A round-up of what is happening in the arts world
Get ready for the arts scrap of 2007. In the red corner: banking fat cats. In the blue: British galleries fed up with mega-buck financial institutions buying up art for investment. Senior UK gallery acquisition heads tell me they are going to push the government to impose a 5 per cent levy on the price paid for art by such organisations; the money raised would go to public spaces. Artworks bought by banks, which frequently snap up paintings by the likes of Monet and Picasso, often end up in storage. What's more, they can't be shown by public institutions here because exhibitions inflate their value. The answer? Tax the bastards. Sounds like a good idea to me.
Disappointed with last year's Christmas TV? For many, it was the worst in a long time (The Thick of It excepted, but only 200,000 people watched that). At least the folks in charge are planning next year's line-up, including a 90-minute film of Kipling's Jungle Book. I gather that the long-term writing partners Bev Doyle and Richard Kurti, who worked on the 2005 film of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, are developing the script right now.
One of this year's cinema treats will be Bathory. Anna Friel (below) plays the Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory, who in the 16th/17th centuries murdered young children and (it is said) drank their blood. The film promises to be one of the most gruesome and saucy of 2007, and presents an interesting theory that Caravaggio kept her company during his mysterious four-year absence in the early 1600s.
Mark Lawson's recent BBC4 probing of Armando Iannucci unearthed the gem that, before Steve Coogan's "isn't Tony a hip guy?" interview with Blair at the 1996 party conference, Peter Mandelson thought Alan Partridge was a real person, and was wondering where he was when Iannucci and Coogan turned up. Says it all, really.
bendowell@btinternet.com
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