Culture

Philip Larkin once remarked that Art Tatum, a jazz musician given to ornate, multi-noted flourishes on the keyboard, reminded him of ‘a dressmaker, who having seen how pretty one frill looks, makes a dress bearing ninety-nine’. If you substitute paintings of flower-beds and dappled sunlight for chromatic keyboard runs, something similar is true of the new blockbuster at the Royal Academy, Painting the Modern Garden. That, however, is only half the verdict on this curious affair. It is a show that feels a bit overblown — like a visit to an enormous Victorian conservatory — but contained inside it is another, triumphantly successful exhibition that is inspiring, exalting and almost entirely about Claude Monet.

Has a new art installation opened up at the Capitoline museum? One might be forgiven for thinking so: nude sculptures were recently encased in white wooden boxes so that only their heads could be seen. So modern! So fresh! So radical! Except there was nothing radical about it. Instead, Italian authorities took the decision to cover up the ancient nude statues in honour of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's official visit to Rome, during his first trip to Europe since international sanctions against his country were lifted. Rouhani and his entourage could not, reportedly, cope with the sight of marble sculptures of naked women, including a Venus dating back to the second century BC.

Like Black Rod and the Poet Laureate, screenwriter Andrew Davies occupies one of the most colourful and arcane offices in public life. He is Pornographer-in-Chief, a title that was first bestowed by the journalist Paul Johnson on the boss of Channel 4, Sir Michael Grade. Davies has assumed the mantle by virtue (or vice) of sexing up cherished texts from the literary canon for the gratification of television producers. His adaptation of War and Peace has taken critical grapeshot for including incestuous romps that do not strictly feature in the novel. Simon Schama, who bashfully admits he has made his way to the end of the book only eight times, claims to have detected no evidence of a sexual relationship between siblings Anatole and Helene.

There’s a spate of statistic-based stories about Christianity in decline. Recently we heard that under a million Brits now attend the CofE. Now we hear that the proportion of Britons who say they have no religion is creeping up to 50 per cent. Already, most white Britons identify as non-religious. It’s not really news. For decades religion has been a minority thing, a subculture that the main culture ignores or derides. But this was half-obscured by a residual sense that most Britons were culturally Christian. In 2001 a surprising 72 per cent said that they were. We are seeing a new honesty from these cultural Christians – many of them are now moving away from the pretence that they are sort of Christian. And this means we can see the landscape a bit more clearly.

I’ve seen some people saying that English National Ballet’s Le Corsaire is so out-of-date it’s risible to see it staged in the 21st century. Sex trafficking, men in black with scimitars in Istanbul, pirates trading slaves across the Mediterranean, rich fat men rubbing their jewelled paws over fresh young bodies — pshaw indeed! But I’d like to have heard Tamara Rojo, ENB’s artistic director, pitch to her board and sponsors to get the shiploads of doubloons she needed to stage it with the bling and panache its spectacle requires. An even tougher sell might have been getting her multiracial dancers on board with playing slaves and slave-dealers. So yes, I reckon Le Corsaire is bang-on current as a project.