s quest only really works as an excuse for Kitri, Basilio, Espada the Matador and Mercedes the street minx to dance up a La Mancha storm. This they do, with bells on. In toreador waistcoat, tight taleguilla and pink stockings to match his cape, Ryoichi Hirano is the Mata-phwoar. The corps de ballet swoon and flutter. He is sexy, even caddish. I was a Hirano doubter, but this was a magnificent performance: athletic power matched by classical control.

Daisy Dunn

Outsider art | 21 February 2019

If you’re tired of hygge then you’ll like Harald Sohlberg. The Norwegian painter  eschewed the cosy fireside for the great outdoors, eager to see what view might greet him as he wandered the woods and country roads of Norway in the failing light. While his contemporary Nikolai Astrup filled his landscapes with people, Sohlberg preferred to bring nature to the fore, at once unnerved and mesmerised by its power. He excelled at depicting the scene just stumbled upon or left behind. In ‘Summer Night’ (1899), a table is set for two on a veranda overlooking the Kristiania Fjord off what is now Oslo. The glasses are half full, the fruit

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Miracle of Mumbai

It’s a 31ºC Mumbai morning, and on Marine Drive the Russian winter is closing in. The Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI) is rehearsing Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony ahead of its first ever UK tour, and even on the campus of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) — a palm-shaded tropical Barbican next to the Arabian Sea — this is still music to raise a shiver. Strings sigh; horns call across frozen steppes. Then the guest conductor Martyn Brabbins gives the signal for a break and players spill into the foyer, chatting and gulping tea. If the sky were more grey and the tea less sweet, it could be a

Stephen Bayley

Maps of the mind

MacDonald ‘Max’ Gill (1884–1947) is less well known than his notorious brother, Eric. But was he less of a designer, less of an artist? The son of a Brighton clergyman, his career was built on a sequence of remarkable connections. The architect Halsey Ricardo, a descendant of the economist, was his tutor. While working for church builders Nicholson and Corlette, Gill very likely met Edwin Lutyens at the Art Workers’ Guild. And for Nashdom, the neo-Georgian house Lutyens built in 1909 for Prince Dolgorouki at Burnham in Buckinghamshire, Gill drew an imaginative ‘Wind Map’. Somewhere between illustration and cartography, this was a pointer of what was soon to come from

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

My diversity targets for the BBC

Terrible news for gay broadcasters —  the BBC has only one year to meet a diversity target which says that 8 per cent of roles on TV and radio must be occupied by homosexuals. This means a reduction in gay TV weathermen by at least three quarters, and they’ll also have to sack a good half of the gay chat-show hosts. This seems to me unfair, but that’s diversity targets for you. The 8 per cent figure has been appropriated by the BBC from the gay lobby, although there are activists who will tell you that a still greater proportion of our country is homosexual. This does not match with