Arts Reviews

I first became aware of the work of Marcelle Hanselaar in a mixed exhibition at the Millinery Works in Islington. All I remember now about the show, and my review, is that I said she could teach Paula Rego to suck eggs. From the mischievous energy packed into her small figurative paintings I assumed she was young enough to be Rego’s granddaughter. That was in 2003; she was pushing 60. Born in Rotterdam in 1945, Hanselaar is essentially self-taught. She dropped out of art school in The Hague — it was the 1960s — and ran away to Amsterdam; what she learned about painting she picked up from the artists

Lost boys, lost women, lost civilisations, lost causes — the romantic ring of the word ‘lost’ is media gold. So when the British Museum announced last autumn that it had acquired 103 ‘lost’ drawings by Hokusai, one was tempted to take it with a large pinch of salt. How do 103 drawings by Japan’s most famous artist simply disappear? The answer is, surprisingly easily. Hokusai’s works have never commanded the sorts of prices a draughtsman of his calibre would be expected to fetch, not even in Japan. His art was designed to be affordable: in his day, you could buy a print of ‘The Great Wave’ for the price of

As 2021 continues to progress at a dizzying rate, one of the recurring social phenomenon we’re seeing is the surreal eruption of online activism in the real world. From the recent explosion of GameStop share prices – hiked up by amateur investors co-ordinating online – to the large-scale protests and riots in Washington following the 2020 Presidential election, the communities in cyberspace continue to spill out into the real world. The question is: why are these kinds of actions becoming an increasingly unsettling occurrence in the usual running of society? In the lexicon of web-design, the term UX, user experience, is often used to describe how an individual may interact

Rams is an average film with a better film trying to get out, and you may already have seen that better film. It’s the Icelandic one, of the same name, released in 2015, on which this Australian version is based. That was played as a spare, stark, bitterly dark comedy set amid ice and blizzards and featuring men with unkempt beards, whereas this is sunnier and more kempt and therefore significantly blander. You may even, at various points, feel as though you’ve been trapped in an overlong episode of All Creatures Great and Small (nothing against All Creatures Great and Small, but two hours of it?). The film stars the

The Fabulist Fox Sister is a one-man show about the three American women who are credited with inventing the trade of spiritualism. It all happened by accident. A younger sister discovered that by cracking her toe joints on the floorboards she could generate noises that scared her parents. Kate Fox, the eldest, claimed the sounds were made by a lonely ghost who wanted to communicate with the living. She invited the neighbours around to contact their deceased relatives. The ploy worked and the sisters took their fake routines to New York where they became a huge success. Even the threat of exposure by the press didn’t dent the public’s belief