Books and Arts

One of the miracles of art history is how painting, so often written off, keeps on coming back. Right now we are in the middle of just such a resurgence, and one sign of the current vitality of the medium is the emergence of painters such as Hurvin Anderson. Admittedly, Anderson – who was born in 1965 – has been emerging for a long time now. But, with the opening of a big retrospective at Tate Britain, his status as a major figure in modern British art is clear. Anderson is completely individual yet visibly connected to the tradition – indeed, to several traditions – and capable of creating huge, wall-filling canvases into which you can sink and float away, but which also make you think and feel.

How times change. Our forebears once thought that full-figured Bill Haley was at the razor-sharp, frighteningly decadent and anarchic edge of pop culture. Compared to the Rolling Stones’ subsequent carnival of drug busts, court appearances, car crashes, house fires, paternity suits and chosen or enforced overseas exile, not to mention the matter of Keith Richards’s alleged blood transfusion, or of his unusual choice in dispersing his father’s ashes (cocaine, nostril), Haley’s act now seems as quaint as the background accompaniment to an Edwardian tea-dance.

Covent Garden’s new Ring cycle has reached Siegfried, and once again, you can only marvel at Wagner’s Shakespeare-like ability to anticipate modern preoccupations. Want to talk about the manosphere? Well, here’s opera’s most profound study of the playful, disruptive, world-making energy of the adolescent male psyche. The least interesting thing that you can say about Siegfried is that he’s an impulsive oaf. Well, duh. Have you never met (or if you’re really unfortunate, been) a teenage boy? Wagner could hardly make it more clear. Siegfried’s upbringing has been toxic. He has been isolated from humanity, and his only inkling of love has been brutally transactional.

The title of David Byrne’s most recent album and current tour is Who Is The Sky? The phrase works two ways. Read literally, it has the playful 1960s feel of a Yoko Ono film or some absurdist Fluxus piece; firmly on brand, in other words, for someone as steeped as Byrne in New York’s downtown art lore. Read it aloud, however, and it becomes “Who Is This Guy?,” a more pointed title for an artist who has always seemed – to reference an old Talking Heads song – one of rock’s more slippery people. At the second of two recent Glasgow dates, both interpretations seem to fit. In Talking Heads, Byrne was a jerky, remote presence, aloof to the point of alien.

More than 30 contemporary artists have contributed to the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition, which asks what it’s like to age at a time of unparalleled longevity. But as so often happens at the Wellcome’s exhibitions, it’s the ephemera that draw the eye first. “These 2 men are the same age,” says a leaflet advertising Kellogg’s All-Bran breakfast cereal. “One has driving power – energy – the will to succeed. The other is listless – tired all the time – it is an effort for him to plod through each day’s work.” The point being that aging is, to a not inconsiderable degree, something we do to ourselves, and something we do to each other. It is a process, not an event.