Arts Reviews

Sochi 2014 is the least wintry Winter Olympics ever. Yes, there’s a bit of downhill shimmying going on in the slalom. And a few figure skaters are pirouetting around the rink. Midair daredevils, with their feet lashed to planks of bendy plastic, are performing spectacular twirls and somersaults and crashes. And there are speed freaks on tea trays racing down ice-packed gulleys in tribute to the Hadron Collider. But the real action is off-piste and off-chute. It’s a political grudge match. Two implacable foes are angrily denouncing each other as shameful and perverted barbarians. The Hope Theatre’s verbatim drama, Sochi 2014, taps into this febrile mood with a documentary history

In recent years contemporary art and regeneration have gone hand in hand. Works such as Antony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’ have been visible and celebrated examples of regeneration. So when, last year, Southwark Council decided to sell Elephant and Castle’s seemingly unloved Heygate Estate (above) to Lend Lease for development into new homes, it seemed inevitable that public art would be utilised. Artangel, the country’s most respected public art commissioning agency, announced plans for a work by the artist Mike Nelson that would take the form of a pyramid made from the estate’s building materials as it was dismantled. James Lingwood, Artangel’s co-director, stated that ‘the project would mark

The Oscar-award winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has been found dead,  aged just 46, in his New York apartment this evening. According to reports, he appears to have died from a drug overdose. Hoffman was known to have battled  substance abuse for several years. Hoffman was popular with The Spectator’s critics. Last April Clarissa Tan wrote that Hoffman gave a ‘stellar turn’ as Robert Gelbart in A Late Quarter. As well as finding his directing debut Jack Goes Boating ‘sublime’, our film reviewer Deborah Ross was particularly impressed with Hoffman’s performance  in The Master — writing that Joaquin Phoenix and Hoffman gave ‘two of the most blistering performances you will see for an unspecified time period’: ‘Hoffman, meanwhile,

I don’t know if you’ve seen this letter to this week’s edition of the magazine, from a person called Chris Doyle. He is a member of the ‘Council for Arab-British Understanding’ and has taken exception to last week’s cover cartoon. He objects that the drawing of ‘two bearded, large hooked nose, weapon-wielding men’ was a stereotypical way of depicting a possible war between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Yes, you utter idiot. That’s what cartoons do. They look for the easily definable, so that they might have a meaning to people. Would you have preferred the cartoon to be of two people with average sized noses dressed in lounge suits and

The Works on Paper annual fair runs from 6 to 9 February at the Science Museum. Its name is a bit of a giveaway: all art must be on paper. There is a huge range of work on display: early, modern and contemporary watercolours, prints, posters and photographs — from the late-15th century to the present day, with prices ranging from £250 to £75,000. So whether you want to buy a Japanese woodblock print, a series of studies by Edward Burne-Jones or one by Stanley Spencer, a drawing by Picasso, Cézanne or Ben Nicholson, South Kensington is the place to go.