What does 2007 hold for you in the arts? What’s happening in your corner of the UK?
My arts New Year kicked off when I ran into three Blue Men at a pub on Gloucester Road on New Years Eve. Who were these mysterious men with bald heads and faces completely painted blue (including blue rubber gloves on their hands). And what were they doing ordering drinks in a pub on Gloucester Road when their London show has been extended until November? Shouldn’t they be off practising their unique blend of theatre, percussive music, art, science and vaudeville? We’ll find out in a feature article next month.
But really, my year began with Kylie’s Showgirl Tour at Wembley Arena last Friday night. It was entertainment with a capital E, and incredibly impressive in its costume and staging with the most mixed crowd I’ve ever seen at a concert – teenage girls to grandparents and groups of escapees from Soho clubs. While theatre ticket prices are being reduced to encourage new audiences and put “bums on seats”, you certainly can’t make any complaints about the lack of audience, or audience enthusiasm at Kylie’s shows. The homo-erotic overtones of the shower dance scene had some lapping it up, and others squirming, but there’s no denying Kylie has bounced back from her own Annus Horribilis with remarkable energy, enthusiasm, and skill in working her crowd.
I ended up at Wembley because I had free tickets. No it’s not because Kylie’s PR are courting Arts Hub (though that’s always welcome), in fact it was part of a punishment. The teenage brother of a friend of a friend had an unfortunate run in with his father, after trying to exploit the sell-out popularity of Ms Minogue on eBay using the father’s credit card. The result was a very angry father, and the tickets were given away at the son’s expense. With artists cracking down on ticket touts trying to make a quick money, (Bob Geldof famously had eBay remove live8 tickets from its site) eBay has not been out of the news headlines for years. An Australian court recently ruled that a concert promoter could not block eBay users from selling scalped tickets. However in some sporting events, such as last year’s Ashes, organisers are buying up all scalped tickets then attempting to lay charges.
Artist crackdowns don’t end with the tickets: concerns about online intellectual property are high, and illicit recording and photography are a problem. Throughout the concert Kylie’s security “stewards” doubled as her image guardians, focussing all their attentions on removing cameras from snap-happy members of the crowd.
Kylie has been in the arts news a lot lately with a new waxwork at Madame Tussauds (in addition to her appearance in the controversial Posh & Becks Nativity Scene), and she makes her debut at the V&A in February in an exhibition described as “not only an attempt to attract young and new visitors but an absolutely valid examination of a contemporary social phenomenon, in the best traditions of museum practice” by the Financial Time’s Peter Aspden. This seems a good point at which to drag out the high culture vs low culture debates, what do you think?
In a more traditional arts outing, Saturday took me to the Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery. While I didn’t think the winning portrait by Richard Boll was the best, Erin Kornfeld’s Prudence and Julie, which won the best portrait by an artist under 25 category, is a truly evocative portrait of the morning after the night before.
From there I went on to watch Catherine Deneuve in Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967) at the NFT. Sadly, the book of the same name (different sub-title – Belle de Jour: The Further Adventures Of A London Call Girl – and no relation to the film) that I picked up in an airport recently certainly doesn’t live up to its saucy promises, and is more rambling self-indulgent blog than novel. This was no surprise really, since it sprang from a blog – a publishing phenomenon we’ll be exploring in detail in February.
I happened to be at Bethnal Green on Sunday, so I also checked out the Museum of Childhood – I must admit I didn’t stay long as all you could hear was the shrieking of small children through the cavernous Victorian building. Perhaps to appreciate it you need a stroller of your own to park alongside the dozens of others in the newly refurbished foyer (by architects of the moment Caruso St John), though I must admit to having Miffy nostalgia at the Dick Bruna exhibition upstairs.
This week I’m looking forward to seeing what happens when an artist curates an exhibition from his own collection, and seeing Damien Hirst’s exhibition at the Serpentine, and taking a slide on the Tate Modern’s latest interactive art exhibit.
If you’re in London at a loose end tonight, the National Portrait Gallery is offering its own “night at the museum” (thankfully no relation to the movie of the same name) and in line with schemes like Late at the Tate, are open til midnight for a chance to see the popular David Hockney Portraits exhibition, complete with drinks and jazz in the Main Hall.
We’d love to know your highlights and lowlights from 2006. Highlights last year for me were Love and Money at the Young Vic, and the fabulously tragi-comic one-woman show from ex-South Park Writer Jane Bussman, Bussman’s Holiday which I saw at the Soho Theatre after its premiere in Edinburgh. The distinct lowlight was Robert Altman’s direction of Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues at the Old Vic.
Don’t forget to let us know what you’re looking forward to in 2007 and what’s going on in your arts corner of the UK, wherever you might be. If you have any suggestions of issues or events you’d like us to look at, write to me emma@artshub.co.uk or have “your say” below.
