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| Children’s Books: Field Guides to Fairies A recent crop of fairy-themed novels and reworked fairy tales is proving the resilience of an age-old genre. feeds.nytimes.com |
Fiction Chronicle Books by Janet Skeslien Charles, Robert Hicks, Anita Diamant, N. M. Kelby and Rebecca Stott. feeds.nytimes.com |
A Christmas Carol | Theatre review Stephen Joseph, ScarboroughOne never tires of Charles Dickens's Christmas tales,but they are told so often it helps to have a little twist to distinguish yours from the crowd. Chris Monks's production carries the unique selling point of a suggestion that Scrooge may have been brought up only a few miles from Scarborough.Stereotypes about tight-fisted Yorkshiremen aside, the facts stack up quite well. Dickens made several research trips to the white rose county, and had a solicitor friend in Malton whose offices he claimed to have inspired Scrooge and Marley's. And try saying "'Umbug" with rich, northern vowels: it works.It also helps to put some flesh on Scrooge's bones, as Kraig Thornber's portrayal is far from the spindly caricature of popular renown. While it usually takes until the closing scenes before we can finally warm to Scrooge, here the thaw begins sooner. The shadow of his unhappy schooldays is all the more vivid for being located just down the road; one even begins to intimate that the unwanted, abandoned child could be a spiritual brother to that other product of a Yorkshire education, Smike.Its regional slant aside, Monks's production is as traditional as chestnuts roasting on an open fire, with a chorus of urchins, some spooky phantoms and a fine, frosty set with all the trimmings of top hats, mufflers and hearty rounds of wassailing. In short: the perfect Yorkshire Yuletide that we Tykes prefer to keep to ourselves, because we're that mean.Rating: 4/5TheatreCharles DickensAlfred Hicklingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Enlightened age for the arts in Britain is cast into shadow A decade of unprecedented investment in galleries and museums is ending and a return to the dark days of closures, entry charges and pandering to the familiar loomsIt is a space dedicated to the fruits of patronage. Against whitewashed walls and beneath a startling glass canopy, the Leonardos and Donatellos, the choir screens and sculptures, the tapestries and caskets speak to an age of extraordinary wealth and aesthetic ambition. But the newly opened medieval and renaissance galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum also testify to the fact that our own epoch of remarkable cultural investment – like Florence after the Medici – is shuddering to a halt.The fear is that a collapse in private philanthropy combined with a political arms race of expenditure cuts and quango-bashing could soon return our galleries and museums to the dark days of charges, closures and pandering to the familiar. Nothing less than the democratic capacity of British culture – the ability both to fund great art and open up life chances – is what is at stake.It began a decade ago with the relaunch of the Royal Opera House following its £178m refit and has concluded with the re-engineered V&A and the equally stunning transformation of the Ashmolean in Oxford. Crumbling Victorian edifices have undergone architectural open-heart surgery and fusty old collections have been taken into the 21st century. Indeed, the Noughties marked a period of unprecedented postwar cultural prowess.Of course, modernisation was never without its controversies. The great chunks of National Lottery and Arts Council cash swallowed up by the ROH set the mark for over-ambitious and poorly managed projects, a view only endorsed by the millions who watched the BBC documentary, The House, chronicling Sir Jeremy Isaacs' rumbustious attempts to manage Covent Garden. But few today, enjoying the acoustics and surviving the crush of the once derelict Floral Hall, would deny the transformative effect of the redevelopment on the opera house fabric and its artistic capacity.With the new build came a new philosophy. The intervention of philanthropist Paul Hamlyn inspired a markedly more activist approach to audience development, with deprived schools and then Sun readers targeted for subsidised opera tickets. For this has been the mantra in arts and heritage over the past decade. Public money for modernised galleries meant access and inclusion had to change.The culture shift began with free entry to museums and has developed down the years to force once standoffish institutions to engage with wider School trips, outreach and working with diverse communities have come to rank as highly as research and fundraising. audiences. "Most museums can no longer afford to blithely concentrate on their collections at the expense of their visitors," as a recent study puts it.It is the move from a museum being about something to being for somebody. The families and groups now wandering through Kelvingrove museum in Glasgow or Middlesbrough's Institute of Modern Art are very different to what they were 10 years ago.Of course, there has been some guerrilla resistance by curators concerned more with restoration than education. A leading fine art director, Philippe de Montebello, spoke for many of his peers when he revealed: "To me, audiences are second… Our primary responsibility is to works of art." But the combination of social activism and public funding tied to popular engagement meant that such disdain could never be sustained.With growing audiences has come the appreciation that museums can rebuild urban economies. Once this was christened the "Bilbao effect" in homage to the impact that Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum had on urban renewal, economic expansion and local pride in the decaying, northern Spanish port. But the problem with Bilbao is that no one goes back. A culture-led programme of civic regeneration needs to be about much more than the kind of single iconic building dispatched by the studios of Gehry, Daniel Libeskind and Santiago Calatrava.Instead, it has to offer numerous competing cultural attractions which bring in not only tourists and culture vultures but the kind of young professionals and knowledge-workers attracted to high-end civic environments. Manchester – with the Whitworth and City art galleries, the Imperial War Museum North and the People's History Museum – has been doing just that.When in 1966 the young German critic WG Sebald arrived to take up a post at Manchester University, he found a city that seemed to "have long since been deserted, and was now left as a necropolis or a museum". Once "one of the 19th century's miracle cities, it was now almost hollow to the core".Today, after a decade of cultural investment, it is that sense for the past – in its museums and cultural institutions – which has helped Manchester recover from its post-industrial nadir. So too in Liverpool, where the Tate Gallery at Albert Dock, the International Slavery Museum and the European Capital of Culture events have all helped to kick-start urban regeneration. And in the northeast, the Newcastle-Gateshead quayside redevelopment – including the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, the Sage Gateshead music centre and the Gateshead Millennium Bridge – have revived this district as a social space and powerfully updated Tyneside's urban identity. For with the revitalisation of museums there usually follows a broader appreciation of the historic fabric, as warehouses, wharfs and factories come to be valued as purveyors of civic sensibility rather than obstacles to economic development.But Britain's museums have done more than gentrify the urban core. Over the past 10 years they have provided cosmopolitan spaces in our multicultural society, offering a vehicle for a shared socialunderstanding. In the face of mass-migration and stark, post-9/11 and 7/7 religious tensions, Britain's great conurbations have mostly remained free of communal violence. Our civic institutions have played an important role in that by offering settings for transcultural dialogues. "The museum is about the world," according to American curator James Cuno, with a social purpose "to breed greater familiarity with the rich diversity of the world's cultures". And from the 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade to the exhibitions charting Iranian heritage at the British Museum, our cultural institutions have done just that.Of course, some ventures have not succeeded. The National Football Museum in Preston expensively confirmed that fans are far more committed to individual clubs than the game's history. Sheffield's National Centre for Popular Music lasted 15 months, while it is fair to say that The Public in West Bromwich has still to prove itself. But intellectually and socially, our artistic and heritage institutions display a far more confident sense of themselves than when the ROH went dark.As such, they have been part of a broader shift in political and cultural activity. With nosediving membership of the mainstream political parties and church pews sitting empty, the British public have taken to exploring ideological and aesthetic issues in book festivals, ideas weekends and evening debates in unprecedented numbers. It is a secular, almost Enlightenment vision of citizenship and public life which marks a passion for culture in its broadest sense quite unheard of two decades ago.When Tony Blair sought to connect his premiership with this artistic revival in a 2007 speech at Tate Modern, Sir Nicholas Serota stressed just how important government funding had been to this process. What was more, "Tony's commitment not to return to the stop-and-start economy in the arts is crucial".Two years on, with seismic cuts to Arts Council budgets and the Olympics succubus swallowing ever greater Lottery funds, such certainty already feels dated. Benefactors are burying their cheque books, endowments are plummeting, builders are going bankrupt and government departments are working out where to inflict 15-20% cuts. At the very moment when, after the big build, our museums and galleries need secure revenue streams, they will be confronting a funding crisis.Things might be even worse under a prospective Conservative government with little feel for the cultural fabric. In the past, Tory frontbenchers have mooted the return of museum charging; now they talk in anodyne terms of quango savings. But numerous arts projects are already looking in jeopardy. In theory, new funds for the British Film Institute archives and the Tate Modern extension are safe, but I wouldn't bet my Jackson Pollock on it. Meanwhile, in Manchester, plans for a Royal Opera North look ambitious, while the British Museum will struggle to finance its new wing. None of which is to suggest that great art cannot emerge during eras of austerity, but the democratic capacity of culture certainly takes a hit when acquisitions falter and education departments close.Of course, there is another way. The Dutch government has decided to protect the culture budget during the downturn. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy has lent £31bn to the nation's universities and museums to safeguard the "cultural heritage". Sadly, Britain cannot afford such largesse. The great boom of the art years was – like Medici Florence – closely and painfully wedded to the financial services bubble. And the effect of the Lehman Brothers crash in September 2008 will continue to be felt in even the most modest local gallery.All we can do is retreat to the glorious V&A galleries and bask in the afterglow of this decade's astonishing cultural rejuvenation. As we do so our gaze might alight on Sir Paul Pindar's house: the beautiful, timber-framed Jacobean frontage of a 17th-century Bishopsgate home which at one point contained this Stuart merchant's extensive cultural collection. Now, for all its elegance, it is just a facade.MuseumsLiverpool 2008: European capital of cultureAshmolean MuseumTate ModernTate LiverpoolArts policyFrank GehryV&ANational LotteryMuseumsWG SebaldTristram Huntguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Other Voices, Other Selves The quirky pleasures in these essays are due in part to Zadie Smith’s inspired cultural references, from Simone Weil to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” feeds.nytimes.com |