Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Alan Judd

Caveat emptor

A weekly airdrop of Exchange & Mart was the luxury I used to think I’d choose when the producers of Desert Island Discs realised who they’d been missing all these years. A weekly airdrop of Exchange & Mart was the luxury I used to think I’d choose when the producers of Desert Island Discs realised who they’d been missing all these years. But now, I fear, it would be access to eBay, that wonderful source of 24-hour auto-porn, plus everything else. Just to browse — I’d have nothing to bid with, of course, though that needn’t stop me. Wonderful though eBay is, it should be negotiated with care. Not only

Saturday

Ariane Bankes

‘If he couldn’t paint, he couldn’t live’

Ariane Bankes talks to the widow of Arshile Gorky, whose retrospective is about to open at Tate Mougouch Fielding opens the door to me looking a little gaunt but as beautiful as ever, though I have not seen her for a couple of years. She is in her late eighties, but no less stylish now than when we knew her as children; we were mesmerised by her chic, her gravelly voice with its hint of an American accent, her sense of fun and the faint whiff of excitement that enveloped her. When she was about 17, my father, then working in China, helped her ashore from a capsized sailing dinghy

Deborah Ross

Game without frontiers

Invictus, 12A Nationwide Gosh, Clint Eastwood will keep thinking of new ways to impress us, the cheeky little monkey. First it was the Dirty Harry and the spaghetti western characters and then he shifted to the director’s chair and ever since it’s been one different thing after another: Unforgiven; Mystic River; Million Dollar Baby; Flags of Our Fathers; Letters from Iwo Jima; Changeling and now Invictus, which tells the story of South Africa coming together for the 1995 rugby world cup. This is not a nuanced film, or even a sophisticated one. It has a story to tell and unapologetically tells it, often quite cheesily, Richard Attenborough-style. But it is

Andrew Lambirth

Island inspiration

Chris Ofili Tate Britain, until 16 May There’s always something temporary-looking about an installation of Chris Ofili’s early paintings. These works are not hanging on the wall, but lean against it, propped up on feet of elephant dung — the best-known ingredient of this Turner Prize-winning artist’s work. As a consequence, the exhibition looks as if it’s still in the process of being hung, and these elaborately decorated and largely trivial paintings have yet to be hoisted on to the gallery walls. But, no, what you see is what you get: glitter, paint, resin, map pins, collaged magazine images, all dexterously arranged in what the Tate publicity department is pleased

Michael Tanner

Distorted account

Così fan tutte Royal Opera Phaedra Barbican When Jonathan Miller’s production of Così fan tutte was first mounted at the Royal Opera in 1995, it was the Armani clothes which received the most attention. Over the years there have been many modifications, and it now bears little relationship, certainly in the direction of the singers, to its original conception. In this latest revival, under Daniel Dooner, a quite new and I found quite distorting account of Mozart’s most ambivalent masterwork of opera is offered, in which the subjects of Don Alfonso’s experiment are presented as self-conscious poseurs, whereas the source of all the insight and pain in Così is surely

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Blunt instrument

Enron Noël Coward Fool for Love Riverside With Enron, the playwright Lucy Prebble has picked an almighty task. The Texas fuel giant collapsed in 2000 with $30 billion worth of debt, which at the time was the largest bankruptcy in the history of money. The firm’s bosses flipped through the almanac of bent accountancy and lighted on a hoary old swindle. A shadow company was created to buy up their loss-making assets thus boosting profit margins and forcing the stock price skywards. To get the auditors to sign off the paperwork Enron simply bribed them. Anyone hoping to find any ingenuity or sophisticated elegance in the fraud will be disappointed.

Charles Spencer

Anything goes | 6 February 2010

God and the editor willing, next month’s column will be the 100th ‘Olden but golden’. God and the editor willing, next month’s column will be the 100th ‘Olden but golden’. For those who write in The Spectator every week, this would doubtless seem small beer. For a monthly column it feels like a landmark and one I sometimes doubted I would reach. And of course I may not…. As any journalist will tell you, every piece you write has the potential to be your last. ‘Olden but golden’ began in October 2001, and I was pleased as Punch to be allowed to do it. Pop music has been a big

Kate Chisholm

Displaced families

Imagine, if you will, that it’s 1922 and you’re living in a small mountain village thousands of miles from Istanbul above the shores of the Black Sea. Imagine, if you will, that it’s 1922 and you’re living in a small mountain village thousands of miles from Istanbul above the shores of the Black Sea. You’re a practising Christian, and there’s a tumble-down cruciform church in the central square, with an icon of the Virgin hanging above the altar. Life until now has been ruled by the Ottoman Turks, but you speak a version of Greek handed down from the days when this part of Asia Minor was ruled by the

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Broken Britain

I’ve got another brilliant idea for a TV series. I’ve got another brilliant idea for a TV series. It’s called MPs Walled Up in Scorpion-Filled, Ebola-Ridden, Plague-Rat-Infested, Acid-Drenched, Radioactive Tower Block of Slow Hellish Screaming Death. All right, so the title does give away the premise, slightly, but I’d still watch it, wouldn’t you? 24/7. Done right — with special feature-length episodes devoted to Ed Balls, Harriet Harman, and the Milibands — I reckon it would be more satisfying than Band of Brothers, The Sopranos, Das Boot, South Park, The Simpsons and University Challenge rolled into one. And from me, that’s quite an accolade. What I shan’t be watching again,

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Problem with Mo

David enjoyed the Mo Mowlam biopic Channel 4 showed on Sunday; I wish I could say the same but am not surprised that I can’t. (You can watch it here, incidentally.) Yes, Julie Walters was just as excellent as one imagined her to be and, yes, it’s carping to complain about what wasn’t in the film (though an acknowledgement that the Peace Process didn’t start on May 2nd 1997 would have been usefu) and it can’t be terribly surprising that the movie gives the impression that the Peace Process was somehow Mowlam’s own possession. Despite that I thought the film was, in terms of the politics of the matter, quietly

Saturday

Peter Phillips

The first Romantic

Peter Phillips on the life and times of Chopin, who was born 200 years ago The year 1810 may seem a little late to look for the beginning of the Romantic movement in music, but with the births of Chopin, Schumann and S.S. Wesley one could make a case. Think of the difference in the lifestyles of these composers, especially Chopin’s, when compared with those of their immediate predecessors. Where Mozart was tied to a court and lived more or less the life of a servant, these three travelled as they liked, the original freelancing musicians. Where Haydn was emotionally tied to the Church (and physically to a court), only

Luke Coppen

Welcome to the age of Gaga

Unpredictable, spectacular, bold and contentious — Lady Gaga is the perfect pop star for the 21st century, says Luke Coppen In 1903, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a letter to a young man who yearned to be a great artist. ‘In the deepest hour of the night,’ the German poet advised, ‘confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself: must I write?’ It’s fair to say that Rilke never imagined his words would end up tattooed on the arm of a pop star with a penchant for porcelain bikinis and

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

All change at Hampstead

As Ed Hall takes over the Hampstead Theatre, Lloyd Evans offers some advice on how to run this prestigious venue Congratulations, mate. You’ve landed a plum job. And a bloody tough one, too. Paradoxically, it’s harder to run a single venue than to run a group of theatres. The focus is tighter. There’s less opportunity to experiment, to learn as you go, to fine-tune your style. You have to get it right fast. Here are some hints. First, where are you? Since moving to its new premises in 2003, the Hampstead has barely left a trace on London’s theatre scene. Many play-goers have yet to pay their first visit. You’re

Andrew Lambirth

Extremes of joy and suffering

The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters Royal Academy, until 18 April Sponsored by BNY Mellon From time to time we need to remind ourselves of the astonishing fact that Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) produced more than 800 paintings and 1,200 drawings in a mere ten-year career. He also wrote letters, of a depth and originality that qualify them as literature in their own right. So much to offer the world, such a sense of discovery and originality, yet he took his own life while still in his thirties. For decades, Van Gogh has been the artistic god of the self-taught and the misunderstood, making a particular appeal

Michael Tanner

In sight of the <em>Ring</em>

Anniversary-consciousness is no doubt primarily commercially driven, certainly in the music world, where the fact that a scarcely remembered composer has been dead for exactly 300 years is a reason for featuring him as This Week’s Composer on Radio Three, but more importantly for many record companies to persuade us that it is time to revalue his contribution to the Orpheus myth, the first to have a bass hero, etc., etc. Anniversary-consciousness is no doubt primarily commercially driven, certainly in the music world, where the fact that a scarcely remembered composer has been dead for exactly 300 years is a reason for featuring him as This Week’s Composer on Radio

Robin Holloway

Fab four

The last of 2009’s remarkable concatenation of musical anniversaries was celebrated — if that is the word — by Radio Three on New Year’s Eve with a chat show in which each of the four great composers was allotted a defence by a noteworthy music lover, backed up by live phone calls for a brief, impromptu telegram, illustrated with well-chosen extracts from their works, subjected to dissenting discussion, and eventually put to the vote at the hands of the anonymous mass of listeners. The last of 2009’s remarkable concatenation of musical anniversaries was celebrated — if that is the word — by Radio Three on New Year’s Eve with a

Deborah Ross

Mixed blessings | 30 January 2010

Precious 15, Nationwide Claireece ‘Precious’ Jones is a 21-stone, illiterate, black, 16-year-old girl with a father who rapes her — not every day, but still — and a mother so insanely abusive that she throws televisions at her and force-feeds her hairy pig’s feet. (Not every meal, but still.) Precious has already had one child by her father — a Down’s syndrome girl, known non-affectionately by the family as ‘Mongo’, short for Mongoloid — and is pregnant with another. She describes herself as ‘just ugly black grease to be wiped away’, but is then dispatched to an alternative school where a saintly teacher works her saintly magic and, what do

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Dealing and drifting

Six Degrees of Separation Old Vic, until 3 April The Little Dog Laughed Garrick, booking to 10 April Even those who’ve never entered a theatre know the title. John Guare’s 1990 play, Six Degrees of Separation, tells of a penniless black hustler, Paul, who inveigles his way into New York’s upper-class society by claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier. The couple he bamboozles are art dealers. Wily, avaricious and insecure, they work without a gallery and instead operate in the shadows of parties and restaurants, like illicit bookies, speculating in works which they own briefly and then ‘flip’ to the next greedy broker or syndicate. Dealing invisibly makes

Kate Chisholm

Sound check

Thank heavens for Chekhov! Master of the mundane, the boring monotony of daily life, the meaningless passage of time, he actually makes the random chaos, the pointless repetitions of day-to-day survival seem somehow rather beautiful. Or at least he helps us to realise that we’re all enduring the same feelings that life is useless and trivial and dull, so why worry. Just get on with it.  Radios Three and Four have been giving us a feast of the Russian writer (born 150 years ago), with plays, features, monologues. It’s been the perfect antidote to this drabbest of all Januarys, now that the snow has gone leaving behind layers of grimy

Simon Hoggart

Perfect pitch

Our attitude to the past of our own youth is like our feelings towards an old grandfather: we love him, admire him for what he’s done, but, goodness, we don’t half patronise him. Our attitude to the past of our own youth is like our feelings towards an old grandfather: we love him, admire him for what he’s done, but, goodness, we don’t half patronise him. ‘Gosh, grandad, you mean if you weren’t at home, nobody could phone you? How did you find anything out without Google?’ Television does this mixture of affection and condescension very well. Rock and Chips (BBC1, Sunday) was John Sullivan’s prequel to his astoundingly successful