Magnus: this chess documentary charts the genesis of genius November 24, 2016 Of all the sports in the world, competitive chess is not one that inspires Hollywood-style underdog stories. But this tale of the genesis of genius is, in its own way, as compelling as any blockbuster. People of a certain age, of course, will remember the epic battle of minds that was Garry Kasparov vs Bobby [...]
Gavin Turk’s Who What When Where How and Why at Newport Street Gallery is proof he has brains as well as balls November 24, 2016 The double-height room in Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery – recently home to Jeff Koons’ giant Balloon Dog – lies empty save for an English Heritage blue plaque reading “Gavin Turk worked here, 1989-1991”. This is the piece, entitled Cave, that infamously caused his tutors at the Royal College of Art to refuse to present [...]
Your Name: this Japanese body-swap disaster anime is the most beautiful film of the year November 24, 2016 Your Name is ridiculously, heartbreakingly beautiful. Every frame is filled with flourishes that amaze and delight; a sunbeam refracted in a tear-drop, motes of dust swimming in the morning light, the technicolour trail of a mysterious comet. It’s the latest film from the hip young gunslinger of Japanese animation, Makoto Shinkai, and it arrives in [...]
Winner of the RIBA International Prize for Architecture is a university in Peru November 24, 2016 The winner of the inaugural RIBA International Prize for Architecture has gone to an engineering university in Peru. The UTEC building in Lima was priased by judges for being a shining example of merging form and function, with its brutalist design the perfect foil for the no-nonsense academic work that takes place inside. The judging panel praised [...]
Dishonored 2: This first-person assassin game by Arkane is a glorious steampunk wonderland November 23, 2016 Dishonored 2 feels reassuringly familiar. The action may have shifted from plague-ridden, Dickensian squalor to sun-baked, equatorial squalor, but the constituent parts remain: it looks the same, it plays the same, it almost smells the same. Thank goodness, because Dishonored is at the very apex of video-game design, dense and textured, beautiful despite the muck [...]
Hidden in plain sight: A visually confounding art piece questions our relationship with social media November 23, 2016 Before the invention of radar technology, warships would disguise their true shape and heading using patterns and colour. Zig-zagging lines, high contrast and sharp angles would confuse gunners, who struggled to accurately determine the distance and speed of their targets. “Dazzle camouflage” drew inspiration from the natural world – zebra herds use this kind of [...]
From Charles Rennie Mackintosh to Renzo Piano: how top architects have helped to reinvent the chair November 23, 2016 Architects have been adding chairs and other items of furniture to their design repertoire since the beginning of the 19th century. The relationships and similarities are often surprising, and raise some interesting questions. What is it that distinguishes a chair designed by an architect, rather than a furniture designer? Why would an architect want to [...]
My House: Preston Fitzgerald, an art and antiques collector who’s turned his home into a pop-up exhibition space for young artists November 23, 2016 I’ve been living in London with my partner for 21 years now, having moved here from New York City. I had come from a sales background, but left that behind when I went back to school to get my postgraduate degree in art history. When I began working at Sotheby’s in furniture and contemporary design, [...]
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them review: a full-on Christmas blockbuster that’s bursting with imagination November 17, 2016 No more, JK Rowling vowed as the Harry Potter series – her magnum opus that took 17 years to write – finally came to an end. And she’s largely kept her word, apart from the studio tour, the theme park and the play that’s currently in the West End. Oh, and a website she runs [...]
An Inspector Calls at the Playhouse theatre: good, cosy fun, but lacking spleen November 17, 2016 An Inspector Calls returns once again to the London stage. A whodunnit in which a police officer investigates the causes of a young woman’s suicide should be an excoriating critique of the indifference of the upper-middle classes, but here it is repackaged as cosy entertainment for the descendants of the very people it originally sought [...]
