Arts Archives

Can you trade love for wealth? The economics of Breaking Bad

Television

It has been the social-science equivalent to the Large Hadron Collider, the most expensive and most awe-inspiring experiment of our time. Like Cern’s particle collider, it started in 2008 and this week, just six months after the Geneva researchers confirmed that they had found the Higgs Boson, it, too, has reached a conclusion. Walter White (above), hero of Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, is...(spoiler averted). When Breaking Bad hit our screens, it dumbfounded viewers and critics alike with the sheer complexity of its narrative and aesthetics. The reviews were mixed and its future uncertain. The social experiment that the series set out to explore was strikingly simple: take an ordinary, law-abiding citizen and have him dabble in crime.

Deborah Ross

I watched Filth from behind my hands. It’s ghastly and unpleasant, but what I saw of it was brilliant

Cinema

People are generally saying Filth fully fulfils the promise of its title and is not for the faint of heart or queasy of stomach or lily of liver and, alas, I am all three, in spades. (My liver is, in fact, so lily-ish it may be a wonder of medical science.) Rape. Anal Sex. Violence. Drink. Drugs. Masturbation. Vomiting down yourself. There’s a part of me that would like to say that’s the average Saturday night in our house, but the truth is we generally watch The X Factor and record Strictly. So I endured this film, from behind my hands, rather than enjoyed it, but in the enduring, was there some reward, as can sometimes happen? We can work that out as we go along. No advantage in rushing such things.

Giannandrea Poesio

Carlos Acosta’s Don Quixote lacks the wow factor

The peril with Brecht is that he will always be Brecht

Theatre

Brecht in the West End? Quite a rarity. Jonathan Church’s zippy and stylish version of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui arrives from the Chichester Festival garlanded with plaudits. Brecht’s wartime allegory was intended as a warning to America that its idolisation of gangsters made it vulnerable to a fascist takeover. Ui begins as a petty criminal mocked by Chicago’s established hoodlums. To revive his fortunes, he orders his thugs to vandalise grocery shops and to extract protection money from their owners. This brings him into conflict with Chicago’s mighty Cauliflower Trust. A huge warehouse belonging to a leading merchant is burned to the ground and Ui orchestrates a show trial that enables him to abolish the civil authority and seize control of the city.

Peter Phillips

Does London really need another concert hall?

Music

Does London need another concert hall? Or, to put it more precisely, does London need another chamber music hall? The recent opening of Milton Court in the Barbican begs this question: a pertinent one since we already hold the world record for full-time concert spaces of fewer than a thousand seats, and must come equal first for symphony-size halls. We also, with the Royal Albert Hall, hold the world record for a jumbo-size venue, fully twice the capacity of a normally large auditorium such as, for example, the one in the Sydney Opera House. But even in these financially difficult times there remains a strong thirst for expanding our cultural resources.

Candy Neubert

on not answering

26 September 2013

Andrew Lambirth

Chris Ingram: from messenger boy to museum benefactor

Arts feature

Chris Ingram is a silver-haired, incisive man, with an air of quiet authority and decided opinions about the art he so passionately collects. A media entrepreneur who started work at 16 as a messenger boy in an advertising agency, Ingram has the strength of his convictions. Over the past dozen years he has built up a remarkable collection of some 500 paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, of which 350 belong in the category described by auctioneers as Modern British. (Or, in other words, 20th century rather than contemporary.) He began by buying for the home and consulting his wife’s taste as well, but branched out when he bought for the office.

Susan Moore

Jeff Koons’s work is childish — just like us

Arts feature

The contrast could not have been more acute. It came the day after a press release from Christie’s New York pinged into my inbox announcing the forthcoming sale of Jeff Koons’s ‘Balloon Dog (Orange)’ on 12 November. Even by current auction-house standards, the hype was of heroic immoderation but it was the novel brazen pandering that shocked me. It is a moot point whether Mr Koons’s monumental party balloon — sleekly engineered in high chromium stainless steel and more than three metres long and some three and a half metres high — is indeed ‘the most beloved of all contemporary sculptures’, or whether the auction itself will be a ‘landmark’ event ‘set to make history’.

William Cook

Henry van de Velde — the man who invented modernism

Exhibitions

In the Musée du Cinquantenaire, a grand gallery on the green edge of Brussels, those bureaucratic Belgians are welcoming home a prodigal son. Henry van de Velde — Passion, Function, Beauty is a celebration of the 150th birthday of Belgium’s most prolific polymath, yet a lot of people here in Brussels scarcely seem to know his name. While Victor Horta is fêted as the father of Art Nouveau, his great rival, van de Velde, is frequently forgotten. It’s ironic that this prophet of modern design wasn’t honoured in his own country until he’d made his name in Germany, the nation that invaded his homeland twice in the course of his long career.

Dan Jones

English embroidery: the forgotten wonder of the medieval world

Arts feature

Think of an art at which the English have excelled and I doubt you would come up with the word ‘embroidery’. As I muttered when my agent asked whether I should like to make a film for BBC4 about the golden age of this forgotten but brilliant native art form: ‘Embroidery? What, like sewing?’ But no, not like sewing. Or, actually, only a little bit. During the ‘high’ Middle Ages, English embroidery was one of the most desired and costly art forms in Europe. It was known as opus anglicanum or ‘the work of the English’ — a generic name that instantly conjured notions of craftsmanship, beauty, luxury and expense in the minds of those who heard it.

Sarah Drury

The grandson of Scott’s deputy makes music in Antarctica

Arts feature

As his father lay dying some six years ago, Julian Broke-Evans promised him that he would ‘keep telling the story’, the story being that of Scott’s ill-fated but heroic 1910–13 Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole. Julian’s grandfather was Teddy Evans (later Admiral Lord Mountevans), Scott’s second-in-command, who was to win fame in 1917 as ‘Evans of the Broke’ when he took on six German destroyers in the Dover Straits. Marrying a Norwegian, he embraced the land of Scott’s rival, Amundsen, with an enthusiasm that has passed down the generations and which is now inspiring an Anglo–Norwegian collaboration of rare beauty, set on a mountain-top above Gudbrandsdalen.

Niru Ratnam

The boom in private museums

Arts feature

In the past ten years museums of modern and contemporary art have proliferated around the world. New institutions have appeared in Los Angeles, Venice, Doha and Beijing. Even Camden has seen a burst of activity — the Dairy Art Centre opened in April of this year, spread over the 12,500 sq ft of a former milk depot, with an exhibition of the Swiss artist John Armleder. A similar size space, The David Roberts Art Foundation (Draf), opened last year in a mews near the Mornington Crescent end of Camden High Street. They joined the Zabludowicz Collection, which has been housed in a former Methodist chapel on Prince of Wales Road since 2007.

Alex Massie

Being a ‘National Treasure’ appears to be a license to talk rot

Take, for instance, the curious case of Sir David Attenborough. The poor booby is another neo-Malthusian. Which is another reminder that expertise in one area is no guarantee of good sense in another. As I wrote in The Scotsman this week: Attenborough is a supporter of Population Matters, a creepy outfit who have previously suggested Britain’s optimum population lies around the 20 million mark. Let’s rewind the clock to 1850 then. Like other Malthusians, Population Matters is coy about how it proposes to reduce Britain’s population to this “sustainable” level. Emulating China’s one-child policy may be tempting, but will not reverse the terrifying tide of prosperity and population growth now threatening our planet.

Mark Mason

A modern take on Victoriana

Downton Abbey is now a weird parallel universe of the royal family. Except with less action

Television

Are you following the world’s most watched aristocratic family? If you recall, they recently took into their ranks a member of the middle classes. The family, headed by a matriarch, is as dysfunctional as any other. But they do live in a palatial home and have a coterie of servants. Their sense of fashion is unerring. There are worries about the future and about inheritance. A boy, George, has been born. Downton Abbey — now a global phenomenon — caters to our insatiable curiosity about the royal family. The more we see of Queen Elizabeth, Charles, William and Kate at processions, and so forth, the more it leaves us wanting. How do these blue bloods actually live? Downton takes us there.

Damian Thompson

Music at Mass is theological warfare by other means

Music

How many battles have been fought over sacred music throughout history? The noise you make when you worship is a big deal: those who control it can shape everything from clerical hierarchy to intimate spirituality. And there are patterns. Deep suspicion of music is the mark of the puritan. Fundamentalist Sunni Muslims teach that all music except for chanted Koranic passages is forbidden; instruments in particular encourage lust. Strict Calvinists take a similar line. Even the Catholic Church considered banning original compositions during services after the Council of Trent. Legend has it that polyphony was saved only by Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli of 1567, which demonstrated that rich harmony could also highlight the words of the text.

Michael Tanner

Why do people talk such nonsense when describing opera? American Lulu and Le Nozze di Figaro reviewed

Opera

Why would anyone want to adapt Berg’s Lulu, a masterpiece even if a problematic one? According to John Fulljames, who is the producer of the version of Lulu that Olga Neuwirth has come up with, ‘the Lulu plays now stand neutered within the familiar history of male authored texts which define women from a male perspective...Neuwirth turns this on its head. For the first time, Lulu is allowed to tell her own story...We [the audience] listen and watch but do nothing and so become complicit in her nightly repeated murder.’ How can people talk such nonsense?

Lloyd Evans

Barking in Essex: a hit with hen-night hysterics

Theatre

How appropriate. Barking in Essex, a farce about gangsters, has been dishonestly billed as ‘a new comedy’. The script was written in 2005 by Clive Exton (1930–2007), who pre-dates Woody Allen by half a decade. The storyline — thieves quarrel over stolen loot — is a trusty antique featured in ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ and in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. The plot moves fast. We open in a monstrously tacky mansion where a criminal matriarch, Emmie Packer, is in a flap. She’s just informed her son Darnley, and his wife, Chrissie, that she’s blown three million quid from a bank heist and the robber is on his way to claim the loot. Run for it! A pretty young lawyer, Allegra, arrives.

Deborah Ross

Woody Allen’s new film will so knock your socks off, you will never retrieve them again

Cinema

Blue Jasmine is the latest film from Woody Allen who, at various stages of his career, has been declared on-form, off-form, sliding-from-form, returning-to-form and, for all I know, as I don’t follow these matters closely, wearing form like a carnival hat with tinkling bells, but there is no need to bother with any of that. All you need know is Blue Jasmine is brilliant. It’s brilliantly written, directed and observed; it’s brilliantly watchable, if not mesmerising; and brilliantly performed, particularly by Cate Blanchett, who will knock your socks off, and may knock them off so explosively there is every chance you will never retrieve them again. (They might be knocked off all the way to kingdom come, for example.

20 September 2013

Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week | 20 September 2013

Yorkshire, says William Cook, is the sculpture capital of Britain. It was the birthplace of ‘Britain’s greatest sculptors, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore’ – but is this just coincidence, or ‘is there something about Yorkshire that makes great sculpture happen here?’ In this week’s lead Arts feature, he visits the ‘stunning, 500 acre’ Yorkshire Sculpture Park, ‘adorned with works by every sculptor you can think of’, which, on a sunny day, is ‘a great artwork in its own right’. It’s one thing to produce a biopic. It’s another to produce a hagiography.

19 September 2013

William Cook

Yorkshire: England’s sculptural heartland in the north

Arts feature

I am standing on the deserted shop floor of a Victorian mill in Wakefield, with the industrial history of Yorkshire spread out before me like a map. Down below, the River Calder, once so busy, is now a leisurely, peaceful place. Children play beside the water. There are fishermen on the banks. It’s a lot prettier than it used to be. It’s also a lot less businesslike. But among these redundant warehouses, a strange renaissance is taking place. This derelict mill reopened last month — not as a factory but as a new annex of the Hepworth, a museum that has welcomed nearly a million visitors in its first two years. Incongruously Yorkshire, a county built on hard graft, is becoming increasingly renowned as a centre of the sculptural arts.

Andrew Lambirth

David Tress: an artist of independent spirit

Exhibitions

Like all artists of independent spirit, David Tress (born 1955) resists categorisation. He has been called a Romantic and a Neo-Romantic, a mixture of Impressionist and Expressionist, a traditionalist and a modernist, yet not one of these labels quite fits. He is all and none, drawing his inspiration from the great traditions of western art but principally from the British landscape that continues to evoke a response in him that can only find outlet through drawing and painting. Tress is a landscape painter and draughtsman of great poignancy, imbuing his dramatically coloured and vigorously constructed works with an emotional intensity that makes them difficult to ignore.

Michael Tanner

Turandot is a disgusting opera that is beyond redemption

Opera

It’s a cynical start to the Royal Opera’s season to have this 1984 production of Puccini’s last opera Turandot. Not that a new production would improve things, whatever it was like. Turandot is an irredeemable work, a terrible end to a career that had included three indisputable masterpieces and three less evident ones, counting Il Trittico as one. Any operatic composer who gets to the stage, as Puccini had, of searching through one play or novel after another, dissatisfied with any subject he is offered, should almost certainly give up.

Lloyd Evans

Hysteria is a pile-up of unmotivated absurdities

Theatre

Terry Johnson’s acclaimed farce Hysteria opens in Sigmund Freud’s Hampstead home in 1938. The godfather of psychobabble is ambushed by a beautiful maniac named Jessica, who forces him to analyse her, and then hides in his closet and strips naked. Along comes Freud’s old chum Yahuda, a bumbling twerp who doubles as the farce’s authority figure. His presence forces Freud to improvise countless daft wheezes in order to prevent Jessica from being discovered. You may wonder if Freud is the best candidate to star in this kind of sex caper. And you’d be right. He is, in fact, the worst candidate.

Patrick Carnegy

Mark Ravenhill’s take on Voltaire’s Candide

Theatre

Ah yes, Candide, the adventures of an innocent abroad in ‘the best of all possible worlds’, as philosophers of the 18th century liked to insist. Voltaire’s satirical demolition of the higher nonsense of his age, and of the powers of Church and state who propped themselves up with it. A novel of 1759 written, at least in part, as an outraged response to those who’d insisted that the earthquake that had razed Lisbon to the ground four years earlier was all part of God’s plan for the good of mankind. Two centuries later, a brilliant musical by Leonard Bernstein. And now, a new play by Mark Ravenhill, mitigating the theft of the title by adding ‘inspired by Voltaire’. ‘Inspired’ turns out to be the right word.

Peter Hoskin

No rest for Diana – the biopic of the late princess is so inept it’s not even hagiography

Cinema

Someone who knows their Dianaology will have to fill me in – did this actually happen? The late Princess Di is walking through central Portofino in Italy. She’s being jostled on all sides by an insistent public and an even more insistent swarm of photographers, when, suddenly, the crowds part. There, huddled by his family, is a thin blind man. She reaches out to him and he reaches back, taking her hands. Then he presses at her face as though it’s Braille; trying, as movie blind-people are wont to do, to read her soul. Sunlight streams down from the heavens. We never see the man’s sight restored — perhaps that’s for the spin-off, Eyes Wide Open: The Diana Miracles — but we get the point.

Michael Henderson

Blitz Requiem première in St Paul’s

Poker

12 September 2013

Robert Gorelangton

Gregory Doran interview: ‘I wanted some big hitters,’ says the RSC’s new supremo

Arts feature

Gregory Doran has famously long glossy locks and is widely known to be a nice guy and an incurable Shakespeare nut. He has now taken over the reins at the Royal Shakespeare Company, with which he’s been associated for 26 years, working on both sides of the footlights, first as an actor and then a director. If you think he’s in the wrong job, blame Eileen Atkins. He first went to Stratford as a schoolboy to see her in As You Like It. ‘I went dancing out of the theatre and as we went back up the M6 in my mum’s beige Mini, apparently I turned to her and said, “That’s what I want to do when I grow up”.’ In fact, Doran, 55, has been putting on shows ever since the placenta hit the pedal bin, to use Maureen Lipman’s happy phrase.