We modern-day Luddites (I am 87) hate stooping to the web for dubious factoids, preferring to get our answers from well-edited books including our old dictionaries that were printed with ink on fine-fibre paper. Those books are now disappearing into a hungry maw called the internet.
Category: General
Learning to Listen – a Lost Art Recovered
It’s funny how some random experiences can teach us important lessons in life. On an Air France flight across the Atlantic recently, I clapped on a new set of Bose wireless headphones and within minutes a stewardess was squeezing my shoulder. I looked up and saw her mouth flapping – but she made no sound….
Playing Debussy on his Blüthner was a ‘head-spinning experience’
French pianist François Dumont has still not quite recovered from ‘the excitement, the anxiety’ of playing “Clair de Lune” on Debussy’s own Blüthner piano in a remote French museum. Dumont is one of the select few pianists ever allowed to touch the instrument, now fully restored and in mint condition. It was his credibility as…
The Innocent Ear
The Innocent Ear was a radio programme, broadcast on the Third Programme (which became BBC Radio 3) in which listeners were invited to “preserve [their] ‘innocence’” by not trying to guess the composer, and by approaching the music with fresh judgment, freed from prejudice”. The music broadcast would be identified afterwards, thus freeing the listener’s…
An unexpected cultural bonanza: ArtMuseLondon Editor’s review of the year
When in March 2020 the concert halls and opera houses fell silent, and the museums and galleries shut their doors, I expected ArtMuseLondon to take something of a sabbatical. What was there to review if culture in London, and beyond, had closed down for the foreseeable future? In fact, this year has proved unexpectedly rich…
Promentum..!
Many of you reading this will be aware that the pandemically-adjusted 2020 Proms season has just shifted up a gear. Since mid-July, the BBC has raided its archives and broadcast selected performances from past years. Now, however, there is an all-too-brief fortnight of live performances from an audience-free Royal Albert Hall, available on various platforms…
The Velvet Underground & Nico: The Ultimate Statement of Popular Art?
Guest post by Doug Thomas I recently re-immersed myself in the works of The Velvet Underground — especially The Velvet Underground & Nico (TVU&N) — and self-flagellated myself for not having written anything about it before. The album, released in 1967, is The Ultimate Statement of Popular Art, and an incredibly accurate portrait of the…
My favourite things: the museum gift shop
I was often denied a visit to the museum giftshop as a child. Hence, now I’m a fully-fledged grown up, I have a rather over-enthusiastic fondness for such places, something which my friend and co-founder of ArtMuseLondon, Nick, finds rather amusing. I’m not sure why my parents steered me away from the giftshop at the…
Culture in a time of coronavirus
2020 got off to a flying start, culture-wise, with the Royal Academy’s remarkable Picasso on Paper exhibition, and our quartet of reviewers were eagerly looking forward to a busy year of exhibitions, concerts and opera. On one trip to London, I managed to fit in not one but three exhibitions in a single day –…
The Art of Recycling: THE ROYAL ACADEMY SUMMER EXHIBITION 2019
The RA Summer Exhibition, with its whiff of the London season, the cocktail party and the 19th-century Paris salon, is always a bit of an oddity, and all the better for it, IMHO.
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