Ah, the bank holiday weekend. A time to get out of London and piece together an agenda of interesting activities, hopefully interspersed with at least one pub lunch. At the start of May I spend a weekend in the West Riding of Yorkshire, including a day in Leeds, and enjoyed activities including a very windy […]
I recently had the good fortune to be in Milan with an evening to spare, and decided on going to the late evening opening at the Pinacoteca di Brera. I had been once before, last year, but hadn’t seen everything I wanted to see, and was expecting a nice evening of art appreciation. What I […]
It’s an interesting thing, travelling to the Middle East. I’ve done it a few times in recent years, and the countries I have so far been to (Israel, UAE, Oman, Palestine and now Jordan) have at the same time confirmed and subverted my expectations. Edward Said’s seminal 1978 work Orientalism really resonated with me when I first […]
I intend to go back to this exhibition again before it closes. Not because I loved it so much I just have to (this remains to be seen) but because the main drawbacks I found with this exhibition were organisational and design constraints: too many people, wall texts too hard to read and not enough […]
This is an exhibition with a very good starting point: a successful and creative businessman, buffeted by the vagaries of 20th Century history, whose story illustrates a much wider narrative. Plus that of a granddaughter (Anne Sinclair), public figure, painted by major artists as a child, and now author of a successful history of her […]
“That was wackadoodle.” – Me, directly after seeing it. “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich. Malkovich?” – My SO, requesting a guest blogging spot. Wackadoodle in a good way? Partly. This collaboration between theatre and music, commissioned from Michael Sturminger by the Philharmonie Hamburg is currently touring an interesting variety of locations (London, Birmingham, Groningen), as necessitated by […]
Artists whose creativity spills out of them – onto canvases, onto objects around them – fascinate me, it’s a reason I have such a soft spot for Jean-Michel Basquiat. It is also a principle behind Robert Rauschenberg’s artistic output, made all the more interesting by the fact that he did not set out on an […]
This is an interesting exhibition, which reflects on how we, as humans, see our fellow animals, and what effect our interactions with and understandings of animals have on them. It opens by looking Linnean classification of species (ie. the Enlightenment era division of living things into kingdoms, species, etc) including a fascinating and fragile dried […]
I rather enjoyed this historic and thematic overview of the place of electricity in our lives. The broad structure of the exhibition takes us from Generation (early encounters with electrical forces, experimentation and understanding of the processes involved in creating electricity) to Supply (how electricity was stored, harnessed and transported) and Consumption (the effect it […]
Exploring the changes in geopolitics, technology and society through the use and evolution of maps is an interesting idea, and the British Library’s exhibition does its best to add enough variety to keep the subject matter engaging. The exhibition is logically structured, with an early section on the opening of the 20th Century and a […]
