Out to lunch

Via Guido Fawkes, news reaches us that shadow culture minister Ed Vaizey MP has been spotted lunching at Scotts of Mayfair — for an heroic, credit crunch-busting three hours, apparently — in the company of the accomplished Channel 4 television interviewee, fashion icon and occasional jobbing BritArtist, Tracey Emin.
Like any successful work of art, this [...]

The Staffordshire Hoard

sinc éaðe mæg
gold on grunde       gumcynnes gehwone
oferhígian                hýde sé ðe wylle —
__________________
[treasure easily may —
gold in the ground — any one of mankind
overpower, hide he who will —]
(Beowulf, lines 2764-2767)

Well, consider me totally overpowered — rather ecstatically so — ever since I saw this, first thing this morning, later supplemented by [...]

No. 76 Dean Street: a restoration drama

In the wake of the Prince of Wales’ ‘censorship row’, Barendina Smedley calls for the resignation of the secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and asks SPAB members to reconisder their involvement.

Blasting & Blessing: a sunstruck edition

Barendina Smedley finds that it’s too darned hot to write much, but still has something to say about the Arts Council, the Institute of Economic Affairs, Westminster Abbey and the charms of the London heatwave.

Worth the wait: ‘Rome and the Barbarians’

Barendina Smedley curls up in an armchair with ‘Rome and the Barbarians: The Birth of a New World’, marvelling at the durable appeal of a really good picture-book.

On “Dr Atomic”

Bunny Smedley finds that the left-wing silliness of composer John Adams and librettist and director Peter Sellars can’t quite put her off a luminous if less-than-perfect “Dr Atomic”.

Ancient and Modern: Palladio at the Royal Academy

Architectural exhibitions are, by default, flawed exercises. Few curators would have the nerve to stage, say, a Titian blockbuster without a single Titian painting on view, a marble-free Bernini show, a Schiaparelli crowd-pleaser offering the curious not a single faded frock or frill. And yet the celebration of a lacuna — a high-profile Hamlet minus [...]

Salutary truth: ‘War and Medicine’ at the Wellcome Collection

It’s hard to know exactly what to say about the current exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, War and Medicine, except that after worrying about it for several days — worrying about the way in which going around the exhibition reduced me to unfamiliar near-speechlessness — I’ve concluded that this is, in fact, indication less of [...]

One hundred years of Clement Greenberg

Unless I am doing my sums wrong, today is the 100 year anniversary of Clement Greenberg’s birth. This notorious figure, surely as transformative of the art world in own his way as Lessing, Ruskin or Baudelaire were in theirs, died in 1994. And indeed his criticism, like theirs, lives on.
If the ability to ruffle feathers, [...]

Land girls in Lymington: war art fights back

Fresh from visiting Lymington to see an exhibition exploring contemporary images of the Women’s Land Army, Bunny Smedley goes on the warpath in defence of British war art, past and present.