I had a ticket to the National Theatre’s Othello tonight, but circumstances now mean that I’m at home. Which offers the perfect opportunity to watch the online live stream of The Arrest of Ai WeiWei from Hampstead Theatre. The stream is on this page – and I’m offering commentary here (read up from the bottom). Do please contribute to the discussion below.
21:55 Of course no-one contributes to blog discussions anymore, do they?
21:52 I really would love to know how much #aiwwlive stream cost – and how many people watched. We need this information to be shared so that other theatres can consider whether or not this is an approach they want to explore.
I was 16 years old in the summer of 1971. At school I had just taken my O’ levels, including English Language and English Literature, for both of which I had been taught by the poet Brian Jones. He told my class that in London there was a production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream which, if we went to see it, we would remember for the rest of our life. I followed his recommendation, even though it meant I had to come back to Canterbury on an early-hours’ milk train. And, as it has for so, so many others, that Dream has stayed with me across the past forty-two years. I’m grateful for so much to Brian Jones, who died in 2009 (see here for my earlier tribute) – and I am eternally grateful to the director of that production, Peter Brook, who thankfully and thrillingly is still with us. read more »
There’s one straight-up, stand-out recommendation this week, Eric Naiman’s lengthy essay for The Times Literary Supplement, When Dickens met Dostoevsky. It’s the tale of a notable literary hoax about an alleged meeting encounter between the two authors in 1862, but of course it’s also about what we fervently want to be true and why. Some of the same ideas run through The Fort Bragg murders – is Jeffery MacDonald innocent?. This is another of this week’s good long reads, in this case from Andrew Anthony in theGuardian about truth, relativism and the 1970 murders about which Joe McGinniss, Janet Malcolm and now Errol Morris have written notable books. Below, there are further links to interesting stuff, with thanks this week for recommendations from @audiovisualcy, @manovich and @poniewozick. read more »
To Clapham Picturehouse for Manet: Portraying Life, the Royal Academy of Arts exhibition (until 14 April) ‘captured for cinema screens worldwide’. That’s the claim of Exhibition: Great Art on Screen, a new initiative from Seventh Art productions and philgrabskyfilms.com in association with distributors BY Experience. It’s a follow-up to Leonardo Live in 2011 (about which I wrote here), except that it’s not live. It is, however, another element of the rapidly developing bundle of events that cinema owners call ‘alternative content’, along with Met Opera: Live in HD, NT Live and a forthcoming Pompeii Live from the British Museum (on 16 June). Except that this isn’t live. Manet: Portraying Life is a documentary of the kind that is familiar (perhaps over-familiar) from the BBC and Sky Arts. It’s 91 minutes long, it’s on a big screen, it’s thoughtful and finely-shot, but it’s not… well, you get the idea. read more »
Let’s suppose that Arts Council England employed the critic Andrew Graham-Dixon and a team of researchers and production staff to put together a substantial 3-volume history of the art of the Netherlands. ACE committed, let’s say, £300K of public funds to the project and this was felt to be money well-spent. The result was generally agreed to be engaging, authoritative and a valuable contribution to extending awareness and understanding its subject.
Now imagine that it was announced that the book was going to be available for just one month. We could all read it together during that month, but after thirty days the book was going to be hidden away. We couldn’t even consult it in public libraries, although it might come out for another month at some point in the future, and it might be the case, although no-one could promise, that we could buy our own copies in the future.
What do you think? Appropriate use of public money? Viable model for subsidised cultural production? Well, um, probably not. But this is EXACTLY the way in which television about the arts (and much more) works now. It’s illogical, crazy, dumb – and we are all the poorer because of it. Yet no-one seems to notice just how weird it is. read more »
Here’s an intriguing mystery. I have been writing in another context about the ITV company Granada and the benevolent despot who ran it in the 1950s and 1960s, Sidney Bernstein. Bernstein owned a chain of cinemas as well as heading an entertainment conglomerate that, by the mid-’60s, encompassed a television rental business and motorway service stations. Often described as a ‘Socialist millionaire’, Bernstein was a major art collector who eventually gave a significant collection of mostly modern masterpieces to Manchester Art Gallery (above). On 14 February 1959, the New Statesman ran a largely admiring profile of Bernstein (without a byline, as was the custom then) which included the information that, thanks to Granada,
visitors to art galleries, in Manchester and elsewhere, will shortly be able to hire for half-a-crown a gadget with earphones, through which they will hear interpretative commentaries on the pictures they are looking at.
Which I find extraordinary. This is early 1959, remember, and Granada is involved in the development of audioguides for museums. I had previously assumed such guides were only introduced, at the earliest, in the 1980s. In fact, it’s tricky trying to research the history of audioguides – I can find next-to-nothing online and one of the most scholarly papers concerned with the topic – ‘Four steps in the history of museum technologies and visitors’ digital participation’ by Jorgen Riber Christensen in MedieKulter, 2011; available as a free download) – contains nothing about their history.
All of which leads me to ask, does anyone know anything about this Granada-backed audioguide? Was it actually prototyped and tested? Does anyone remember using one? And, inevitably, is there a collector of historical media artefacts who actually owns one? All information, including about the early history of audioguides, gratefully received.
These past few months I have spent a good deal of time in Stratford-upon-Avon, where I have been exploring further collaborations with the Royal Shakespeare Company. That’s how I know that many of the company’s leading lights, including artistic director Gregory Doran, have this week decamped to New York. The RSC opens its mega- successful musical Matilda on Broadway on Thursday, and the night before Greg’s production of Julius Caesarstarts its run at BAM. (For background, see this Wall Street Journal piece.) I have also been reading Sally Beauman’s truly terrific The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades, first published in 1982 (and which I can’t quite believe I haven’t encountered before). And that is how I came to realise that this year marks the centenary of the first visit to the USA by the company that much later became the RSC. read more »
So even if you’ve already seen this, it is worth another watch – it’s a brilliant marketing coup for Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum which re-opens this week after a decade of closure. A detail of the painting which it recreates – Rembrandt’s celebrated The Night Watch – is above. The image is courtesy of the museum’s new website with its wonderful Rijks Studio facility which has a generous framework for downloading and re-use.
I am currently watching more television series drama than I have for a long time. Each new episode of Broadchurch on ITV and of both The Good Wife and Nashville on More4 demands a viewing, and Mad Men S6 is just about to return. (I am, however, clearly the only person in the world who is not totally up to speed with GoT S3 E1.) But this post is about another episodic drama that I have just discovered on DVD: The Spiral. The first series of this French cops’n’lawyers chronicle (Egrenages in the original) ran – thanks to the need for a follow-up to The Killing – on BBC Four in 2009. But it was made in 2005, since when there have been three further runs, each of which has also made it to Four, and series five and six are underway. Perhaps it’s a bit eccentric to write about an eight-year-old programme (and apologies for coming so late to this particular petite réception), but it really is terrific television – and DVDs have in any case made the medium more perpetually present than ever before. read more »
First day at work for new BBC Director General Lord Hall. His morning e-mail to all staff is here. Advice? Well, nurture the arts, please, and perhaps especially performance on television, but other than that I will leave it to others – including the mostly sensible contributors to The Observer, and Melvyn Bragg as well. Instead, I want to muse a little on the inability for television to work with independents on true research and development. I’m not thinking about technology R&D here, which the broadcasters, and especially the BBC, have shown themselves to be rather good at, but what we might think of as programming R&D. And I don’t mean the development of individual programmes, like commissioning scripts or securing access. Rather, I am concerned with deep R&D, thinking about the ways in which particular programme forms or genres might develop and trying to come up with radically different ideas. This kind of R&D is pretty much structurally impossible for broadcasters and independents to collaborate on. read more »
