In his Budget 2009 yesterday Chancellor Alistair Darling (above) announced a £4million cut in Arts Council England funding for 2010/11 - less than the ACE had feared, and manageable enough that no reductions will be made in client funding for the year. The Welsh-language broadcasting channel S4C will lose £3million.
That sobbing musical theme resumes, so does that hospital-white dreamlike cartoon of a male figure tumbling in a Hitchcockian fall from grace past huge ads of poster girls. Actually it’s almost as much Milton as it is Hitchcock. I say that to be deliberately pretentious, because the secret of Mad Men’s addictive draw is the human profundity you try to…
Written on Thursday, 09 September 2010 01:33
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The video for this Kansas fantasist’s new single shows Monáe in harshly lit close-up singing the adrenalin-charged “Cold War” directly to camera. But then halfway through the song her concentration goes and she starts laughing and then crying, leaving one wondering what the thinking was behind its release. Perhaps this “artist and business woman” (as she describes herself) deduced that…
Written on Thursday, 09 September 2010 01:33
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Next to choose some favourite books is conductor Peter Phillips, whose touring lifestyle can make "summer reading" something of a year-round phenomenon. When Phillips founded the vocal ensemble the Tallis Scholars in 1973 it was a hobby among university friends – a “haphazard” group, as the director himself describes it. Decades later, with more than 1,000 concerts and 50 disks…
Written on Thursday, 09 September 2010 00:20
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To mark Pope Benedict’s controversial visit to Britain next week, the V&A have mounted an exhibition devoted to four of the 10 tapestries Raphael designed for the Sistine Chapel – the first time they’ve ever been seen in this country. Depicting the Acts of St Peter and St Paul, these bright, vivid works were made to hang on the lower…
Written on Thursday, 09 September 2010 00:00
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