America
Sarah Kent
Its more than 50 years since Yoko Ono first presented Mend Piece at the Indica Gallery, London in the exhibition through which she met John Lennon. The piece is currently being revisited at the Whitechapel Gallery and, in the intervening years, its meaning has subtly shifted. Strewn over four tables are dozens of broken cups and saucers along with everything you need to attempt a botched repair – glue, sellotape, scissors and string.According to the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, broken pottery is repaired using lacquer mixed with precious metals like gold and silver that are clearly visible Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Last year a stoneware jar by David Drake sold at auction for $1.3 million. It fetched this extraordinary price because of its history: Drake was a slave on a plantation in South Carolina who not only made fabulous pots, but dared sign and date them at a time when it was illegal for slaves to read and write. Needless to say, his descendants haven’t received a penny in royalties from sales of his work.Theaster Gates includes one of Drake’s storage jars in his Whitechapel Gallery exhibition A Clay Sermon; on it is written “Jan 13 1862. I am Dave” – evidence of Drake’s defiance as well as Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Hypocrisy. Is this the right word? I don’t mean the play, but the audience. Of course, in the middle of the current COVID 19 crisis, there’s bound to be a certain amount of discomfort when watching Larry Kramer’s 1985 modern activist classic about the AIDS epidemic, since both cost many thousands of lives, but it feels really odd to me to be in the middle of a National Theatre audience where only half are wearing their masks. So while everyone cheers this story about how selfishness has to be challenged in order to preserve public health, only half are acting unselfishly in keeping us all Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Isamu Noguchi may not be a household name, yet one strand of his work is incredibly familiar. In 1951 he visited a lamp factory in Gifu, a Japanese city famous for its paper lanterns. This prompted him to design the lampshades that, for decades, have adorned nearly every student’s bedsit.Strips of fine white paper made from mulberry tree bark are glued onto bamboo ribs to create a design that is amazingly versatile and comes in all shapes and sizes. Spheres are the most popular, but Noguchi also designed rectangles, cubes, pyramids, ellipses and columns alongside forms resembling pumpkins, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Watching this restored print of Nicholas Ray’s delirious Western reminded me of the discovery that those pristine white statues of the Ancient World had once been painted in gaudy colours. When I first saw Johnny Guitar, it was one of those movies that played the repertory and art house cinemas in a battered, faded 16mm print. Seeing it on a modern TV screen in all its original lurid glory, the film is so shockingly garish it’s as if it had been reconfigured in 3-D. Although it did well enough at the box office in 1954, American critics hated it and its producer-director Nicholas Ray, rated Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s well worth tracking down one of the September 29 special cinema screenings of Ric Burns' lovingly made documentary portrait of the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, or seeking it out online. Famous for his vivid, insightful descriptions of people living with disabling conditions (Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars), Sacks was born into a brilliant Jewish family of doctors in north-west London in 1933, but after studying medicine at Oxford, spent most of his working life in America. Burns had the luxury of making the film with full co- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A stealthily powerful play gets the production of its dreams in Camp Siegfried, which marks a high-profile UK presence for the American writer Bess Wohl. A world premiere at the Old Vic, Wohl's two-hander shines a scary and pertinent light on a Nazi training ground in the 1930s that is seen to have all sorts of ongoing repercussions for today. That a potentially slippery text is as well realised as it is pays tribute, and then some, to a creative team working in complete harmony, starting with an impeccable cast, Luke Thallon and Patsy Ferran, who deliver the play's darkening affect well Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite an alluring cast which includes Melissa McCarthy, Chris O’Dowd and Kevin Kline, The Starling is doomed to be remembered, if at all, as a slender idea unsatisfyingly executed. Directed by Theodore Melfi from a screenplay by Matt Harris, it’s the story of Lily (McCarthy) and Jack (O’Dowd), a couple whose domestic dream was blown apart by the death of their baby daughter Katie.The past is filled in as the narrative ambles along, from scenes of the pair eagerly imagining what career their new baby might take up (podiatrist? Vegetarian butcher?) to the gradual realisation that all bets are Read more ...
joe.muggs
Lil Nas X is good at being a pop star. Like, what could pop culture need more than a young, flamboyant, witty gay rapper from the deep south who can top the US country charts then just when it appeared he might not be able to live up to the success of “Old Town Road” lap dance Satan in the video for the Latin-tinged “Call me by Your Name” and storm to mega sales all over again? He is in many ways the culmination of the deconstruction of hip hop machismo, being from a generation that grew up on the dweebiness of Drake, the thoughtfulness of Kendrick Lamar, the camp of Nicki Minaj, the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
God is a tricky one. Or should that be One? And definitely not a He. So when she says take revenge, then vengeance is definitely not only hers, but ours too. American playwright Aleshea Harris’s dazzlingly satirical 2018 extravaganza is about two women seeking justice and getting even, and it comes to the Royal Court from New York, trailing shouts of enthusiasm and the Obie Award for Playwriting. Unlike many plays about African-Americans this one is refreshingly free from cliché, and this new production does it complete justice.The set up is gloriously surreal. Two 21-year-old twins, Racine Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s been described as “the most improbable story that has ever happened in the art market”, and The Lost Leonardo reveals every twist and turn of this extraordinary tale. In New Orleans in 2005, a badly-damaged painting (pictured below left) sold at auction for $1,175. It was listed as a copy of a Leonardo da Vinci, but the buyers – dealer Robert Simon and Alexander Parish, who searches for overlooked masterpieces – believed it might be the real thing, a painting known as Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World) by the Renaissance master himself.Even Parish admits the idea was ludicrous. “ Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Rivalled only by Titanic and La La Land for its 14 Oscar nominations, 1950's Best Picture-winner All About Eve is a film that audiences and reviewers love – even though Joseph L Mankiewicz’s brilliant screenplay makes no bones about the fact that he thinks both fans and critics are less than loveable.Broadway star Margo Channing (Bette Davis) is dismissive of the admirers who hang around the stage door: “Autograph fiends, they’re not people. Those are little beasts that run around in packs like coyotes". Later on, professional critics are described as needing to Read more ...