Arts news

• I used to think booing was healthy. Now it’s out of control | Martin Kettle

  03-01-2016 13:56
  
  The threshold has fallen so low that performers who live every day with fear of failure are being booed by audiences for no good reasonIn the 1980s, I wrote an article in the Guardian that began: “What’s wrong with booing at the opera, for goodness sake?” My view back then was that booing was unpleasant but at least it showed people cared. Why should British audiences feel they had to sit meekly and applaud all the time, whatever was served up to them? They shouldn’t have
  
  Read more

• Bright lights, big city – Lumiere comes to London

  03-01-2016 13:30
  
  The gloomiest days of the year are approaching, but this month London will be lit up with its first Lumiere, a light festival that will see the city reimagined – and repurposed – for four days. For its creator, Helen Marriage, it has been a feat of imagination – and planningA couple of weeks before Christmas, in a 17th-floor corner office near Victoria station in London, a coup is being organised. The two dozen plotters and planners in the room are concerned principally with th
  
  Read more

• Laura Cumming: how Velázquez gave me consolation in grief – and set me on the trail of a lost portrait

  03-01-2016 13:04
  
  For John Snare, a Victorian bookseller, the discovery of a long-lost painting by Velázquez brought fame and ruin. His tale is told in The Vanishing Man by Laura Cumming: a detective story, a study of obsession – and a passionate homage to the Spanish artist• Velázquez on Broadway: an extract from The Vanishing ManMy father died quite suddenly when I was in my late 20s. He was a painter. The fatal illness attacked his brain and then his eyes. In my raging grief, I could n
  
  Read more

• Laura Cumming: how Velázquez gave me consolation – and set me on the trail of a mystery

  03-01-2016 13:04
  
  For John Snare, a Victorian bookseller, the discovery of a long-lost portrait by Velázquez brought fame and ruin. His tale is told in The Vanishing Man by Laura Cumming: a detective story and a passionate homage to the Spanish artist• Velázquez on Broadway: an extract from The Vanishing ManMy father died quite suddenly when I was in my late 20s. He was a painter. The fatal illness attacked his brain and then his eyes. In my raging grief, I could not bear to look at any paintin
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Velázquez on Broadway: an extract from The Vanishing Man by Laura Cumming

  03-01-2016 13:00
  
  In the Observer art critic’s new book, the tale of a Victorian bookseller who discovers a long-lost portrait by Velázquez becomes a detective story, a study of obsession and a passionate homage to the Spanish artist• Laura Cumming: how Velázquez gave me consolation – and set me on the trail of a mysteryThere is something intensely romantic in the fact that while walking up Broadway in the midst of a busy noonday crowd – made up of Bulls and Bears, rattling om
  
  Read more

• B Wurtz: Selected works 1970-2015 review – everyday rubbish reimagined

  03-01-2016 09:00
  
  Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
  From painted takeaway cartons to plastic bag trees, California artist B Wurtz wants us to take a close, loving look at junkSomething out of nothing – that is what the California artist B Wurtz creates. He is a conjuror and cobbler of junk. A master of balance and composition, he can turn the most unprepossessing rubbish into graceful works of art. What we might simply throw away – carrier bags, shoelaces, used plastic, old buttons –
  
  Read more

• Parting words from an artist of rare vision

  03-01-2016 08:30
  
  Painter Sargy Mann did not live to deliver the TED talk he spent his final months preparing. This is what he wanted to say…Not long before he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the autumn of 2014, the painter Sargy Mann was invited to give a TED talk. Mann, then 77, was told by doctors that he had only weeks to live. In the event he survived for more than half a year, and he devoted much of that time to working out what he might say to a TED audience.The subject of his talk was to be a
  
  Read more

• 'Like a beautiful painting': image of New Year's mayhem in Manchester goes viral

  03-01-2016 04:43
  
  A photograph depicting New Year’s Eve celebrations gone awry in central Manchester has been compared to a Renaissance masterpieceA photograph of a Manchester street strewn with revellers is being lauded online for artfully capturing a uniquely British New Year’s Eve celebration. The striking image, shot by freelance news photographer Joel Goodman, first appeared in a picture gallery on the Manchester Evening News website, and was brought to Twitter’s attention by BBC producer R
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

Follow @ArtsUKnews on Twitter!