Arts round up October 2015

Arts round up Oct 2015

Why has so little been said this autumn by this (post) august body of thinkers ? We dont spend all our time in bed - honest.

Well, there has been so little to enthuse about. The art shows Ive been to have been lamentable. Frank Auerbach is the greatest living British artist Waldemar Januszach told us in the Sunday Times. Really? Is that all we are left with in this post Freud and Bacon age? How about Hockney? Goldsworthy? Hurst and the other YBAs still creating. Mat Collishaw, Jeremy Dellar, how about Banksy? I didn't make it to Dismaland- Banksys super art theme park in Weston-Super-Mare, but everything I heard was positive and generous. He really is the real deal, not interested in fame and fortune, you never see him in his artistic output. Sarah Lucas take note ; maybe you arent as interesting and your weedy attempts to embarrass men are just feeble and pathetic, not oh so clever like I think you want us to think.
Auerbach at the Tate - so disappointing. Theres not one piece Id really want to own and cherish. What a paucity of ideas. What shall I paint today?
Lessee...oh, the view from the studio in Mornington Crescent ! What, again? Yes , again! If its good enough for Monet, its good enough for me. Plus I cant think of anything else. The early years included a piece that was so thickly plastered with paint, it was a wonder it hadnt all dripped in a long spaghetti like dollop. From afar this one of three figures in a garden was actually quite mesmerising, it has a ghostly quality that amazed me. So I am being harsh, but the later, badly mixed and roughly applied lines that were the "To the studio" series were just boring and low in quality.

The other show at the Tate Modern was  The World Goes Pop. Having paid - well if i wasnt a member - £15 or more, I wouldn't have been happy to see room after room of distinctly 2nd rate efforts by artists from around the world I had never heard of. Where were the Lichtensteins and Warhols I asked? "The idea wasn't to show the famous Americans, but show how Pop was created by artists from other parts of the globe" I was told at the info desk. Well OK, fine. But dont charge mega bucks as if the place was packed with dollar bills, Marilyns and Elvises. It just struck me as disingenuous and not worthy of my favourite art institution.
The best entertainment has been provided by the fabulous BBC radio channels 4, 4extra and 3, yet again. The series of plays, essays and documentaries commemorating Arthur Miller's birth has been a real treat and education. I have heard Death of a Salesman and View From the Bridge with David Suchet and Zoe Wanamaker having a great time with some of the best writing of the post war era. Howard Pinter's The Caretaker with David Warner was equally gripping, but I could not get to the end and stopped listening at a apposite time. Now a minor winge - BBC iplayer is quite hard to navigate, and now I cant find it again !
TV - now the remarkable Shane Meadows series This is England has finished, there is little left. Narcos is great on Netflix, but Homeland really is getting  dafter and dafter. I have a feeling it will end up like Lost, flogging the dead horse while no-one is watching.

Angus McGill - one of the Fleet st old school

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