Tanjil Rashid

A paradox of art history: to understand the artists of the past, it helps to study how, and where, they conceived of the future. If today we foresee the future in the East, previous generations looked westward. In the last century, Europeans, having inherited a seemingly aged and decrepit civilisation, determined that the future of art was to be found in the New World. That much is well known. But this did not always mean America. Indeed, the true cognoscenti had a different country in mind: Brazil.

When William Morris was born in Walthamstow, in 1834, it was little more than a clump of marshland at the edge of the Epping Forest. This was the terrain of his free, frolicsome childhood, and it would forever form his image of humble, Edenic England, uncorrupted by the industrialist’s yoke. About the only thing that remains of this prelapsarian Walthamstow, amid its railway lines and brownfield sites, is the family home where Morris grew up, in some splendour – now a gallery dedicated to his artistic legacy. ‘To us pattern designers, Persia has become a holy land, for there our art was perfected’ The landscape has been supplanted, and much of the population transplanted.

I had my birthday recently – one I share  with a venerable old aunt who shaped my formative years. Well-travelled and fluent in more than 40 languages, Auntie broadened my horizons well beyond the dreary suburb where I lived. She informed me about events in faraway lands, but also steeped me in ‘our island story’. On intimate terms with everybody in the arts, Auntie was unbelievably cultivated. Back then, she also spoke with an unmistakable clarity that was a model for non-native speakers – such as myself. Millions worldwide acquired English in this way, gaining with it a whole civilisation. And so last month, on my birthday, I was genuinely more moved by the thought of the BBC turning 100.

Everyone has a type they can’t resist. For the writer Kazuo Ishiguro, it’s old men. Old men secretly worried they’ve spent entire lives on the wrong side of history. Old men born in a world of certainty, transplanted to a different, more dubious one. Old men asking themselves, as so many of us will do (if we haven’t already): ‘What was it all for?’ But as I wait at the offices of a West End PR firm to interview Sir Kazuo about his new film with Bill Nighy, Living, I can’t help but wonder what unlikely preoccupations these are for arguably the nation’s greatest living literary talent. Those of us with humdrum lives may daydream about winning a Nobel Prize.

At 6ft 4½in tall, Satyajit Ray was head and shoulders above his countrymen. His height was unheard of among Bengalis, ‘a low-lying people in a low-lying land’, as the colonial saying went. With his stature, jawline and baritone voice, he might have been a Bollywood hero. Instead, he chose to tower over the world of art-house cinema, a directorial giant among the likes of Bergman, Kurosawa and Fellini, alongside whom he is credited with inducting cinema into the temple of high culture. His standing was secured with his first film, Pather Panchali, which premièred at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1955. India then only churned out musicals which, as Ray later put it, ‘present a synthetic, non-existent society’.

The films of Wong Kar Wai are a kind of map of Hong Kong. In them the city becomes a magnificent metropolis of missed connections, a tempestuous port where ill-fated lovers cross paths like ships in the night. And Wong has filmed the city from so many angles, with such spatial precision, that if the People’s Republic were ever to grow impatient with the territory’s seditious tendencies and raze it to the ground, Hong Kong could be reconstructed, flawlessly, from Wong’s films alone. A major retrospective on the Chinese film director is under way at the BFI and ICA. It couldn’t be more felicitous, since Wong Kar Wai is that most retrospective of filmmakers, always looking back, his characters ever in search of lost time.

How to sum up the legend of Marlene Dietrich? She was an actor, a singer, a style icon, even a war hero. A retrospective is under way at the BFI, where more than a dozen of her films are being shown throughout this month. Many admirers saw only the shimmering legs and forgot the sharp intellect, the wartime gallantry. But it would be wrong to deny that body image was central to her success. It was with this in mind that the critic Robin Wood christened Dietrich ‘the Venus de Marlene’. Like the statue alluded to, Dietrich is a monument of Western culture, her image cast not in stone, but in light (that marble of the modern world, made possible by the newly invented movie camera).

The White Pube started life as an influential art blog, written by Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente. The name announced iconoclastic intent, playing on the White Cube gallery — which certainly deserves mockery (like a city law firm, it has outposts in Hong Kong and Manhattan). But The White Pube podcast is as inanely conventional as the gallery it makes fun of. Each episode is an hour-long salvo by the hosts, or ‘art critic baby gods’, and as with their exhibition reviews — rated with emojis, not stars — conversation is appealingly informal and spontaneous. But they have little of interest to say, especially about their ostensible subject. Three episodes into this art criticism podcast, hardly an artwork has featured.

Italy has long captivated romantics from rainy, dreary, orderly northern Europe. Goethe, Stendhal, Keats and Shelley all flocked to Italy in search of the ideal society. There they found what they thought was a utopia. ‘There is,’ Byron marvelled in a letter home from Ravenna, ‘no law or government at all, and it is wonderful how well things go on without them.’ Well, Silvio Berlusconi has made some of Europe’s wisest men sound like chumps. If the notorious career — chronicled in the podcast Bunga Bunga — of the longest-serving prime minister of Italy since Mussolini and its sometime richest man has done one good thing, it’s to have dispelled for good our quixotic fantasies about his troubled nation.