"Most of Wagner's operas are simply Harry Potter set to music." Sir Jonathan Miller tells theartsdesk ...read more

...and isn't afraid to tell them. The contemporary art world - filled with million-pound paintings, august institutions, competitive gallerists, rich collectors and so many egos - is never that good at keeping things quiet. There's always some advantage (or just glee) to be gained by spilling the beans, and the better your sources the more popular you'll be.By that yardstick, Cathedral of Shit is the most beautiful girl at the dance. The anonymously-written blog is roiling the art scene with its Deep-Throat-like knowledge, and art parties now resemble McCarthy's inquiries: "Are you now or Read more ...

Let’s get the obvious one out of the way first: if a law firm is going to put on an opera, it should probably be Gilbert & Sullivan’s Trial by Jury. Instead, having progressed through G&S’s Mikado and Pirates of Penzance in previous years, Magic Circle firm Allen & Overy last weekend staged The Magic Flute, and not just anywhere, but at Glyndebourne. The house which has resounded to Peter Pears and Felicity Lott this time was filled by tax lawyers and legal secretaries.It has no shortage of talent behind (and in front of) it. The director was Andrew Leveson, who has worked at Read more ...

Author Simon Singh has spent £100,000 defending a libel action under our notoriously archaic libel laws, which are unjust, often against the public interest and have been internationally criticised. The case relates to him being sued by British Chiropractic Association for writing a newspaper article that questioned some of the claims of chiropractors, and now he is heading a campaign to reform these laws, and needs 100,000 signatures. Although this campaign was sparked by this particular case, I believe that it is in the interests of all writers, critics and journalists to support reform Read more ...

What do you do for an encore at a theatre awards ceremony that several years ago featured James Corden locking lips with a mighty surprised Daniel Radcliffe? The unscripted moment that had spectators buzzing at Sunday night's whatsonstage.com trophy-bearing gala at the Prince of Wales Theatre involved one theatrical knight making a rather, uh, pointed reference to another.More precisely, scarcely had Sir Patrick Stewart accepted his supporting actor prize for playing Claudius in the Royal Shakespeare Company Hamlet before he was giving  the affectionate finger to Sir Trevor Nunn, who had Read more ...

Eliska Bartek is one of the leading photographers of flowers, among other subjects. She also experiments with painting and video and mixes her media. Her first solo exhibition at Photo Edition Berlin opened today and shows new photographic works and will also celebrate the publication of her new book Flower Power.As the Gallery puts it, "Flowers are prominent in the works of Irving Penn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nobuyoshi Araki, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, or Thomas Florschuetz and often stand for the limits of visible perception, notions of beauty and the ephemeral. Eliska Bartek continues Read more ...

You'll be lucky to find the one you want. Yesterday I took a nine year old to gape at the wonders of the Victoria and Albert Museum's new Medieval and Renaissance galleries, which I've been popping in to frequently since reading about them here. He reeled at the giant memorial to the condottiere, the enormous choir screen from 's-Hertogenbosch, the entire chapel of Santa Chiara from Florence and the gorgeous Hardwick Hall tapestry of a boar and bear hunt, among other treasures. Then we paid a final visit to the shop so that he could spend some of the £5 he'd saved up to buy postcards of the Read more ...

It has been reported today that Google - via its Blogger and Blogspot services - has been closing down popular music blogs and wiping their archives without warning, citing copyright violation by those blogs who post downloadable mp3s of the tracks they review. While hosting copyright material may not by the letter of the law be legal, it seems that this heavy handed approach completely ignores the subtlety of the "grey economy" that exists between bloggers and a music industry which knows full well what a valuable promotional tool they can be - and it appears to be yet another example of how Read more ...

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, today announced a new initiative, London Film Day. Sunday 21 March will see 15 simultaneous world premieres at suburban cinemas across the capital from Wood Green and Wandsworth to (stretching the definition of London somewhat) Romford and Croydon. The film in question is admittedly one for families more than cinephiles: Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, the second comedy scripted by Emma Thompson from the Nurse Matilda books. Thompson also reprises her role as the officious magical nanny. The screenings will be prefaced by what publicists like to refer to as Read more ...

She sang on the night of Johnny Dankworth's death last week, performing along with their children Jacqui and Alec in a Wavendon 40th anniversary concert, and since her man's gone now, Cleo Laine is equally determined that the show should go on in Pinner this Saturday. Rumour has it that the one-off voice is still in good nick after more than forty years in the business, so catch the concert if you can - and if there are still tickets left - in part of Pinner Jazz Club's season at the Parish Church. In the meantime, here are Cleo and Johnny, long before they became Sir and Dame, back in 1965.

Should we be silent in classical concerts?  Alex Ross, the classical critic of the New Yorker and writer of the superb panorama of 20th Century music The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, an “unlikely mass-market proposition” which has been a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic will be giving this year’s Royal Philharmonic Society Lecture. His talk is entitled Inventing and Reinventing the Classical Concert and will be given on 8 March at the Wigmore Hall. In the lecture Alex Ross will address concert culture - what has changed since the 18th century and what Read more ...

Mine's a Strawberry Mivvi, if you are buying, thanks. Suburban Counterpoint: Music for Seven Ice Cream Vans is a deliciously intriguing work by composer Dan Jones that does what it says on the tin. It will be performed as part of this year's Norfolk and Norwich Festival in May, before being reprised in London.A set of seven ice-cream vans will, we are told, "weave a spellbinding counterpoint across an entire suburb at a time, weaving a carefully planned route as melodies  echo from one van to another, calling out across great distances through  the evening and sometimes into the Read more ...