Arts feature

Despite promises, the London Olympics is set to leave us with a legacy of unwanted buildings. We should cut costs and have flatpack movable stadia, says Ross Clark The complex used for the 1908 Olympics became known as White City. For 2012, the challenge is not to create a White Elephant City. While gymnastics can impress and beach volleyball entertain, the Olympic sport that has spectators truly gasping is property development. It has become almost a cliché that each Olympic city be left with a host of monumental venues that were built to sell the host city to the world but that lie empty for years while citizens struggle to pay the bill. Even before the credit crunch, London 2012 was conceived as the Olympic Games that would put an end to the gargantuan waste.

A museum dedicated to Charlie Chaplin will open soon. William Cook gets a preview and talks to the star’s son Michael about life with a legend Standing in the deserted drawing-room of Charlie Chaplin’s Swiss château, waiting to meet his eldest surviving son, Michael, I remember something Auberon Waugh once said to Naim Attallah. ‘A lot of sons of famous fathers seem to be upset by the circumstance, even destroyed by it,’ said Waugh. ‘But I don’t think they need be. It entirely depends on the personality.’ However, Waugh was merely the son of the best British novelist of the last century. The man I’ve travelled here to meet is the son of the 20th century’s biggest film star — for a while, the most famous man in the world.

Tom Conti tells Mary Wakefield how to get inside a woman’s mind I watched Shirley Valentine again last night. It’s different when you’re older. At 14 it’s impossible to imagine that any sane woman would talk to a wall — or put up with that dour, demanding husband for so many years. When you’re 35, well, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched, does it? Tom Conti (as Costas, the love interest) looks better, too, this time round — more attractive. When you’re a teen, you’ve no idea how rare it is to find a middle-aged man who looks good in jeans. As the credits scrolled up over sundown in Mykonos, I was full of an unsettled longing for retsina, self-actualisation and holiday romance.

Assailed on all sides by cultural vacuity, we are more than ever in need of the life lessons of Beethoven, argues Michael Henderson We do not, as a rule, meet all our loves at once. Those things which mean so much to us in our emotional maturity did not always strike us as special presences. Indeed, we may have been suspicious of, or felt hostility towards, some of the supreme works of art, and the minds that created them: many an indentured Wagnerian had first to leap through the magic fire of his initially forbidding music dramas. Last week, therefore, as I sat in the drawing-room of a house in central London, and watched Gábor Takács-Nagy, founder of the Takács Quartet, supervise another superb ensemble, the Belcea, as they played through Beethoven’s Op.

Henrietta Bredin talks to the Earl of Harewood about a life in opera In his memoir, The Tongs and the Bones, the Earl of Harewood ruefully quotes his uncle, the Duke of Windsor, remarking, ‘It’s very odd about George and music. You know, his parents were quite normal — liked horses and dogs and the country.’ As it happens, George Harewood also likes horses and dogs and the country — and football and cricket and fishing — but in addition he has had, from an early age, an abiding passion for music. At the start of the second world war, while he was still at school, he notched up as many performances by Sadler’s Wells Opera as he could and tuned into static-ridden radio broadcasts of operas from Italy, Germany and Hungary.

It’s an irony of Western art that our vision of modern metropolitan life was shaped, via Impressionism, by ukiyo-e prints — ‘pictures of the floating world’ of Edo, Japan. It’s an irony of Western art that our vision of modern metropolitan life was shaped, via Impressionism, by ukiyo-e prints — ‘pictures of the floating world’ of Edo, Japan. In his new exhibition, Tokyo, at Flowers East, Jiro Osuga updates that vision for the 21st century. The son of a Japanese businessman, Osuga left his native Tokyo for London in 1970 at the age of 12 and studied at Chelsea and the Royal College of Art.

Philip Ziegler puts the case for Terence Rattigan, whose centenary is celebrated with numerous revivals of his work After decades in the doldrums, Terence Rattigan seems once more to be returning to popular and critical favour. Last year After the Dance was one of the National Theatre’s more emphatic successes, and the centenary of Rattigan’s birth is being celebrated by productions of his plays at the Old Vic, the Jermyn Street Theatre and in Northampton, West Yorkshire and Chichester. There is to be a Rattigan season at the British Film Institute, and a new screen adaptation of The Deep Blue Sea. Rattigan, it seems, is back. Of course, he never really went away.

Lloyd Evans talks to Sophie Thompson, whose lack of vanity defines her approach to acting Straight off, as soon as I meet Sophie Thompson, I can see the look she’s striving for. Elegant ragamuffin. Torn jeans, scruffy trainers and a charity-shop blouse all offset by some peachy designer accessory worth five grand. Then I realise there’s no peachy accessory. She’s just pulled on her gardening gear and left it at that. And not a trace of make-up either which, for a woman over 45 — even though she looks ten years younger — is either reckless or bold. Or perhaps just genuinely modest. Thompson is starring in the social satire Clybourne Park, which opened at the Royal Court last autumn and arrives in the West End this week.

Mark Greaves talks to the artist Peter Howson about his latest commission and his demons Peter Howson started hallucinating last summer. Lying awake at night, he saw what he describes as ‘devils, demons and goblins’. They told him there was no point in living; that he might as well do away with himself. It was, he says, probably the worst year of his life. He felt as if he had been abandoned by God. At times he says he couldn’t really walk or see. He made himself feel better by reading the Book of Job — in which Job’s children die, his possessions are destroyed and his skin covered in boils as part of a test by God. I am anxious about meeting him in such a delicate state.

It’s time to heed the complaints and free art schools from the constraints of the university system, says Niru Ratnam The Turner Prize award ceremony always attracts protest — usually in the shape of the Stuckists, a group of bedraggled, eccentric-looking artists who gather outside Tate Britain in funny hats and bemoan the death of representational painting. But this year they were upstaged by around 200 art students, who entered the museum in the afternoon and refused to leave, staging what was described as a ‘teach-in’. In addition to wearing their own humorous hats, the students made speeches, marched round and chanted.

Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain, talks to Ariane Bankes about the planned revamp of the museum and 100 different ways of showing sculpture The evening after first meeting Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain, I bumped into a mutual friend who told me, only half-joking, that she could be frightening. Fair enough, I thought: to become the first woman director of one of Britain’s pre-eminent public galleries you have to frighten a few people along the way. As it happened, I hadn’t found her alarming at all at the press briefing that morning: direct, brisk, purposeful — she was, after all, embarking on a wholesale top-to-toe redesign and rehang of the gallery — but approachable.

Damian Thompson highlights the gems among the prolific and pilloried composer’s nine million notes The extraordinary thing about Franz Liszt is that he remains one of the most famous composers of the 19th century despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of his music is forgotten — and likely to stay forgotten. He wrote enough of it, that’s for sure. If you were to listen to his works one after another without interruption, it would take about a week. I’m basing that estimate on the fact that Leslie Howard’s 98 CDs of Liszt’s complete piano music, which are just about to be reissued by Hyperion, last for just over five days. That’s nine million notes spread over 12 miles of printed pages, in case you were wondering.

The rights and wrongs of internships for those who are seeking a first job have been hotly debated in the press recently, and nowhere more so than with reference to young people who hope to make a career in arts and music administration. But the principles remain the same whatever the discipline: is it legal for an organisation to employ people who are usually given a stipulated job when they become an intern, and not to pay them; and is it acceptable that these opportunities tend to go to young people who are already rich enough (through parental support or earnings from a gap year many cannot afford to take in the first place) to underwrite the costs of living while earning nothing?

Niru Ratnam invites you to join in and take off your trousers in the name of art at the taxpayer’s expense — while you still can In the week before the G20 summit in early 2009, I found myself sitting at a large, round, glass-topped table in the new extension to the Whitechapel Gallery. A large tapestry copy of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ hung on one of the walls nearby. Around the table were 30-odd people made up of students, random art folk, regulars of the Anarchist Bookshop located in the alley next to the gallery and, somewhat incongruously, the managing director of the Whitechapel Gallery looking dapper, if increasingly confused, in the chair. We had all been invited along to respond to ‘the current political and economic climate’.