Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Don’t blame Kanye for his abject idiocy

Grade: C– Kanye? No, I can’t, quite. I will always quietly overlook the idiotic political sensibilities of the conformist millennial legions who comprise our pop charts – the keffiyeh-clad Hamas wannabes, the BLM halfwits, the greenies, the men-can-be-women wankpuffins – in order to let their music be judged on its own merits, free from boomer political disdain. But songs such as ‘Heil Hitler’ and all those swastikas? Well, they are just a stretch too far for me. The man is an abject moron. Some will say, so what? There have been loads of abject morons down the years in pop. Why draw a line in the sand for Kanye West?

Lloyd Evans

The National Theatre needs help

In The Print is a docudrama about the bitter war between Rupert Murdoch and the unions in the mid-1980s. Murdoch was determined to computerise the production of his UK titles and to terminate the far left’s stranglehold on his business. Daily papers are vulnerable to last-minute strikes and his thieving employees made no secret of their larcenous tactics. The print workers, known as ‘inkies’, earned £1,000 a week for 16 hours’ work and their union, Sogat, behaved like a bunch of racketeers. They laughed at Murdoch by submitting wage claims for employees called ‘Donald Duck’ and ‘Ronald Reagan’. Murdoch fought back with smart, imaginative tactics that Sogat, under Brenda Dean’s

Graeme Thomson

Unrelentingly entertaining: Basement Jaxx reviewed

How would you like your nostalgia served, sir (and it is usually ‘sir’): in mist-shrouded monochrome or crazed lysergic Technicolor? Last week I saw two bands in the same venue, a few days apart. Neither having released any new material for more than a decade, both duly crammed their sets with their greatest hits. And yet one felt like the future, and the other like the past. Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe, aka turn-of-the-millennium electronic duo Basement Jaxx, should be credited for having great sport with that in-built characteristic of almost all electronic outfits. Namely, that two or three blokes pushing a bunch of keys and buttons cannot hope to

Richard Bratby

An outstanding Turn of the Screw

Never let it be said that The Spectator fails to follow up an arts story. Long-term readers will recall that in the edition of 6 March 1711 Joseph Addison investigated the supply of live sparrows for the first production of Handel’s Rinaldo. ‘What, are they to be roasted?’ he asked, reasonably enough. No, they were ‘to enter towards the end of the first Act and to fly about the Stage’. Still, you need to keep an eye on these theatrical types and although there was certainly birdsong in the latest revival of Rinaldo – the end-of-term opera at the Royal Academy of Music – I can report it was recorded.

Deborah Ross

A hypnotic new adaptation of The Stranger

François Ozon’s The Stranger is an adaptation of Albert Camus’ 1942 novel about a clerk who – spoiler alert* – senselessly murders an Arab in broad daylight on a hot Algerian beach. Why did he do it? ‘It was because of the sun’ is all he can suggest. Existential ennui: that’s what’s at play here, which isn’t generally a great draw at the cinema. It would come way down on most people’s lists. But miraculously, Ozon has managed to make a film about boredom without making a boring film. If nothing else, the radiant black and white aesthetic will grab you from the off and then never let go. Visually,

Rupert Christiansen

A mesmerising new work from English National Ballet

Crystal Pite is one of a handful of truly original choreographers today, extending the boundaries of her art form without going all doolally about trendy gender issues, AI or neuroscience. She is rooted in something more universal – the tension between conflict and connection, between what draws us together and what keeps us apart. ‘We want to individuate,’ she says. ‘Yet we want to belong.’ Out of this grows Body & Soul, in which individuals fight their way out of great swarms and cocoons, only to be sucked back into an inexorable flow that snakes and stiffens, multiplies and divides. Using only  soberly clerical black and white costumes and lighting

Robin Simon

The truth about artists’ optical aids

The first thing you see on entering this major new Viennese exhibition is not one of Canaletto and his nephew Bernardo Bellotto’s majestic paintings of London, Venice or Vienna, but a camera obscura. The magical art of both artists depended upon this simple but effective device, which exploits pin-hole projection – an optical phenomenon that had been known since antiquity.  The decision to open the show at the Kunsthistorisches Museum with a deceptively boring little wooden box amounts to a curatorial throwing down of the gauntlet. Because – although I find it hard to fathom – there are still art historians and critics out there who refuse to countenance the

Wednesday

George Morony

Sex, Bacon and bad haircuts: Cecily Brown is back

Cecily Brown, like pop art, moved from Britain to America and found an audience. Picture Making, her new show at Serpentine South Gallery, is a return to the country of her birth – her first solo exhibition here since 2005. Brown has steered clear of art movements. But she has a reverential attitude toward art history that keeps her work from identifying with recent genres of painting that have tried to escape either subject or materiality, or that have tried to collapse the space between painting and life. The subjects she recycles from art history are, as a rule, more interesting than what she drags up when she mines her personal

Tuesday

Deborah Ross

The Drama makes no sense

The Drama is the latest from Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli whose films (Sick of Myself, Dream Scenario) always cause a stir, and this is no exception. It stars Hollywood big-hitters Robert Pattinson and Zendaya as a happily engaged couple whose forthcoming wedding may not go ahead after one discovers a disturbing truth about the other. What is this disturbing truth? It would be a spoiler to tell you – even though the details are splashed all over the internet and have already created a backlash. (Don’t look it up. Or do. I’m not your boss.) It is intended to shock but it may not be as shocking as it thinks

Calvin Po

The man who rescued the Notre-Dame

The Notre-Dame de Paris has had several close shaves down the years – even before the 2019 fire that nearly obliterated it. The revolutionaries temporarily turned it into a ‘Temple of Reason’, then a grain warehouse; some of it was even sold for scrap. It only became the recognisable Gothic fantasy and French national icon that we know today largely down to the efforts of architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who headed its definitive restoration from 1844 to 1864. Following the cathedral’s 2024 rebirth, Bard Graduate Center is now hosting the most comprehensive exhibition in the Anglosphere of the architect’s work. Viollet-le-Duc kept superhuman working hours: 6 a.m. to midnight. And this

Michael Hann

It’s time to redefine what we mean by classic rock

Classic rock used to be an American radio genre made up of bluesy guitar bands from the past. It spawned Fathers’ Day compilation albums, a magazine and endless lists where ‘Stairway to Heaven’, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Free Bird’ argued among themselves about which was the public’s favourite. But that’s not classic rock any longer; that’s heritage rock, music by the dead or dying. When the radio format was invented, the bands it celebrated were largely extant, or only recently departed; the oldest of the musicians were not yet 40. Their music was both current and nostalgic because new groups were still nicking from them, and their songs weren’t yet period

Hermione Eyre

How sure are we that all the Michaelina Wautiers at the RA are by her?

Roll up, there’s a new old master in town. Or a new old mistress, if you prefer. Michaelina Wautier (1614-89) is revealed here as a painter who excelled within the genres of her time: flower painting, portraiture, emblematic tronies, and, if the scholars are right, classical epic, too. The new Royal Academy show cracks open the received idea of what a Flemish woman operating in the decades immediately after Rubens and Van Dyck could achieve. Her c.1650 self-portrait at the easel is a confident statement. She is enthroned under a mantel of lusciously painted black velvet, which looks restrictive, but emerging from it comes her agile, three-dimensional painting hand. Her

James Walton

Over-cautious and clumsy: The Downfall of Huw Edwards reviewed

It’s not easy for a drama to be over-cautious and clumsy at the same time. Or to turn a real-life story that shocked (and, let’s face it, titillated) the nation into an oddly flat piece of television. So how did the much-hyped Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards manage to do both? The answer, I’d suggest, is by failing to interrogate – or even engage much – with its own material. Instead, it opted to simply pass on the facts drawn from its own research, making only the most half-hearted and sometimes contradictory attempts to explain them. The programme began with Edwards (Martin Clunes) in his voice-of the-nation pomp, as

Lloyd Evans

Self Esteem is the star of this David Hare musical

Teeth ’ n’ Smiles is not quite a musical. David Hare’s 1975 play about rock’n’roll includes a handful of tunes performed by a group of failing musicians. It feels like several dramas rammed together. One strand concerns the aimless witter of instrumentalists who lounge around backstage discussing drugs and groupies. Another strand follows the lead singer, Maggie, and her destructive appetites for booze and casual sex. The third element concerns the band’s manager, Saraffian (Phil Daniels), who knows nothing about showbusiness and seems keen to advertise his ignorance to the world. Saraffian is a Dickensian figure who talks like Fagin and believes that pop stars should resemble school prefects. The

Richard Bratby

The joy of American romanticism

Grade: A– For some record collectors, the fun lies in comparing recordings of standard repertoire. For others, it’s more about exploring – discovering works that are extinct in the concert hall, but which the inscrutable economics of recording make viable. If you’ve a habit of forming modest crushes on wallflowers and unfashionable composers, the news that Chandos is recording the orchestral music of Edward MacDowell (1860-1908) will bring a pleasant flush of blood to the cheeks. MacDowell, in short, is what American classical music sounded like before there was such a thing as American classical music – before Copland, Gershwin and all that jazz. Romantic, in other words; very, very

Margaret Mitchell

The art of Schiaparelli

It’s a great shame that Elsa Schiaparelli is less widely known than her rival Chanel. Perhaps that’s down to how difficult her name is to pronounce. Is it ‘shap’, ‘skap’ or ‘skyap’? Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, answers with a quip from Schiaparelli herself: ‘No one knows how to say it, but everyone knows what it means.’ The V&A’s new exhibition Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art traces the web of influences around one of the great couture houses of the 20th century. Like Coco Chanel (I hate to compare them), Elsa Schiaparelli created clothes for the modern, independent woman – it is now conventional to say so but they ‘pushed

Saturday

Tim Shipman

Tim Shipman, Ben Clerkin, Maxwell Marlow & Hermione Eyre

24 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: looking back to 1973, Tim Shipman wonders how bad the energy crisis could get; Ben Clerkin interviews Steve Hilton, the former Cameron aide running to be California’s next governor; Maxwell Marlow explains how to solve the student debt crisis; and finally, ‘disorientatingly enjoyable’ is the verdict of Hermione Eyre as she reviews David Hockney at the Serpentine. Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Tim Shipman, Ben Clerkin, Maxwell Marlow & Hermione Eyre

Wednesday

Hermione Eyre

This Hockney show is disorientatingly enjoyable

When so much contemporary art is riven with obscurity and angst, it is disorientating, at first, to encounter something as straightforwardly enjoyable as Hockney’s latest exhibition. Aged 88, the artist went out into his garden in Normandy with his iPad to make a visual diary of the year 2020. A hundred or so of the iPad sketches he made have been put together here, blended into a frieze, a walk-through panorama of the seasons rendered with Vivaldi-like virtuosity. As we move along the curve of this frieze, we see nature through Hockney’s bright yellow spectacles As we move along the curve of this 90-metre frieze, we see nature through Hockney’s

Daisy Dunn

China wants robots to look after the elderly

An AI data centre – imagine a factory of buzzing wires and computing equipment cooled by industrial fans – can consume as much power as a city. It has been estimated that, not too long from now, we’ll require 92 cities’ worth of extra power just to meet the demands of artificial intelligence. Ergo, the heat is on – but so, it is said, is a new cold war. On Radio 4 last week, Misha Glenny was exploring how the rapid evolution of technology is shaping the rivalry between the US and China. It turns out that the race for pre-eminence – in AI, at least – is as close

James Delingpole

Goodwill will not save Claudia Winkleman’s new chat show

Claudia Winkleman has a chat show on the BBC. I’m struggling to understand why this is a story but I listened to an entertainment-industry podcast recently which tried to explain. Apparently, chat shows are ratings death; hardly anyone watches them, so TV execs are very reluctant to launch new ones. But because of Traitors, Winkleman is now huge, bigger even than Ant and Dec, so against their better judgment they decided to give her a shot. If Winkleman’s chat show flops and doesn’t get recommissioned she shouldn’t blame herself, just the genre They’re probably regretting it, though. Everyone wants Claudia to do well because she seems nice. But goodwill and