My first visit to the Lake District after more than a decade living in the UK had me thinking about our relationship to landscape and how it has changed over time. 2021: Year Of The Staycation I miss being able to plan holidays abroad. I really do. But a silver lining of the pandemic is […]
A look back at the things I did manage to see despite all the obstacles of 2020, as the Salterton Arts Review counts down the top five highlights of the year. The Salterton Arts Review in 2020 2020, what a year. I can’t say anything that hasn’t been said already about it, so I won’t […]
A new series on the Salterton Arts Review blog, in which I manoeuver around Covid measures to see what arts and culture I can in 2020. We’ve all had a bit more time on our hands recently. And some time to reflect on what we value. Turns out that a big part of what I […]
I recently went to Cuba. Not primarily for reasons of heritage tourism, more for reasons of wanting to have a holiday in the sun, see somewhere different, drink mojitos, and practice the Spanish I’ve been learning. But nonetheless I did visit some historic sites, museums and other cultural spots, as well as doing a couple […]
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 […]
Being a Benjaminian, I value the aura of seeing the ‘real thing’ as opposed to reproductions. Find the Mona Lisa boring? Not me. Yawn at Van Gogh’s sunflowers because they’re reproduced everywhere? Not likely. I like to get up close, see the brushstrokes or the chisel marks or the other traces of the human hand […]
There is something quite enchanting about Paris’s smaller museums, and I recently spent a very nice afternoon between two of them in the 9th arrondissement, both housed in what was once an artist’s residence. The different histories of the buildings and their gifting as public spaces, as well as the profiles of the artists and […]
Far away from ‘Museum Mile’, nestled in a Beaux Arts complex on Audubon Terrace near the top of Manhattan, the Hispanic Society of America is from a bygone era, which is exactly what drew me to it. Between its museum and library it has the finest collection of works from the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking […]
