Reviews on The Review

I don’t like dance performances which require you to read the programme in order to understand what’s going on. I didn’t buy a programme (mostly, to be honest, because the drinks were so expensive at the bar I didn’t have any cash left). So when the lights came up on a girl towering above a sea [...]

Yeats supposed that we make rhetoric out of the quarrel with others; but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. When I first started listening to folk music, it was Irish and very much concerned with the quarrel with others. It was dedicated to the wronged and with the search for finding some way of [...]

Francis Bacon is presented, in his third Tate Britain retrospective, as a straightforwardly thematic painter: the exhibition’s ten chronologically-arranged rooms consistently refer the viewer to the Cold War, World War 2, the illegality of homosexuality, the decline of organised religion.  Although Bacon regularly objected to any narrative readings of individual paintings, he becomes here the story of [...]

There’s the upstairs and round and about to walk through of Finland, Japan and (most interesting to me actually) the UK, but it happens to be this gallery first, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia (places I’m not sure exactly where they are) – and immediately I’m given pause and, well, transported. And not least by this medieval [...]

Herbie Hancock, unlike Miles, has never been afraid to revisit his back catalogue and this Sunday’s concert in Manchester was a trip down memory lane.  However, as we know, revisiting is usually rather more than revamping.
 
This evening’s concert started with ‘Actual Proof’ from Hancock’s second Headhunters’ album, Thrust, And for a while in there it [...]

Poor Mark Rothko. An intensely private individual whose brooding canvases are enough to reduce one to existential uncertainty (why is that painting moving?), has been rendered banal by over-reproduction of his works – a framed, poster-sized reproduction of sunshine yellow and burnt orange hanging on the wall is as predictable an element of a dinner [...]

Five years ago the V&A attracted bumper crowds for its Art Deco exhibition, with sellout crowds flocking to see the eclectic mix of everything from footage of Josephine Baker dancing to radio sets the size of an average sideboard. Using the same template of a mix of everything from cars to posters, the museum has [...]