Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

I’m warming to Meghan Markle – only joking

You know that urge when you’ve got friends coming for the weekend and you just have to spend the previous week putting together all the essentials for a successful stay: personalised bags of truffle-flavoured popcorn and pretzel nibbles for their bedside; hand-blended, sensually curated bath salts; layer cake flavoured with honey from your private hives; etc? Well, if you’ve never had that urge, I’ve got some disappointing news: With Love, Meghan may not be the programme for you. Wait, no, actually, it might yet. But not for pleasurable reasons. Only for car crash-TV reasons. It’s like the lifestyle-TV equivalent of one of those rare public appearances by Mark Zuckerberg where

Rupert Christiansen

Irresistible: Osipova/Linbury reviewed

One of the few indisputably great ballerinas of her generation, Natalia Osipova is a magnificent exemplar of the Russian school, her training at the Bolshoi furnishing her with a steely security of technique, powerful stage personality, and spirit of dauntless daring. Happily based at the Royal Ballet since 2013, she’s now also one of ours. As popular inside the company as she is with audiences, and much missed while she recuperated from an ankle operation last summer, she returned as the focus of a ‘curated’ evening in the intimate environment of the Linbury Theatre. First came a revival of a modernist classic: Martha Graham’s Errand into the Maze dates from

Graeme Thomson

Silly, moving and imaginative: Steven Wilson’s The Overview reviewed

Progressive rock never died. Whenever some grizzled punk soldier next appears on a BBC4 documentary relaying their version of that beloved old fairytale, the Sex Pistols’s Slaying of the Dinosaurs, it’s worth remembering that nothing of the sort occurred. The big beasts of the 1970s – Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes – thrived into the 1980s and beyond, albeit in somewhat sleeker form. In turn they begat the likes of Marillion, Ozric Tentacles, Dream Theater, Talk Talk, Muse, Radiohead and Lankum, all of whom had or have familial ties to prog. Porcupine Tree, the project founded by Steven Wilson in the late 1980s, is a case in point. Doggedly unfashionable, Porcupine

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A treat for nostalgic wrinklies: Punk Off!, at the Dominion Theatre, reviewed

Punk rock, packaged, parcelled, and boxed up as a treat for nostalgic wrinklies. That’s the deal with Punk Off!, a touring show that recently completed a lap of the country at the Dominion Theatre. Most of the audience were there to recall their rebellious heyday. ‘It’s about to get really, really loud,’ announced the compère, Kevin Kennedy, as the four-piece band hammered out ‘Sheena Is A Punk Rocker’ ‘and ‘If the Kids Are United’. Both hits sounded eerily unfamiliar. Why? Those raucous, pulsing rhythms can’t be turned into elevator jingles or a background drone at a shopping mall – so we rarely hear them. Just as well. Kennedy rattled through

Thursday

Joanna Moorhead

The true birthplace of the Renaissance

The baby reaches out to touch his mother’s scarf: he studies her face intently, and she focuses entirely on him. There is connection; there is familiarity; there is love. It could be one of the pictures on my phone from last weekend of my daughter with her six-month-old. In fact, it dates from Tuscany c.1290, and the mother and child are the Virgin Mary and Christ. It’s a small painting, tempera on wood; it’s the opener of the National Gallery’s new blockbuster, Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350; and it’s there to make the show’s fundamental point, which is that its creator, the Sienese Duccio, introduced many of the painterly

James Walton

Anjelica Huston is comprehensively upstaged in the BBC’s new Agatha Christie

Coincidentally, two of this week’s big new dramas began with a fourth wall-busting declaration of their narrative methods. At the start of Towards Zero, BBC1’s latest Agatha Christie adaptation, a man we later discovered to be a lawyer addressed the camera. ‘I like a good detective story,’ he told us. ‘But they begin in the wrong place. They begin with the murder’ – which should instead ‘come at the end of a long chain of cause and effect’. Get Millie Black opened with a voice-over explaining that ‘This is just another story about Jamaica… But like all stories in this country, it’s a ghost story’. As it transpired, both programmes

Craig Raine

The greatest paintings are always full of important unimportant things

Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection, at the Courtauld, consists of a selection of 25 absorbing paintings chosen from 207. I was disappointed but not surprised that one of the greatest paintings in the world, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘Die Anbetung der Könige im Schnee’ (The Adoration of the Kings in the Snow, 1563), didn’t make the journey from Winterthur in Switzerland. Too precious to put at risk. There is no requirement for a collector to accumulate thematically consistent paintings. Whim, availability, opportunism, taste, connoisseurship, pleasure, accident, catholicity all play their part. The Oskar Reinhart collection is gloriously heterogeneous, a series of bonnes bouches. What is it,

Michael Hann

Finneas has little to offer without his sister Billie Eilish

No truth is more self-evident than that there are those whose best emerges only when they are paired with others: Lennon and McCartney, Morecambe and Wise, Clough and Taylor. And it’s perhaps even harder for a behind-the-scenes collaborator to step out in their own right. Jack Antonoff, for example, is one of the creative powerhouses of modern pop: he co-writes and produces songs for Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and Lorde, who plainly regard him as intrinsic to their success. His work probably reaches more ears than any other songwriter on Earth. But when he writes and produces those songs for himself? The magic vanishes. The band he fronts, Bleachers,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Brian Cox’s Bach has to be heading for Broadway

The Score is a fine example of meat-and-potatoes theatre. Simple plotting, big characters, terrific speeches and a happy ending. The protagonist, J.S. Bach, receives a mysterious summons from Frederick the Great of Prussia. The long first act takes us through Bach’s professional woes and his physical infirmities. His weak vision is being treated by an English oculist, John Taylor, who tours Europe in a scarlet coach decorated with eyes. For unexplained reasons, Taylor decides to taste Bach’s urine, which is excessively sugary – a symptom of diabetes. When Bach reaches Frederick’s court in Potsdam he finds the atmosphere oppressive and alienating. Enter Voltaire. ‘Prussia is not a state in possession

Richard Bratby

A dancing, weightless garland of gems: Stephen Hough’s piano concerto reviewed

Stephen Hough’s new piano concerto is called The World of Yesterday but its second ever performance offered a dispiriting glimpse into the world of tomorrow. A couple of minutes into the finale Hough stopped playing and the orchestra fell silent. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he explained. ‘My iPad is going crazy.’ A murmur of sympathy, mingled with laughter; then Hough signalled to the conductor Mark Wigglesworth and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and they carried on, this time without mishap. But we’d seen it happen, and until last week I’d have told you it was inconceivable. This wasn’t some rash experiment: professional musicians have been using electronic scores for well over a

Deborah Ross

Cartoonish, sub-Armando Iannucci comic caper: Mickey 17 reviewed

Mickey 17 is the latest film from the South Korean writer-director Bong Joon-ho, who won an Oscar for Parasite and made Snowpiercer and Okja. It’s a dystopian sci-fi satire starring Robert Pattinson twice over (all will be explained) but while it initially kicks some decent ideas around, it eventually descends into a cartoonish, sub-Armando Iannucci comic caper with, as far as I could ascertain, nothing fresh to say. It’s not the biggest disappointment I’ve had in my life but it’s up there. The film is set some time in the future and Pattinson plays Mickey 17, a crew member on a space-colonisation mission who, in the opening sequence, has fallen

Digby Warde-Aldam

A blast: Leigh Bowery!, at Tate Modern, reviewed

Tate Modern’s latest exhibition is a bizarre proposition on so many levels. Its subject, the Australian designer, performer, provocateur and club scenester Leigh Bowery, was by all accounts inescapable in London for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. Standing at well over 6ft and weighing 17st, he would have been a conspicuous presence on the capital’s streets even had he not adopted the berserk sci-fi drag attire that became his signature aesthetic. He appeared on TV, at Sadler’s Wells and in a ponderous suite of portraits by Lucian Freud. His life could be read as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, but he was not an artist in any conventional sense

Tuesday

Daisy Dunn

The fixation on sport at boarding schools is the reason the country is failing

As a teenager, I very nearly went to boarding school after falling in love with the architecture, the greenery and the sense of freedom. What ultimately put me off was the school’s obscene fixation with sport and my discovery that I would be expected to run around those fields not just once or twice a week, but every single day.  Listening to How Boarding Schools Shaped Britain, a three-part series on Radio 4, I am not convinced that all this sport isn’t the reason our country is failing. Over two-thirds of our Prime Ministers and half of all holders of offices of state went to boarding schools – and a

Friday

Paul Wood

Paul Wood, Matthew Parris, Ian Buruma, Hermione Eyre and Francis Young

34 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Paul Wood reads his letter from the Vatican (1:17); Matthew Parris warns Conservatives from embracing causes that could lose them as much support as they would gain (7:31); reviewing Richard Overy’s Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan, Ian Buruma argues that the atomic bombs were not only immoral, but ineffective (15:35); Hermione Eyre examines the life and work of the surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun (23:03); and, Francis Young provides his notes on Shrove Tuesday (29:12).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Alexander Raubo

Real artists have nothing to fear from AI

Christie’s is making digital-art history again – or at least trying to. Between 20 February and 5 March, it is hosting Augmented Intelligence, the first major auction dedicated solely to AI-generated art. This follows a series of headline-grabbing stunts, including the first major sale of an AI-generated artwork in 2018 – ‘Portrait of Edmond de Belamy’ ($432,500) by the Paris-based collective Obvious – and the first NFT sale by a major auction house,  Beeple’s ‘Everydays: The First 5,000 Days’, which shattered expectations (and good taste) by selling for $69 million in 2021. With the NFT bubble – which Christie’s played a significant role inflating – having burst in 2022, its

Graeme Thomson

Shades of Berlin Bowie and Ian Curtis: Hamish Hawk, at Usher Hall, reviewed

I am a regular attendee at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh’s most ornate and venerable concert venue. On more than one occasion recently I have seen Hamish Hawk here – albeit each time he was showing the audience to our seats. Hawk has graduated from Grand Circle stair duty to centre-stage spotlight, the kind of local-boy-made-good dramatic arc that positively begs for the Richard Curtis treatment. Making his debut headlining the 2,200-capacity venue, Hawk had the good grace to allude to his change in circumstances halfway through his set: ‘Please, be kind to the ushers…’ Everyone loves a hometown hero, but the pressure to deliver as a returning prodigal must be

Hermione Eyre

An exhilarating, uneven survey of an outstandingly eccentric British surrealist

Ithell Colquhoun was always a bit of a mystery surrealist. Her greatest hit is the unsettling, dream-like ‘Scylla’ (1938), a painting of two towering cliffs, which could equally be thighs in the bath. The prow of Odysseus’s Argo peeps through them. The pubic hair is seaweed, and there are shells, but, as far as discernible, no crabs. The point of view of the painting is that of the titular monster Scylla, lying in wait. It’s witty and disturbing; mythic and domestic. A British surrealist high point, frequently anthologised. This aside, her name was relegated to lists. She was at Dali’s lecture in London in 1936 when he got his head

James Delingpole James Delingpole

I think I’ve found the perfect TV series

Drops of God is one of those gems of purest ray serene that cable TV prefers to keep hidden in its deep unfathomed caves because it thinks you want something more lowbrow. Try finding it by accident: you won’t. When I looked for it on Apple – which doesn’t have all that many shows – I had laboriously to type in its name. It wasn’t offered to me in the recommendations. If I hadn’t been tipped off by my friends Candy and Diarmuid, I would never have seen it. I had been lamenting, as I often do, the dearth of stuff to watch on TV that doesn’t put you through

Deborah Ross

Pamela Anderson is a thing of wonder: The Last Showgirl reviewed

The Last Showgirl stars Pamela Anderson as a Las Vegas dancer who has reached the end of her career (too old). And she is wonderful, a revelation. I’d like to say I saw it coming but I did not. Did you? When she was doing all that bouncing in slo-mo along the beach in Baywatch did you ever think: Pammy’s going to make a fine dramatic actress one day? But she’s better than the film itself. It would be flimsy without her – plus her own backstory adds a whole other layer. ‘What you sold was young and sexy,’ her character is told at one point, ‘you aren’t either any

Richard Bratby

Spreads emotions like jam: Festen, at the Royal Opera House, reviewed

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera Festen opened at Covent Garden earlier this month, and reader, I messed up. I broke my own golden rule with new operas: don’t do any homework, don’t try to memorise the plot, and whatever you do, don’t revisit the source material. The aim is to experience the new work on its own terms. That’s hard enough, given the PR onslaught that precedes any Royal Opera première – the way the classical establishment circles the wagons, and the unspoken consensus that certain living composers (including Adès, Benjamin and Turnage, though not Judith Weir, curiously) are simply too big to fail. But no: I rewatched Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998