Hope Springs

Grace Jones by Chris Levine

2010-05-10T20:34:00.002Z

First published on theartsdesk.com

Grace Jones with laser and crystal bowler hat by Chris Levine (c) Chris Levine

One can hardly imagine the spiky dervish Grace Jones sitting still for a second, let alone remaining motionless long enough to have photographs (and plenty of them) taken for her portrait. Nevertheless, Chris Levine has managed to pin her down - in a manner of speaking.

Levine's exhibition at the Vinyl Factory - Stillness at the Speed of Light - captures the performance artist's restless activity in a very clever way: several of his portraits are in fact lenticular 3D portraits - holograms. Having shot many images of Grace's face in motion, Levine layers them and illuminates them with acid colours and lasers. When you walk past the portrait, her eyes demurely flutter open or shut or she sways slightly.

The laser beam bouncing off Jones' crystal bowler was Levine's contribution to her recent show at the Albert Hall, and he has made it a motif for this one, Jones' impassive stare daring you to look on as light shoots towards you.

Levine used this technique most famously with a portrait of the Queen, but it works especially well with Jones: for her, a machine of perpetual motion, only a moving portrait will do.

See Chris Levine's portraits of Grace Jones in motion here.

The most spectacular piece in the show is perhaps impossible to capture. By cutting an image of Jones into tiny vertical strips and feeding them into a flickering column of light, you see nothing when you stare directly at it, but as soon as you turn away, it appears in a flash in your peripheral vision, and disappears as quickly. Another perfect metaphor for Jones' heightened speed.

Stillness (single)
Stillness (triptych)
Superstar (single blue)
Superstar (single red)
Superstar (triptych)
Superstar (sequence blue)
Superstar (sequence multicolour)

Stillness at the Speed of Light is on at the Vinyl Factory, 51 Poland St, W1 until 15 May

LUX/ICO Artists Cinema Commissions

2010-05-10T20:32:00.001Z

First published on theartsdesk.com

A still from 'Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright' by Akram Zaatari

In my parents’ day, apparently, one just turned up at the cinema whenever one felt like it, even if that meant the first thing you heard on entering the auditorium was Bogart signalling the start of a beautiful friendship. That doesn’t wash these days – the auteur put paid to that – and given the short films commissioned by ICO/LUX to run before the feature, we can only approve.

ICO, which supports independent film in the UK, and LUX, an agency for artists who work with film, asked eight international artists to make five-minute films, the results of which are being premiered at Cannes on 15 May. There is a fitness in this conjunction, film being the most popular medium of the 20th century and a key medium of 21st-century visual art.

The results are, expectedly for contemporary art, a mixture of linear narratives and semi-abstract mise en scènes, touching personal stories and alienating political works, the harmonious and disjointed.

Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright by Akram Zaatari is the most obviously filmic: words magically appear on paper fed into a typewriter, and the person sitting at the typewriter engages with the ghost in the machine, who appears to be a former lover, taunting, teasing and tenderly enticing him.

It works as its own narrative, a taut romance played out in front of us, yet is almost suggestive of some sort of screenwriter’s madness, where he becomes so caught up in his writing that the characters come alive and type themselves. This film succeeds because it talks to the audience in cinematic terms it will understand.

That can’t be said for This Quality by Rosalind Nashashibi, which goes from a long take of a woman staring at the camera to sequential shots of unmoving cars. Unmoving is the word, although you might more kindly say “meditative”. The Last Days of British Honduras by Catherine Sullivan with Farhad Shamini requires far too much hinterland to be appreciated by the incidental filmgoer: if you (like I) have never seen Ronald Tavel’s play of the same name (and perhaps even if you have), you will instantly be lost in this maze of mysticism.

Pulmo Marina by Aurélien Froment (pictured right) is the most visually abstract: a white jellyfish glows against an electric blue background, arresting like an Yves Klein, as a voiceover talks about the jellyfish’s nature and biology and the construction of the marina. Whereas most films tell a story in pictures, this film separates the two and makes you question the artifice of the whole medium, a little like those Downfall videos where Hitler fulminates against vegetarians or copyright theft, or John Baldessari’s early word-paintings.

There is no good reason why these films have to be “accessible”, since they are art, after all, but it is clear that some will work much better before films – engaging the audience, making them reflect on where they are and what they are about to see – than the obscurity of others. Nevertheless, the project is daring and thought-inspiring, and may well stir cinema-goers out of the torpor the darkened auditorium and the shining screen can easily induce.

The LUX/ICO Artists Cinema Commissions will be appearing before selected films across the country over the coming year

Stuart Semple, Morton Metropolis

2010-05-10T20:27:00.002Z

First published on theartsdesk.com

Almost vibrating with tension: 'A Pounding Outside Poundland' by Stuart Semple (c) Stuart Semple Industries

Sincerity is not a quality the contemporary art world seems to value: the masking of emotions under layers of irony is where we stand. But while Damien Hirst paints from a cynical palette, British Pop Artist Stuart Semple's Nineties-inflected paintings have sincerity to spare.

The Happy House, his new show at Morton Metropolis and his first in London for three years, combines the commercial tropes of Pop Art as refracted through a certain naffness with self-portraits both visual and emotional.

This is clear in the show’s outstanding picture, A Pounding Outside Poundland, where Semple recreates the time he was assaulted outside the titular mart. It has the shrinking awfulness of the enthusiastic Poundland logo (“yes! everything’s £1”), the assailant in a skeleton tracksuit and mask, glaring at the viewer, and Semple in a kapow!-style stagger, complete with neon flashes to exaggerate the force.

The way in which Semple plays with the time scheme – the skeleton has already hit him and turned away, while he is in the instant after the blow – gives each figure much more potency and individuality and puts the event in a permanent state of happening, the canvas almost vibrating with this tension. The cartoonish power-lines try and inject some levity but serve only to heighten the tension, like a weak joke at a wake. That this is all taking place outside Poundland makes it that bit grimier even as Semple is mocking it.

Anything before 2008 suddenly seems appealing, as suggested by titles like Comfortably Numb (pictured above right) and Killing Me Softly cribbed from golden oldies; the crosses emblazoned with “Our Price”, “Biggie” and “Working Class” in the former picture hark back to what is no longer with us.

These are very much post-recession works, disdaining the indulgent Noughties: there is a tiny Jeff Koons balloon-rabbit in silhouette in the far distance, and one of the decade’s stars, Kate Moss, is a cheap and corpulent patriotic stripper in Welcome to Middletown. (Nostalgia is, after all, free.) Pairs of suspicious eyes taken from the cartoon Trapdoor hang around the canvas, while the word “HAPPY” in emetic colours and manic-depressive arrangement suggests we are anything but.

In Killing Me Softly (pictured left), Semple layers a message to a former lover over what looks like a Harajuku Lolita in front of a distant forest. Each letter of the message is in a different colour (in one of the matt paints he has designed especially for his work), dizzying the viewer as the girl stares out from behind huge red sunglasses.

The message in part reads “Maybe… you’ll see me as I paint this song”, and that captures what Semple is doing with this exhibition: by melding wide-ranging cultural references with an intense emotionality – finishing this painting with “i miss you… Good luck, Goodbye xxx” [sic] in his own script – and his vital yet sensitive technique, he is making Pop Art personal.

Stuart Semple: The Happy House is on at Morton Metropolis, London W1, until 28 May

Mark Quinn moves White Cube into the green

2010-03-23T20:37:00.001Z

First published on theartsdesk.com

'Archaeology of Desire' by Marc Quinn

Thanks to the wonders of council applications, theartsdesk can bring you an exclusive preview of Marc Quinn's new sculptures to be placed outside the White Cube gallery on the grass of Hoxton Square.

Quinn will be putting two colossal orchids (over two metres squared each), cast in bronze and painted white, in Hoxton Square as part of his new show Allanah, Buck, Catman, Chelsea, Michael, Pamela and Thomas (7 May-26 June).

According to the application, submitted to Hackney Council, The Archaeology of Desire is "based upon a naturalistic Phalaenopsis, a genus of the orchid family, which has been rendered in exquisite detail. The fine, papery petals, each distinguished by unique venation, defy the properties of the bronze medium in which they are cast to appear almost weightless and ethereal."

The piece will continue Quinn's work which strives to create the ideal beauty of nature yet, by the grossly artificial means of production, undermines this beauty. Garden, where flowers were cast in silicone, is one such work.

Quinn is one of the best-known YBAs, for such works as Alison Lapper Pregnant on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square and the bust of himself made with his own frozen blood (which melted when Charles Saatchi's freezer broke).

The Culture Show: Henry Moore, BBC2

2010-03-18T22:21:00.000Z

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure (1951) (c) Andrew Dunn, 9 September 2004

What emerges from tonight’s Culture Show on Henry Moore, which examines how the sculptor exploited the media (and vice versa), is not the difference between the media of sculpture and television but the similarity.

Rather than a simple programme on Moore’s career – one fawning talking head after another – to coincide with the retrospective of his work at Tate Britain, Alan Yentob has instead chosen the meta-route, talking about TV talking about art. It is a topic which resonates today, where the one thing we love as much as looking at art is hearing people discuss art, and is well chosen.

Moore was cannier than one might assume for an early star of television (his first appearance was on the BBC in 1937): he does not give himself a televisual disembowelling, pouring his emotions out into the camera as one must today, Stoicism be damned, and he quite reasonably deflects probing questions about his motives. He says that if you talk about your reasons for working, they may disappear, a common belief among artists: the unexamined life may be a productive one.

The films about Moore by John Read – six over 40 years – were groundbreaking because they showed an artist’s creativity and process in action, but they do not take us much closer to what lies behind the work. In a later film, Moore recalls massaging his mother’s back when he was a young boy, and, thanks to Yentob not intruding with a statement of the obvious, we draw our own conclusions. But this is much later in his life, when memories cannot harm the artistic drive, or his own persona.

John Read hits on a vital point when making a defence of himself for (let’s say) creatively editing a key scene for one of his films. A plaster version of a sculpture has cracked, but as Read had not captured that moment, he cuts from the complete sculpture to the studio cat to the cracked sculpture. Yentob says he’d be fired for that today, but Read responds with: “To tell the truth you have to cheat sometimes.”

If anything is an artists’ mantra, it is this. Artists can summon all the resources of artifice to make something real, from Illusionist curtains over paintings to sculptures with hollow interiors. Perhaps Moore learned this from Read, for later we find him erecting sculptures made from polystyrene on his garden’s artificial mound, but it is anyway clear that this basic principle of television – make it look like truth (even if that truth is mental or emotional rather than physical) – has also been basic to art.

Moore also quite deliberately “manages his image”, as Yentob suggests: the omnipresence of his necktie, the relegation of any talk of the sexual or political aspects of his work. He was beatified in Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation. Clarke was a true Mephistopheles, seducing Moore with his patronage and – in the opinion of some of the talking heads – turning his work into public-sculpture banality. Moore clearly did not respect Clarke just for his high standing on TV, but it couldn’t have hurt.

The talking head contribution from Sir Anthony Caro is moving: he talks about his experiences as one of Moore’s assistants and recalls how he signed a letter protesting against Moore’s demand that the Tate build a new wing for all the work he intended to donate to it. He seems genuinely regretful, speaking slowly and looking away: “You shouldn’t do that to another artist.”

Yentob carelessly or thoughtlessly falls victim to the clichés of today and sets up straw men: Moore is “a global superstar”, it is a “paradox” that his reputation can be low critically just as it is high popularly. Anyone watching the Culture Show on Henry Moore will not need such inflated language or cheap sophistic devices to get a better understanding of the artist: the programme itself does that.

Variety spikes own critics

2010-03-16T21:59:00.000Z

From theartsdesk.com

Variety, the most venerable entertainment trade journal in America, is sacking its chief film and theatre critics, including the man for whose film reviews many people read the magazine, Todd McCarthy.

According to a leaked internal memo from editor Tim Gray to editorial staff, “It doesn’t make economic sense to have full-time reviewers, but Todd [McCarthy, chief film critic], Derek [Elley, senior film critic] and Rooney [David Rooney, chief theatre critic] have been asked to continue as freelancers.”

The memo prefaces this by saying: “Today’s changes won’t be noticed by readers,” which manages to insult both the departing critics and Variety's readership. The leading Chicago film critic Roger Ebert blogged yesterday that he was unsubscribing from the magazine on the news of McCarthy's dismissal - if it could fire its best-known critic, he said, could Variety itself long survive?

What is most worrying is that Variety, even with its new paywall business model, doesn't feel that it can support full-time reviewers. Variety's paywall means that you can only access up to five articles a month before you have to pay to subscribe; paywalls are being rolled out across media brands on the internet.

There is also a clear degree of panic in the memo: “Ignore the bloggers (who obviously are trying in vain to steal our readers and our advertisers).” Those bloggers almost certainly include the acute, fearless and favourless Nikki Finke, with her Deadline Hollywood Daily, which has been screwing Variety to the wall for a while now. And – in possibly a valuable lesson to Variety – her blog has just been sold to a large media company.

Variety, founded in 1905 in New York to cover vaudeville, before evolving into the leading entertainment weekly for Hollywood too, has not covered itself in glory lately anyway - what with a director threatening to sue after he paid $400,000 for an ad campaign in the magazine to promote his movie, only for the magazine to turn round and give it a terrible review. Revealing its integrity, Variety pulled the review when the director starting making noises.

Nevertheless, Hollywood runs through Variety’s veins, including the hometown principle which requires you to shut up about your problems: “Be sensitive to co-workers," the memo says. "Doom-&-gloom helps no one. It may make you feel better to talk about your darkest fears, but it might make them feel worse.” One may almost be certain it is the sacked critics who probably feel the worst.

From Page to Stage to Screen

2010-02-24T21:49:00.001Z

From theartsdesk.com

The thought of watching a filmed play is enough to make even the hardiest theatregoer flee screaming down the aisle. Recording the stage has a poor history, causing even the nimblest staging to seem thudding and deep performances transparent. But that was before Digital Theatre came along.

Set up in late 2008 by theatre director Robert Delamere (Julius Caesar at the Manchester Royal Exchange, The Crucible at the Sheffield Crucible, among many others) and TV and radio producer Thomas Shaw, Digital Theatre films plays in front of their audience, edits them and offers them for download for £8.99, far less than a ticket would cost (let alone an entire evening out in town).

So far they have the Royal Court’s Over There, English Touring Theatre’s Far from the Madding Crowd, the Old Vic’s Container and Kafka’s Monkey (above: Kathryn Hunter in Kafka's Monkey), and the Almeida’s Parlour Song. It is an iTunes of the proscenium.

Delamere says the idea stemmed from surprise that no-one had tried to film plays in a sophisticated, unobtrusive, realistic way: “Surely given the advances in technology there might be a way of not having big, burly cameramen sitting in an auditorium taking up seats? And [we wanted to avoid] a static, completely neutral filming, which is what people have seen for years and which doesn’t accord with anyone’s idea of film language.

He has previously cited Newsnight Review as a culprit in this regard, with its lifeless clips. The National Theatre has, of course, in the past year filmed three of its shows and broadcast them to cinemas around the country, with varying degrees of success.

“Everyone said at the beginning, ‘Hurdle, hurdle, hurdle, hurdle, hurdle’,” recalls Delamere. “Can you aesthetically do it, can you do it practically, can you not disrupt the performances, what about the rights and legal scenarios? There’s a mountain to climb even to get to the point where you start filming.”

After negotiations with the relevant unions and licensing authorities, and £1 million of private investment, Digital Theatre launched its first play, Madding Crowd, at the end of last October, and is now in the final stages of producing its sixth.

With anywhere between five and 13 cameras fixed around and above the stage, controlled from an external production unit, and two performances of each show filmed, there are hours of material to sift through before a final edit can be made. This turns out to be a collaboration between Digital Theatre and the original creatives, Shaw says, “Since Rob’s been a director before, you’re able to have a sensitivity which goes a long way.”

But rather than just relying on their own taste, skill and intuition, they work closely with directors, lighting designers and sound designers so they can “follow the intention of the original production itself,” says Delamere. Not that that is without its problems, according to Delamere. “With people who are working strictly within that discipline of theatre, their understanding of film technique or language can sometimes not be as high.”

That captures one of the artistic paradoxes of Digital Theatre: is a filmed and edited play still a play, or some chimerical new genre? If you take a purist’s view, you should not need to understand the language of film: theatre does not work on zoom shots or rapid editing, should not direct the eye second-by-second.

Indeed, the idea of stitching together the best of two performances to make one film could be downright untheatrical. You expect, on any particular night of a play, unified yet unique performances, varying according to the actors’ moods and developing by experimentation, and so merging two separate ones for any one actor is philosophically difficult. Theatre is not Meryl Streep’s best laugh from 15 takes.

Delamere counters this with “the practical recognition” that sometimes actors make mistakes which they’d prefer not go down to posterity, and Shaw says, “In the edit, we do use one [performance] mainly.”

But this difficulty is far outweighed by the end product and what it allows. The film of Kafka’s Monkey moves in rhythm with the performance, gently panning up as Kathryn Hunter tenderly reaches up to the monkey projected at the back of the stage. The Container is claustrophobic and dark as the illegal immigrants panic and argue in their enclosed space. And Parlour Song (picture left) even makes you forget you are watching theatre, so natural are its shots.

Madding Crowd, different from the others in its larger cast and more expansive set, has perhaps too many cuts from one camera to another: just because there are more people to focus on does not mean you have to shift so quickly between them; theatre is rarely that frantic. Further Digital Theatre productions will lead to greater sophistication in this respect.

Given the global marketplace Digital Theatre finds itself in, it is no surprise when Delamere says, “We’re in 106 countries now, and we get these great emails from African schoolteachers going, ‘The idea that I could possibly get my children to watch a British theatre production is beyond imagining and now it’s a possibility.’” And closer to home, Digital Theatre is making these plays – by no means mainstream, frequently with brief runs – available to the rest of the country, which too often feels isolated from the giddy metropolitan world of the arts, and indeed to those who saw them the first time and would like to revisit them.

There are some plays that Delamere and Shaw concede will not work in this medium, although they gallantly don’t say which. What about the immersion-theatre of Punchdrunk, where the plot is almost incidental to the experience of their fully imagined world? Delamere ponders what it might be like: “You’d have to operate some sort of game theory, which would be to multi-record it. You could option what your experience was. You’d have 12 to 15 screens to decide where you were next. It would be amazing to set up a wall somewhere where you could do that.” It sounds like a perfect replication of the Punchdrunk mode, surrounding you with the show.

From intimate chamberpieces to full-blown epics and even 360º installation-events, it seems as if there are few theatrical productions Digital Theatre will not tackle. As their experience becomes greater and their name spreads further, their productions will become the exemplars of their genre and they may prove a durable exporter of a previously Britain-bound industry.

More information and sales of Digital Theatre productions here

Ana Mendieta, Alison Jacques Gallery

2010-02-19T21:56:00.001Z

From theartsdesk.com

Still from Untitled (Creek #2), San Felipe, Mexico 1974 Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy of Gallerie Lelong and Alison Jacques Gallery

Works of art are usually quite easily recognisable: they’re in a frame, or on a pedestal, or (if it’s a particularly expensive one) there’s a security guard nearby. You’ll probably be in an art gallery or a smart private house too. But what about when the art is in the land? And moreover, when that art is almost too subtle to be noticed?

This is what confronts the viewer of Ana Mendieta’s work, on show at Alison Jacques Gallery in London. Cuban-born Mendieta (1948-85) made interventions in the landscape based around her own silhouette, such as pressing her hand into grass or arranging stones around her outline, and then took photographs. She also made videos of herself, lying naked underneath stones, hardly visible, in what looks like a quarry, or submerged in a Mexican creek.

Drawing on Mesoamerican traditions of the spirituality of the land, an anthropomorphised land, Mendieta affects nature by putting herself in it, almost as if she is willing that spirituality to enter her, or her to enter it. Her photos and videos, which seem almost bland at first, are thus quiet examinations of the relationship of man (and woman) and nature. She alters nature without doing so in an obvious or permanent or destructive way, and thus maintains an ancestral respect; contrast the “art” of Mount Rushmore and you’ll see what I mean.

By inserting herself into the landscape, and indeed with several photos of vaginal slashes in the earth, Mendieta is asserting the importance of the feminine in the natural world. Whereas most interventions are grand masculine statements, Mendieta’s play on her own womanhood makes her work that much more modest and affecting.

Another important aspect of Mesoamerican culture is ritual, which motivates Mendieta’s performances. One of these was recreated at the private view last night, where guests lit black candles arranged around Mendieta’s silhouette and the candles were left to melt down. (Picture right is the original performance.)

This echoes a Cuban ritual from which Mendieta was excluded both by being a woman and an exile, her family thrown out of Cuba for opposing Castro. By being invited to light one of these candles, that is, become a participant in Mendieta’s ritual, it became a meditative experience, poignant and inclusive.

Thus far most famous for her death (her husband, artist Carl Andre, known best in England for Tate Modern’s arrangement of bricks called Equivalent VIII, was acquitted of her murder after she fell out of their 34th-floor apartment window), Mendieta is difficult because of how she draws on unfamiliar non-Western traditions of art and because of the low voice in which her art speaks. However, her conception of nature, and specifically woman’s place within it, is ultimately compelling and beautiful.

Ana Mendieta: Silueta and Silence is on at Alison Jacques Gallery, 16-18 Berners St, from 19 February to 20 March

Cathedral of Shit knows the art world's secrets...

2010-02-16T21:55:00.001Z

...and isn't afraid to tell them. The contemporary art world - filled with million-pound paintings, august institutions, competitive gallerists, rich collectors and so many egos - is never that good at keeping things quiet. There's always some advantage (or just glee) to be gained by spilling the beans, and the better your sources the more popular you'll be.

By that yardstick, Cathedral of Shit is the most beautiful girl at the dance. The anonymously-written blog is roiling the art scene with its Deep-Throat-like knowledge, and art parties now resemble McCarthy's inquiries: "Are you now or have you ever been a contributor to Cathedral of Shit?"

Someone is spilling secrets, about art PRs out of favour and gallerists out of luck, plus there is plenty of general mockery of art's nostrums and most celebrated figures (especially Damien Hirst). Why is the Armory art fair in New York having a rough time? Which PR was banned from Frieze this year? And what's going on with the ICA? Plus, it performs a public service in working out where the Arts Council has been wasting its money.

The finger has been pointed in several directions, including at this writer, and there are several likely suspects, but whoever it is is taking no prisoners.

Ironically, one thing is for certain: Cathedral of Shit has given the art world one more thing to gossip about.

from theartsdesk.com

Beyond Ink: Authors and Their Websites

2010-01-06T20:39:00.003Z

First post of the new year, but hopefully lots more - from the embers of 2009 as well as roaring 2010 - to come. Originally published on theartsdesk.com.

--

J K Rowling's semi-spooky website

Your browser could search a long time for philiproth.com. There are some writers, it is plain, who are not the web type. I find it hard to envision a site garnished with a picture of a smiling – scowling – Roth standing outside his Connecticut farmhouse, beckoning web traffic to read his latest blog post (“My new year’s resolutions”) or even providing a biography beyond the terse notes on his flyleaves. An author who is reclusive in life is unlikely to be prodigious online. You would not define these solely as “literary” writers, but the high priests of prose style are not often found in the world of LOL.

There are, of course, others who embrace the web, and for a variety of reasons: some enjoy the contact it gives them with their readers, others can have an online catalogue raisonné, and for all of them it is a good way of selling books.

'I’m thinking of starting my own web site. I must find out what a web site is exactly.'

armisteadmaupin.com, for the author of the Tales of the City novels, is as quirky and personal as his fans would expect; indeed, it is administered by Rick Miller, asked by Maupin after he saw his fan-blog. As well as brief notes on all his books and other projects all his books and other projects, the site hosts Maupin’s occasional writings, personal photographs and an innovative guide to the San Francisco he evoked in the Tales books.

Thanks to this customised Google Map, many places featured in the books are clickable at pinpoint, with quotations from the novels and current or archival photographs; fans can use this as a tour guide when they visit San Francisco. The internet is, in fact, the perfect location for fiction and fact to coincide: digital can often make "real" the literary.

The site rewards the deep and intense personal connection his fans often feel with him. This connection is not one way, either: when I got in touch with his webmaster to ask why Maupin had wanted a new website, I got a response from the author too: “I wanted a more comprehensive website because I needed a way to put all my lore in one basket, so to speak. I’ve included some old pieces that show my activist roots and other odds and ends that might be of interest to readers, especially the younger ones who – age-wise at least – are as far removed from me as I once was from P G Wodehouse.”

There is also a more serious purpose to Maupin’s site – and to his Facebook fan page too, which Maupin keenly watches: “Writing is such a grimly solitary profession that there's comfort to be found in discovering fans outside of an autograph line or a public reading. There are some cheap thrills to be had, too. For instance, I've never actually met Diane Keaton, but I love knowing she enjoys my work. Somehow that makes it easier to face the blank page every day.”

This type of website – which is not a blank behemoth of publisher-induced text but responsive, engaging and author-driven – is much more likely to use whatever the internet can offer: Twitter, blogs, embedded video.

This is true even post mortem: simongray.org.uk, which relaunched last October, just over a year after the author’s death in August 2008, is not just a reference point but keeps Gray’s memory alive with regular Tweets and fresh blogs. (His former editor Ian Jack has contributed a scabrous post on the farrago of book awards.) Gray was himself keen on a website as far back as 2001: “I’m thinking of starting my own web site. I must find out what a web site is exactly.”

Anthony Wilks, one of the site’s two editors, says: “The initial concern was simply that there had to be some presence for him on the internet, if nothing else just to be an archive for the many strands of his work.” But “archive” need not just mean what has passed: “It will be a living, accumulating archive, with unique contributions from people who worked with him. It will be a kind of ongoing documentary about Simon.”

Since Gray worked in many media – theatre, diaries, novels, television, film, radio – the internet is again the perfect destination to unite these. There is YouTube footage of some of his television shows, available in the video gallery, and when radio plays are rebroadcast, the BBC’s iPlayer can be linked to.

However, rights are often a problem, as is the BBC’s deletion of much of its early material. For what exists but has been unreleased, however, the site, Wilks says, can act as a “useful lobbying tool”. For example, “There is a final play, Hullaballo, which hasn’t been performed, and we would love to put together a recording of a read-through or basic performance for the site to generate interest in the work.”

Writers who work across genres in this way can benefit enormously from the possibilities of a website, according to Guy Courtney, director of Pedalo, a digital design agency which has worked with authors including Ian Rankin and Jeanette Winterson: “Most of the writers we work with are polymaths and a site can effortlessly cross-promote aligned projects such as novels, television, film, photography, art, news, journalism and similar.” It also allows independence: “A website is a great way for a writer to put across their message about their work rather than the publisher’s message.”

Those who can be “branded” by their publishers inevitably have the slickest, sexiest websites, although they tend to fall into clichés such as letting readers pick a book from a virtual shelf. danbrown.com is afflicted by this cliché, although one might reflect that this is not wholly inappropriate.

Otherwise, Brown’s site has had time and money spent on it: it lets the visitor play games based around his books (having not read The Lost Symbol, I got nowhere with that one) and there are plenty of resources for those who want to explore the cultural background to the myths he makes.

A site is also a very good way of making what’s old new again, certainly bringing it to new audiences but also just bringing it back to light. The Orwell Trust is republishing, 70 years to the day, his private writings in a blog, and there is even someone unofficially incarnating him on Twitter. A fascinating act of mimesis has also been undertaken for Dr Johnson, who regularly defines the words of the modern world.

There are plenty of entirely competent, uninspiring sites, such as joannatrollope.com, and even some which could charitably be said to appear “homemade” (such as ruthpadel.com), but what they lack more than élan or technology is personality.

This is becoming the exception rather than the rule, Guy Courtney says, “An increasing number” of Pedalo’s authors do want to get involved. (Their new site, Discover Writers, has tips for how writers can do this.) “The development of a community around a site is the key to success as it helps build traffic, so if a writer who we are building a site with is happy to contribute in some way then all the better. That contribution can take a number of forms: some of our clients run blogs or forums, some send out regular email shots to subscribers to their mailing list and some just update the news section of their site.

“Ensuring that the user has a reason to return is vital, be that a regular monthly column or a competition (win a signed book), list of appearances, a forum to discuss the books or simply some background on the writer that is not available on any other sites. All these things work well. A successful site is one where the content changes regularly and is unique.”

For some authors, the internet is a darned distraction, and dabbling in it only takes them away from their mission. Why get involved in e-chit-chat or the Twitterverse when all you have to say is in your books?

But many authors are keen to connect with their readers, to see how their work is received. For these, a website is vital, and the key to a successful website, to building new and reinforcing old relationships with readers, is engagement: those that repay the loyalty of their readers with the personal touch will last long after the latest reprint has hit the shelves.

The Art of Russia, BBC Four

2009-12-11T19:35:00.005Z

From theartsdesk.com

Andrew Graham-Dixon at the Hermitage in front of David and Jonathan by Rembrandt
BBC/David Williams

If Andrew Graham-Dixon's arts career ever goes belly-up, there is surely a microphone with his name on it at Radio 4, so warm and confident and trustworthy is his voice. Judging, however, by his new three-part programme on BBC Four, The Art of Russia, there is no chance of this happening soon.

The first episode is entitled "Out of the Forest", describing how the Russian people under Ivan the Terrible emerged from their wooded subjugation by the Mongols, but the story Graham-Dixon starts with - how they got there in the first place and how they survived - is at least as interesting.

It was - as so often seems the case in Russia - the idea of one man. In the late 10th century AD, Vladimir of Kiev decided that there had to be a way of unifying the tribes scattered across thousands of miles. As is also so often the case in Russia, Vladimir imported his solution: Byzantine Christianity.

Russian Orthodoxy brought the flourishing of two great art forms, one it made its own (icons) and one it borrowed (books). Graham-Dixon makes a thoroughly compelling case for the transcendent passion embodied in and evoked by icons (paintings on wood) and the iconostasis (a wall of icons) by observing a service in progress in the Holy Trinity Monastery, where whole walls of the master Andrei Rublev's icons loom, golden, beatific presences. I have tended (through my own ignorance and atheism) to devalue icons, but Graham-Dixon so spiritually conveys what they mean to contemporary and modern Christians that you are moved.

The books are another import: Byzantine scholars developed a written language for the unlettered peoples based on Greek characters, with mystical crosses and circles added. Russian illuminated manuscripts do not match up to the splendours of their Renaissance counterparts, but the letters themselves, Graham-Dixon says, are an art form.

After the Mongols pillaged and burned, the Christians hid out in forests and built churches with onion domes, and only emerged when Ivan let his own brand of violence do its work. At this point, the programme becomes rather too much like a lecture on the history of Russia: art did not develop under Ivan, and although the folk tradition of luboks (popular satirical or fairy-tale prints) continued, Graham-Dixon cannot avoid this change of tone. Thus, it is rather contrived when he says that an old lady (who survived the era of Stalin) with whom he's spent the afternoon has turned her house into a work of art, given that it is no more or less decorated than yours or mine. The idea that portraits of Lenin and Stalin were icons themselves is interesting, but it does not warrant this tenuous connection.

Finally, when Peter the Great came to the throne, his European travels led him to found that most European of cities, St Petersburg, with its hideously over-gilded Baroque Cathedral of St Peter and Paul. Peter also brought with him a fine Rembrandt, sparking a new era in Russian painting, for realistic space, psychology and colours had never before played a part.

What is most interesting is the role of Europe in Russia and the insecurity-disguised-as-pugnacity this engenders in some Russians. Graham-Dixon interviews a rich collector of icons and inadvertently gets involved in an argument when he suggests that one piece of painting is rather Persian. The collector loses his temper and starts yelling about how "we have everything our own" in Russia - he denies any foreign influence at all.

This is fascinating because it both reflects a resurgent Russian nationalism (stoked by previous humiliations and current power) and a complete ignorance of the truth: as Graham-Dixon astutely shows - but does not make too much of - Europe has been everywhere in Russia. From the religion to the script to Rembrandt to (ironically) the arch-nationalist Ivan's adoption of the title "Tsar" (derived from "Caesar"), you cannot tell the story of the art of Russia without the influence of Europe. No doubt the next two programmes will bear this out too.

The Art of Russia continues on BBC Four on Wednesdays at 9pm. Watch it on BBC iPlayer.

Why Beauty Matters/Ugly Beauty, BBC Two

2009-12-06T21:33:00.004Z

From theartsdesk.com: an interesting thread of comments on the linked article is worth following.

Waldemar Januszczak at the Anish Kapoor retrospective at the Royal Academy BBC/ZCZ Films

The battleground: beauty. What’s at stake: our souls. At least on these two things philosophy don Roger Scruton (presenter of Why Beauty Matters) and art critic Waldemar Januszczak (presenter of Ugly Beauty) were agreed in the Modern Beauty season. For despite very different ideas of beauty, they both reached the same conclusion: it is there to nourish the soul.

Which is why it may seem odd that their programmes consider the same examples and yet reach very different conclusions. Jeff Koons to one is shallow and materialistic, to the other a source of self-knowledge. Scruton finds Damien Hirst a soulless, abominable trickster, Januszczak a poet of death in the tradition of the Baroque.

Scruton’s is a philosophical essay set to pictures and music. He starts with the importance of beauty in art up until the 20th century, and says its purpose was to transfigure the real in the light of the ideal: that is, to make us consider reality and how it relates to our higher ideals. The problem of the 20th century is that we have no ideals any more except for utility, and what is useful is invariably ugly and eventually useless. (Take Reading town centre, he says.) What beauty does is connect us directly to the spiritual, in the manner of religion, and thus nourishes the soul: this is Plato’s idea, and Scruton is a fan.

(Scruton argues that creativity is important in beauty, differentiating Michelangelo’s David from cemetery copies of the statue. This does make it slightly unfortunate that one of his jumping-off points is Oscar Wilde’s quotation, “All art is quite useless,” which is a paraphrase of John Ruskin’s “The most beautiful things in the world are useless.”)

Januszczak’s is a much more irreverent tour around Venice’s Biennale, with over-dramatic narration and on-screen antics, slopping dead fish everywhere and gesticulating like a bull at Pamplona. He – like Matthew Collings in the same season – outlines his vision of aspects of beauty, which include death, motherhood, texture, emptiness and kitsch. (This last is where Koons comes in.) Except, unlike Collings, he interviews many artists to provide us with the knowledge to understand their works and find them more beautiful. His roll-call is starry – Koons, Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Yoko Ono, Carl Andre (who refuses to appear on screen) – and the explanations provided may convert even the sceptical to viewing their work as beautiful.

The problem with Scruton’s argument is that it is old-fashioned, not just in the authorities it cites (Plato, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Victorian poets), but when he says that beauty is meant to console the afflicted and reinforce the joyous, as if beauty is visual Prozac. This negates the message of the 20th century, which is that sometimes there is no consolation, no joy.

If two world wars and existentialism and the double helix showed us anything, it is that the world does not exist for a higher, affirmative purpose, and thus beauty should not try to make us feel good. The world is bad, so beauty can show us the bad.

This "bad" beauty nourishes our souls – or at least stimulates them to thought or emotion – in the same way as "good" beauty. Scruton does not realise, or refuses to accept, that the notion of beauty has been extended to reflect the world as we know it, not as we would like it.

That said, the underlying message of his principle is not wrong, nor is it rejected by Januszczak, who quite clearly believes that modern beauty is there to touch the soul: he just does not believe it must be a comforting touch.

What Is Beauty?, BBC2

2009-11-26T16:13:00.001Z

From theartsdesk.com. May I recommend you look at the comments under the original post, from the bottom up?

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As questions go, "What is beauty?" is quite possibly only second to "What do women want?" in the frequency of its asking and in the difficulty of its answer. As the first programme in BBC Two and BBC Four’s Modern Beauty season, What Is Beauty? features Matthew Collings skirting around the edges of an answer and in doing so inadvertently hitting upon one.

Collings tries to identify ten different components of beauty with reference to some of his favourite artworks. Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto from Monterchi is beautiful because of its simplicity, Robert Rauschenberg’s Charlene because its components are carefully selected, Norman Foster’s Millau Bridge because it returns to nature.

He travels around Europe (presumably the recession put paid to an American jaunt), from the new Brandhorst Museum in Munich to the gilded Norman Monreale Cathedral in Sicily, to illustrate these points.

From a technical perspective, there is not much wrong with the show, although he does tend to over-address the viewer ("you" should do this, "you" can do that), as if we actively need to be engaged.

But it is his argument which is pointed in the wrong direction. When Socrates asked people, "What is bravery?" and they responded (according to Plato) with examples like "running into a burning building to save a child" or "fighting well in battle", he pointed out that they were giving him accidents of bravery, not a definition of it. It is exactly the same here: Collings’s ten factors are accidents of beauty, not a definition of beauty.

So Magritte’s Reckless Sleeper (in the Tate) may be beautiful because it is surprising (another factor), with its sleeping man and the banal tokens of everyday life in an amorphous grey dream below, but what about a work that is not surprising (eg a still life of fruit)? Collings says something is beautiful because it tries to (or just does) imitate nature, but what about the unnatural idea of acceleration? Art Deco is concerned with mechanics, rejecting the natural.

The problem is that for every factor Collings suggests is beautiful, its absence or its opposite can be equally beautiful. He implicitly admits this too. At the end of the programme, he urges you to make your own list of what is beautiful, but what I find beautiful may not fit into his categories, or if it does, it may be entirely opposed to them. There are limitless categories, and we all find different things beautiful. Collings does not address or even seem to understand that we will not all agree with him: beauty, if it is anything, is relative.

Despite the relativity of these factors, Collings does help us to answer "What is beauty?" What he is doing is asking questions, which in turn cause us to know more and thus gain a greater appreciation, which is surely what makes something beautiful: our understanding of it. The more you know about the technique Monet used or the subject of Guernica or the materials of the Parthenon, the more likely you are to understand the work and find it beautiful because you comprehend its complexity and the intelligence behind it.

So, instead of saying that something which adheres to nature is beautiful, he should say, "What was the artist intending to say about nature with this work?" The answer could be something or nothing, but in asking it, we learn a little more and will think more about the picture. Don’t ask "Is this Jackson Pollock patterned?" (as he does) but "Why was Jackson Pollock trying to create (or avoid) pattern?"

The answers to these questions cannot necessarily be found in the pictures – a study of history and biography and art history and psychology and pop culture will help us answer them. This then leads to the perhaps perverse conclusion that the question "What is beauty?" is best answered not by looking at beautiful things (such as in a TV documentary) but by reading: the surface becomes deeper when you know more.

But what about when one first looks at a picture and is struck dumb by its beauty? For example, new artists I know nothing about can stop me in my tracks with the appearance of their work. A Raphael Christ made me cry. If this is anything, it is art touching our emotions. We do not consider its spontaneity (another factor) or relationship with nature but there is an almost atavistic reaction: this is emotional, mental, psychological – not words which get much play in Collings’ film. His factors try to intellectualise these emotional experiences, but their intellectual dimension is not quite enough either.

One further complaint is that he also hardly touches on any art form but painting: there is the Laocoon sculpture and Matisse’s paper snail, but what about photography and film? Do these have their own kinds of beauty? If we follow Collings, we could find different types of beauty in them: the truth of a photo (but a staged one can be beautiful too), a film of a meadow (but not one of a city?).

Collings sets out to answer "What is beauty?" but the best answer to this that he provides is implicit in his questioning, not explicit in his answers.

Today's Mother Courages

2009-11-26T16:10:00.001Z

I've never seen an entire row of people leave during a play. Singles, couples, parents with screaming brats in tow, but never ten people at once. They were quite clearly a coach party, or corporate hospitality gone wrong. Mother Courage and Her Children at the National evidently proved too much for them.

And why shouldn't it? Brecht's 1939 play features a woman (Fiona Shaw storming the stage) who drags her caravan of provisions to sell across the battlefields of the Thirty Years' War, accompanied by her children, who are gradually conscripted, raped or killed. She sells because she wants to and because she has to, and every move she makes takes her closer to safety and to ruin. Her choices are impossible, and we feel pity, anger, grief and love at the same time. It is a complex masterpiece.

It also a prime exponent of Brecht's Epic Theatre, which tries to convey moral messages through a variety of unsubtle ways, so Mother Courage had scene titles on canvas flags (which were read out by Gore Vidal) and plenty of rock songs. It was during one of the songs - which were by no means discreditable or unlyrical - that the row got up and left. It's a little too in-your-face for those more used to revivals of My Fair Lady.

One of the best things about the show was the light Mother Courage shed on today's banking crisis (much more, to judge from critical reaction, than the speed-written reaction to the recession, Power of Yes). What we see is a woman who ploughs on much further than she ought to because she feels that she cannot stop: there is money to be made, even if you do have to cross (not metaphorical) minefields.

This is surely not unlike what those who followed derivatives pioneers experienced: with some knowledge of the danger, they kept going. Perhaps that is too kind to the bankers - most people would propose that they had no knowledge of the danger, which gives Mother Courage one up on them. The play stands for our appetite for risk and our stomach for failure, and how well we can ever reconcile the two.

What happens to Mother Courage in the end? I don't want to ruin the play, but suffice it to say, bankers ought to look around themselves before deciding that forward is always best.

A gold medal for the Cultural Olympiad?

2009-10-26T21:21:00.002Z

From theartsdesk.com

Detail of a crocheted lioness by Shauna Richardson Matthew Andrews

Worries that London 2012’s Cultural Olympiad had fallen at the first hurdle – as it seemed when the proposed Olympic Friend-ship, carrying a cargo of British artists and philosophers around the world, was scrapped – can be assuaged. The organisers of the London Olympics have, in fact, turned their course around: instead of this monumental, nationalistic, elitist, pretentious idea, they have moved to the local, the inclusive, the relatable. Artists taking the lead, a co-production of Arts Council England and London 2012, has announced the 12 public art projects it is commissioning for a total of £5.4 million, all to come to fruition by the Olympics.

There are certain projects whose boldness or silliness make them tall poppies, visible and ripe for a critical scything. Shauna Richardson, representing the East Midlands, will create the Lionheart installation, exploring the values lions and the Olympics share (supply your own qualities here) through the medium of crocheted wool, one of the chief exports from Richard the Lionheart’s heartland. (It all comes together.) Three lions, each 30 feet tall, will be displayed in Nottingham, to loom over the city.

Scotland will see the destruction of part of a forest for Craig Coulthard’s Forest Pitch, where a football pitch will be created deep within a forest by felling trees. After one match has been played, the forest can reclaim its space.

The environment is at the centre of the North-East’s project, FLOW, a floating watermill and mill house, which will power itself and some musical instruments. FLOW, by Owl Project and Ed Carter, aims to examine how local industry and the river have sustained and exploited one another. Quite what is artistic about this apparent science project is not clear.

Other artists take the term “public art” to mean “art created by the public”, which – as Anthony Gormley’s One & Other on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square has demonstrated – can be provocative and kaleidoscopic. London probably has the most kaleidoscopic project, called Bus-Tops: bad pun, good idea. Alfie Dennen and Paula Le Dieu (pictured right) will install LED panels on top of 40 bus shelters in London, and the public can submit their own ideas for images, text and animations through the web, mobile apps and other media.

This concept seems much more consciously ‘artistic’ than many of the other projects: there are ideas of beauty and image, contemplations of the aesthetic, as much as of community (as with other projects). Bus-Tops engages with both words in “public art”, since it is concerned with what those outside the art world think is beautiful, an approach which is much more likely to provoke a public dialogue on art than the aforementioned mill.

The public are intimately involved in Robert Pacitti and the Pacitti Company’s project, in the East region. The Pacitti Company will produce a feature film whose material is drawn from "a series of large-scale participatory, outdoor events, exploring themes of trade, defence and migration".

This is another project which is driven by the community, but some of the happenings proposed are terrifyingly anaemic: 205 black flags along the coast will be gradually replaced by the flags of the 205 countries attending the Olympics. This is fine for vexillologists, but what do we learn about the local community from this? It is a vapid gesture, which will work visually for the film but not intellectually.

Marc Rees’s project for Wales is in danger of being the most condescending of the lot. Titled Adain Avion, it is a DC9 fuselage converted into a "mobile art space", which will be pulled across Wales as a "social sculpture". The towns it visits will welcome it with a festival and will engage with it through artistic, sporting and community activities, which ought to be praised.

Unfortunately, however, this is reminiscent of nothing so much as missionaries landing their planes in Africa, Bible in hand, to the whoops of astonishment of the "natives". The Welsh have seen planes before – they are not as wide-eyed as this project would make them seem.

All of these projects are aimed at taking art outside (even if many of them struggle to qualify as art). London’s Dennen and Le Dieu say, “The ‘art public’ is a new audience for art, one that looks for artistic expression that touches on their world,” and this neatly captures the direction public art is taking us in: art is not just what one finds inside a gallery, but should invade the public sphere too. In this way, these projects are perfect embodiments of our time, art reaching out.

If we contrast these projects with previous commemorative grand artistic schemes in Britain, we have to wonder whether it will have the same effect. Consider the pleasure and enlightenment still available from the museums in South Kensington founded after the Great Exhibition of 1851, or from the Festival of Britain’s impact on the South Bank.

This will leave us, by design, with nothing permanent, which suggests a worryingly evanescent conception of British society. Large museums or concert halls would not be the only way to fix the Cultural Olympiad in the national memory: encouraging a whole generation of children by spending this £5.4 million not on incidents of "art" but on instruments in schools, not on watermills but on watercolour paints, would also have a long-term positive effect.

The reason people enjoy involvement with public art is because they so often feel neglected by the rest of the culture, especially its artistic side. Public art projects are partially used to unify communities, and indeed, one of the key reasons for London bidding for the Olympics was so that East London could be regenerated, building 21st-century communities. What we should be considering, however, is not what wacky sculpture will bring people together but why we have not brought them together in the first place. Public art is a sticking plaster for our wider failures.

While London seems set on the most temporary form of Olympic public art, Olympic public art projects can involve the contrary danger too: Barcelona ossified in its 1992, with its large-scale Miro-esque projects which now dominate the skyline yet mean very little. Britain's, perhaps happily, are temporary. Still, only after 2012 will we be able to tell whether we have been left with a cultural legacy.

Middle picture: Alfie Dennen and Paula la Dieu by Matthew Andrews

Frieze Week: Thursday

2009-10-18T20:12:00.001Z

Go to the Fair? Now why would I do that? After a few frenzied hours at the Fair on Wednesday, the call of actual work cannot be ignored. The call of several good post-work parties, however - that's a different call altogether.

First was the most newsworthy of all things happening this week: the Trafigura Prize in association with the Cynthia Corbett Gallery at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane. The show is called Young Masters and features artists who take inspiration, techniques or subjects from the old masters.

There are the Renaissance pictures updated with modern young men by Hector de Gregorio, who paints and varnishes over posed photographs; Alice Evans' Easel, a lightbox which recreates a Vermeer-like aura; and Constance Slaughter's Invasion, a modern Bayeux Tapestry where soldiers are surrounded by assaulting pencils.

There are lots of excellent pictures, and I would encourage you to go, but it is one of the sponsors which is proving particularly interesting at the moment. In case you haven't been following (tho' if you're on Twitter, you will have been), Trafigura, an oil shipping company, obtained a super-injunction to prevent the Guardian reporting a Parliamentary question about a report into a company Trafigura hired dumping (allegedly) toxic waste on the African coast. With me so far?

After several thousand people had Tweeted about where said question could be found online, the injunction was effectively broken and Trafigura's solicitors (the eminently loveable Carter-Ruck, no enemies of freedom they) withdrew the injunction. Victory for the untraceables of the internet.

Well, as part of their PR effort to pour oil over troubled waters (sorry), Trafigura has sponsored this prize, and when I caught up with Cynthia Corbett last night, she confirmed that Trafigura had come on board "two months ago", a relatively short time in the two years she had been planning this show (which you really should go see). I would never suggest Cynthia had done anything wrong or improper: no, it is Trafigura who are trying to paint over (oil paint, I'm guessing) their bad PR.

If we've learned one thing this week, it is that art audiences aren't especially stupid, Trafigura.

And now a happier topic. The Embassy is an installation of work by the 20 Hoxton Square gallery at the former Sierra Leonean embassy (and afterwards alleged swingers' venue) at 33 Portland Place. It had its opening last night and after hotfooting it from the Trafigura Prize on Brick Lane, I managed to grab fifteen minutes amid the complete frenzy. The congestion on the staircase was so hip, so chic, that you could have thrown a paper plane and hit a Vogue model.

The idea behind the Embassy, according to Alex Dellal, whom I spoke to yesterday afternoon, was formed after hearing how modern embassies (such as some of those being built in Dubai) are using some of their premises to promote national artists. Alex wanted "to do the exact opposite by inviting artists from all over to recreate the national identity of an anonymous country". Instead of having an embassy defined by artists' nationality, the artists would definte the embassy's nationality.

So the Embassy has everything from a flag to an anthem. Alex says that plenty of research went into the anthem: 'From America to Europe to South-East Asia, there's this very repetitive feeling you get from national anthems: they sound fairly similar, all in four-four beat. They often sound like a backing track reminiscent of a James Bond theme.'

The recession has made it more difficult to sell works, Alex, the brother of noted denizen of the gossip columns Alice, concedes, but he says that 'people are now more open to seeing new things. [They don't want to see] a lot of these huge artists who get huge sales, they want to see things beyond that. People are going to more art fairs, they've got a better understanding than ever before.'

It is that sort of sophistication which makes a conceptual project like the Embassy more approachable. It is (just in my view) not a wholly successful project: while there are some very interesting pieces, too many seem to be a simplistic reaction to America. I am not passing judgment on America one way or the other, but I think a post-national embassy could cease fighting the battles of 2001-8.

For example, Wolfe von Lenkiewicz's melange of art history features Jesus' head on an American eagle while the Lincoln memorial sits on top and a plane crashes into it. I believe Rufus Wainwright best encapsulated this approach in his song Going to a Town, which was also a lot more timely. At least Alastair Mackie's Mud Hut, a model of the Capitol Building made from mud, straw and horse manure, was made as sectarian violence in Iraq was rising.

Still, I particularly liked Michael Lisle-Taylor's Crossing the Line and Black Knight Square Away, two miliarry uniforms turned into straight jackets, which are direct but quite moving.

And after all that, I turned down my chance to go to the Omega party with Cindy Crawford because I spent the rest of the evening (and early morning) at the Paramount Club with some good friends over from New York. Cindy Crawford is one thing, but friends - that's what Frieze Week is about.

Tonight, the Kandinsky Prize and the Art Review Power 100.

Read Monday's diary here
Read Tuesday's diary here
Read Wednesday's diary here

Pictures from top: Héctor de Gregorio - Absinthes, Alice Evans - Easel, Constance Slaughter - Invasion, Wolfe von Lenkiewicz, Michael Lisle-Taylor - Crossing the Line

Frieze Week: Wednesday

2009-10-18T20:09:00.001Z

Cometh the day, cometh the fair: Wednesday saw the official exclusive preview of the Frieze Art Fair. It was indeed an exclusive, rarefied group of five thousand* international collectors, journos and bon vivants who thundered round the 165 stands, causing gallerinas to tremble and artists to thank god. Orange stickers appeared on labels across the fair like a rapidly-spreading outbreak of chicken pox. (Of course, the real collectors were allowed in at 10.30 and had disappeared by the time we were let in.)

And that wasn't the only piece of good news: as well as seemingly buoyant sales, the work this year, like at Art Basel, was much subtler, much more subdued. There was not even a Pharrell Williams-Takashi Murakami bejewelled frog to relieve the parsimony. This meant that there were fewer look-at-me million-dollar pieces and the great works of the greatest contemporary artists were by and large absent: there may well have been a revolt if a spot or spin painting had turned up.

There were, of course, plenty of pleasant discoveries, among whom I would include Hiroyuki Masuyama's lightboxes layered with modern photographs which, taken together, recreate Turner's paintings; Jim Hodges' That day (Blue) I through X, ten swirling blue pastels mixed with saliva which resemble Raphael's sketches for heaven; and Lucy Williams' Reading room (seinajoki), a piece of craft truly, where bookspines in a bookshelf are slivers of paper.

One new aspect to Frieze is Frame (Frieze Frame, geddit?). This is dedicated to solo artist presentations from galleries under six years old, curated by Daniel Baumann and Sarah McCrory, and is a genius way of drawing attention (admittedly, at the rear of the fair) to those who could not afford a White Cube-size stand or position. Gareth Moore at Lüttgenmeijer from Berlin had a field full of flags, where the flag was black zig-zag material or think pink sheeting or wooden sticks. It was a witty way of playing with nationalism and representation.

Pommery broke out the champagne at 5.30 although some had broken out the vodka even earlier. Spotted earlier that day were Grayson Perry, looking like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane if Bette Davis had been a YBA; Lily Allen; and Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Galleries.

Despite tremulous qualms about whether the recession would condemn Frieze to the abandoned paint-pot of history, it is clear that its influence - and more importantly, its rejuvenating creativity - has been maintained.

* Author's estimate based on number of times his toes were trodden on.

Later that evening, the Frieze hordes descended on church. Not for religion, of course. (Well, not a religion with a bible, unless you count the Art Review Power 100, more of which in Friday's diary.)

Just across from Regent's Park is One Marylebone, a deconsecrated church by Sir John Soane, he of the museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields. This regularly hosts events (I once went there for the launch of what I thought was a TV series but was in fact for a series of TVs) and now is showing The Age of the Marvellous, an exciting and refreshing exhibition of the collection of All Visual Arts.

There are some thrilling pieces of work. Not so much Paul Fryer's ape on a crucifix, which (if we're being honest) is rather obvious, but Ben Tyers' Breathe, an egg-shaped container wherein water falls and rises at the rate we inhale and exhale at. It is an understated, contemplative piece, even among the crowds grabbing cocktails from the waitress' tray before she even leaves the kitchen.

Alastair Mackie's Amorphous Organic is a chessboard whose pieces are small amber columns with insects suspended inside and a lightbox-board to illuminate them. It is a Darwinian version of the match with Death in the Seventh Seal. Indeed, Darwin's presence is very much felt: there are monkeys, feathered Möbius strips, Alyson Shotz's Helix (outside the church) and (the most beautiful work in the show) Paul Fryer's Venus and Mars, an orrery (look it up here) with just mythical lovers Venus and Mars orbiting yet never meeting.

All Visual Arts is a joint project between former LA gallerist and director of ArtNet Joe La Placa and the founder of Europe's third largest hedge fund, Mike Platt, utilising the art smarts of the former and the business smarts of the latter to amass a collection of works produced especially for it. This art and financial nexus makes it the perfect combination for Spear's, and so I caught up with Joe as he fended off crowds of admirers.

What is their collecting philosophy? 'The theme of the collection is a not very used word, consilience. Consilience is the unity of knowledge. Edmund O. Wilson wrote a book in 1998 that called for the unification of the sciences, which were the chopping up of knowledge.

'I’m very much influenced by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century method of collection where you can have in one room a cosmological vision of the knowledge of mankind, like the Pitt-Rivers Museum. I think that art unifies knowledge and I’m interested in artists that look outside the normal aesthetic criteria to things like science, like anthropology, like the humanities and unify them.'

What about the business side? 'I used to direct ArtNet and I was an expert on art as an asset class. My partner Mike Platt is the third-biggest hedge fund in Europe. People mistake us for a fund – we’re absolutely not a fund. Our business model is a long-term strategy over five year to make a collection so we’re not interested in any of the methodology that a fund or a hedge fund would follow.

'Mike often says, "Joe’s forgotten more about art than I’ll ever know." The thing about Mike is that he’s an autodidact, and he wants to learn, and the way to learn is to take a plunge, so what I rely on Mike for is financial expertise and acumen, and Mike relies on me for the art side and the production side. We don’t raise money – just he and I.'

On their method of collecting: 'The concept of the AVA collection is that unlike a lot of other collections which go around to galleries and buy things, I produce things because I love working with artists and have done so for 30 years. It’s not commissioned, because that would imply we’ve bought it – ‘produced’ I like to say. We’re like Hollywood producers: someone pitches me an idea and I say, "That’s fantastic, how much do you need?" and they say, "Fifty grand," and I say, "Let’s go for it'."

How has the recession affected AVA? 'I have to say for me, "What recession?" I’ve been doing this for a really really long time. I think the point is that great art, meaningful art that people connect with, you’re always going to have a market for. Even in a recession, it’s not the high-quality works that suffer, it’s the middle ground that actually suffers.

'For us, it hasn’t really affected us. My collaboration with Mike has made us recession-proof, because the way we’ve designed All Visual Arts as a hybrid organisation, without a gallery for instance, clocking 250 grand a month overhead. We have a nice humble production office, but when we do shows, we go for it.'

Tonight: Trafigura Priza, The Embassy of 20 Hoxton Square and more.

Read Monday's diary here
Read Tuesday's diary here

Frieze Week: Tuesday

2009-10-18T20:08:00.001Z

Damien Hirst - as may well have become evident in the past decade - is not a man to do things by halves. Not a skull with zirconia, not a cabinet of real pills, not a pickled terrier, and now not a normal white-walls-and-bare-brick Soho gallery. No, Damien has paid £250,000 to refurbish rooms in the Wallace Collection, hanging them with his own blue silk as a backdrop to his 25 new paintings. And last night everyone came to see, spectate and gawk.

Damien was keeping well away from the throng upstairs, almost all of whom were talking about whether he would turn up or not, looking gleeful at both possibilities. It was pure luck that when I went in search of a drink, I found him in the courtyard, which was mostly empty; he was looking much more relaxed than he would once word spread and the photographers realised.

His new paintings - all done by Damien himself, rather than his previous production-line approach - are not a wholly-new departure for him, since they feature his favourite motifs: skulls, butterflies, spots. They float on deep blue backgrounds with thin white cages locking them into the plane. There is some terrific brushwork and not a little Francis Bacon.

'Bacon? Who's he? Never heard of him,' says Damien when I ask him about his influences. 'I prefer eggs and beans.'

Setting himself against the old masters of the Wallace Collection - Gainsborough, Velazquez, some great Murillos - creates a grand prospect for failure. I'll leave his degree of success up to you.

What was a certain success was the party: Tracey Emin, one of the Chapmans, one of the Gallaghers, Alexander McQueen, Patrick Cox, Nicky Haslam, Jay Jopling, Lily Cole (looking like one of the baby-faced Gainsboroughs). Ivor Braka, the art dealer, was almost refused entry because he looked too scruffy.

The core crew peeled off to Jay Jopling's dinner afterwards.

The other big dinner last night was that for Ed Ruscha, who is having a retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, at Skylon. Guestlist to follow...

Afterwards, to the Anish Kapoor after-party at the Royal Courts of Justice. Oh yes, art has invaded the law. (Only a matter of time before there's an art gathering in the PwC boardroom.) Anish had been showing new work at the Lisson Gallery, but many people went straight to the Royal Courts, which looked more like Cannes in July than the Strand in October. There was gentle orange lighting, plenty of trees and sofas, and so many cocktails it gave new meaning to 'being called to the bar'.

The crowd was mainly collectors early in the evening and gallerinas later on. Plenty of people made a beeline for Nick Hackworth of Paradise Row, but there were also notable spots from Sotheby's, Sky Arts and almost every gallery north of the river.

Today: Frieze opens to collectors, Frieze launch party late tonight, the Tatler and Vanity Fair parties, a party at Christie's for their contemporary sales this week and All Visual Arts at One Marylebone.

Read Monday's diary here
Read Wednesday's diary here

Frieze Week: Monday

2009-10-18T20:07:00.000Z

Frieze Week started last night as it meant to go on: with art, with an auction, with charity, with glamour. Laurence Graff's FACET Foundation (For Africa's Children Every Time) raised over $1.2 million with a sale at Christie's of work donated by Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and more.

Laurence Graff told Spear's that he had always wondered what it was like to stand on the other side of the podium instead of sitting in the front rows. He brandished his panel with enthusiasm and alacrity, but also proved a generous consigner: the first lot - Khotsa Nala Earrings - was donated by him.

The actual auctioneer was Jussi Pylkkänen, president of Christie's Europe. At the afterparty at Sketch, Jussi told Spear's: ‘The crowd here is a testament to the pulling power of Laurence Graff, not just with serious collectors but more importantly with artists, who he’s been a big supporter of, hence all their donations.’

Jussi also broke one of his rules when Spear's asked what his favourite picture of the sale was: ‘Anyone who knows me knows that I very rarely announce any sort of personal preference for a picture when it comes up for sale, however I did come out and say I really liked the Lionel Smit.’

The biggest surprise of the evening was that Raqib Shaw's 'Mild-Eyed Melancholy of the Lotus-Eater', an oval of delicate flowers and Hindu symbols rendered in acrylic, enamel, rhinestones and glittery, went for £200,000, well above its £80-120,000 estimate.

Mr Graff set up FACET after his mother's death in 2008 to give back to Africa, the source of most of his diamonds. It is currently funding the Graff Leadership Centre in Lesotho, in association with Help Lesotho. The centre will provide a leadership camp for orphans and vulnerable youth in a country where Aids has reduced life expectancy to 37 and made it the third poorest country in the world.

Tomorrow: Hirst at the Wallace Collection, Anish Kapoor at Lisson and Royal Courts of Justice

Read Tuesday's diary here
Read Wednesday's diary here

Art London looks up

2009-10-18T20:04:00.002Z

From spearswms.com

The Frieze Art Fair is a little too contemporary for some tastes: last year’s smoking booths are not what most of the patrons of Art London in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea would consider art. Not art, at least, that one could hang in one’s drawing room. That was the problem Art London had last year: too much drawing-room art. This year, I’m pleased to say, Art London moved out of the drawing room and into a more daring room.

Don’t get too excited – we are still not in a world of neon tubes leaning against white walls or projects so large they have to be installed in a separate building (as at Art Basel). But some of the 60 galleries showing had evidently striven to avoid the staid and give buyers a more exciting choice. (Having said this, there were still a disturbing number of Monet-lite works this year.)

Piers Bourke’s Bhutanese Monastery (Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery) was a tall digital print which seemed to have gone through a shredder before being roughly reassembled in three dimensions. It was challenging in a Cubist manner – the angle of approach is always changing, there is no way to see it all – and looked like it might fall apart at any moment, which gave it a nice tension.

Galerie Olivier Waltman, from Paris, exhibited three interesting artists: Jean-Pierre Attal, with his external photos of occupied office buildings, looking in on at activity within; Tali Amitai-Tabib, showing from her series of libraries, geometrical yet humane in their emptiness; and Charles Fazzino, whose lurid decoupage scenes of metropolitan life seem like novelties but are actually rather neat social commentary.

Irish artist Marty Kelly had a one-man show at BlueLeaf Gallery. His work is Uglow-like and arresting: roughly-painted grey, yellow, blotchy orange humans are caught in black backgrounds. He told me that “there’s an automatic assumption that the paintings are gloomy, but for me the black just serves to illuminate the figure.” And it does: they look like they have been caught in a shaft of light, just beyond our reach. His best painting on show was of one figure turning through five stages, where he convincingly captured the motion of his ballet-dancer models.

There was also a large presence of the work of Frederic, Lord Leighton, a Holland Park resident whose house is now a public museum (closed for refurbishment until 2010). Many Leighton paintings – including a fine and sombre Clytemnestra – were on show, giving the fair an excellent anchor in a serious piece of art history, just in case it ever threatened to blow away in the stormy October weather.

Finally, it is impossible to forget the Tatler stand, which may have been a post-modern joke or indeed a serious business proposition (they were flogging the new issue, out the day after the private view). Celebrating its tercentenary, the magazine displayed some of its finest covers, which really say quite a lot about the modern world – more than many of the other galleries.

From the full-text first cover, promising the best gossip London’s coffeehouses had to offer, through those featuring notable women of the twentieth century to the bland blondes on today’s, you saw the past three centuries flash before you, and the ending wasn’t pleasant.

The art world may have suffered along with everyone else, but it seems to have brought out a little bit of fighting spirit in Art London. It is not meant to be avant-garde – it never has been – but at least it now looks beyond the heavy curtains of Carlyle Square.

Top picture (c) Piers Bourke/Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery
Bottom picture (c) Marty Kelly/BlueLeaf Gallery

Museum of Everything, Primrose Hill

2009-10-09T16:58:00.005Z

From theartsdesk.com

The art world has never been un-self-aware – its navel is deeper and more gazed-at than almost any other art form. So what happens when you bring artists unaware of the art world into the contemplated and contemplating fold? The Museum of Everything, a new space in Primrose Hill, north-west London, which opened this week, is devoted to outsider art and by extension to answering this question.

James Brett is the founder of the Museum of Everything and a keen collector of art made by non-traditional artists; he rejects the term 'outsider art' as being too loose and inaccurate.

He sees his artists as “anyone who’s making art privately – or feels that they have been called”. As he says this, we walk past the work of Hackney medium Madge Gill, who felt compelled to draw over and over a spirit who came to her: the two sides of a corridor contain dozens of these small black-pen drawings.

The main space is hung like a Russian aristocrat’s palace, with pictures jostling on every inch of every wall, from floor to 30-foot ceiling. There is Indian-influenced work and Pop Art-esque work, Incan animals and urban sprawl. By being outside of the mainstream, there is no-one to dictate fashion in their art.

“They are not always artistically talented,” says James, reflecting on the varying quality of the work, “but they tell the truth, and the truth finds the form.” What perhaps unites all of this work is indeed that truth-telling, the lack of restraint. This is not to imply the work is gross or unsubtle, only that you do not feel the artists are holding back through dogma or ‘dignity’.

It would be patronising to say that a museum for outsider art is a daring move – we’re very liberal, don’t you know – but art from outside the mainstream by definition is harder to place in context, to assess as part of a wider tradition, and runs the risk of drawing from viewers either blank looks or beneficent glances, not serious consideration.

The crowds milling round the 10,000 square foot former dairy which houses the museum are the Hampstead smart set, which lends a slight air of unreality to a show of work by their social polar opposites: theirs are a combination of polite blankness and genuine enthusiasm. James cannot move for being crushed by an embracing fur coat.

This insidering of outsider art is akin to the tree falling in the forest: is it still outsider art if it’s looked at in a gallery, or does it become just another part of the art world? Some of what makes this art-for-art’s-sake special is that it was never intended for show. In arriving at greater exposure, the semi-illiterate placards quoting the Bible and damning communism and Aleksander P Lobanov’s self-portraits with gun lose a little of their intimacy. Of course, you are trading this for access to unknown worlds, and I think the price is fair: Sister Gertrude Morgan’s visions of her literal marriage to Christ are a beautiful revelation.

The official opening is October 14. James plans to keep the museum open throughout Frieze Week, next week, and depending on demand perhaps Thursday to Sunday afterwards. What is certain is that in bringing the outside in, he has added a valuable new dimension to the London art scene, but not one without its own conflicts.

The Museum of Everything, corner of Regent's Park Road and Sharpleshall Street, London NW1

Conrad Shawcross: Chord

2009-10-09T16:54:00.004Z

From theartsdesk.com

Conrad Shawcross - Chord. Photograph by Alex Delfanne

Is site-specific the new collaboration? What I mean by this is that where it was once the fashion for artists and dancers (think Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham) or film directors and opera houses (Anthony Minghella and the ENO) to mix art forms, now it is fashionable to have work inspired by and installed in a particular place.

Take Punchdrunk with their Faust, which nightmarishly overran a Wapping warehouse, or Turner Prize nominee Roger Hiorns: his Seizure featured a flat in South London whose walls were daubed with liquid copper sulphate, eventually producing a blue crystalline cave. The latest in this line is Chord by Conrad Shawcross, who has installed a rope machine in an abandoned tunnel in Holborn.

The tunnel itself, opened in 1906 by Edward VII, is of historical interest: through it used to run the Kingsway Tram from Southampton Row to Aldwych; it closed in 1952 as tubes and buses took over. Now it is soaked in an aura of mystery: its entrance gates at the surface are locked and in even the least curious passer-by this is bound to stoke an interest, a question about such a public yet abandoned space. It is, in fact, used by Camden Council to store things, such as timber and recalcitrant workers.

Conrad Shawcross, the young sculptor of abstract scientific ideas, was offered the space and returned to an abandoned technique of his, rope-making: here there are two machines spinning thick thread into a omni-hued cable, retreating along a track as the rope gets longer. “I haven’t made anything with rope for about seven years,” Shawcross says. “It just seemed that the linear structure of the tunnel [suggested] this work. It gradually recedes backwards and will eventually make about 100 metres of rope each run.” As he speaks, the whining and creaking of the machines echo down the tunnel.

The machines fit in quite elegantly. You have to descend far into the tunnel, past the former platform, with its Union Street signs and contemporary posters in tatters on the walls, until you reach a level stretch, where Shawcross has laid down a wooden track. They are beautiful objects: both specially made by Shawcross, from a distance they look like flowers in a Japanese print, a thick stem and regular petals. They whir round rhythmically and the cable produced echoes the tunnel’s shape.

Shawcross is quite keen for visitors to devise their own interpretation of the work: “It’s whatever you want it to be – hopefully it’s quite a conceptually open piece. It is essentially a rope machine and it’s been made in a very neutral, diagrammatic, ethereal way.”

He does concede that it is space-time and visions of time which inspired him: “My original interest in it is to do with space and time and the linear perception of time – whether it’s a line or a cycle. This rope being a linear structure formed from a rotational system, it has quite a good reference to that.” In line with this, when the rope is finished, it will be cut into editions whose length is not measured by metres but by minutes.

Time certainly plays a role, but to me it seems that these machines have been here eternally and we have only just discovered them – they are the spinners of the threads of fate (as the Greeks knew them), churning away as they programme human action. We are observers who cannot interfere. This is in the abandonment of the location too: it is a place untouched now by humans, a melancholy place for a melancholy contemplation of free will.

Bottom three pictures by Josh Spero

Chord, Kingsway Tram Subway, until Sunday 8 November. Book free tickets here

On BBC 3 Counties Radio

2009-10-09T13:56:00.003Z

Every so often, I get a phone call from BBC 3 Counties Radio to talk about Classics (which is my weekend job - I tutor). This time, it was as part of their Mastermind commentary, where they have someone come on and talk about one of this week's specialist subjects, in this case, Greece from 490-323BC.

It's a bit like choosing Britain from 1509-2009, so capacious a period is it: Persian Wars, rise of the Athenian empire, Peloponnesian War, seventy years of inter-city fighting, rise of Alexander the Great. That's not forgetting the literature, philosophy, art, architecture...

Anyway, here I am wittering on: enjoy.

Friezing Already

2009-10-02T10:34:00.004Z

From spearswms.com
I can't quite believe it's got to that point in the year again: 'summer' 'holidays' over, Spear's Awards out of the way (not that they weren't a pleasure) and it's already time for the Frieze Art Fair.

There have been some good private views already (Ryan McGinley at Alison Jacques Gallery was a star turn) but things kick off properly with Frieze (15-18 October): it is the starting pistol for the art world's runners. The interesting question is whether it is a sprint, a marathon or an aesthete's Supermarket Sweep.

A case can be made for each. The last category is not in fact a joke: if you have ever seen the Wednesday preview, which is when celebrities and major collectors are let in to snap up what's good and hot before anyone else, you will note its resemblance to that much-maligned show of the Nineties. Essentially, buyers speed round trying to pick up the most desirable objects, rather than leisurely wandering through, alighting at a gallery here, a gallery there, appreciating the work and coming to a reasoned decision.

You can't blame them: everyone wants to stop the inexorable march of Dasha Zukhova as she strides across the globe, cherrypicking the best on offer. And you know she's serious about Frieze: she even has rollerblades for extra speed.

Sprinting is obvious. Frieze Week consists of a round of parties not seen since VE Day: every hauntable place in London is celebrating an artist or a gallery or their continued existence, and you will run up a considerable taxi bill to get to the best ones. It's the 100m canape-grab.

But it's the marathon aspect which really shows how important Frieze is. It's a bellwether, a harbinger, a sign of art times to come: in brief, it sets the mood for the months to come. If you have a bad Frieze, the talk can turn against you and you may as well burn your canvases. If the whole of Frieze is bad - poor sales, poor attendance, poor quality of work - then the art market may stay depressed into the winter.

It's the major event which launches the year in art, and like the Iowa caucus or the first night at Covent Garden, it may not just herald but influence what's to come.

Ryan McGinley Speaks

2009-09-11T07:45:00.001Z

From theartsdesk.com

Ryan McGinley: Jonas and Marcel (Blue Altar) Alison Jacques Gallery

Surrounded by a heaving, drinking, swooning, sweating blanket of admirers and professional artworld partygoers, Ryan McGinley has come a long way from the caves he shot for his latest show, Moonmilk, which opened at Alison Jacques Gallery last night. He finds it hard to move without being papped or kissed or having a catalogue thrust into his hand for a dedication. He thought about Jonah and the whale when immersed in taking these pictures, so is it like being inside a whale now, at the opening, with churning crowds and this feeding frenzy?

“Absolutely!”

The relevance of the whale to his work is that he wanted to know “what it would be like to be inside of a body or inside of a heart”, and these pictures are both satisfactory and contradictory answers: naked figures of brittle young things hold extended poses in unadulterated North American caves, molecules rattling round a vast universe yet closely trapped by the frame.

Inside of a heart is easier: McGinley, 31, a New Jersey native and strikingly, boyishly handsome, makes these photographs tender, the youths exposed by their nakedness yet not punished for it, an Edenic state among million-year old caves. Their colours suggest otherworldliness, with Warholian turquoise and pink and mustard fading in and out, and they have the exquisite textures of the cave walls, brought out by a matte finish. Bright strata are outlined and undulate like in a Bridget Riley.

It’s the intimacy and antique virginity – and the possibilities these entail – which McGinley values: “I like caves because they’re untouched for millions of years. They’re somewhere I can go that’s just a place, that’s meditative. You take blackness and you add a person and all this colour to it.”

Meditation is a quality present in these works which has been noticeably absent in his earlier ones – “I was always doing running and jumping and falling and lots of action in my work and I wanted to slow my role” – which have the same nude youths but frolicking and caught mid-movement. It was the movement which fascinated McGinley, but now it is the stillness. Where does the new direction come from? “Honestly, I always try to challenge myself and I don’t want to be an artist that just does one thing.”

It is no criticism to say that McGinley has not yet established a single style or a thesis: he is following paths which interest him. It’s therefore all the more noteworthy that he has already been lionised by the art establishment: the youngest artist to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2003), aged 23, thanks to some assiduous and creative self-publicity; the Kunsthalle Vienna (2006); the New York Times’ Oscar portfolio (2007).

If they were relying on McGinley producing more of the same, sticking to an outrageously successful formula, they have been disappointed, although his obscuring of faces remains. Does he feel any expectation for how his work should be? “Oh no, those days are over. There was a time when I was worried about that, but that was a long time ago. I know now – I have a path and I know my journey, what I’m going to do. I’m not worried about it.”

Perhaps the best piece in the show is Blood Falls, a small human figure surrounded by a starburst of red droplets which coalesce and darken as they expand into a scarlet colour-field. It is the rain-shower of the water, the distance of the figure, the hue which conspire to make it unexpectedly moving. And that’s McGinley: amid freewheeling movement or subterranean grandeur, a touching human sympathy.

Moonmilk is at the Alison Jacques Gallery till Oct 8.

Bonds of blood and snow

2009-09-09T20:26:00.005Z

There is no author quite like Michael Chabon, a virtuoso who can pick genres which would usually mix like oil and water and make them a thrilling, cohesive combination. The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a good example, putting a noirish thriller, conspiracy theorising, exile, counterfact (a Jewish homeland in Alaska), chess and familial dramas into a compelling, moving mix which is also great literature.

The plot is sufficiently complex that any explanation will result in greater confusion, but let's just say a bum has been murdered in a deadbeat hotel in the godforsaken corner of Alaska that is now (but not for much longer) the Jewish homeland. Detective Meyer Landsman, a man with an alcohol problem, an ex-wife problem and a troubling sense of duty that can't lead to any good, undertakes the investigation, which leads him to an ultra-orthodox and ultra-corrupt Jewish sect.

What shines through the Yiddish Policemen's Union is exactly what made the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay a sterling work (tho' K&C is still supreme): Chabon does not shy away from the darkest moments as Landsman has to investigate his sister's death and contemplate the Jews' imminent exile and whether god is in fact beneficent, but he mixes it with a wry Yiddish irony and a vivid evocation of place, in this case the snow which carpets everything for good or ill.

What could easily be mawkish or empty philosophising makes perfect sense in the heads of his fully-drawn characters. For example, a bereaved mother married to the capo di tutti capi - in this case a 'black-hat' rabbi - ponders where her son went wrong:

But there was always a shortfall, wasn't there? Between the match that the Holy One, blessed be He, envisioned and the reality of the situation under the chuppah. Between commandment and observance, heaven and earth, husband and wife, Zion and Jew. They called that shortfall "the world."

Doubt and faith co-exist exactly in that short paragraph - Chabon is able to describe a difficult idea and make it beautiful at the same time.

There is also perfect noirish narration:

His jaws snap together, making each tooth ring out with its own pure tone as the impact of his ass against the ground conducts its Newtonian business with the rest of his skeleton.

Perhaps even more to his credit, Chabon managed to keep this noirish action in some sort of vaguely comprehensible frame. Everyone knows that Raymond Chandler couldn't plot for toffee (rather, wasn't interested in it), but Chabon ties together his threads into the sort of plot you wish weren't true but can still believe.

After reading K&C, I didn't think the Yiddish Policemen's Union could live up to it, and it's a different book in many ways: K&C will break your heart (if you have one) over and over, whereas YPU is a slower-burn, but it still burns - all the way down to the butt-end of the soul.

Julie & Julia

2009-09-09T20:23:00.002Z

From the new site theartsdesk.com

If you tried to cross chefs, romantic comedy and cyberspace, you might end up with a YouTube video of Nigella Lawson recreating the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally. As much fun as that would be, it would hardly justify two hours of screen time. That’s where Julie & Julia comes in.

From the same pen as When Harry Met Sally, Nora Ephron, come the stories of Julia Child (Meryl Streep), the diplomat’s wife who brought French cooking back to America, and Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a frustrated government worker who starts a blog where she records cooking her way through all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s monumental Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Based on Powell’s blog and Child’s memoir, Ephron (who also directs) intertwines these women’s lives, jumping from Child’s revelatory first sole meuniere in Paris, where Streep looks almost inconsolable at her inability to make sufficiently satisfactory moans of delight, to the Queens apartment where Powell and her husband (Chris Messina) live above a pizzeria and Powell cooks away her stress at her job, fielding calls relating to Ground Zero. (Her story is set in 2002.)

Streep – whose comic talents are well-established but often forgotten – raises belly laughs just by incarnating Child, lanky and not that graceful with her oddly-rhythmic high-pitched voice, which bounces up and down off successive syllables, like a hysterical glockenspiel. She manages all the sly glances and fluttering hand-waves of a woman who knows that the French are out to get her yet responds with Yankee bonhomie. Stanley Tucci as her husband Paul is a picture of devotion and support.

Adams, on the other hand, just has to look somewhat fed up at her tedious life and stalled literary career, and occasionally excited when a recipe goes well. It is not her fault that her role is not stretching, and so most of her energy goes into a lovey-doviness with her husband, who is tolerant of her narcissistic quest and grateful for its side effects. She is given, however, the second best lobster scene in film (after Annie Hall).

Given how difficult is to make eating in films realistic, Julie & Julia is pleasingly unvarnished: people talk with their mouths full, stuff their faces, and turn the corners of their mouths up in private delight. Still, two hours is a long time to watch becrumbed lips, and the second half - with added 'drama' - drags.

Perhaps more interesting than the content of their cooking is the fact that Child and Powell are turning inside themselves (even if food can be a source of pleasure to and interaction with others). Child, after World War Two, and Powell, after 9/11, have both had enough of reality: they learn to explore their own interests and talents, both as a way of consuming time and a way of finding fulfilment.

When they spend this much time in the kitchen, they seem to reject the world outside. What that really makes Julie & Julia is not gastroporn, which it could easily have become, but a fight for the self which happens to have some gratuitous baking shots. Perhaps this seems too serious for a film about cooking, but it is much more than that: it is cooking as a window to the soul.

Round-up

2009-08-15T21:04:00.003Z

God, this is going to look ridiculous, but here are some things I've seen but haven't had the time to review, so a mini-review is appended:

All's Well That Ends Well (Olivier, National Theatre): wondrous gothic fairytale staging redeems thin play, reminiscent of Winter's Tale with split between Paris and Florence, one a crystal castle, the other the Costa del Italia. Bizarre and discomfiting are Helena's obsessive love for Bertram and the lengths of deception she goes to, even as he treats her terribly. I assume the title is ironic.

Prom 22: MGM musicals (Royal Albert Hall): a joyous evening, starting off with heavy-hitters like Over the Rainbow and the Trolley Song, which Kim Cresswell delivered with aplomb. Curtis Stigers' voice is a little hoarse and he forgot some of the words. Seth MacFarlane (yes, he of Family Guy) has a very passable Sinatraesque voice, and did some of his lines as Stewie. Thomas Allen had a wonderful tone in More Than You Know and Gigi. Slight programme snobbery: Cresswell and Stigers are 'vocalists', Allen and Sarah Fox are 'baritone' and 'soprano'.

Un ballo in maschera (Opera Holland Park): my first full Verdi in my plan of attack for opera (on which craziness more another time). Despite contextual and hence onomastic oddities (Italian opera about Swedish assassination moved to colonial America and here staged in modern America), an enticing mix of love triangle and politics with some powerful music and a clever staging made a good evening. Amanda Echalaz was wonderful as Amelia, powerful and sweet. The music is often confused, however, rendering comic for dramatic moments, and the staging (hokey witch Ulrica is a reality tv star) could be a little too clever and meta.

Hello, Folly!

2009-08-12T13:16:00.000Z

The title should not be taken as a reference to the whole new production of Hello, Dolly! at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, which opened last night. (The play, not the theatre - the theatre is always open. Except for when it's closed. But even then it's open, if you see what I mean.)

There are plenty of things to admire in this musical on several levels, even if the introductory note in the programme says that it is just a 'romp'. But the folly is the miscasting of Samantha Spiro (no relation - not even a para-relation) as widowed matchmaker in turn-of-the-century-New-York Dolly Levi, who can fix everyone's love life but her own. The show will be most famous as the movie starring iron-lunged and sweet-toned Barbra Streisand (see her do it here), but the original stage show starred, among others, Carole Channing and Ethel Merman. I think the problem is already apparent.

Samantha Spiro cannot match up to any of these, and worse, she cannot even sing well. Sure, she dances niftily and has a neat way with the Jewish shtick, but her voice is not an instrument which can sustain or even reach some of these notes. Vamping your rasping way through the climax of a song is not a subsitute for singing it. There was no point at which she adorned the gloriously bolshie melodies and chewable lyrics of Jerry Herman.

That aside, it was an enjoyable evening. (I think that is called bathos.) There was inventive choreography by Stephen Mear, some of which drew on the movie for classic scenes like the dance of the waiters at the Harmonia Gardens, where all the characters have retreated for an evening of waltzing, stuffed chickens and frenetic wait-service. The cast were put through their paces as whirl followed whirl followed whirl, all perfectly executed, complete with parasols.

For the scene where they all get the train to New York, the danced the train with its engine and wheels and carriage, and the hat of the character representing the smokestack even began to give off smoke. It was a small touch, but reflective of the humour and ingenuity which went into the show.

Director Timothy Sheader started off rather poorly, having Spiro walk through the audience and chat to them as her grand entrance, even as the cast were valiantly singing and dancing on stage and being completely ignored, but it got better with a clever use of the stage, designed by Peter McKintosh.

To return to that troublous introductory note. As penned by Emma Brockes, it is a masterpiece of vacuity: 'There are no subtexts in Hello, Dolly!, no satire nor social critique and certainly no moralising. It is, pure and simple, a romp in the best tradition of the American musical.'

This is fatuous to the extreme. Perhaps Jerry Herman didn't see it as a social critique, but Thornton Wilder, whose play this is based on, certainly did. Take the three principals: Dolly Levi, Horace Vandergelder (the curmudgeonly object of Dolly's love) and Irene Molloy (a milliner who longs to break out of the [hat]box).

All three are widows, advanced in years (relatively, of course), and all have been consigned by society into the box of decorous celibacy and decline - it is only their efforts and Dolly's personality which give them a second chance at happiness. Whereas most art likes the loves of the young, here we have marginalised older people centre-stage.

Another non-existent subtext might be the great clash between city and country. All is tedious and routine in rural Yonkers, where most of the characters live, and it is not until they arrive in New York that all hell breaks loose. This theme stretches back through Midsummer Night's Dream to the Bacchae (where the contrast is the other way round).

I would not claim that this is an intellectual masterpiece, but when you combine the terrific songs and dancing with these subtle themes, then Hello, Dolly! looks more like a work of drama than - as it is regularly perceived - a piece of fluff.

We're here, we're queer...

2009-07-30T20:34:00.000Z

and we've got something to cheer.

Exhibitions come in two parts: the art and the theory. You can have brilliant pictures and a slightly ropey thesis, like Citizens and Kings at the Royal Academy, which had Ingres and David but a poor (or poorly interpreted) idea linking all of them, or you can have a spellbinding idea which the works don't support, like the RA's Summer Exhibition. Or you can have both or neither.

Gay Icons at the National Portrait Gallery falls into the Citizens and Kings mould: it has some beautiful images, both aesthetically and emotionally, and you can't deny that a show devoted to gay icons will raise interesting questions about love and family and culture and politics. It's just that no-one is clear on the rules.

Before I saw the show, I assumed that the selectors (famous homosexuals from Elton John and Ian McKellen to Sandi Toksvig and Sarah Waters) would choose gay people who were iconic to them. (The question of what even constitutes an icon is thorny in itself.) I thought these would be the gay icons of gay icons. Meta-gay icons.

However, Elton John and Billie Jean King both chose people who were icons to them, Elton picking Graham Taylor for his devotion to Watford, King her family, among their six choices. These are fair picks when the rules have not been defined.

It makes the show no less beautiful but slightly less coherent. Many of the pictures are indeed beautiful: porn star Jeff Stryker (one of Lord Alli's choices) is captured on his bed, reclining in a non-sexual pose and not even at the centre of the scene (McDermott and McGough, 1990). The innocence of the picture gives a human side to the great gay porn star-businessmen.

Joe Orton (chosen by head of Stonewall Ben Summerskill) emerges out of the darkness, a fine interpretation of his work and ultimately prefiguring his death (Lewis Morley, 1965), while Bessie Smith (chosen by Jackie Kay) looks quizzically, vulnerably at the camera. Harvey Milk (Efren Ramirez, 1978, chosen by McKellen) is at the centre of an applauding crowd in a news shot (rather than a posed portrait), looking serene in the chaos.

The most literary choices come from Alan Hollinghurst, Booker winner for the Line of Beauty. He chose Jesuit priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thom Gunn (a favourite poet of mine), Tchaikovsky and Edmund White, whose A Boy's Own Story is one of the most beautifully-written books I've read. Hollinghurst's choices revealed a clear line between the closet of history and modern hard-won freedoms.

Chris Smith, former Culture Secretary, had perhaps the most poignant of all pictures: a portrait of Alan Turing (Elliott and Fry, 1951), who bit into an apple filled with cyanide after the war because society refused to accept his homosexuality. That Turing had helped Britain win the war by cracking the Enigma code and invented the first computer did not save him: it just made his tragedy greater.

Which could lead to a triumphalist conclusion: "Look how liberal we are now! We would never hound someone because they were gay." We may not, but many around the world would, so while we should ultimately celebrate this exhibition (philosophical qualms aside), we should not think of it as a terminus - but rather a call to action.

Harvey Milk (c) Efren Ramirez, 1978/2008
Joe Orton (c) Lewis Morley Archive/National Portrait Gallery
Alan Turing (c) National Portrait Gallery

Designing the Future. Today

2009-07-23T20:37:00.000Z

It gave me great pleasure to go to the New Designers show at the Islington Business Design Centre last weekend. The first reason was that my brother Ollie was one of these talented young designers, representing Bournemouth U with his green, clean, practical one-cup kettle/dispenser. (Essentially you fill it with water, put it onto the mug, then once it's boiled, it dispenses the water into the mug. Simple.)

The other was that I got to discover countless other young talents too in furniture, products and visual communications. These are the people who are designing our future, with many focusing on environmentally friendly design and reinterpreting modern classics. There were perhaps too many Alvar Aalto updates (yes, blond wood, we get it) but there were also bold developments.

One of my favourite pieces was by Harry Hasson, who has designed bookshelves which are self-assembly but bear no resemblance to anything from IKEA: they are sleek black shelves, and an orange ratchet circulates around the outside, holding it together with its tension.

The other piece which I thought had the longest (design) legs was a freestanding wardrobe by Olayinka Ilori. Inspired by the showcases of luxury clothes stores, the deep blue case opens towards you to reveal shallow ranks of hangers (in the doors too). Two compartments below each door glide out, and the experience makes getting dressed (I would imagine) feel more elegant.

The role of patronage (as investigated on a grander scale in this post-Basel Hedgehog) has an even more significant role at New Designers: these are people - by and large - who are at the very commencement of their careers, and any boost which can be given in the forms of money, advice and attention (three principal planks of patronage) is likely to have a far greater effect than for established artists and designers.

I am not exactly in the patronising league (yes, very funny), but I am enjoying watching these young designers and - when my racheted bookshelves are ready - supporting them too.

MIF: Rufus Wainwright's Prima Donna

2009-07-11T12:22:00.001Z

With the virtuosic score, intellectual scintillation, metatheatricality, dramatic boldness and flourishing colour we have come to expect from Rufus Wainwright, his first opera, Prima Donna, premiered last night at the Palace Theatre as part of the Manchester International Festival. Being Rufus, it was also flawed – but grand, magnificent, and always human.

The scene is a Paris atelier in 1970, where acclaimed soprano Regine Saint Laurent (Janis Kelly) has retreated for the six years since her career-climaxing performance in the premiere of Alienor d’Aquitaine as the queen of England and France. She performed the role once, then fled from the stage, unable to hit her final note in the climactic love duet.

In the grip of nightmares and surrounded by a domineering majordomo, Philippe (Jonathan Summers), who is a Josef von Sternberg from Sunset Boulevard with greater self-interest and malevolence and a neon green suit, and her new maid, fresh from the provinces, Marie (Rebecca Bottone), Regine prepares to return to the stage to sing Alienor once more.

A journalist (William Joyner) comes to interview her, but ends up singing the duet with her though she cannot reach her final note still and stirring up her memories of the fateful performance from which she did not recover. He also releases in her long-dormant passions which promise to revive and threaten to undo Regine.

As you would expect – and hope – Prima Donna combines the very best that nineteenth-century Italian opera and twenty-first century theatre have to offer, with a sophisticated, harmonious score, a fantastical, lurid, inventive set and almost more irony and reflexivity than one stage can take.

Wainwright and director Daniel Kramer run with this reflexivity. As well as writing an opera about an opera singer who sings about being afraid to sing, Wainwright even gets his revenge on Puccini: when the journalist, whom Regine has fallen for, returns with his fiancé, she is Madame Butterfly. She may not sing, but the kimono says it all: this time Butterfly wins. It is a brilliant, overwhelming touch, indicative of Wainwright’s love of opera and sense of humour, but perhaps also of the problems of this opera.

The metatheatrical cleverness at points confuses. In the second act, when Regine plays the record of her singing the climactic duet from Alienor, we disappear into almost a dream-sequence where the original production plays out on stage, complete with Regine and the king (played by the journalist, of course), a common play-within-a-play motif. This creates the beautiful irony that while she sings the notes on stage she cannot sing on stage, it is only as a recording – yet it is a live ‘recording’.

After she is done, the curtain falls and Regine takes several bows, accepting flowers, while the real audience applauds. This draws us into the conceit but breaks the illusion of the opera entire and disturbs the drama. Also, Regine hitting her note in the recording should be a triumphant moment (in an ironic mode), but it does not fulfil the expectation of the note created to that point.

The set moves from darkened, bare apartment, to theatre-within-a-theatre, with the maid and majordomo taking up their seats to watch Regine and the journalist, complete with its own proscenium and red curtain. Towards the end of the second act, where Regine’s world starts collapsing, all of the sets collide: bed, record-sequence table laden with candles, apartment window, dayglo kitchen, red curtain.

A less ambiguous problem than Pirandellian tricks is the lack – for want of a better word – of a tune, a single outstanding aria for Regine. You would think that after a century of Callas and Gheorghiu and Netrebko, Wainwright would want to offer his leading lady something to get her teeth into, but the closest he comes is the beautiful, baleful lament of Marie that ‘Paris is not Picardie’, where she sings of the recklessness of metropolitan love (a recurring theme of Wainwright’s). It is a shame that I came out of the theatre whistling Vissi d’arte.

Nevertheless, Regine is given the whole final sequence, once the butler and the maid have been banished and she has decided, Dietrich-like, on solitude henceforth. She emerges onto her terrace, high above Paris (for a moment I thought Wainwright was going to have her Tosca herself), to watch the Bastille Day fireworks, and sings from the joy of the fireworks and from her new freedom. This is a triumphant scene: the staging has all fallen away apart from her windows and terrace, set against a screen which changes colours with the fireworks, and the music fizzles and sighs and pops with the fireworks, a passage of outstanding imagination and sophistication and (simply) beauty. Kelly’s voice is free, yet falters as she confronts her future, moving around her repeated phrases with a fawn’s tentativeness, eventually emerging into golden confidence.

The score as a whole is a masterpiece of sophistication, with all the lessons of the great Italians learnt. (Indeed, Wainwright took his bow dressed as Verdi, complete with beard.) This will not come as a surprise to extant fans of Wainwright, who have heard everything from chamber quartet (Leaving for Paris II) to Mass (Agnus Dei) to three orchestras at once (I Don’t Know What It Is), but that he maintains his grasp of orchestration for a full opera, overture, arias and two acts, ensuring complex melodies and individual lines across the instruments, creating a delicate score which surges with passion and retreats with regret, is a triumph.

Writing an opera in the late nineteenth-century Italian mode is today revolutionary in its conservatism, but Wainwright was not simply content to produce a pastiche: with his twenty-first century eye for irony, his wit and the beauty of his music, he has done his forebears proud and produced an opera which – with some work – will endure.

MIF: Carlos Acosta

2009-07-10T11:00:00.000Z

Last night I saw Carlos Acosta at the Lyric Theatre in the Lowry Centre. Acosta is the world's most famous and brilliant dancer, a Cuban by origin who has made the world fall in love with his passion and skill. I've never seen him before, so I was curious about just how good he might be; abandon all hype ye who enter here.

If other ballet dancers hate Acosta, I could understand why after his programme of three dances (Afternoon of a Faun (Jerome Robbins/Debussy), A Suite of Dances (Robbins/Bach) and Apollo (Balanchine/Stravinsky)): once he has danced these roles, it seems like no-one else ever can. He incarnates such beauty that it seems only natural he takes them.

For example, A Suite of Dances is set to four movements from Bach's Six Suites for Solo Cello, each one with a different mood and tone of movement. From the first movement, slightly hesitant and restrained, to the fourth, where Acosta spins and cartwheels and almost ecstatically jives, he has created both beauty and personality. There is nothing forced, nothing harsh.

Apollo was the second half entire. It showed Apollo being educated by three of the Muses, each of whom took turns front stage and solo, but it was when Apollo was dancing with all three, graceful in control, or in his pas de deux with Terpsichore, where he proved eminently responsive to and in harmony with his partner, that we saw the wonder of Acosta. His precision and passion combined, each move invested with fluency and meaning. It was perfect acting without words. The final image of Apollo and the Muses arrayed as one like a bird in flight took the breath away.

There was (in the first act) a response to Apollo, a new work called Young Apollo choreographed by the Texan Adam Hougland with music by Britten. This was a pas de deux which started before the curtain rose and the music sounded and continued after it fell and became silent, implying the eternity of this dance, as did the way in which Junor de Oliveira Souza swung Anais Chalendard around him, gracefully yet erotically. This was indeed an erotic piece, the sort of dance the libidinous Apollo might have delighted in, with sharp, identical moves by both dancers evincing their passions.

The music - provided by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Andre de Ridder - was sharp and passionate, with Philip Glass' Overture for string orchestra played with urgency and crispness.

Tonight I'm seeing Rufus Wainwright's new opera, Prima Donna. Stand by for thrills, spills and (probably) pills.

The idea of Earnest

2009-07-09T20:39:00.000Z

Is there anything more frightening than the idea of The Importance of Being Earnest in the Regents Park Open Air Theatre on a summer evening? This is to the upper-middle class of north-west London what a raging argument on Eastenders at Christmas is to those who watch television, a combination so predictable – formulaic, even – that you have to blink at its latest revival.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this – some combinations are hallowed by success – but it is deeply unimaginative. When presented with this lemon-lemon-lemon jackpot, you can only hope that they make lemonade.

Now, while Irina Brown’s production is not quite the radical Earnest the world is waiting for (I just long for the day when Lady Bracknell has a Cockney accent and Jack and Algie resemble Vladimir and Estragon), but it had sufficient thoughtful touches to make it a damn sight more interesting that one could reasonably expect.

For a play which is all about play-acting, you need something suitable metatheatrical, and starting off by having the cast examine the audience with monocles and opera glasses hit the right note. The giant curved mirror at the rear of the stage, constantly used for preening, neatly captured the idea of the characters examining and constructing themselves.

The homoeroticism of the play – it is, of course, an allegory for the secret double life of the Victorian homosexual – was brought out with the fight between Jack (Ryan Kiggell) and Algie (Dominic Tighe). Brown evidently did not feel the need to tame the play, but nor did she play it up quite as fully as the text itself suggests.

Had the performances been as imaginative as some of the hints of Brown’s direction, it would have been a very good evening as opposed to just quite an interesting one. Jack and Algie’s banter was utterly leaden, each line dropping to the floor with all the weight of expectation. The same can be said for Lady Bracknell (Susan Wooldridge), who in clearly trying to avoid the shadow of Edith Evans reduced ‘A handbag?’ to a mere nothing.

Jo Herbert as Gwendolen brought a wicked sexuality to the role, ramping up the innuendo and overt eroticism of the part. Instead of a virginal Gwendolen, this was a liberated, libidinous, even predatory Gwendolen, which lifted her above the rest.

Despite rain almost stopping play at one point, the evening recovered and ultimately proved that some clichés can be rescued.

One & Other & I

2009-07-06T20:27:00.002Z

I have applied to be in One & Other, Anthony Gormley's fourth plinth installation, along with such luminaries as Jill Archer (yes, I know she's fictional). Suggestions welcome below for what I should do (tho' I have some ideas already). Suggestions welcome below for what I should do (tho' I have some ideas already).

GetSomeKulture

2009-07-01T20:26:00.000Z

To the John Madejski Fine Rooms at the Royal Academy this morning for the press launch of the next instalment of the GSK Contemporary exhibition this Christmas (yes, quite previous, I know, but it's always good to have advance notice) in 6 Burlington Gardens.

This year the theme of the show, featuring the work of over 40 artists from around the world, is climate change, which - given the persistence of land-, sea- and sky-scapes throughout art history - seems entirely appropriate. Earth: Art of a changing world, which runs from 3rd December this year to 31st January next, will tackle all aspects of how humans affect the world they inhabit, from destruction to hope.

The key promise from Kathleen Soriano, the director of exhibitions who is assembling the show from scratch in just a year, is that it 'wouldn't preach and wouldn't admonish', which is good news, as there are only so many pictures of polar bears on melting icebergs that one can take before wanting to go hunting.

When I asked Charles Saumarez Smith, the secretary of the RA, whether this focus on the green might be seen as tendentious or even propagandistic by certain sectors of the media, he said it was about creating a debate: 'We maybe haven't done so much on the debating side. If there's a debate, if Nigel Lawson has a placard outside Burlington Gardens saying global warming is good, that's not a bad thing for the exhibition.'

The show is sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline (hence GSK, duh) and their Responsibility arm, whose head Dr Justine Frain was there too, shedding a lot of light on the different projects GSK sponsors, from homelessness to the environment to Aids and malaria.

One of the most exciting aspects of the show is a tie-up with Sketch on Conduit St, which is cementing its position in the London arts scene. Sketch will take space in 6 Burlington Gardens. There will also be a National Trust tie-up for a site-specific work.

If your appetite has been whetted, then start marking off your calendars - December is not that far away. Although, on second thoughts, there's still a little more time for a pina colada before then.

Learn more about the exhibition and buy tickets now at http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/earth

Top image: Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot, 2006, Mixed media. Stainless steel and neon tube, 234 x 223 cm, David Roberts Collection, London

Bottom image: Edward Burtynsky, Super Pit #4, Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, 2007, Chromogenic Colour Print © The artist, courtesy Flowers, London

Phuck Phedre

2009-06-27T21:51:00.004Z

Oh dear. Just as we lull ourselves into thinking that maybe the French have a playwright to rival Shakespeare, up comes Phedre, the National's first Racine in a lifetime, to destroy any such notion. For this adramatic blowhard to attain any kind of stature can only indicate what a dry well the French draw their classic drama from.

And that is before we even get to Helen Mirren, chucking herself from one side of the Lyttelton's stage to the other like a deranged fishwife (back to Peter Grimes with you!), and Dominic Cooper, who is in imminent danger of being sued by planks for identity theft.

Drawing on Euripides' Hippolytus (a play aggravating in itself), Racine finds Phedre mid-obsessive passion for her stepson Hippolytus, egged on by Baldrick-like nurse Oenone (the splendidly natural Margaret Tyzack always has a new plan). Hippolytus rejects Phedre, who avenges herself by convincing Theseus, her husband and Hippolytus' father, of the boy's guilt; a curse follows and all we have to do is wait - and wait - and wait - and wait - until disaster strikes.

What we ought to realise is that disaster struck the moment the lights went down. It's no surprise that longeur is a French word. Interminable speech tumbles out after interminable speech, each side battering rhetoric until it finally gives in. People stand still and speak, or they wander about aimlessly and speak, but this is all.

There is no tension, no worrying about what will come next, which can be true even with plays we're very familiar with. This is drama where you positively cannot care what comes next because it is so static and will undoubtedly be just more speechifying without action.

There can also be little doubt that most tickets were sold because Helen Mirren was in it. Unfortunately, she either took the staginess of Racine to heart and decided to ham it up or she just forgot that naturalism is an effective way of acting. Screeching and getting angry are not her full range, so why let her limit herself? Those even passionately in love are not constantly hysterical.

On the other hand, Dominic Cooper gave the impression of having had his soul Botoxed (along with his face): he could not muster a word or an expression with any emotional weight, and when Phedre describes him as 'lovable', you wonder if she was talking about his understudy, or some person unknown to us. Perhaps she was thinking of the nice person who made her purple veil with which she is wreathed like a Silk Cut widow.

Nick Hytner deserves some praise for taking the play out of the seventeenth century drawing room and into a vaguely Greek coast, but it is beyond even Hytner's capabilities to inject life into it. While you can level the speechifying charge against Greek tragedy, it at least has the rapid-fire interchange of stichomythia; Racine just lets his cast speak in chapters.

It was a painful evening at the National, one which could quite easily put off any rare visitor to the theatre from returning. This is its greatest crime: it makes you like theatre slightly less.

Design for Life

2009-06-10T14:21:00.002Z

WEDNESDAY 13:00 BST
Back in London after a flight so early the pilot was still in his pyjamas. Thanks to the good people at Audi, who are the exclusive automotive sponsor for Design Miami/Basel, I got an invitation to one of the parties of the week last night, held on a boat moored the other side of town from the fair. I also - naturally - got a rather comfortable lift to the party in an Audi.

The party began after a small dinner onboard for the team behind Design Miami/Basel, including Ambra Medda and Craig Robins, as well as VIPs and ubiquitous celebrity-designer-at-large, Pharrell Williams. Takashi Murakami was slated to appear too. Designers of the Future were in attendance too, having broken free of plaster and mirrors.

The crowd was hip hip hip, and the band more so: perhaps it's not for all Spear's readers, but London synth-pop group We Have Band put on a decent show. Here's one of their videos:

Ah well, back to London, where it rains welcome. Or rather rain welcomes.

20:00 CET
So it's not strictly work - call it perspective. I took a trip (thanks, Audi!) to Augst, a Roman settlement just outside of Basel. When you see the ruins - well-restored by the government - of baths and temples and basilicas, the same in Augst (August Raurica, since you ask) as in Bath as in Leptis Magna, you realise that there are design classics and design classics.

17:00 CET

Brad Pitt is at Design Miami/Basel with an eye on some fine pieces. Shame about the silly facial hair and peaked cap like Guy Ritchie manqué.

14:30 CET
Art Basel, in the cavernous hangar of Messe 2, is heaving like the dance floor at the exhbitionists' Christmas party. There are thousands upon thousands of wallets - sorry, collectors - across both floors of the show, while galleries from across Europe and American, and some futher afield, have everything from Picasso to pornography.

Thanks to a good friend, I got hold of a VIP pass, which means I get escalatored up to art heaven, decked out all in white, tout de suite. Trust Spear's to bring you insider access. It's also heaving up here, but everyone is sitting in much nicer chairs and Confiserie Sprungli is giving out free mini-macaroons (strawberry and rhubard is the best). There is also a stand (more like a salon) from Axa, promoting their art insurance. Hopefully by the end of the week I can bring you one of their extremely useful art-theft solutions.

To see some of my personal favourites, as documented by my trusty iPhone (no fancy SLR here), click here.

11:00 CET
Have had another look round Design Miami/Basel and emerged into the bright sunshine of the press office. (Doesn't look like it'll hold up.) It's looking a bit quieter today, but that's because Art Basel is having its official first day down the road; reports from there later.

Finally got some pics of Raw Edges' plasterboard mountain/parquet lake extravaganza:

And Pharrell's chair, which speaks for itself. (What it says is 'You must be over 18 to understand this.')

TUESDAY 09:00 CET
Have just had breakfast in the Hotel Adagio and will be heading over for art and design later this morning. Check back.

20:00 CET
At the Vernissage for Design Miami/Basel. It's a mix of indecently well-dressed HSBC Private Bank clients from all over the world and indecently stylish gallerists, plus Pharrell, who is eating a spiral of pink candy floss. For those not on the floss, there is fish carpaccio and Veuve Clicquot, one of the fair's other sponsors.

19:30 CET
Picks of the day from Design Miami/Basel:

Chair some dude called Voltaire sat in (Galerie Perrin, Paris)

Peter Marigold's Designer of the Future 2009 project, called Palindromes, working in mirror and plaster. Neatly combines two kitsch items (plaster mouldings and old mirrors) and turns them into something very modern and meaningful.

Drinks cabinet, foam and polyester, Atelier van Lieshout (VIVID Gallery, Rotterdam)

18:30 CET
To Art Basel over in Messe 1, the fortieth incarnation of the fair. The front courtyard, clipped out of the main square, is heaving even though it's starting to rain. I popped inside and was confronted with Art Basel Statements, installations so cutting edge I came out bleeding. Whether I understood them is something else, tho' the chess board which had been converted into a piano (Queen to Rook five is quite harmonious, apparently) was pleasant.

16:51 CET
Just met Pharrell Williams, for any Spear's readers who know who that is.

15:30 CET
Had a short interview with Tony Joyce, global head of marketing and communications for HSBC Private Bank, and Alexandre Zeller, CEO of HSBC Private Bank (Suisse), about why they're sponsoring Design Miami/Basel.

There is usually a lot of talk at corporately-sponsored events about purely engaging with the arts and the reward being the art itself. While clealry HSBC PB does enjoy this aspect, Tony and Alexandre were refreshingly frank about the benefits to both company and clients.

Alexandre said: 'There are two main benefits. The first one is to position the Private Bank as a bank that can identify early trends and innovation and creativity. Design is something that makes us different.' (You hear that, UBS?)

'The second is to foster existing and new relationships, to make connections with our clients. You get to share emotions with them - in the Private Bank it's all about relationships, and you get to know the client a lot better.'

Tony said that it's much easier to engage with designers than with artists: 'Designers are willing to give up a lot of their time to talk to clients.' Entry to the design world is thus made a lot less imposing.

There are also plenty of intimate dinners and events for HSBC PB's clients where they can meet artists and gallerists and other clients, making further connections and benefiting the client.

On a separate subject, Alexandre said that he wasn't worried that the recent loss of banking secrecy in Switzerland would negatively affect the bank: 'It's never been the model of HSBC Private Bank to build a business on non-compliant money.' Those were the people who had to be afraid of losses.

14:30 CET
Spoke to Cyril Zammit, project manager, HSBC Private Bank (Suisse), who has helped mastermind the bank's involvement with Design Miami both in Miami and in Basel. He helped to design the HSBC Private Bank lounge, which is a haven of white leather sofas and red triangular tables. Whence the inspiration?

It's very cool in here, with clients sipping champagne and staff polishing the pristine floor every time it's scuffed. There are also floor-to-ceiling cotton screens with silhouette projections of rotating foliage. And mirror balls. Don't forget the mirror balls.

13:30 CET
Lunch with HSBC dignitaries and Craig Robins, principal of Design Miami/Basel, and Ambra Medda, director and co-founder, who look as cool as ever, despite the lack of air conditioning (apparently banned in Basel) and the pressure of running a giant fair. Craig was saying that design is a very easy way into collecting (and there is always the advantage that you can sit in what you buy).

The interesting fact Craig revealed was that Design Miami is potentially thinking of opening a branch of the fair in Abu Dhabi. So that would be Design Miami/Basel/Abu Dhabi?

MONDAY 13:00 CET
A quick turn round the fair to see some of the Designers of the Future, Design Miami/Basel's prize for rising stars; this year, the designers have to use mirrors and plaster for their installation.

Raw Edges have the most startling inspiration: in the words of Shay Alkalay, one half of the duo, their design comes from 'hideous, tacky seventies wallpaper' in his flat, which has a giant picture of a Swiss mountain reflected in a lake.

Their reponses? A giant plasterboard mountain that reaches the height of the hall with its odd planes and flock pattern, and parquet flooring stained in the greens and yellows from the reflection in the wallpaper. Picture later.

Faust squared

2009-06-03T14:42:00.000Z

What intrigues about Faust is not the prurient possibilities of limitless knowledge and consequenceless evil but the quick descent and slow realisation and finally, the horror.

I've been thinking about Faust a lot lately, not - I hasten to add - as a role model, although there is certainly something to be said for getting the best out of every situation. It is more that I have been noticing the prevalence of the Faust-type in different guises.

The most obvious in retrospect was crooked cop Vic Mackey of The Shield, a man with no need of an external Mephistopheles. Mackey was bad from the start, seven seasons ago, shooting dead a fellow officer and committing the equivalent of the Great Train Robbery in the nastiest part of LA, where immigrant gangs dance with drugs and guns. Mackey got worse.

Throughout the show's run, he sacrificed what the rest of us would identify as justice to his own perverse sense of right, which was often equated with personal gain. Every solution brough another problem in a chain so complex it was rarely clear who was doing what and why.

The final link - or at least the fade to black - featured Mackey, a violent, profane, autocratic (in the true sense of the word) cop chained to a desk job, a new penpusher in a corporate world. This was the solution to his sequence of problems, but it was also his damnation, as the camera lingered on him, last in his office at night, the only sound the neon light buzzing endlessly.

Another Faust is closer in time and location to Goethe's: Ibsen's surreal verse-play Peer Gynt, which anticipated Freud by having the fabulist Gynt meet his own subconscious. Staged by the National Theatre of Scotland at the Barbican (after their knockout Black Watch), the play is transferred from Norway to the Scottish wilds, but all the grotesqueries and horrors are kept.

This doesn't sound promising for Faust, but when presented with the love of a good woman (Solveig for Gretchen), he abandons her for sexual pleasure, violence at the hands of the trolls (really) and a life of arms-dealing wealth in decadent Africa. Eventually he is taken to an asylum (or has he always been mad?) and on his return home (in the NToS's version, on easyJet), he witnesses his own funeral.

The NToS is a rootless company, with no home theatre, and it is a brave attempt to present such a forbidding, difficult play around the country. What makes it successful is the emotion is draws out of Gynt's descent, first smothered under his vile plutocratic self, but brought out in the asylum. That Gynt may eventually be redeemed does not mean he has not embraced the values of Faust.

Whereas Goethe's Faust wanted knowledge, Vic Mackey and Peer Gynt both want wealth, but all three sacrifice their humanity. They prove the enduring popularity of an archetype whose vileness we are attracted to because, perhaps, we understand what drives them. There will always be room for more Fausts.

With an iPod iAm iSolated

2009-05-17T20:53:00.003Z

Forgive me for being late to this particular feast, but I have just started listening to music on my iPhone. Podcasts, sure - who doesn't like a bit of Melvyn Bragg while walking through Eaton Square? But music - what can you learn from that?

Putting aside my insanely auto- (or should that be audio-)didactic desires, last week as I took my morning purposeful amble from Victoria Station to the Kings Road, the only exercise I get of a day, I put my iPhone onto shuffle.

This caused several problems. When you have a couple of symphonies and a couple of operas and a couple of musicals, all of which have plots or 'plots', hitting one aria or movement or song is both likely and irritating, the music impossible to be appreciated outside of its context. (That's why even a CD of Sondheim's greatest ballads isn't as good as seeing one in a complete show.) You could say the same for album tracks, but the order of those isn't always vital for me.

The other main problem was my complete obliviousness from the world around me. As anyone who has seen Eaton Square in the past year knows, there are more workmen and scaffolding and flying beams and poles than can be avoided, incidentally a testimony to the lack of a credit crunch in SW1. After being swept away by my music and nearly by an opening van door, I decided that being in my own world might need a modicum of reality, or at least perception.

What intrigued me most about the iPhone/iPod experience was the way in which I realised not just was I oblivious to the outside world but it was oblivious to me. I don't mean to say that every man, woman and child on the street is regularly looking at me, but now they had no idea what was flowing into my ears (assuming I wasn't one of those people who likes to perforate their and everyone else's eardrums with their music).

You think you can tell something about someone by their appearance: black leather trenchcoat c.The Matrix = Goth. Jack Wills hoodie and pyjama bottoms = Chelsea teenager. My black Gap raincoat and smart grey suit = young and on the make journalist. And so forth.

But the music may confound these perceptions, even if we can't know it. I listen to everything from Johnny Cash to Rufus to (shame, I know) Beverly Knight (only one song). What does that say about me, versus my clothes? How do I know that the Goth isn't listening to Mahler's Second? The Chelsea teenager to Ligeti?

This is, of course, already true: you can never tell what is going on in someone's brain, but this is pointed out by the iPod, which is an active sign that they are engaged in something. I like to think that the iPod - following the Walkman and minidisc player - is an invitation to mystery, a public challenge to perception.

Perhaps the Goth is listening to Slipknot, the Chelsea teenager to the grand high commander of Jack Wills' latest podcast. But you never know.

The fat lady's sung and I like it

2009-05-07T20:47:00.000Z

From my blog at spearswms.com

--

From out of nowhere, opera has seeded itself into my soul. When reviewing a villa in Italy (as you can read in the upcoming Spear's), I felt under obligation to listen to something Italian and cultural on the through-house sound system.

Up came Tosca. Out went my established (non-)feelings about opera. For better or worse, I'm smitten.

Like most music (altho' unlike the Rite of Spring, which was instantaneously powerful), it took a couple of listens to get the feel, to start grasping the structure, to identify the characters, eventually to observe the motifs. By my fourth listen (now back in London on my car's CD player), I began to get swept away by the power of Tosca, which is perhaps not ideal in automotive circumstances.

Finally I could see what the fuss was about. The role of Tosca (sung by Maria Callas in my version) is joyful and wrenching, a heart-breaking turn. Gone were all ideas about battleaxes in horned helmets, like an overstuffed Viking - the possibilities of the world of opera were suddenly clearer.

From Tosca to Madame Butterfly, which seems positively subtle in comparison to the titanic efforts of the former, and then to a live broadcast from the Met of La Boheme, where I saw a hundred-strong chorus on stage and the backstage exertions of the technicians.

Once I've had my fill of Puccini, I'll be on to Verdi, and thence northwards, perhaps, via Austria to Germany. Having said that, I'm seeing Peter Grimes on Monday, but an English detour is excusable. After all, I'm now revelling in the world of opera, letting it take me where it will.

Budget liveblog

2009-04-22T20:46:00.000Z

I do actually write about serious stuff at spearswms.com!

--

Spear's will be bringing you live updates from the Budget with analysis of what this means. You can follow its tweets at twitter.com/spearswms

13.36
We'll be back with quotes from tax experts starting at 3.30. Join us then.

13.35
'All Labour governments run out of money. What's the point of this government of the living dead. If they can't manage the money, why don't they make way for the team that can?'

13.31
Great Cameron joke about applying the new scrappage scheme to the Labour government. Another one about the IMF. I like the wit.

13.27
Cameron doesn't talk about the 50% tax rate but goes straight to the man-on-the-street beer and petrol taxes. Might Tory grandees not be demanding greater indignation?

13.23
Call Me Dave is up. 'Any claim they have ever made to economic competence is dead, over, finished.' Public borrowing will be greater over next two years than in past 300 years. Total borrowing over next four years: £606bn.

13.22
HEADLINES

INCOME TAX: 50% above £150,000 from next April, a year early. Personal allowances over £100,000 fully withdrawn.

£1bn extra revenue over next three years from stopping tax evasion.

Pension tax relief restricted for those with incomes over £150,000.

UK net debt (including banks) to GDP ratio: 68% (2010-1) 74% (2011-2) 78% (2012-3) 79% (2013-4).

Public sector borrowing: £175 billion, 12% GDP this year.

13.21
'I commend this speech to the House.' Someone has to.

13.20
ISA limit is £7,200 - to go up to £10,200, £5,100 in cash, for 50s or over this year, next year for everyone else.

13.18
Pensions will rise by 2.5% regardless of inflation in December. Extra winter fuel allowance to be maintained.

13.16
"Hope for the future." As opposed to hope for the past or reality for the future, a reality of hurting those who contribute most taxes to the economy directly and indirectly.

13.14
A debt to GDP ratio of nearly 80% in 2013-4 is huge, much much bigger than he forecast in November. Guess it'll be Cameron's problem. This is all assuming that growth restarts - if it's postponed, this could rise.

13.13
Carbon to be cut by 34% - binding target.

13.12
Will the new tax rate make this a redistributive budget or the one that causes HNWs to flee?

13.09
North Sea oil extraction is expensive, so 2bn barrels to be taken out of smaller oil fields. Not a green budget then.

13.06
Corporate governance and remuneration at banks to be reformed, capital and liquidity, transparency of regulations. All in line with G20. Treasury paper to be published. Will be an interesting read for the Square Mile.

13.03
Darling has hit the easy target, walloping the rich by increasing a proposed tax rate of 45% for money above £150,000 to 50%. Labour can't have got many votes from this category anyway, but now it'll be impossible. It seems like it might well drive high-earners in the City away, or at least force them to be thoroughly devious.

13.00
Booze and fags up 2%, petrol duty up 2p in September.

12.58
INCOME TAX: 50% above £150,000 from next April, a year early. Personal allowances over £100,000 fully withdrawn.

£1bn extra revenue over next three years from stopping tax evasion.

1/4 of the pensions tax relief goes to top 1% of earners.

Pension tax relief restricted for those with incomes over £150,000.

12.57
UK net debt including banks: 68% (2010-1) 74% (2011-2) 78% (2012-3) 79% (2013-4).

Public sector borrowing: £175 billion, 12% GDP this year.

2010 onwards:

£173bn
£140bn
£118bn
£97bn

11.9%
9.1%
7.2%
5.5%

12.56
Learnt from interwar mistakes: no deflation to get out of a recession. Fiscal easing of 0.5% this year, 0.8% tightening each year until 2013-14. Budget deficit halved in next four years.

12.53
Tax revenues down (previously financial sector 27% public revenues), corporation tax and income tax revenues down, stamp duty down, tax as part of GDP 1.2% down.

12.51
Scrappage scheme: £2,000 discount on cars over ten years old. Mandy to give more details.

12.50
Guaranteeing mortgage-backed securities - isn't that how we got here?

12.48
Darling seems optimistic for future growth: he says we have a diversified economy, but with financial services and London weighing so heavily, where is this diversity? The pound is recovering meaning manufacturing isn't going to be (and isn't now) the source.

12.42
Economy to grow by 3.5% years after 2010.

Inflation down to 1% by the end of the year. RPI down to -3% in September. Deflation!

12.41
GDP -3.5% this year but to start growing again, suffering less than the Eurozone and elswhere. 1.6% contraction 4Q08, similar 1Q09.

1.25% growth in 2010.

12.38
G20 rehearsal, details of which you can see in my liveblog here.

Economy to start growing by end of year? What does he know that we don't?

12.35
Darling outlining our current crisis for the benefit of those who have been under rocks. Everyone else's economies and exports are declining too.

12.32
Investment will be protected and financial services rebuilt (does that mean RBS's smashed windows?). No repeat of inertia that led to last Depression.

12.30
Darling up.

12.11
A good post from Stephanie Flanders: watch out for the date the UK returns to positive growth (now 0.3% in 2010), the date the debt ratio gets under control (now 2015-16) and 'the forecast real growth in total spending from 2011-2016. In the PBR he was looking at average real terms growth of 1.1% a year.' Of course, debt-to-GDP ratio is also key (PBR in November said 57%).

12.03
Just watching PMQs. Business as usual.

11.58
Net borrowing for 2008-9 was £90bn, below expectations but above the Pre-Budget Report.

Venezuelan Sensation

2009-04-20T20:42:00.002Z

From my blog at spearswms.com.

Far be it from me to tread on the (extremely knowledgeable) toes of another Spear's blogger, Dr Vanessa Neumann, but I'd like to offer my two cents on one aspect of Venezuela: the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel and authors of the most thrilling performance I have ever seen.

When I booked my tickets for Saturday night's performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring at the Royal Festival Hall, I said that people would mortgage their houses on the day of the concert for a spare ticket.

All right, it was October 2007 so I didn't know people would find getting a mortgage impossible in eighteen months' time, but the principle was right. I've never seen touts at a classical concert before.

By any standard, it would be hard to call the Rite of Spring dull. Its punishing polyrhythms, its violinists who attack their instruments, disc(h)ordant bassoons and a frightening, surprising ending keep you in permanent tension. It is the musical equivalent of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, with its African masks and sharp angles.

But the SBYO turn these notes and staves into a visceral, thundering, unutterably thrilling event, accelerating through barlines like a Ferrari with the pedal down, leading the dance in new and shocking ways. The orchestra seemed to understand in their very beings the violent passions of the music, and it flowed out through their explosive style.

The critical consensus is that they're great with the fortes, not so hot with the pianos, but I didn't find this true, either in the other works on the programme (three early 20th century Latin American pieces) or in their encore of Elgar's Nimrod, which was a warm tribute to their hosts. It is the thunder, however, at which they excel.

The orchestra is the product of El Sistema, the national programme for putting an instrument in every child's hands. This has resulted in not low-level enthusiasm for music but dozens of orchestras, including one world-beater.

If we could inspire Britain's youth away from their computers and into rehearsal rooms, perhaps we would have such a grass-roots orchestra to be proud of.

I don't feel confident about that. What I do feel confident about is that the SBYO will continue to thrill us for years to come.

Here is their signature piece, the Mambo from West Side Story at the 2007 Proms:

The faces of Cindy Sherman

2009-04-16T20:40:00.000Z

I don't think I've ever seen quite so high a patron:picture ratio as at the Cindy Sherman opening at Spruth Magers on Grafton Street last night. The gallery verily overflowed with an unaccustomed mixture of Mayfair and Shoreditch, spilling out onto the street where neon t-shirts rubbed shoulders with tailored suits, all to see three pictures.

They are very good pictures, of course, and the attraction en masse was easily explicable. Cindy Sherman is an alchemical mixture of reality and fiction: she photographs portaits but they are not of real people; she is her own subject, but she is always heavily made up as other people; she has realistic settings but they are blurred or digitised; they are in gilt frames but they are modern productions.

These are not simplistic oppositions, the facile sarcasm which is so off-putting in certain artists. Literally and metaphorically, we want to get under Sherman's skin, to explore the difference between her false face and her true one.

I actually find Sherman's pictures much more psychologically intriguing than most traditional portraits, but that of course is because they are designed to be ambiguous rather than aggrandising or beautifying. We have to ask what sort of woman is portrayed, and what sort of woman would want to be portrayed that way.

The intense fictionality of Sherman's pictures runs alongside their truthfulness and the gap between them is where she leaves the viewer, wondering.

Art finally eats itself

2009-04-03T19:53:00.001Z

From my blog at spearswms.com.

--

It has gone beyond parody. Just like the fashion designer sending his models naked down the catwalk at the end of Robert Altman's Pret a Porter, an exhibition with blank canvases on the wall suggests either a brilliant post-modern stroke or a highly juvenile art-student mentality.

I'd plump for the latter, though Merlin Carpenter at Simon Lee Gallery did at least have the theoretically redeeming feature of painting on the canvases during the opening. I didn't stay long enough to see the art in progress because - oddly enough - there wasn't enough before that to hold my attention.

The blurb speaks of capitalist speculation and a Mad Ma(r)x future where values are created not just by money. A fine idea, but that's not terribly much to sustain a show, or rather the fifth iteration of this internationally-plied gimmick. Why eleven unpainted canvases? Is the point that much more significant than with just one?

The gallery will still try and sell these pieces in very much capitalist fashion, making a nonsense (or at least a hypocrisy) of the idea.

Questions of value are of course at the forefront of the mind today, but I just feel that if a G20 rioter were to have smashed the windows of Simon Lee Gallery last night, they would have been more bemused by the blank canvases than enraged or indeed empathetic with his point of view.

The charm of the medieval

2009-04-03T19:51:00.001Z

From my blog at spearswms.com.

--

I suffer for Spear's. The latest outrage was having to review a villa near Perugia, on which much more in the next issue.

Being in Umbria, I wanted to take the opportunity to visit nearby Tuscan Siena, Florence's overshadowed neighbour but easily its better in medieval art and architecture and a respectable second in the Renaissance race.

I was inspired to do so after visiting the National Gallery's Renaissance Siena exhibition, which was a revelation with its skilful and colourful Beccafumis and Pintoricchios.

The city itself is like a medieval keep, high stone buildings square on roads that run steeply up the hill. Siena is a city of hidden alleys rather than broad piazze, and turning aside from your track will lead you to discover the true medieval Siena: dark, cool, private, a respite from the marauding Florentines and the sun.

The ancient University has a small colonnaded square with a tremendous tromp l'oeil vaulted fresco where god and the devil pour out down to earth, but I only found this by stepping through a door I'm not sure I was supposed to. So it goes in Siena.

The dark, cool privacy was very much evident when I visited the Museo Civico, housed in the Palazzo Publico, outside of which spreads the coral shell of Il Campo. Being mid-March, I was the only person there, apart from a wedding party, the bride in scarlet dress, veil and heels, in Beccafumi's Sala del Consistorio.

The ceiling is covered with scenes of Classical justice, perhaps setting the marriage on an auspicious course. Beccafumi's frescoing technique is light and vivid, pale colours and figures easily arranged and not strained.

Contrast this with the effortful Sala des Risorgimento, telling of Victor Emmanuel's life and deeds, most of which appear to have been equestrian. There is none of Beccafumi's life - it is heavy-handed.

There is a suite of overwhelming rooms: the Sala del Mappamondo, where the council used to meet, is overlooked by Simone Martini's Maiesta (which is in turn overwhelmed by the Duccio Maiesta in the Duomo), and next door are the Chapel and Ante-Chapel, which retain the Sienese gloom but are illuminated by intricately patterned vaulted ceilings and scenes from the Aeneid prophesying a glorious Roman future.

The guidebooks say that the Sienese are a proud people (it is hard to imagine any city in Italy which could not be or is not proud), but the charm of Siena is that it is in reality far less reputed than its Renaissance rival.

The quiet modesty of the city is what makes its treasures that bit more pleasurable to discover: without heralds, without noise, Siena sits, waiting to be found.

Saturday Sale of the Century

2009-03-13T12:34:00.003Z

If I praise the realism of the Saturday@Phillips auction, I am not (or not just) talking about the art for sale. What I mean is that by holding a sale where most items have estimates under £3,000, Phillips de Pury is putting the first pieces of a collection within the realistic grasp of young professionals.

The show is varied in tone and quality and in the fame of the artist. There is a terrific Warhol Polaroid of Jerry Hall, staring at you over her bare shoulder, her wide blue eyes fixing you like a seductive Madonna. This seems exactly the sort of iconography Warhol would take aim at.

There is an orgasmic (literally) Nan Goldin and some minor Banksies, plus quite a few Banksy-derivatives; perhaps the triteness of his imitators makes Banksy a gimmick rather than an influential artist. FAILE are a collective who produce street art crossed with pop art: Liechtensteins for the overly-cynical.

Some of the artists I haven't heard of (which is not really saying much) are (by definition) wonderful discoveries. Andres Serrano's Piss Discus is a photo of an ancient Greek discoboulos (discus-thrower) in his traditional torqued form who looks like he has been concealed behind a translucent orange-fading-to-yellow screen (possibly the titular urine). It reminds me visually of a Rothko, but one much more humane, much less angsty.

There is plenty for all types of collector - figurines not of the Lladro kind (think Astronaut Jesus), classic watches (sorry, timepieces) and furniture by Ron Arad and Robert Indiana, as well as beautiful modernist designs. It sure beats IKEA.

The worst thing about the show? I'm considering buying things I can ill-afford. But that, I think, counts as a success for Phillips.

Sondheim on the Stock Exchange

2009-03-05T22:17:00.001Z

From my blog at spearswms.com

Given the long lead-in times for plays and musicals, it is rare that they can be as relevant as the credit-crunched characters of Stephen Sondheim's Saturday Night, now on at the Jermyn Street Theatre. What makes this relevance even more surprising is that the show was written in 1954 (tho' it is almost never performed).

Set in Brooklyn, the downtrodden, notoriously grey and grimy and crimey sister of Manhattan, the characters are young schlubs in the spring of 1929, when the bubble was still filling with hot air and cheap cash and the stock market was the ever-escalating path to eternal bliss.

The one who dreams bigger (and not coincidentally works on Wall Street) finds himself living the grand life on the money of others - and comedic complications ensue. With the love of an equally phoney dame and the inexplicable loyalty of his Brooklyn buddies (whose money he has stolen), he makes it through.

Sondheim's songs are enjoyable pastiches of 20s jazz, bouncily played by the actors (very much in the John Doyle mode), with some sparkling and inventive lyrics by Sondheim too. Take 'Love is a Bond' - amour is 'gilt-edged prefered'. Financial phrases are scattered throughout, just as today everyone who's read a newspaper can now explain why CDSs are the devil's lottery tickets.

The cockeyed optimism of the Brooklyn boys is frighteningly recognisable as they fork over their money. Worse is Gene, who takes their money, blows it on a Park Avenue rental, pawns a car that doesn't belong to him and ends up owing money to everyone and requiring a bailout. Sound familiar?

Even if the complexity of the shadow markets which exist today could not have been imagined in 1929, what is unchanged is human nature: the desire for a fast buck, the misplaced trust in immaterial money - but also human compassion and forgiveness.

If the show were just timely, it would be amusing, but its wit and warmth (tho' not without some typical Sondheim despair) and eminently enjoyable songs make it a rediscovered treasure.

A line's many sides

2009-02-24T22:13:00.002Z

From my blog at spearswms.com.

--

A line is a curious thing. It links two points, or it divides two sides: you can have a line of communication or a line in the sand. In 'The Russian Linesman: Frontiers, Borders and Thresholds', the new show at the Hayward Gallery curated by Turner-winner Mark Wallinger, we see both sides, as it were.

The titular linesman is the official who helped England to its 1966 World Cup win by deciding that the ball had crossed the line. This is the least interesting thing about the show: there is far more inside that this might suggest.

Wallinger's own contribution to the show is a gigantic mirrored Tardis, which straddles the line of existence: it is clearly there, but its mirrors reflect the room (and us), so that there is no hint of anything solid, only images. As the picture makes clear, at certain times it even seems transparent, rather than reflective. It is a neat trick.

One of the key pieces, which has more than art-theoretical resonance, is Bertelli's Continuous Profile of Mussolini (1933). The dictator's profile has been shaped by carving contours all the way around a ceramic centre: whichever angle the sculpture is viewed at, there are always two faces of Mussolini. (It draws on the two-faced head of Janus, god of doors and the origin of 'January', adjacent to it.)

As well as being artistically innovative, the work is a politically subversive statement: Mussolini is watching at all times, but he has no solidity, no definition. He is and he isn't . Given that this is an official bust, one must be surprised by his tolerance (or lack of understanding).

Thomas Demand's Poll (2001) is a curious experiment too: a cardboard recreation of a photo taken during the election recount of 2000, then photographed. This is the line between the government America had and the one it lost, but also the line between several kinds of reality: the real scene, the photo of the scene, the carboard recreation of the photo of the scene, the photo of the cardboard recreation of the photo of the scene. A veritable fractal, or two mirrors casting images at each other.

There is a lot more than this, and each piece is its own complex variation on the idea of lines, which saves the show: rather than being simple demonstrations of the use and abuse of liminality, we see that there are far more than two sides to a line.

Sprung Awake: Spring Awakening

2009-02-19T16:17:00.005Z

There is much to like about Spring Awakening, the new rock-emo musical based on Frank Wedekind's late-nineteenth century play on at the Lyric Hammersmith: it has some very tender acting, a couple of memorable songs, some very lyrical lyrics (when audible) and a knock-out neon-bar set.

It - for me, but clearly not for the hundreds of mooning teenagers in the audience - had one serious problem: it could not make me engage emotionally. But more on this later.

The play exists on a similar plane to A Clockwork Orange and Lady Chatterley's Lover: its explicit sex among teenagers has made it a perfect candidate for black-listing. (Frankly, it should be a mark of pride and distinction rather than dishonour.) Class stud and intellectual aspirant Melchior (Aneurin Barnard, touching) accidentally impregnates innocent (but willing) Wendla (Charlotte Wakefield), while depressed nihilist Moritz (Iwan Rheon) faces his parents, his teachers and his (lack of a) future in a society where children are first oppressed, then made into cogs in the machine of life. It is, in fact, a perfect analogue for A Clockwork Orange's dispossessed teens, who instead take the path of violence.

This production does not shy away from the sex - masturbation in a nightshirt raises all sorts of questions, and there is even a teenage breast for the boys dragged there - but it makes it such a natural part of the lives of these characters that it is wholly justifiable. (The 'kids', tho' 14 in appearance, range from 16 to 25.)

It is odd to talk about what is natural in a musical, where things are inherently not natural: communal singing and dancing may be part of a rich inner life, but it is their expression which is odd. Spring Awakening overcomes this because the songs come at pitches of rage, or despair, or desire, when a recourse to words is not enough.

There are no showtunes in the manner of the Lloyd Webber, but rather a blend of metal-rock and emo instantly recognisable to anyone who has been (or known) a teenager in the past decade. (The book and lyrics are by Steven Sater, the music by Duncan Sheik.) They are not wildly individual or catchy, but their lyrics, which revel in the emotional colour of the Romantics' verse, cut to the dreamy hearts or angry minds of the characters. If they were more clearly sung, they would be a real achievement.

This production is inescapably tender, but never mawkish: when Melchior and Wendla have sex - well-staged on a floating platform - their friends sit around them on the floor below and sing of true belief in love. The early meeting of Melchior and Wendla is beautifully done (tho' it's hard to tell from this clip):

While this could be construed as Dawson's Creek with songs, it is really much more touching.

The problem I have with Spring Awakening is almost certainly more to do with me than with the play, but it is still a fair point, I think. Like with the paintings of Mark Rothko, people like to sit in front of Spring Awakening and pour out their angst and misery, project it onto the work of art. It is a very public form of sadness and it seems more for display value than for itself: it says, 'Look, I am sensitive. I have feelings.'

I am not embarrassed by public displays of emotion, but it seems that Spring Awakening requires that leap into grief to succeed fully. Without reserve, no doubt I could have soaked through a handkerchief or three as did the teenage girls flooding the stalls, but it felt a little too forced, a little too much of a prerequisite: it operated on a level of too-easy emotion. Or perhaps it was just me.

A complete shower: Three Days of Rain

2009-02-19T15:49:00.003Z

Or should that be Two Hours of Pain?

Tedious doesn't even begin to cover Richard Greenberg's Three Days of Rain. According to the programme, the play is called Three Days of Rain FULL STOP, which is indicative of how seriously it takes itself: this play does not just have a name, it is a statement. It is meaningful. Even if it is vapid and meaningless.

The first act shows the combustions of mysterious, troubled Walker (James McAvoy, a first class ham which is off its lithium), his mild, troubled sister Nan (Lyndsey Marshal), and their manic, troubled friend Pip (Nigel Harman). They are to learn what Walker and Nan's famous architect father has left them in his will: who will gain possession of a house so described as to resemble most closely a cross between Falling Water and the Taj Mahal?

Thirty-five years earlier (although it feels later), the second act shows their parents, the famous architect Ned (McAvoy, who brings out a prize stutter and some rather affecting acting), his partner Theo (Harman, still manic) and the girl Ned steals from Theo (too late for a *spoiler* I suppose), Lina (Marshal). They have combustions over Theo's lack of talent and Ned's talent.

Harman runs away and almost his entire role in the second act is to walk back and forth across the front of the stage while it rains. He has one speech. For heaven's sake, if you have three characters, use them - don't try and establish some parallelism with the first act then toss away one corner of the triangle.

While Harman is getting soaked to the skin, McAvoy is getting down to his, prompting mass faintings among the audience, who were clearly there because they had loved Greenberg's earlier Donmar drama, Take Me Out, about gay baseball players.

There is supposed to be tension between Ned and Lina, because she is Theo's girlfriend and manic, he is an unassuming genius, some sexual chemistry even, but there is none: it's a shower, rather than a storm. (The title is a hostage to fate.)

There are no grand themes here: the personal, which can be universal or even simply powerfully-rendered, is banal. We cannot make meaningful connections between the two acts - the mental disturbances of Walker (Ned: 'I always wanted to be a flaneur, you know, a walker') may stem from his mother's problems or his father's reticence, but the second act is so flimsy that it is hard to identify them.

The title comes from a brief entry in Ned's diary, which Walker has found. It is supposed - through cunning understatement - to evoke the grand passion of the three days when he and Lina fell in love, but it - just like the play - is a damp squib.

Indian Summer blooms

2009-02-19T14:45:00.001Z

From my blog at spearswms.com.

--

I feel a desperate need to slough off the English winter and replace it with an Indian summer (or at least a Delhi spring). Sadly, I won't be gracing the duty-free shops of Mumbai airport or practising my practical Hindi ('How do you keep your economy so buoyant?') but I will be attending a season of exhibitions and events at the British Museum.

No-one would try to claim that the BM is now only known for the Elgin Marbles and the Sutton Hoo burial: it has made strides far beyond this with blockbuster terracotta warrior and Hadrian exhibitions, and now it has moved into Babylon and thence Iran. Judging by this vaguely eastward movement, it's time to hit India in a season sponsored by HSBC.

Of equal interest to fans of Gertrude Jekyll and the history of art, Garden and Cosmos: the Royal Paintings of Jodhpur will explore a relatively unknown facet of Indian art: the landscape. These paintings are in some ways exactly what you would expect, bright and vibrant portrayals of a world away from Constable.

What lifts them above the mere landscape (take that, Constable) is the metaphysical dimensions they tackle. The paintings move into exploring planes and colour fields, more like Rothko than Rajasthan.

There will also be, thanks to the kind curators of Kew, an Indian garden installed in the Museum's forecourt. Theory and practice, you see. And if Indian trees can't ward off the rain and coax out the sun, then there's really no hope for us. Step inside instead.

Art pays

2009-02-16T22:08:00.001Z

From my blog at spearswms.com.

--

There is a good article on Wealth Bulletin asking what banks should do with their art collections: after all, according to the article, Deutsche Bank has 53,000 pieces (valued at £75m in 2004, including the Hirst below) and UBS has 45,000 (approximately £100m) and they could no doubt stand to sell some, as well as profit from their loss.

But there are several compelling reasons to keep the art. When companies are as far in the hole as global banks are, losing so many billions that their calculators can't display enough the full figures, selling an art collection - in a falling market - is hardly likely to raise enough cash to service the second executive jet.

Less tangibly, but perhaps less credibly, an art collection says something more about a bank, something beyond 'We know the price of everything and the value of nothing' (which is clearly not even true any more since they can't even price their toxic assets).

Art is not (meant to be) a stock market, where prices fluctutate daily on rumours and warnings: it should be a good deal more enduring. Even if - as would terrifically gauche on the bank's part - the art deals with financial themes in an obvious way, the work should still be hoping to speak to the future too.

The ownership of art - and its display, of course - says that a bank cares about things beyond its own walls, feeling and thoughts more profound and more sophisticated than an abacus can say. Even if this is an illusion, it is an illusion which dignifies the bank. Selling up is selling out.

Why?: Some questions raised by 'He's Just Not That Into You'

2009-02-15T22:00:00.003Z

A serious film like He's Just Not That Into You (based, as are all cinematic classics, on a self-help guide for terminally optimistic singletons) deserves serious critical consideration. Sadly, it only has me. Nevertheless, some questions raised by the film.

1. Why?
2. Why?
3. Seriously, why?
4. What has happened to Scarlett Johansson's career? She was so good in Lost in Translation and - well, so far that's it.
5. Are Scarlett's breasts really worth sitting through two hours of HJNTIY (as it would be called were this a pronounceable acronym)? They do get a lot of screen time.
6. This film is set in Baltimore, home of The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street. Is it thus plausible that there is not a single murder in two hours?
7. Why couldn't Jennifer Aniston's character have been murdered?
8. Or even Jennifer Connelly's?
9. Why don't we see Drew Barrymore in more films? She was the only one with spark in the whole palaver.
10. Why are black women (especially fat ones) and gay guys inherently funny? As one of the latter (but not the former), I would suggest we can be rather witty, but when the only 'laughs' in the film are assigned to these two categories, you have to wonder if we're doing more than our share of the laugh-lifting.
11. Are lines like 'You're my exception' due to become classics along the lines of 'We'll always have Paris'?
12. Are women really as stupid as the film portrays?
13. Are men really as cruel?
14. If so, why do we go on?
15. Are we supposed to approve of Scarlett acting as a home-wrecker? It seems so, but in a film where a relationship is the highest good, adultery is presumably bad.
16. Why am I spending so much time asking questions about this film?
17. Seriously, why?

Triennial triumph

2009-02-15T21:50:00.003Z

From my blog at spearswms.com.

--

It is all, says the curator, about dialogue. Works of art in Tate Britain's fourth triennial are placed so that they can speak to one another. (Not vocally speaking, obviously, although there is one terrifying use of larynxed animatronics.)

It is also all, says the curator, about Altermodernism (read its manifesto here). Two steps beyond miserable modernism, one step beyond miserable post-modernism, joyful altermodernism sits, embracing global cultures and new media.

From the improbably-named Spartacus Chetwynd's video installation across a dozen screens to the grave photogravures of Tacita Dean, via Navin Rawanchaikul's epic Bollywood-style painting and Shezad Dawood's ecumenical DVD, all continents and forms are examined in a show which embraces the vibrant and difficult.

Nicolas Bourriaud, the aforementioned curator, has wrenched what he hopes will be the next movement in art out of the pasty hands of westerners and into those of the rest of the world. This is better in theory than practice, of course: at least half the 28 artists work in London, and several more in New York. Talent from elsewhere, while not lacking on the arts scene, has largely not made it into Tate Britain.

The best room in the show is in fact the work of one Englishwoman and one Scotsman. Tacita Dean has made photogravures of funerals and scenes of devastation, then written over them (as is her way) as if to suggest they are stills from a movie. The darkness (metaphorical and visual) of the images, their sombre tones, their stillness all touch the heart.

At the other side of the room is Charles Avery, whose art all stems from a fully-realised fictional world - not just geography but culture and society. There is a black and silver swirling map of this world, complete with imagined place names and a delicate topography. There is a sculpture of an imagined creature too, which resembles a duck whose bill is another duck; this 'Aleph Nul' (to the right) is just one of the animals which populates the world (and Avery's mind). Along with some deft drawings, you become instantly immersed in this world and begin to ask why it is any less real than the real world. After all, much of this world is as we would like to imagine it, rather than as it is.

The photos of Darren Almond are peaceful landscapes, taken with 15-minute exposures; they are just as restful on the brain as they are on the eyes. Inversely stimulating is Navin Rawanchaikul's triptych, which looks like a Bollywood billboard and is painted in joyful colours, with beautiful Hindi script snaking along in pastels and vibrant blues. The simple appearance belies its complex exploration of alienation from one's culture (Rawanchaikul works in Japan and Thailand) - this movie is one of dreams lost, rather than realised, on celluloid.

It is stretching it somewhat to claim that these are the up-and-coming heroes of modern art - Tacita Dean is a long-established figure. Nevertheless, it provides an interesting survey of the landscape, eliciting hints about the future of modern art. Post-altermodernism, anyone?

Thatched, matched, dispatched: a BBC conspiracy?

2009-02-06T21:24:00.003Z

Far be it from me to stoke conspiracy theories - especially ones favoured by the excitable middle market papers - but the idea that the BBC hates Margaret Thatcher received support from possible the most likely place.

After her daughter Carol was thrown off the One Show for a racist remark, thousands complained that this was because of a BBC vendetta against the Iron Lady. Well, the conspiracy grows: on QI just now, one of the witnesses to the remark, Jo Brand, said that Thatcher's ennoblement meant she now sounded like a pubic depilator. Laughs all round.

Of course, Jo Brand is not the entire BBC and does not represent its views, and QI was filmed weeks before the Carol Thatcher controversy, but no doubt those who so enjoy foaming at the mouth will be filling letters columns citing this as proof of all sorts of conspiracies. Did someone say they saw Jo Brand behind the grassy knoll...?

Where's Waldo? Inauguration day eye-spying

2009-01-26T20:36:00.003Z

Although this is theoretically an arts blog, it is also my arts blog, and so when something as brilliant as this comes along, it behoves me to share it with the universe.

For the most detailed photo of a President since the evidence at Clinton's impeachment, check out the link below, a shot where you can zoom in so far that you can see Cheney's thoughts.

But first, take a check-list with you: see if you can spot Cheney, Aretha, Yo-Yo Ma, a tear from W's eye, Big Bird with a camera, a gold eagle appearing out of a man's head, Al Sharpton with a fake Burberry scarf, a Nobel prize winner and the lovechild of Susan Sontag and the last of the Mohicans.

Click here for photographic pleasure you can't measure.

Rewriting history/his story: Further Tales of the City

2009-01-04T18:04:00.007Z

If you're going to seize the imagination, better do it young. Lucky, then, that Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City sequence, six novels about San Francisco life in the 70s and 80s (from pre-Aids to very much the Aids era) which were originally published as a daily newspaper column, got me when I was 14.

Spanning a thousand pages and fourteen years, the series let Maupin create intensely developed characters - a core of half a dozen and a guest cast of hundreds - whose lives are filled with romantic, sexual, fantastical and tragic events, set against the climates of Carter- and Reagan-era America. There is also a Warholesque omnipresence of evocative brand names, making Maupin's San Francisco a vivid, fully-realised picture of the times (and changing times - Betamax recurs in its heyday and then as a laughable historical curio).

This is not to be a paean to Tales, however, although I could quite happily sing its praises for pages. I was recently kindly given all the TV adaptations of the first three novels (Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City), and as the third one has not been broadcast in Britain yet, I watched it first.

It has the same excellent cast as the first two (mostly) - Olympia Dukakis as Anna Madrigal, the pot-growing landlady whose house draws the characters togethers; Laura Linney as Mary Ann Singleton, the ambitious Cleveland secretary; and many others - which gives the films the same constancy as the books.

What has changed to a great degree is the plot. Further Tales has always felt like the least successful of all six books to me: its plot - a survivor of the Jonestown massacre has to rescue her children from a not-dead Jim Jones, while (inter alia) a news anchor is kidnapped by Anna Madrigal - takes the degree of absurdity which the elastic nature of San Francisco seems to allow too far. There are logical holes in the plot, unsatisfactory twists and endings, and a bizarre, pointless jaunt to Russia, which one of the characters even concedes is 'drifty'.

The movie version adds some successful episodes - a funny run-in for Michael Tolliver at the Glory Holes and the return of dippy Connie Bradshaw - and there is the welcome reappearance of Anna Madrigal's ancient, crotchety, whorehouse-running mother, although she is despatched off-screen for no obvious reason other than as a pull at the heart-strings.

But what is added (quasi-incest), what is taken away (a queer-bashing of two key characters, originally written in to reflect the Milk-Moscone murders) and what is edited (dialogue is rewritten, losing the point), as well as what remains, all conspire to make the show unsatisfactory.

Maupin is co-credited as screenwriter, along with James Lecesne, and this made me wonder whether he had taken the opportunity almost to rewrite history/his story: I can't help but feel that there are aspects of the Further Tales book he must be unhappy with (the exigencies of a daily serial could not have helped), and the series is the perfect occasion to rectify these. That this rewriting keeps some of the madness is in fact beside the point: it is the ability to get it right the second time round which is interesting.

There are not many opportunities for writers to republish, as it were. Obviously, film scripts are a second bite of the cherry, if the original writer is engaged, which is rare. Some authors do rewrite without films, and even win awards: Peter Mattheissen's Shadow Country is three books rewritten into one and won the National Book Award last year. Stephen Sondheim regularly adds or removes songs as previews continue and plays are revived. And of course Shakespeare, as a jobbing playwright, went through several versions of his plays, to the extent that, thanks to directorial choices, Hamlet can end up a veritable tombola of lines.

The problem is clear: rewriting is inherently to concede that the first go was faulty. As much as the writer may feel this - and looking back on articles I've written, I would certainly change things - it is a matter of private pride or public reputation, or at least is perceived as such. Not many people could regularly republish because people would stop taking them seriously.

But I'm not sure rewriting is an admission of failure. Would we admire Philip Roth more if he said that the Human Stain could have done with a little more subtlety? Almost certainly, since this would not come off as weakness but as humility, an honest striving for perfection.

Of course, if you rewrite it and get it wrong the second time (as, I fear, with Further Tales) - well, perhaps third time isn't the charm.

In the line of fire: Ed Stourton

2009-01-03T23:19:00.003Z

I like Ed Stourton, soon-to-be partially-redundant presenter on Radio 4's Today programme. Never mind the 'posh Ed' nickname - he asks intelligent questions and has a melodious voice. As media-savvy readers will know, he was ingloriously fired from Today, and (more ingloriously) had to find out from a Daily Mail journalist. After a ruckus, and some honest comments from Ed about his shock, he was promised some sort of rolling contract. Harmony was regained.

Or was it? Ed has been filing reports for Today recently from the Gaza Strip, covering the Israeli attacks. It can't be safe. Let's hope the BBC bosses only sent him there for journalistic reasons...

Unamerican Icescapades: Mighty Ducks 2

2009-01-02T14:49:00.003Z

Not that I am in the habit of watching the highlights of the Emilio Estevez filmic corpus, but I did catch the last half of Mighty Ducks 2 today. I haven't seen an ice hockey movie since Mighty Ducks 3 in 1994 (a school treat - lord knows what I'd done to deserve that), so give it another 15 years and I'll have seen the trilogy.

Mighty Ducks 2 (or 'Revenge of the Duckies', as it's known in drag circles) is a perfect studio picture, straight from the modern Disney school of racial and gender harmony: the team is a Benetton rainbow, from the cornfed (Joshua Jackson) to the kid from the mean streets of South Central L.A. (Brandon Adams).

It should also be the perfect picture to push the pro-American bilge we have become used to, less subtly than Invasion of the Bodysnatchers but not quite as flag-waving as The Green Berets (good link here) or the Rambo series. It is, after all, about the Mighty Ducks kids hockey team at some global championship. U-S-A! U-S-A! etc.

What actually happens is rather unexpected. The team, playing in the final against evil Iceland (how much foresight writer Steven Brill had!), who cheat and steal [matches, not millions], cannot get up a head of steam in their America jerseys. Indeed, they are facing almost-inevitable-but-just-possibly-evitable defeat.

When Estevez, as their plucky coach with a puck-full of horrific hockey memories to exorcise, gives them an interval talking-to, he makes them name their home cities, to inspire them and make them realise who they really are. Heave, I know. The funny thing is, they re-emerge onto the ice wearing their Mighty Ducks jerseys, having junked the US ones. They then, of course, go on to win the match and the world championship, though this is surely violating the rules since there is no country of Mighty Ducks (outside of a Marx Brothers film). The audience scream, the signs flash up Mighty Ducks win, hoorah hoorah.

What this seems to say is that it is local loyalty, or club loyalty, or loyalty to one's friends, not blind nationalism, which gives the winning spirit. This is hardly the moral we expect from the Mouse House. Now if only this were more of a global guiding principle.

The long and the short of it: drama on R4

2008-12-23T23:57:00.006Z

Ever since I nearly swerved my car off the road listening to Radio 4's adaptation of Dr Zhivago in the Sunday afternoon Classic Serial slot (is vivid infanticide really tea-time programming?), I have been semi-glued to their choices. What I appreciated most about Dr Zhivago is what I like about The Archers: plenty of space is given to the story to develop.

This seems not to have been the case of late, to the detriment of the adaptations. I enjoyed Jamila Gavin's Coram Boy over the past fortnight, with Jonathan Slinger as the narrator, posh yet wounded and soulful, but it seemed like an awful lot was crammed into two hours. Indeed, the last ten minutes featured a chase, shooting, kidnapping on a ship, escape from said ship, a burial and a happily ever after (not to be too specific).

Or take that well-known short story, Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. This came in four episodes, which means the adaptor put three of Powell's books into each hour of airtime. I have not read the sequence, but I am certain they are not this thinly populated.

While I can well understand that contractions must be made to keep up the pace, allow more productions and avoid over-complications, I am not certain that every book is well served by being filleted. I know that the radio is not a book, with its infinite opportunities for digression and expansion, but if you can guarantee one thing about Radio 4's listeners, it is that they are patient, patient people. There is no danger of losing your audience by constructing a more detailed, more eventful, slower-paced drama.

Turning the other cheek: Renaissance Faces

2008-12-23T23:05:00.008Z

The National Gallery has a quite incredible exhibition on at the moment: Renaissance Faces, Van Eyck to Titian (until January 18). There is no shortage of masterpieces, both familiar - Holbein's The Ambassadors and Titian's Philip II - and less well-known - Vermeyen's Portrait of a Man (c.1540) with his delicate fingers and Gossaert's allusive A Little Girl (c.1530).

As with other shows (such as Citizens and Kings at the Royal Academy), you cannot fault the art on display, but there is one aspect of the curating which lets the show down. The thematic arrangement (identity, courtship, love, etc) is useful for comparing the various uses of portraiture, which can often seem like one face after another, so many ornate playing cards.

This failing aspect is the neglect of much of the artistic and art-historical theory (as opposed to social, political or historical purposes) behind these portraits. In the first room ('Remembering'), which shows the evolution of the portrait from side-view to Botticelli's divine Portrait of a Young Man (c.1480-5), a frontal slide of a youth the colour of fine porcelain, what seems to be a fundamental point of this changed technique is ignored: artists did not just turn the head after the fashion of Classical busts (tho' obviously this is important) but because it engaged the viewer.

The real revolution in portraiture is the third dimension, you might call it - to painter and sitter is added viewer, in a much more realistic manner than previous passivity for side-on portraits. By turning the face towards the viewer, we are forced to search the face and to consider ourselves relative to it. It is more than a medallion - it is a challenge. To demonstrate this change from 2D to 3D with such great paintings but such a theoretical motivation is to sell it short.

The aspect of symbolism and physiognomical convention is explored but not pursued as far as it could be. Pisanello's Portrait Medal of Leonello d'Este (c.1441) has a kingly lion, while the Gossaert features the ubiquitous symbol, the armillary sphere, representing temporal power. Women are shown with fine noble features to emphasise their own nobility, and vice versa as with Quentin Massys's ugly, lusty crone, An Old Woman (c.1513).

The questions this leads to is, How far can we trust portraits, and how far is their purpose even to represent? The opportunities for deception are noted, and Titian's Pope Paul III, bareheaded, bowed, broken, is a good counterblast to the idealism elsewhere, but limbo feels like the default state: the balance between nature and stature is not that often considered. As time passed, are we meant to assume that portraits became more accurate? It would be nice to have heard some critical voices on how important accuracy even was.

These are, as I said, not cavils with the quality of the art. It just seems that with such serious works on show, a more serious approach - instead of easily digestible thematic chunks - would have rounded out the exhibition.

Ham/let

2008-12-16T16:16:00.003Z

I sat next to an odd young gentleman at Hamlet last night. (No, not Edward Bennett kicked out by David Tennant, back from his sickbed.) He arrived 15 minutes late, which is understandable since it started at 7.15, not 7.30, but didn't come back for the second act. Who comes for the Ham but not the let?

I slightly feel this way about the play, which Greg Doran and the cast had trimmed down, losing Claudius' speech about the subservience of England, Hamlet's piracy narrative and a lot of the jokes about lawyers in the gravediggers' scene. 'To be or not to be' was also reassigned to the nunnery scene, making him (to me) far too introspective too early.

These subtractions feel like they were there to speed the second act along, making it more palatable to the public, and I get this sense from other choices: interjecting the interval just as Hamlet stands over Claudius with a dagger (a dubious position - is he really on the verge of striking?) is a cliffhanger, not a wholly credible character choice.

The programme too is perhaps less wordy and thoughtful than for other productions - nothing on the issues of the play, just on the rehearsal process (which is certainly interesting). If this is all to please the public drawn to it because of David Tennant, it is rather patronising.

This aside, the acting was excellent. Edward Bennett was raw and youthful, almost childlike in some of his cruelty and buffoonery. Patrick Stewart's Claudius is a calm diplomat, whose occasional cracks are soon papered over by a supercilious assurance. I particularly enjoyed Penny Downie as Gertrude, because her role seems to have been enhanced in this production - rather than being the typical underwritten cipher, she was played with passion and prominence. (I did spot Tom Davey's Laertes being fed his lines by a priest at the beginning, but this is understandable as another link in the understudy chain.)

What really struck me in this performance was how important a theme unquestioning obedience is: servants obey royals, the queen her husband, Polonius the king. The smooth operation of the world is predicated on an almost mechanical principle - the king is the wheel, of course, in the famous phrase - of obedience. It is the struggle for freedom (of action and thought) which traps Hamlet in his uncertainty, which is at least authentic. This is the void Hamlet seems to stare into: a certain servitude or an uncertain freedom.

Quite a brief exposition of a rather complicated theory, but I know some people I shall be able to argue this with for hours.

Art is for Life

2008-12-11T22:41:00.001Z

From spearswms.com

Art is for Life

If a de Kooning or a Duchamp is out of your league (not for long, perhaps, given the plummeting prices of art), at least something mid-range might suit for a Christmas gift. Herewith, some dos and don'ts for buying art for Christmas gifts:

Do consult trade newspapers and magazines (the Art Newspaper, Frieze) to see who is in esteem at the moment.

Don't buy because someone is the latest young thing - fashion will always be succeeded.

Do ask about (or at least ascertain) the recipient's taste: there is no point buying them a video installation when they long for watercolours.

Do spend time with the artist if you're very taken by their work: by talking to them you will understand their art much better.

Don't buy it as soon as you've seen it: as them to keep it on reserve so you can go away and think about it.

Finally, and most importantly, do buy something because you will be able to spend time with it, not because you see pound signs.

My day job

2008-12-09T20:44:00.002Z

Just in case anyone is sceptical enough to believe that my illusion of busyness is just, in fact, an illusion, here are links to my articles written for Spear's WMS, of which I am Senior Editor.

How to Spend It (Where to put any money you may have right now)
Payback Time (The new arena of philanthrocapitalism)
Reality Bites (I eat a £1,000-a-head meal and live to tell the tale)
From Russia With Loot (How Russians can best escape Russia)
Haven on Earth I and II (The world's best and worst tax havens)
Ticket, Please (A profile of the London Library)
Help! (How to deal with one's staff)
Twilight Zone (An interview with Bill Henson, Australia's greatest living artist)

Clint against the system

2008-12-08T17:31:00.005Z

Never has an older dog been less keen to learn new tricks than Clint Eastwood, on the evidence of his latest film, Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie. A superb, subtle, unsettling tale of a woman whose child is snatched and replaced (with the police's connivance) by someone else's son, Changeling embodies the same individualist philosophy as all Clint's early westerns.

Jolie, who puts her wide eyes to tearful use as the desperate mother in 1920s America, is told by the police that they have found her son, and despite maternal feelings and objective facts which tell her that they are wrong, she is forced to accept him by official pressure. When she puts up a fight and proclaims the truth, the snakelike police captain has her thrown into an asylum.

Now, this may seem about as far from the wild west as one can get - Angelina Jolie's character wouldn't have lasted a minute at the OK Corral - but the theme of an individual fighting against the oppression of the state is the same liberal spirit that animates most westerns. The rugged cowboy trying to overcome the corruption of the brutal sherriff and liberate the people from fear is a trope second to none, and one which applies equally here.

It is Jolie's heroic resistance which gives Changeling its spirit, but it does not take much to see Eastwood behind the camera.

August rising

2008-12-05T21:31:00.004Z

August: Osage County, Tracy Letts' new play at the National Theatre, grew on me as it progressed, and it had nothing to do with the interval champagne. Indeed, sitting in the stalls watching a play about the addictions (pills, the sauce, drama) made me think twice (but not more) about taking another sip.

August is more of a blender-drink play than a champagne, for that matter: if you threw Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee into a liquidiser and hit 'squish', you'd end up with August. There are some fairly obvious references to the greatest hits of twentieth century American drama - a poker game, a warring intellectual couple.

This is not wholly to denigrate the play, although it is far from perfect: each line can almost be predicted from the one before, and the ending is far too explicit - the audience, credited with intelligence, could easily supply it for themselves, maintaining the tension.

Set in a family home in Oklahoma largely deserted by the family, Violet and Beverly Weston (Deanna Dunagan and Chelcie Ross [he is in fact a man, despite real and fictional Christian names]) tear strips out of one another, until Beverly disappears. Sharp-tongued Violet, who is dying from (what else?) cancer of the mouth, was built to fill the phrase 'pill-popping shrew' and has apparently driven her husband away with her pilled-up rages and bemusements.

By stages their dysfunctional dependents arrive: the dutiful daughter (Sally Murphy), the runaway daughter (Amy Morton), the sister taken straight from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Rondi Reed), and so forth. Secrets are revealed - a standard litany of unmentionable sins - and a family dynamic becomes a family diabolic.

This would all be ordinary except for a blistering set of central performances. Deanna Dunagan is superb as the alternately vulnerably befuddled, viciously bitchy Violet; a lesser actress would not be able to carry off these mood swings with any degree of conviction. What is most pleasing is that despite the opportunity to take chunks out of the scenery, Dunagan resists, not camping up what could just be another sacred monster.

She receives strong support from her daughters, especially Amy Morton as Barbara who moves from peace-maker to warlord to caretaker. What worked best was the way in which Barbara was transfigured into the hated figures of her parents, the passage of time indicated by clever use of lighting (by Ann G Wrightson). Because this represented what Barbara most feared, her worn-down face hits hardest.

There have been, apparently, grand claims for the play to represent the downfall of the American empire, and indeed one character is involved with private contractors [i.e. mercenaries] in Iraq, but this is the only indication. If Letts wanted to make August stand for a moral, global harvesting season, the text could have touched more on these issues; otherwise, one could map any situation onto the Weston family.

It is not hard to see August entering the repertoire as a twenty-first century Grand Guignol, but without striking performances, it is hard to see what there will be to watch.

Branagh beats all

2008-12-01T22:18:00.002Z

From my blog on spearswms.com:

Branagh beats all

I had the privilege of meeting Kenneth Branagh last week at the Evening Standard Drama Awards. Not just meeting him, in fact, but eating his dessert. (How many people could - or would want to - claim that?)

Branagh had been nominated for Best Actor, for his role in Chekhov's Ivanov, where he inhabits a very lonely space, a depressed man drowning in debt who pushes away his virtuous wife and torments his well-meaning friends. Despite being one of the great stage performances, Branagh lost to Chiwetel Ejiofor, who was Othello. Ejiofor deserved it, but so did Branagh, and Branagh was nothing but gracious afterwards.

Branagh stands so prominently in the canon of great British actors precisely because he is not prominent in any way: he submerges himself in every role. Whereas it is impossible to distance the person from the performance with so many other actors, Branagh folds himself into his character.

Last night's Wallander on BBC1 was an example. Based on a series of Swedish crime novels, Branagh played the lonely, depressed (perhaps a theme here?) police detective. His acting was natural and unassuming, quietly taking you into his psyche. Amid a production of great subtlety, Branagh stood out (if this is not an inappropriate metaphor) for his humanity and insight.

Branagh will soon be off the stage, but if you can get a ticket to Ivanov, or have the time to watch Wallander on the iPlayer, I urge you to do so: Ken is king.

Hope in the Courvoisier Future 500

2008-11-30T09:25:00.004Z

After an inexcusable period of absence (excuses include new job, weekend job, love life, lack of love life, Law & Order [all three types] and celebrity-fuelled parties), I'm determined to return to blogging, so keep visiting for all your artsy needs.

But in the mean time, I'd like to share some good news: I've been named in the Courvoisier Future 500 as a rising star (indeed, in the top 100 supernovas: flick to Josh Spero). Which is nice. Lucky I like Courvoisier really. Pick up the Observer today to see the full list.

And come back soon - plenty of theatre, art and general mischief to be made here.

Obama must recultivate America

2008-11-10T20:36:00.000Z

From my blog at spearswms.com:

Obama must recultivate America

No, this does not mean that I think that America lacks culture: from my time in New York earlier this year I can tell you that it has culture in abundance. But that's New York, which was never going to let Bush stifle it. The rest of the country, and the example set from the centre, is another matter.

As we have learnt, Barack Obama is a ferocious reader: from Philip Roth to Toni Morrison to Shakespeare. Anyone who has heard his speeches must be convinced of his hyper-literacy. After eight years of Bush, rarely found reading (except to children when the planes hit the World Trade Center), Obama needs to show that reading is not just done on cereal boxes.

This could be part of a general programme rehabilitating the arts, extending outwards from Washington. Instead of making the Kennedy Center Honors the only time politics and the arts interact, why not bring back the era of the Washington literary salon? Staffers mix with creatives, with approval from on high, and the lessons of art (not that it ought to be didactic) permeate back into politics.

President Obama can visit the symphony in Chicago and urge schools to supply instruments to all their pupils; music is well-known as an aid to study and for boosting mental processes. The same goes for theatre: run a competition for the best in school drama and dole out tickets to the community.

If the President engages with the arts, on a (continuing) personal level and reintroducing them into the political discourse, he could restore some dignity and thought to an all-too aggressive and atavistic political culture.

Gawker-in-Chief

2008-10-30T20:40:00.000Z

From my blog on spearswms.com

Gawker-in-Chief

How should you react when faced with a hero/idol/legend/object of devotion? I only ask because I was lucky enough to go to the RSC's gala this week, where I met two of my favourite actors, Jonathan Slinger and Chuk Iwuji. They both blew me away when I saw them as part of the RSC's histories cycle, the Glorious Moment.

Happily I had had a glass of champagne, so my natural responses (gawk/be silent/cry) were suppressed, and I think I managed some decent conversation, or at least did not just stutter like an unleashed Uzi.

One question is whether you should admit that you are a fan. I felt that, since their performances had moved and enthralled me, it would be nice to say so, and I feel I came off with at least some of my dignity remaining. After all, they do not perform in a vacuum and surely must want to hear they've touched someone.

With a plastic Hollywood megastar, it's bound to be a different matter. They have (in my experience) such shields up that it's impossible to say anything and have them listen, or indeed to say anything and have them take you even a little seriously.

Perhaps the best strategy is not to lead off with slavering adoration, but mention it if the time feels right. Don't faint (not me) or scream (not me) or stammer that the New York Times wrote a really great article on them (sadly me). Above all, keep your cool - no-one likes a hysteric.

Now or Later: Never

2008-10-22T20:41:00.003Z

From my blog at spearswms.com

Now or Later: Never

I find it hard to believe that the burghers of Chelsea are so politically and psychologically unaware that they can give Now or Later a thunderous ovation. Nevertheless, I was proved wrong last night as the play, which is as facile as it thinks it is deep, was sent off with plentiful applause.

Now or Later, by Christopher Shinn at the Royal Court, is set on American election night, as the son of the Democratic candidate sits in a hotel room, watching the results roll in and a scandal concerning him grow. He has been photographed dressed as Mohammed at a college party, and despite the entreaties of staffers, friends and family, refuses to back down.

These arguments form the body of the play, with characters tossing back and forth ideas of freedom of speech, religious and sexual equality and political principles. This would all be well and good if we had not already seen The West Wing, which did the exact same thing in greater depth with infinitely more style. This shallow man's Republic wants to deal in heavy issues, yet it only does so in cliches and speciosity.

Eddie Redmayne, the rising star playing John, the gay pseudo-Mohammed, would have his talents served so much better if he had lines with intelligence. His ability is clear, and the final image of him looking out of a window, broken and tearful and reflected back at himself, is a powerful one, which he handles well. But to be left spouting commonplaces about Islamic fundamentalism and American hypocrisy is an error.

I wish I had returned to my DVD player and seen what real insight into American politics was like, courtesy of Aaron Sorkin and Martin Sheen, instead of having to wade through the treacle of contrived debate, courtesy of Christopher Shinn.

Sex and the City and me

2008-06-11T15:56:00.005Z

After two weeks of tortuous waiting and half an hour of more tortuous adverts and trailers (why advertise so many cars before the ultimate chick flick), the plinky-plink of the Sex and the City theme tune started and my mind slipped (largely) into neutral. It stayed there most of the time, but did it ever have fun.

All the criticisms made by people who want to treat the film as a serious exercise in cinema are valid. Yes, its morality is vapid. Yes, there are more labels than in Topshop's factories. Yes, it does feel like five episodes tacked together. But yes yes yes, it is fabulous, and isn't that really what's important here? If you want 'satire' on fashion, watch Robert Altman's unwatchable Prêt à Porter.

The cast are all back, with public problems of catfights and pay gaps sufficiently submerged under an awe-inspiring wardrobe (as indeed is the one Big builds for Carrie). To the left is Sarah Jessica Parker in a Vivienne Westwood wedding dress, plus exotic cockatoo sur la tete. Characters are still delineated by clothes: Samantha (Kim Cattrall) is fierce in primary colour, Charlotte (Kristin Davis) does virginal chic, Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) seems to have been clothed largely by GAP casuals.

It is this simplicity of approach which largely prevents any particular complications evolving, other than the obvious ones. Someone is going to cheat on someone, someone will have commitment issues. The only interesting plotline is Samantha's, because she has always been the one with hidden depths and a great range of sensitivity, which is the more affecting for its few appearances.

I felt sorry for Cynthia Nixon, since she was taken back to her early, inconsiderate, over-businesslike persona just to have her shaken out of it. Since the show ended with her as a forgiving, more selfless woman, her cruelty (and it is quite cruel) is a straw (wo)man.

You have to hope that the actresses enjoyed making the movie, since it gives them lustre but fails to develop or explore their personalities as the six-year series allowed. Indeed, writer and director Michael Patrick King seems to glory in (inadvertently?) parodying his characters - when Samantha surprises the girls with not one but (gasp!) two bottles of champagne, you get the sense that someone is being mocked.

There are a few laugh-out-loud lines, even fewer of which are as smart as in the series, but there is plenty of fun to be had gliding over the surface of Louis Vuitton handbags.

Laura Solon: just listen

2008-06-03T16:01:00.002Z

I don't want to say too much about Laura Solon's new programme on Radio 4, Talking and Not Talking - it's too funny for description. Okay, it's also quite clever, so maybe discussion later. But now, just listen.

A Shrew tamed by laughter

2008-06-03T15:14:00.003Z

The Pantaloons, whose name could easily be a conflation of pantechnical and lunatics, are a troupe of former City high-flyers who turn the comedies and problem plays of Shakespeare into, well, problematic comedies.

Performing last week at The Scoop, an amphitheatrical basin next to the Greater London Authority's testicular home and in what is preposterously known as 'More London' (as if a small plot of new glass offices on the South Bank added something to the city), their Taming of the Shrew is now touring around the country. Good job, too - exposure to a knockabout, commedia dell'arte style of the Bard could well interest children, as well as amuse adults.

The Pantaloons' approach is for all five them of them to play as many roles as they can possibly conceive of, with perpetual on-stage costume changes, and to have a simple set, but dozens of props to be battered about. Using a more comic, riotous style, drawn from all genres of performance (including slapstick and silent movies), they hope to bring out energy that could otherwise be lost.

It is fair to claim that they do indeed bring a great deal of energy to the play, and the laughs (so easily missable in Shakespeare's comedies) are plentiful. They also include lots of material devised by them to soften any edges they think are too rough or inject a contemporary feel. This works humour-wise - bringing back Gremio, who feels excluded from the play was fine - and in fact even helps take your mind off what is a rather lumpen plot.

The obvious concomitant problem is that it is very hard to inject seriousness when people keep pulling their trousers down, and there is no less seriousness in the Shrew than anywhere else. It becomes quite difficult to appreciate Kate's pain with a sudden jack-knife into drama. The constant comedy runs the risk of underplaying the other elements.

Having said that, the comic elements were certainly enjoyable, despite the best efforts of three future young offenders (no older than 12 now), whose idea of hilarity was to ride their bikes into the Scoop and yell 'pillock' at the actors. One shouted something about magic mushrooms, which implies he may actually have been a child since the 60s.

Caitlin Storery was a wonderfully versatile Bianca and Gremio (with a Methuselah-esque beard), and Don Conway and Mark Hayward made a handsome, suave Lucentio and a tough Petruchio. Martin Gibbons was hilariously nerdy, and Sarah Norton a surprisingly violent Kate. Particularly well played was the scene when Lucentio and Hortensio are trying to teach Bianca.

The Pantaloons have a noble ideal and a novel concept, and it would be wonderful if they could tour all year, all about the country. But - and I can only imagine this, having seen just this - there are only so many plays, and so many times, this knockabout approach will work. Just like any other theatrical concept, its strength will be seen in its flexibility.

Savaging Grace

2008-06-02T17:16:00.004Z

Incest is evidently the new black, which is bad news for haute couture. As well as Polly Stenham's That Face, which I'll be able to review in a couple of weeks, the movie Savage Grace is out soon. Sadly, while awards bodies salivate over That Face, they'll be spitting on Savage Grace.

Based on the true story of the wealthy Baekelands - Barbara (Julianne Moore), a social climber; Brooks (Stephen Dillane), the heir to a plastics fortune; and their son, Tony (Eddie Redmayne) - Savage Grace follows the dysfunctional trio across the world as they hurt each other and make us miserable. Incest ensues, but not interest.

Instead of a plot, there are three beautiful people sleeping around and Julianne Moore acting hysterically. The only semblance of a plot comes in far too late, when Moore decides that the best way to 'cure' her son of homosexuality is to sleep with him. It's an effective scene, in that it makes your stomach churn, but after all the meandering, it's little recompense for the previous 75 minutes.

Director Tom Kalin has an assured hand, which is surprising since his last movie before Savage Grace (and directorial debut) was in 1992. He captures beautiful locations and beautiful actors (Redmayne has quite amazing lips), but where is the drama? Self-obsession naturally excludes an audience, but even the vain can be made interesting and given something to do. Instead, Kalin lets them get on with the tough business of being pretty, only fitfully prompting them TO DO SOMETHING.

When the projectionist failed to put on the fifth reel, there was an audible cry of relief. (It may or may not have been me.) But it got a laugh, and captured the sour feeling of the room. Savage Grace is a film that thinks it is showing you something profound about the capacity of humans to love and hurt each other; what it really does is show you how shallow and dull they can be.

The next greatest Shakespearean actors

2008-05-20T21:01:00.005Z

The RSC's Glorious Moment has been one of the triumphs of modern theatre, as fairly acknowledged by countless critics. It is not just the rapport between the cast, developed from two years in rehearsal and rep, nor the clever staging nor even Will's words.

These productions (of which I have seen five, and dreadfully regret not seeing the other three) have introduced me to those who I am convinced are the most brilliant Shakespearean actors of their generation: Jonathan Slinger and Katy Stephens.

Jonathan Slinger is evidently one of the stars of the company, since he opens and closes the series as Richards II and III. His Richard III hit most of the psychotic notes and an entire octave of original ones, giving him a wounded cruelty and a shiver of sadism, a faux vulnerability and joy in his cleverness. It was a monumentally memorable performance, not at all monotonous but highly entrancing (almost).

What really won me over was his Richard II (which, perversely, I saw last of all). I wasn't wild about the play, whose plot doesn't seem fully Shakespearean in its refinement, but there is absolutely no denying the complexity of Richard, which Slinger exploited with skill. The capriciousness which plunges his realm into trouble, the self-examination in his cell, the defiance, the joy, the anger, the cruelty, the rage - Slinger makes you feel every emotion and understand quite how Richard's mind is working.

It is not just with words and face that Slinger succeeds. His hands are constantly moving, as fast as his thoughts, playing out in the air what whirls through his brain. During his last, great speech in his jail cell, as he ponders time, the mind and the body, he focuses you on his words with his body language. In a word, captivating. In more words, he has an ultimately indefinable quality which shoots his vision into your mind and heart.

Katy Stephens has equally significant parts, as Joan la Pucelle in 1 Henry VI, Margaret of Anjou in Henry VI and Richard III and the Duchess of Gloucester in Richard II. These require more energy and passion than you would think could be offered by one actress, let alone the first two roles (less RIII) all in one day.

The turnabout from the violent, liberating maiden of France, down in the dirt and sharp as her knives, to the imperious, calculating queen, requires careful delineation, and Stephens' skill is both to unite but separate her characters, both contained at once in one figure. Her emotional breakdown over her son's body is traumatic, but watching Stephens build to this pitch throughout the last four plays gives it especial punch.

Slinger and Stephens should bestride our [Shakespearean] world like the colossi they are. They turned in epic, brain-branding performances of depth and yet clarity. Memories of them are what will stay with me the longest.

I spy...

2008-05-19T11:57:00.003Z

We spy on others – and are spied on by others – all the time. From conventional eavesdropping and peeking where we should not to the high-tech surveillance of the government and the measures of stalkers or peeping toms, uncovering the lives of others has an illicit fascination. The arts are well-versed in this voyeurism.

This week I had the misfortune to see Contains Violence at the Lyric Hammersmith. A show of almost breathtaking inanity and dullness, it places the audience on the Lyric’s terrace, equipping them with headphones and binoculars so we can spy into a building opposite and consume the play.

But instead of a Rear Window-esque thriller (more on which below), we are left dangling without an obvious plot (woman murders man several times) or credible characters. Instead of our voyeurism giving us a pleasurable, shameful thrill, the play holds your attention so little that it becomes more interesting to see what is going on in the other buildings around the theatre, which is actual voyeurism. Contains Violence is a perfect missed opportunity. It turns what could be a clever theatrical device into a gimmick, unnecessarily invoking voyeurism as a substitute for drama.

Hitchcock knew what to do. The tension of the immobilised James Stewart becoming involved in lives (and deaths) of others in Rear Window works perfectly. He gave us snippets which mount up into terror, brief glimpses and low-tech spying. It makes us just as voyeuristic as Stewart, desperately craning to see what comes next, and this double implication of actor and audience in the scene makes us think about our own voyeuristic desires and culpability. It is not something we are proud of, but we cannot turn away.

In serious works of art, the voyeurism is never solely – or at all – pleasurable. Compare Sliver with The Lives of Others. The former is a high-tech soft-porn movie where William Baldwin gets to spy on Sharon Stone’s breasts. (Why he didn’t just rent Basic Instinct is anyone’s guess.) The latter examines how we interact with those we spy on, through the eyes of a Stasi agent in late 80s East Germany; without exploitation, the morality and effects of spying are played out, with drama and humanity.

And of course paintings have been taking up voyeuristic perspectives for centuries. Think of Velazquez's Rokeby Venus, where we are introduced to Venus as she examines herself in a mirror. The genius of this is that not only are we voyeurs of her, but she seems to be looking at us too from the mirror. It is a private moment but one in which our spying is thrown back at us.

The thrill of what we might see – and the fact that we are not supposed to be seeing it – will be an eternal prompt to voyeurism. While it may be immoral, it is also endlessly fascinating. The art that makes us feel all of these contradictory emotions at once surely succeeds in being valuable, whereas – as with Contains Violence – the work that merely seeks to exploit voyeurism ends up without even the thrill.

Small but perfectly formed

2008-05-14T09:28:00.003Z

An experiment in scale and ambition, The Miniaturists presented an evening of five short plays at the Arcola, a taster menu of drama where what's good is savoured momentarily and what's bad is gone quickly.

The score card stacks up in favour of the Miniaturists, 3-2. There were three very interesting plays, perhaps the best of which was For a Button, by Rachel Barnett, which tells of two friends who are almost obsessively close. When one meets the man of her dreams, what will the other do? If this sounds a bit Basic Instinct-esque, it is in the furious, roiling, passionate subtext - the overt signals are comic, but there is a lot going on beneath the surface about over-intimacy and possession. With a very well-staged climax, For a Button was a small treasure, and the rapport between Rebecca Everett and Daisy Brydon was layered.

The other two successes were a moving monologue - one half of a phone conversation with an ex-boyfriend - by Declan Feenan (What About the Rent?), the emotion of which was largely ruined by someone's loud mobile phone ringtone, which they kindly neglected to deal with, and Shelter by Hilary Bell, featuring a daughter who comes up with an odd plan to help her neglected, acting-out mother. By painting this pairing quite sparely, it allowed us a lot of space to imagine the true, difficult nature of the bond. Ann Firbank as the mother was dry yet wounded.

The spare quality of Shelter was distinctly lacking from A Late Goodbye and Cadillaxing. The former was the entire breakdown of a relationship and was intended to show off a great grasp of human psychology, I think, since the writer, Paul Chadwick, is a professor of clinical psychology, but really just showed a deaf ear to drama and language. There was nothing which has not been tackled infinitely more subtly even on television soap operas.

Cadillaxing (by Christina Balit) was a scene from Drunken Yobville, Kent. The characters were stereotypes, from their high-heel-short-skirt trashiness to their unsurprising revelations, which were in fact exactly the kind of revelation you'd expect.

These are in fact short plays, rather than works in progress, so I don't expect we'll be seeing expanded versions any time soon, but an evening with the Miniaturists has made me eager to discover more of these playwrights.