As Jude Kelly put it today, the Southbank Centre’s Festival Brazil this summer is about a country "living its future now" (link here for the initial programme).
visual arts buzz
simon.tait
We’d almost blown the so-called Cultural Olympiad, and if the appointment of Ruth Mackenzie as artistic director had come a moment later than the turn of this year, we would have done. Not my opinion: this from Tony Hall of the Royal Opera House, and he chairs the board that appointed her. More than that, on Friday Hall was given a cross-bench seat in the House of Lords to thump the tub for the arts in 2012, and we’ll take notice then. Won’t we?
josh.spero
Everything was green at 20 Hoxton Square this week as Kilimanjaro Magazine Edits opened: forget the environment, it was the plentiful absinthe imparting a verdant hue.
joe.muggs
My abiding memory of The Foundry is being held aloft by my throat by the landlord, Falklands veteran and notorious band manager Alan "Gimpo" Goodrick, as he accused me of stealing a Shirley Bassey album. I had been DJing for a book reading by Mark "Zodiac Mindwarp" Manning, and there was a lot of absinthe being drunk thanks to some fellow from The Idler. I knew at that point I shouldn't have begun the evening by playing the line "there may be trouble ahead" from Bassey's version of "Let's Face the Music and Dance" over and over on a loop. It's a dreadful cliché to say knowingly of a bar "it was that kind of place", but really, it was that kind of place.
joe.muggs
Original Cultures is an artistic collective with bases in the UK, Italy and Japan, dedicated to audiovisual collaborations inspired by street art, graffiti, hip hop and electronic music. It is staging its first London event over the course of a week from 27 February to 5 March this year, in which artists Ericailcane, DEM, Will Barras, Hiraki Sawa, Om Unit, Tatsuki and Tayone will be joining to create new works in a series of public events and workshops in and around the Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London.
theartsdesk
theartsdesk received a New Year's gift last night when we were given a significant accolade from BBC Radio 5 Live. In Web 2009 with Helen and Olly, the station's podcasters and self-styled "internet obsessives" Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann recognised theartsdesk as one of the five "essential sites of 2009" in a series of awards to the "cream of weblebrity".
theartsdesk
The morning after the day before has dawned. If you're not inclined to join the shopping queues, theartsdesk is happy to suggest alternatives. Our writers recommend all sorts of cultural things you could get up to in the next week.
sheila.johnston
Richard Wright's work celebrates impermanence but his election last night as the 2009 Turner Prize winner - an award which brings with it a purse of £25,000 - has guaranteed it a sort of immortality. The Glasgow-based painter's major piece currently on display at Tate Britain is an enormous, luxuriant and ornate symmetrical fresco painted in shimmering gold leaf which commands the otherwise virtually empty room it occupies.
alice.vincent
With the launch of the Wunderbar Featival this week, Newcastle continues to demonstrate just what 2008’s European Capital of Culture judges missed when they anointed Liverpool. The 10-day celebration, which starts tomorrow, is international in content but thoroughly North-East in spirit: unpretentious, clever and surprising. There are 28 free and ticketed events taking place throughout the city, from conventional cultural venues such as the Baltic, Northern Stage and Gallery North to people’s private living rooms and a plot of land in Byker. It is one of those rare festivals that makes it practically impossible for NewcastleGateshead’s citizens not to be involved.
Graham Fuller
Outwardly the Morgan Library & Museum is a citadel of sedateness - inside it may be the locus of turbulence. Thirteen years ago I walked around one of the rooms with the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, on whom I was writing a profile. She was then starring in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre, and it made sense for us to look at the Morgan’s exhibition of Brontë juvenilia together. She seemed vaguely haunted by the show; I know I was.