Archives: Posts From June 2008

'Black Watch' Finally Lands in London, to Applause
By Zoe Strimpel | Sun, 29 Jun 2008 at 11:44 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: "Black Watch," Gregory Burke's play about a Scottish regiment in Iraq, based on interviews with servicemen, has finally come to London two years after taking the Edinburgh Festival Fringe by storm. It toured America (including New York), Australia, and ...

Jay-Z Brings Hip-Hop to Glastonbury
By Zoe Strimpel | Sun, 29 Jun 2008 at 9:47 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Glastonbury, Britain's biggest rock festival, has been a little different this year on a few levels. First, it didn't sell out; last year all 137,500 tickets sold even before the lineup was announced. For the first time in recent memory touts have been ...

Big Names, Odd Canapés at TLS Summer Fête
By Zoe Strimpel | Sun, 29 Jun 2008 at 6:32 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) held its summer party on Thursday evening and, boy, did the crowds pack in. If anyone was in doubt about the size of the readership of that august publication, any concerns about its social clout can be laid to rest ...

Nudists on the Fourth Plinth? Could Be
By Zoe Strimpel | Sun, 29 Jun 2008 at 5:27 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: The sculptor Antony Gormley is one of two winners of the competition for Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth, beating a short list that included Jeremy Deller, Tracey Emin, Anish Kapoor, and Bob and Roberta Smith. His "One and Other" and Yinka Shonibare's ...

Madonna Recruiting McCartney's Divorce Lawyer?
By Zoe Strimpel | Thu, 26 Jun 2008 at 1:55 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Always trust the rumors. After months of tabloid whispers and denials from her camp, it appears that Madonna is taking steps to negotiate a divorce from Guy Ritchie, her husband of seven years. Word in legal circles — according to the Times of London ...

Beautiful Inside Hirst's Head Forever
By Zoe Strimpel | Mon, 23 Jun 2008 at 5:42 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Sotheby's London is to hold a September sale devoted purely to new Damien Hirst paintings. "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever" comprises a wide range of works completed in the last two years, though the list of lots is still under wraps. We do, however ...

U.K. Border Agency Turns Martha Stewart Away
By Zoe Strimpel | Sun, 22 Jun 2008 at 6:11 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Martha Stewart has been barred from entering the U.K. because of her criminal record, the Sunday Telegraph reports. Tough break: "Martha loves England and hopes this can be resolved and that she will be able to visit soon," her spokesperson was reported ...

Redeveloped Battersea Leads London Into the Future
By Zoe Strimpel | Sun, 22 Jun 2008 at 4:46 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Perhaps it's the fate of all London's vast, historically industrial spaces: Now it has been announced that Battersea power station is to be "saved" by being turned into posh flats, shops, and offices in a £4 billon ($7.89 billion) overhaul. The ...

Agency's Carcass Carted Off for a Few Million Pounds
By Zoe Strimpel | Thu, 19 Jun 2008 at 4:49 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: I blogged in March about the final nail in the coffin of the once-great literary and entertainment agency PFD (Peters Fraser & Dunlop). The poach heard round the arts world was Andrew Wylie's fly-by-night snatch of the Evelyn Waugh estate, considered to ...

Directors Sound Alarm About UK Film Industry
By Zoe Strimpel | Thu, 19 Jun 2008 at 3:53 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: The British film industry had better do something quick or the cream of the nation's cinematic talent will flee, top dogs in the field have said in a united outpouring of concern. The warning marks a contrast to the upbeat praise of British cinema the ...

Taking Tea With Boucher and Chardin
By Zoe Strimpel | Sun, 15 Jun 2008 at 4:41 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: The Wallace Collection, London's prettiest, most avowedly Francophile gallery, has cut right through the blockbuster art season with a quiet jewel of an exhibition: "Boucher and Chardin: Masters of Modern Manners," in conjunction with Glasgow's Hunterian ...

London Dons Its Best Jewels
By Zoe Strimpel | Thu, 12 Jun 2008 at 9:58 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: The first London Jewellery Week is under way. The city has decked itself out in fashion shows, talks, events, private viewings, and sales intended to show just what a capital of jewels the city has become. Experts, from the head of the Jewellery ...

Michael Frayn Weaves Genius Into His 'Afterlife'
By Zoe Strimpel | Wed, 11 Jun 2008 at 9:53 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: The world premiere of Michael Frayn's "Afterlife" took place last night at the National Theatre, and it was an absolute firecracker. As with "Copenhagen" and "Democracy," Mr. Frayn uses history as his starting point — in this case, the heyday and decline ...

Have London's Russians Had Their Fill of Art-Buying?
By Zoe Strimpel | Wed, 11 Jun 2008 at 6:12 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: The Russian art circus rolled back into town Monday night with Sotheby's evening sale, which made £21.1 million ($41.4 million), a result considered to be mixed. Could the art market — and the never-ending wealth-spinning of the two big auction houses ...

David Starkey Leads Tate's Rubens Campaign
By Zoe Strimpel | Sun, 8 Jun 2008 at 10:06 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Popular historian David Starkey has given his high-profile name to a campaign to keep a rare and beautiful Rubens sketch in England. It was for the ceiling of the Banqueting House in Whitehall and is considered a national treasure. The Tate has been ...

A Bomb That Didn't Blast
By Zoe Strimpel | Sun, 8 Jun 2008 at 9:53 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Ever since July 7, 2005, the day terrorists blew up Tube trains and a bus, resulting in carnage on London's Underground and streets, the sight of the words "Tube" and "bomb" in the same sentence has been enough to cause instant and major panic. So it was ...

Tracey Emin Won't Disappoint Posh Ladies
By Zoe Strimpel | Thu, 5 Jun 2008 at 5:33 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Putting Tracey Emin in charge of a room at the Royal Academy of Arts's Summer Exhibition was always going to provoke the establishment. Hot on the heels of fellow enfants terribles Jake and Dinos Chapman's shocking Hitler-based show at White Cube, Ms ...

Orange Prize Goes to Rose Tremain
By Zoe Strimpel | Thu, 5 Jun 2008 at 4:52 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Bookies' favorite Rose Tremain won the Orange Prize for fiction last night with "The Road Home" (to be published in America in August by Little, Brown), her novel about a Russian immigrant to Britain. Lev comes to London with no job, few friends, and ...

Who Wants a Drink on the Tube (Now That We Can't Have One)?
By Zoe Strimpel | Sun, 1 Jun 2008 at 9:30 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Well, it's June 1 and that's an end to boozing on the Tube. This is no bad thing, as I said a few weeks ago when Boris Johnson announced his intentions. But it has, all the same, provoked a sudden itch to drink in transit. Alex Clark in the Observer ...

The Chapman Brothers Make Their Own Hell
By Zoe Strimpel | Sun, 1 Jun 2008 at 8:50 PM | Permalink
Excerpt: Is this what the cutting edge in art has become? Jake and Dinos Chapman, the brothers whose previous work includes mannequins of children with genitals on their faces, opened their latest show last week at the White Cube gallery, and it's entirely about ...