Culture

Circles and Tangents sounds like a show of abstract art, but actually the title is somewhat misleading. As Vivienne Light, the exhibition’s curator and author of the accompanying book, explains, the circles are intended to denote networks of artists (not the circular forms in a Ben Nicholson painting, though Nicholson is included in the show), and the tangents are really digressions. Clear? Put more simply, the exhibition focuses on art made on or about Cranborne Chase, the lovely unspoilt stretch of Dorset landscape once William the Conqueror’s hunting ground and more recently the inspiration for countless painters and sculptors.

The Venice Architecture Biennale, the world’s biggest and most prestigious architecture exhibition, struggles to know who it’s for — the professional architect or the interested public — and indeed why it exists at all. This is partly Venice’s fault. To spend one’s time looking at architectural models, drawings and, this year, photographs and film when you could be slinging back Bellinis in an 18th-century palazzo seems perverse. Added to which, the Biennale organisers have now decided the vernisagge — the private view — should take place in late August, when Venice is at its hottest and the Corderie, the former rope-making factory of the Arsenale where the main exhibition is held, becomes a vast wooden greenhouse. Yet everyone comes.

The British Museum has collaborated with the Royal Shakespeare Company on this exhibition, in order to make links between the rich array of BM treasures and Shakespeare’s plays. I’ve never been very convinced about the intermingling of video screens and art: people almost always gravitate to the moving image, particularly if words are involved and people featured. Clips of actors rolling out Shakespeare’s lines with every appearance of enjoyment are bound to capture the attention of the audience at the expense of artefacts, which simply don’t have the same drama or human interest. ‘Oh look, there’s Siân Phillips — or is it Harriet Walter?