Arts Blog
Reviews and news from the world of the arts
Time for the top ten
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- Posted by Harry Williams
- 15 December 2008
As the year draws to a close, the time comes to take stock of what 2008 has added to the mound of artistic endeavour.
In line with the craze for Best Of lists, books editors will be searching round for those definitive novels, biographies, memoirs and histories which readers and critics have snatched from the deluge of this year's published material. One lauded book, Pierre Bayard's 'How [...]
No head Turner?
- 1 comments
- Posted by Harry Williams
- 08 December 2008
Turner Prize 2008
"If you’re working as an artist nowadays the worst place to be in terms of critics is Britain… You go elsewhere, you go to America, you go to Europe, then you get a fair reception. People look at your work and actually try to understand it," the artist Mark Leckey told Channel 4’s Nicholas Glass on Monday, immediately after winning the Turner Prize.
Nevertheless, [...]
Doubled edged chalice...
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- Posted by Harry Williams
- 01 December 2008
So, farewell then Andrew Motion
The search has begun for the next poet laureate, the government announced on Tuesday. Andrew Motion will step down in May of next year, having completed the ten-year tenure introduced by New Labour in 1999.
The culture secretary announced that the public would play a role in choosing the next laureate, prompting visions of an ‘X Factor’ style selection process.
The [...]
New artists anyone?
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- Posted by Harry Williams
- 24 November 2008
Sons and Lovers
It must be hard being the son or daughter of a famous writer, particularly when you inherit all their old papers. Bonfire or book: this is the dilemma faced by David Rieff, son of the late Susan Sontag, and Dmitri Nabokov, son of Vladimir; both have gone for the second option.
On the BBC's Newsnight Nabokov stated why he has decided to publish his father’s [...]
Adieu Mitch Mitchell
- 1 comments
- Posted by Harry Williams
- 17 November 2008
All roads lead to Google
Imperial Rome has been rebuilt. Never mind the tourists, the ruins, the choking traffic: if you really want to get to grips with 4th century Rome all you have to do is download Google Earthh. Their new programme 'Ancient Rome 3D’ allows the virtual tourist to swoop amongst the 7000 digitally reconstructed buildings as they stood on the morning of April 1st [...]
Is Broadway dying?
- 3 comments
- Posted by Ruth Collins
- 10 November 2008
Change has come...for the arts?
Obama’s victory at the US elections this week has been tipped as the dawn of a new era in both North American and world politics, but what will it mean for the arts? American literature, in particular, suffered greatly during Bush's tenure, Horace Engdahl at the Nobel Academy scorned its literary efforts as "parochial" when announcing the prize shortlist this year. During the [...]
A load of Banksy?
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- Posted by Ruth Collins
- 03 November 2008
Taking liberties
In a week of controversy fuelled by the Brand-Ross duo, it seems pertinent to question the extent to which we should exercise our freedom of expression. Certainly, when Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi decided to fund the 1977 film The Message starring Anthony Quinn as the Prophet Mohammed, he never guessed that the film would have incited such violent public outrage. Protesting against its [...]
More than just the Beatles
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- Posted by Ruth Collins
- 24 October 2008
Cultured crowds flock to Merseyside, while the people of Madrid occupy themselves in daubing fibre-glass cows
Capitalising on Culture
Liverpool has crowned its successful year as European Capital of Culture by winning the Visitor Impact Award at the North West Tourism Awards this week. The urban regeneration carried out to accommodate this year’s cultural programme has made Liverpool a tourist hub with record-breaking numbers of visitors pouring into the North West. Who could blame them, with a host of must-see exhibitions included in the [...]
Blooming in the desert
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- Posted by Ruth Collins
- 20 October 2008
Houellebecq and Henri-Levy are raging against the French media, while Qatar gets a new publishing house. Ruth Collins rounds up seven days in the arts.
Eastern promise
This week the publishing house Bloomsbury announced their decision to launch Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, a new Arabic-language partner company in Qatar. This may have less to do with raising the profile of native Arabic writers than it does with tapping into the riches currently circulating in Gulf states. Yet it is also in keeping with the trend set at the London Book Fair earlier this [...]
'Unruly Slavic eyebrows'
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- Posted by Annie McDermott
- 13 October 2008
Mocha chocca libraries
Many were terrified by the picture of new "21st century libraries" painted by the Secretary of State for Culture, Andy Burnham, this week: libraries modelled on Waterstones and Virgin Megastores, filled with mobile-phone-talkers, McDonalds-eaters, Wii-players and Youtube-watchers, with books featuring low down on the list of priorities.
More terrifying still, however, is the fact that this sort of thing seems to work: in [...]
Smoking Kurt Cobain
- 2 comments
- Posted by Annie McDermott
- 06 October 2008
Hermetic America? Nobel Prize controversy
Nobel Prize judge Horace Engdahl’s criticism of American literature this week has incensed the literary world. His claims that American novels were ‘too isolated, too insular’ merited no more than a one-word response from author Giles Foden, and Harvard Professor Werner Sollors, specialist in American literature, complained of Engdahl’s ‘historical and literary myopia’.
But perhaps Engdahl has a point – or more [...]
Going underground
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- Posted by Annie McDermott
- 30 September 2008
Questionable pop ballads and Deptford's very own subterranean feel
'A song from the darkest hour': Brown's party playlist
All poets want to be rock stars, and all rock stars want to be poets. Which is fine. There will always be a place in the world for ageing poets in leather jackets, and no-one would begrudge a rock star a few too many bad metaphors. It’s more perilous by far, however, when it’s not poets but politicians who decide they [...]
New hope for the West End?
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- Posted by Annie McDermott
- 22 September 2008
The success of Ivanov this week is a beacon of hope for those who worried that the West End is drowning in a glittering sea of overpriced musicals.
Tom Stoppard’s version of the Chekhov play is part of the Donmar's residency at Wyndham's theatre, an ambitious project that aims, says director Michael Grandage, to bring about a return to straight theatre in the West End and make it accessible to all.
Tickets will be sold at Donmar rather than West End prices, with 130 tickets per performance going for £10, which means that each show will [...]
Sliced from the curriculum
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- Posted by Graeme Allister
- 15 September 2008
Armed with three complaints (two about knife crime, one about a goldfish being flushed down the toilet) Britain’s biggest exam board has removed a poem by Carol Ann Duffy from its GCSE English syllabus. The loudest complaints came from one Pat Schofield, an exam invigilator who described the poem, "Education for Leisure", as "horrendous". The poem details feelings of internalised rage and inadequacy as a man signs on to [...]
Taking aim at Sarah
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- Posted by Graeme Allister
- 08 September 2008
It’s been a tough time for wise-cracking American talk-show hosts of late. Letterman, Leno and Stewart have found Obama just a little too perfect to make the butt of their jokes and their lines about McCain’s age were getting a little, well, old. But then along came Sarah, the answer to their prayers. They’ve been taking aim at her lack of experience, her image and of course her gun-love. [...]
