Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

This strategy won Eurovision. It could also save your life

Oskar Morgenstern grew up in Vienna, John von Neumann in Budapest. Clearly the same Austro-Hungarian intellectual spirit which gave rise to Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele and their seminal joint work Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour is still alive in that part of the world, because the Austrians chose a bearded transvestite to represent them in the Eurovision song contest. Oskar and John would have been very proud. If you want a really childish explanation of game theory, it is that when everyone else goes around shouting ‘rock’, a few smart people should start to shout ‘paper’. And perhaps a few really smart and really brave people, figuring out this

Camilla Swift

Norman Thelwell: much more than a one-trick pony

‘The natural aids to horsemanship are the hands, the legs, the body and the voice.’ But a Thelwell pony sometimes required some, er, additional aids. Norman Thelwell’s first pony cartoon was published in Punch magazine in 1953 and struck a nerve with readers; so much so that the editor asked Thelwell for a double-page spread of ponies. ‘I was appalled. I thought I’d already squeezed the subject dry,’ he later recalled. But of course he hadn’t, and Penelope and her pony Kipper went on to become his most popular characters. It may be in pony cartoons that Thelwell found his niche, but he wasn’t just a one-trick pony. As Thelwell

Kate Chisholm

When Virginia Woolf’s husband ruled Sri Lanka’s jungles

Tucked away in the schedules, just before midday, just after midweek (on Thursday), just four lines in the Radio Times, was one of those radio gems. Nothing remarkable on the surface, but every so often sparkling with insight, or a different way of seeing. Woolf in the Jungle (produced by Dan Shepherd) took us to Sri Lanka (or rather Ceylon) in 1904 when a young Leonard Woolf arrived on the teardrop island, with his wire-haired terrier Charles, 70 volumes of Voltaire, and absolutely no political, business or legal experience. He had been sent out to work as an officer in the Ceylon Civil Service, and very soon was posted to

James Walton

So Dylan Thomas was a drunk: does this TV drama have anything else to say?

According to its executive producer Griff Rhys Jones, A Poet in New York (BBC2, Sunday) sought to rescue Dylan Thomas from the ‘forces of sanctity and hagiography that now hover over his shade’. Instead, we’d be reminded that he was ‘a hollering bohemian roustabout’ — which is presumably Griff’s longhand for ‘a drunk’. By that measure, the programme was a triumphant success, even if fewer people may have been startled by the revelation of Thomas’s booziness than Griff seems to think. As a piece of television, though, it suffered badly from the decision to concentrate on Thomas’s alcohol-laden final days in New York, which inevitably led to a lack of

Deborah Ross

Avoid the latest commercial juggernaut and go off-road with Run & Jump

When you see the latest corporate entertainment juggernaut hurtling at you, what are your options? When I saw X-Men: Days of Future Past (what?) hurtling at me, I thought: I can either jump aboard or I can swerve off-road. In this instance, I chose to swerve off-road — I’ve seen Godzilla; I’ve done my time — and although it could have ended in disaster, and I could have been hurled into a ditch or something, it actually worked out great, as I swerved off-road straight into Run & Jump, which is a lovely film, just lovely, and although nothing gets blown up, it does star Maxine Peake, whose performance may

Lloyd Evans

Memo to Nick Payne: filling your plays with cosmic chit-chat doesn’t make you intelligent

How do you write a play? Here’s one theory. Put a guy up a tree, throw rocks at him, get him down again. It’s a good working template. Nick Payne’s latest script, Incognito, uses a different scheme. You put 21 guys up a tree, set them jabbering for 90 minutes and then go home. This cumbersome structure is greatly damaged by the decision to hire just four actors to play all 21 characters. And the locations, covering six decades, leap so often between Britain and America as to induce dizziness and possibly vomiting. There are no changes of costume, or set, to indicate where you are. You just have to

Hugo Shirley

A Rosenkavalier without a heart ain’t much of a Rosenkavalier

In all its minute details, Der Rosenkavalier is rooted in a painstakingly stylised version of Rococo Vienna that, paradoxically, is further fixed in a web of cannily juxtaposed anachronisms. Upset their balance and you risk upsetting the balance of the whole piece. That’s no bad thing, of course, but Richard Jones’s bold new production for Glyndebourne — opening the festival’s 80th season — shows exactly the advantages and disadvantages of doing that. Out go the dusty stucco-work and wobbly walls of elderly traditional productions; in come Paul Steinberg’s sharp sets and Jones’s trademark garish wallpaper, which Mimi Jordan Sherin’s brilliant lighting floods with further shifting colours. White wigs remain, but

Giannandrea Poesio

Romeo, Juliet and Mussolini

George Balanchine’s Serenade, the manifesto of 20th-century neoclassical choreography, requires a deep understanding of both its complex stylistic nuances and its fascinatingly elusive visual metaphors. Many recent stagings have failed to meet such criteria,  but not the performance I saw last week. Things did not exactly start especially well, as the opening group of ladies with raised arms lacked ‘magic’ evenness. But as soon as both Marianela Nuñez and Lauren Cuthbertson darted on stage, the whole performance became incandescent. The two artists, perfect modern-day incarnations of Balanchine’s female ideal, were soon joined by the equally superb Melissa Hamilton and the neoclassical perfection of Matthew Golding. Ryoichi Hirano, too, was good,

Monday

Fisun Güner

What makes art art? And why gaming may not make the grade

Every now and then, you’ll come across an article which puts a case for something or other being taken seriously as an ‘art form’.  Designing computer games, cake-making, upholstery, you name it, sooner or later it’ll be up there with painting the Sistine Chapel. And the more elaborate or intricate the process of production, the more earnest the appeals of the writer seeking artistic validation. And sometimes the article will even come right out and say it: ‘This [insert the thing being promoted as a Serious Artistic Endeavour] is art. It’s as much art as Turner’s late paintings, which were once dismissed as “soap suds and whitewash” by the sneering

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

A photographer sheds new light on Constable Country

The phrase ‘Constable Country’ summons up a quintessentially English landscape: river and meadows, open vistas bordered by trees, the greens and golds of cultivated acres, with the wide (and often blustery) skies of East Anglia over all. John Constable (1776–1837) is one of our greatest artists and certainly one of the most popular. His vision of rural England has become a cherished ideal of how landscape should look, and is as much a state of mind as a real place. In actuality it is based around the village of East Bergholt where Constable was born, in the Essex–Suffolk border country, and extends through Dedham Vale and the valley of the

Martin Gayford

The brilliant neurotics of the late Renaissance

In many respects the average art-lover remains a Victorian, and the Florentine Renaissance is one area in which that is decidedly so. Most of us, like Ruskin, love the works of 15th-century artists of that city — Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Ghiberti — and are much less enthusiastic about those of the 16th. But a superb exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: Diverging Paths of Mannerism, might change some minds. It contains pictures that are intense in emotion, eccentric, mysterious, sometimes bizarre and — to a 21st-century eye — appealingly neurotic. Rosso Fiorentino and Pontormo were almost exact contemporaries, born within a few months of each other

Matilda Bathurst

What was Allen Ginsberg doing in Wales? LSD

‘Valleys breathe, heaven and earth move together,/ daisies push inches of yellow air, vegetables tremble,/ grass shimmers green…’ The characteristic undulations of the voice of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg greet the visitor on entering Wales Visitation: Poetry, Romanticism and Myth in Art at the National Museum Cardiff. Bearded and mellifluous, projected to mythic proportions across a vast expanse of wall, Ginsberg is seen reading his poem ‘Wales Visitation’ on American television in 1968, telling less of visits than of visions. What was the Blakeian, Buddhist, drug-sampling poet doing in Wales? LSD. What he’s doing dominating an exhibition so thoroughly Welsh, formed almost entirely from the Museum’s impressive national collection,

Laura Gascoigne

When Raquel Welch danced on a table at Cinecittà

Before there was Hello!, OK! and Closer, there was Oggi. Oggi was the magazine my Italian mother used to flick through on the long dark English winter evenings. Its celebrity photo spreads were for her the armchair equivalent of the Italian national pastime, the ‘passeggiata’. The Years of La Dolce Vita, revisited in a new exhibition at the Estorick Collection, were the glory years of Oggi. The show draws on an archive of more than a million images taken by Marcello Geppetti (1933–1998), the street photojournalist ranked by American Photo ‘the most undervalued photographer in history’. Geppetti worked the poshest passeggiata strip in Italy, the Via Veneto, 1960s hangout of

Johnnie Kerr

A Waiting for Godot that’ll make you laugh as much as it’ll make you despair

I have to remind myself that Waiting for Godot is a confounding piece of theatre. It’s supposed to be. The famous repudiations Beckett made to its interpreters, the ignorance he professed of its characters, were more than just cryptic obfuscation. ‘The only thing I’m sure of,’ he is said to have said, ‘is that they’re wearing bowlers.’ Likewise his sole description of the set: ‘A country road. A tree.’ All deliberately, maddeningly vague. And the tradition since has often been to treat the play as virtually untouchable, to dismiss any thought of embellishing Beckett’s wasteland with new ideas. So Vladimir and Estragon have always been imagined, by director after director,

Ben Wilkinson

This is Anfield

Living up to its fabled buzz, the Kop roared and rose even before kick-off. Down in the main stand I watched; John Barnes adjusting his captain’s band on the hallowed turf. Waves of red in rows and rows – a kid in that season’s kit, I swelled with a kind of borrowed pride, belonging without belonging; my dad and brother craning to see McManaman darting, how Fowler propelled strike after strike.                                 Half-time over, and a crashing header left the keeper without a chance … the place erupted. I still remember it like that – the luminous pitch, the echo of the terraces, players floodlit beneath an October sky. An ordinary

Niru Ratnam

The rise of the art fair – and the death of the small gallery

In 1967, two Cologne-based gallerists came up with the Cologne Art Market — a trade fair where German galleries could set up temporary gallery-style spaces for a few days to showcase their stock. The following year, three dealers in Basel copied the idea but opened up their event to international galleries. For years these two art fairs were discrete yearly shows which were in the background to far more visible gallery exhibitions, museum shows and biennials. Today there are hundreds of art fairs, with an explosion of these in the last few years. Last December 18 different art fairs took place in the same week in Miami alone. There are

David Blackburn

The general who scribbled and doodled his way around the British empire

Soldier scribes are rare, soldier artists rarer still, and soldiers who can write and draw rarest of all. General Henry Hope Crealock (1831–1891) was one such polymath. He scribbled and doodled as he fought his way around Victoria’s empire. He was a decorated veteran of the Siege of Sebastapol, the Second Opium War, India and the Anglo–French march on Peking in 1860. In the Anglo–Zulu War of 1879 (Rourke’s Drift and all that) Crealock commanded First Division and sent sketches of the campaign to the Illustrated London News. His work provides an invaluable account of the history he helped to forge. After retiring in 1884, Crealock spent his declining years

Kate Chisholm

The best blues singer you’ve never heard of

A rustle of paper as the sleeve is removed. A clunk and click as the needle arm is swung across. The needle hits the vinyl, bringing it to life. At first there’s a lot of crackling in the ether. Then at last the music begins. A sultry saxophone. A few notes on the guitar, slow, low and relaxed. At last the voice enters. It’s not at all what you would expect from that swingband opening. The voice is strong, unmelodic, harsh almost, but so passionate you’re drawn in straight away. We’re told it’s Little Miss Cornshucks. She’s singing a version of ‘Try a little tenderness’ that sounds just as good,

James Delingpole

Thank God for the Game of Thrones imp – and the heaving breasts

Which character are you in Game of Thrones? For me it’s got to be the imp, Tyrion Lannister. As Ed West suggested in his erudite Speccie article a few weeks ago, Tyrion is about the only character with a vaguely sympathetic 21st-century mindset as opposed to a ruthlessly pragmatic medieval one. Persecuted since childhood because he’s a dwarf, he understands — as his fellow members of the ruling class generally do not — what it is to be marginalised, downtrodden and thus empathetic. And the other reason to identify with him is that he’s not going to die. I say this without any knowledge of what happens in George R.R.

Deborah Ross

The humans in Godzilla are so bland and dull you may well find yourself rooting for the monster

Godzilla is from the director Gareth Edwards, a Brit whose first film, Monsters, truly put him on the map, as it daringly played with the genre, and incorporated a plausible human love story, and the difference between that film and this may be summed up as follows: whereas Monsters was a clever and inventive film made for relatively little money ($500,000), this is a quite stupid film made for a lot of money ($160 million). Oh dear. It sounds like I’m wearing my disapproving hat again, although I don’t always. For example, I take it off for special occasions, and sometimes even in bed. (Sometimes yes, sometimes no; depends.) What’s