Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Friday

The Spectator

Rivers of reality

I have yet to capitulate to this series of Big Brother, which is not to say that I won’t. But it does seem very striking to me that the reality TV show seems to have become the canvas upon which we observe the nation’s residual bigotries and (in the case of Shilpa’s victory) our desire to conquer them. Funnily enough, the politician who best understands the power of such shows is Gordon Brown, who has often said that we should ask what programmes such as The Apprentice and Pop Idol tell us about aspiration. Meanwhile, BB is once again KKK. Enoch to the Diary Room….

Saturday

Michael Henderson

Arousing a love of England

This weekend, as the orchestras of England celebrate the 150th anniversary of this country’s most celebrated composer, is an appropriate time to review the national monument that is Sir Edward Elgar. Does he continue to speak of and for England? Or was he merely a late-romantic nostalgic, whose music was hopelessly outdated when he died in 1934, and which now offers even less value — or ‘significance’, in the weedy, trivia-obsessed language of our age? If one takes notice of the public pronouncements, it hasn’t been a good year for Elgar. When in March his profile was replaced on the £20 banknotes by that of Adam Smith, some people rejoiced.

Andrew Lambirth

Gormley spotting

I have been dipping into the Modern Sculpture Reader, edited by Jon Wood, David Hulks and Alex Potts, an invaluable compilation of texts produced by the Henry Moore Institute at £20. It’s a hefty paperback tome determined to give sculpture its rightful place in the anthology stakes — so often dominated by painting — and in doing so it tracks the nature and status of the art object in the modern world. It ranges from Adolf von Hildebrand writing in 1893 on the problem of form, to Susan Hiller in 2003 discussing the sculptural legacy of H. Moore himself. In between it stops at many stations from Rilke to Acconci,

Marcus Berkmann

Staying cool

It’s always a problem, comparing a new band with others who have gone before. Critics have to do it, defining the new in terms of the old, because there has to be some way of describing the indescribable. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been caught, having read somewhere that someone was the new Squeeze or XTC or Nick Drake or Electric Light Orchestra or any of several others. Gullible fool that I am, I believe every word. You buy the CD without pausing to listen to the little 30-second snippet of each song they offer you on Amazon (because you know they never sound right and

Michael Tanner

Greeting Death with joy

At last ENO has come up with a production which can be greeted almost without reservation, and of a treacherously tricky opera, Britten’s last and for many his greatest, Death in Venice. After a gruelling two weeks in which I have seen major works manhandled beyond bearing at the Royal Opera and at Glyndebourne, I was almost shocked to see a production which couldn’t be faulted in its concentration on realising the composer’s vision with economy, imagination and concentration. When a work is as complex as this, the production team’s first duty is lucidity, and that is exactly what Deborah Warner, with her set and lighting designers Tom Pye and

Richard Cork

Private passion

Right until the end of his life, Euan Uglow remained one of the most elusive English painters. An intensely private man, known only to a small circle of devoted artists, critics, models, collectors and former students, he disliked promotional exposure and the celebrity cult. His reputation has always been high, but it was largely confined to those familiar with his work from group exhibitions or visits to his studio. Uglow saw no reason to submit himself to the public gaze. Utterly absorbed in his own work, he thrived on solitude and the quiet life. But interest in his achievement keeps on growing. Now that figurative painting is no longer regarded

Deborah Ross

Wishy washy

Water opens with a beautiful little Indian girl sitting on the back of a cart joyously chewing on sugar cane. She has luscious hair, pinchable cheeks, dark eyes, a nose-ring and tinkling silver anklets. (So cute; Madonna would kill for her.) A middle-aged man is on the cart, too, lying on his back and groaning. He is her husband and he dies. We don’t know how long she has been married for, or even if she’s had time to register that she is actually married, but now she is a widow and, as her father tells her, she must now lead a widow’s life. ‘For how long?’ she asks. She

James Delingpole James Delingpole

History distorted

Very sadly I couldn’t get hold of Sea of Fire (BBC2, Friday), the (reportedly superb) drama documentary about the destruction of HMS Coventry in the Falklands War, because tapes weren’t available till just before broadcast. But not to worry. I think I can still tell you with some confidence how it went. The first thing I know is that it was artfully shot, beautifully acted, had an authoritative voiceover and looked very realistic, for these BBC drama docs always are. The second thing I know is that, also like all BBC exercises in this vein, it made you feel dreadfully ashamed to be British. Very probably, its thesis went something

Thursday

Toby Young Toby Young

A cunning apprentice

I’m becoming increasingly intrigued by Katie Hopkins, the contestant on The Apprentice who has emerged as a national hate figure. (See Richard Curtis’s aside during his Bafta Fellowship speech.) On last night’s show, in which the six remaining contestants had to sell merchandise on a home shopping channel, Katie was so outrageously snobbish about the channel’s typical customer — whom she dubbed “Mavis” — it seems clear that her whole appearance on the show is some kind of publicity stunt. Another reason for thinking this is that she seems too intelligent — too essentially competent — to be bothering to jump through all these hoops merely to secure a job

Saturday

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Inspiration to young artists

How do you react to the news that Kay Hartenstein Saatchi, ex-wife of Charles, the woman who helped to discover (or invent) the original Brit Art brat pack, is putting on a exhibition of London’s best young artists this week? Perhaps your eyes have already begun to widen with excitement? Perhaps you feel a sudden predatory stillness, as I did, as greed, the 21st-century’s answer to aesthetic appreciation, steals across your soul? Well, then, if you’d visited the One One One gallery in London’s West End last Friday as the show, Anticipation, was being hung, you might have felt, as I did, a little chastened by the almost alarming absence

Andrew Lambirth

Destroying the past

Futurism was originally an Italian manifestation in art and literature, a cult of speed and movement, triumphantly urban and dynamic, a sort of souped-up Cubism, which lasted from 1909 until its deathblow in the first world war and final dissolution in the 1920s. It was pretty much invented by the poet Filippo Tomasso Marinetti (1876–1944), who liked to call himself ‘the caffeine of Europe’, and was actor-manager and travelling salesman for the group. The first international agent provocateur of modern art, expert promoter and publicist, he was for ever on the road organising confrontational meetings masquerading as art and guaranteed to grab the headlines. He can be blamed for much

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Surtitle fatigue

Strange business walking into the Three Sisters at the Barbican. A vast new temporary seating complex has been built over the auditorium, and as you wander along the reverberating walkways you can peer down through the gaps and make out the familiar opulent cushions of the stalls below you, all shadowy and deserted. It’s like glimpsing the Titanic from a bathoscope. The new seating is supposed to make the Barbican’s overlarge space feel more like a theatre and less like the Nuremberg stadium. But even with fewer seats, the stage is still as large as an aircraft hangar. This gives it a mood of rangy airlessness which is intensified by

Michael Tanner

Laughter unbecoming

The Glyndebourne season began this year in a striking fashion, with a new production of Verdi’s Macbeth which treats it as a broad comedy — and naturally, from this audience, gets the laughs it is begging for. The production is by Richard Jones, as anyone who has seen one or two of his other operatic operations would soon realise. There is the obsession with cardboard boxes — in the Ring the end of the world consisted of piles of them collapsing; here, instead of Banquo’s ghost, we get a box with a smiley painted on it, jerking on to the stage and frightening Macbeth, as it would. When the curtain

Kate Chisholm

End of the world

It’s your last chance this afternoon to catch one of the best programmes on Radio Four, guaranteed to come up each week with something a bit different: an unusual voice or opinion or insight. For the last couple of years it’s been infuriatingly easy to miss, broadcast at 5.30 on a Saturday afternoon when you’re either too exhausted by a week’s worth of chores to listen to anything other than Mantovani (or Monteverdi, depending on your taste) or too busy revving up for a night out to pay attention to something so densely packed with information. But in its nine-year run A World in Your Ear has always given its

Wednesday

The Spectator

Why Rocky rocks

DVD release of the week is Rocky Balboa, the sixth and final instalment of the boxing saga. Yes, I know the idea of the 60-year-old Sylvester Stallone climbing into the ring again is innately absurd, but all of the Rocky movies, including the first which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1976, have been completely ridiculous. That has been their popcorn magic, a classic example of the American Dream told in comic book idiom. Any film that includes lines like “what we’ll be calling on is good ol’ fashion blunt force trauma” and “let’s start building some hurtin’ bombs!” has my vote. Rocky Balboa has the added attraction of

Tuesday

Matthew Dancona

Poetic news

Tomorrow, I am taking part in the launch of Pass on a Poem, a terrific campaign to encourage the reading and enjoyment of poetry at the Oxfam Bookshop, 170 Portobello Road, London W11. Lots of other readings are set to take place around the country, but this one will feature such luminaries as P.D.James, Jon Snow, Richard Dawkins, Alex James, Joan Bakewell, and Mariella Frostrup – with yours truly making up the numbers. I have to admit that I haven’t decided which poem to read yet, but I’m down to a shortlist of two (Ted Hughes versus Emily Dickinson, ten rounds, two falls or a submission.) Entry is free but

Saturday

Mark Fisher

Counting the cost

An estimated one in three of the world’s six billion people will watch the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games. How will Britain fare in that global spotlight? Having committed more than £600 million to prepare our athletes and competitors, there’s not much more that the government can do on the haul-of-medals front. The Cultural Olympiad, which will present the best of our arts and culture, is another matter. Undoubtedly, Britain has some of the best museums and galleries, concert halls and theatres, and some of the finest artists in the world, so ours should, as Tessa Jowell hopes, ‘be better than any Cultural Olympiad that has ever been

Andrew Lambirth

Knight vision

Sir Peter Blake is much in demand. A popular figure since he rose to fame with his unforgettable design for the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album (1967), he has long been a spokesman for his generation and for the arts. His knighthood in 2002 brought a whole host of new requests and obligations, much of it figurehead stuff: his name on lists of patrons, or as the chairman of selection committees. To take these things seriously is time-consuming, and Blake has to be rigorous about preserving his hours in the studio, where typically he is busy on a number of projects at once. On the eve of a retrospective of his

Martin Gayford

Scraps of Van Goghiana

Having spent a chunk of my life living, mentally, in 1888 with Vincent van Gogh in Arles I find that I still have not completely left that place. The book is published, the paperback is out, my surrogate literary life is in another country and a different time — with John Constable and his wife-to-be in early 19th-century England. But still I find my attention sometimes wandering back to his little Yellow House in that dusty Provençal town. Here, then, are two little addenda to the story, scraps of Van Goghiana that have occurred to me since the text was finally proofread and published. One concerns the only meal that,

Mark Glazebrook

Can artists save the planet?

Given his interest in the merging of blue with green, David Cameron would presumably feel at home in the United Arab Emirates while Sharjah’s 8th Biennial is on. The Biennial’s title and theme is Still Life: Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change. I imagine that the first two words refer not only to the historic painting genre — a genre which reminds us of our mortality on the occasions when it includes the depiction of a human skull. The two words may also suggest sentences such as ‘Despite man’s destructive tendencies there’s still life on planet earth but we can’t take it for granted.’ Whether or not there is