Art

Public funding for journalism and the arts is certainly part of the answer. Democracy is healthier where public media funding is high.

Democracy, here, is defined as whatever it is that luvvies like this week. What is not meant is that as the peoples’ tatste changes so too does what luvvies boradcast this week – you know, reflection of the democratic will.

Obvious solution is obvious:

to public media endowment funds answerable only to their governing boards, and nominations to which should stretch across multiple electoral cycles.

Creating such a “meta-endowment” at an EU level, and charging it with being a supplementary source of funding for national, regional and local public service media, journalism, publishing and cinema across Europe

Take the money from a level still abiding by the luvvies views and give it, in perpetuity, to the luvvies. For we cannot just have the people deciding things now, can we?

Alan Cumming is Leo and David Morrissey is Clive, two middle-aged neighbours in a Manchester street. Leo is gay and runs a lively bar in Canal Street that’s become a refuge for waifs and strays – young people rejected because of their sexuality or how they present themselves – having inherited the place from a former partner who left him to marry a woman. Clive is an electrician, unhappily married with two grown, or almost grown, sons. Saul is 25 and George is 16; the latter is gay, though he’s told no one. Leo is outgoing, not to say a busybody: he sees trouble in Clive’s family and he wants to help. But Clive, a brutal and brutalised Brexiter who has swallowed all kinds of conspiracy theories online, is a poor target for Leo’s generosity.

Who could imagine that the father of the yet to come out laddie is a brutal, brutalised, Brexiter? In a Russell T Davies production? Imagine that, eh?

The performing arts industry in the UK is “inhospitable to parents” and falling far behind other industries in supporting women who have children, according to research.

The report, titled “the Motherhood penalty”, criticises the industry for failing to consider how it might adapt to better accommodate parents, with the result that many, in particular women, drop out.

Its author, Jennifer Tuckett, a playwright, said: “Caring responsibilities were one of the major issues affecting women’s careers in the arts.

“We were shocked to find problems like schedules being sent out the night before and the impact this has on parents, and we would urge both arts organisations and policymakers to look at new models which support both women and men to achieve success in the workplace and at home.”

All plays, musicals, live performances, now to be between 1 pm and 3 pm to allow the mothers among ther performers to do the school pick up. Hey, equality’s the paramount virtue, right?

Between 2021 and 2025, Black nonbinary artist Sage Ni’Ja Whitson visited 91 locations across 15 states – in all of these sites a trans, gender nonconforming, or intersex individual had died, either by murder or suicide. At each site they conducted a ceremony of their own to bear witness to what had happened there.

“It was very challenging in ways that I’m continuing to mend from and rest with,” they said. “It is not ‘inexpensive’ on my body and spirit. That cost I knew would be there.”

I’ll invent a boogie, a rain dance, a prayer, a ceremony, which is very taxing upon me, then you all bow down to me as the artist.

Currently showing at Los Angeles’s California African American Museum (CAAM) is These Waking Glories, Whitson’s solo show displaying a variety of photos and other pieces in conjunction with these ceremonies. A moving and important bearing of witness to the violence that continues to ravage the communities of both racial and gender minorities, it is a powerful show that should be experienced.

Now, as we all know, some considerable portion of these dead are sex workers. Or, to use older language, trannies who may or may not have been wholly open about physical matters before proferring. Or even during. They are indeed individual and precious snowflakes because all humans are that. But tranny tart is a risky profession. It’s not obvious that tranny, as tranny, nor black, has much to do with it.

But, you know, art…..

Amanda Seyfried: ‘People walking out of our film means we’re doing something right’
The Mamma Mia! star and the Oscar-winning composer Daniel Blumberg on creating The Testament of Ann Lee – a tale of sex, suffering and faith

People might also walk out because it’s shite of course.

Not that I have any intention at all of checking to find out.

‘Her time has come’: did Mondrian owe his success to a cross-dressing lesbian artist who lived in a Cornish cove?

No?

Or perhaps more importantly, who cares?

By combining internal documents seen by the Guardian – alongside information disclosed in financial filings by the films’ holding companies – it is tempting to guess how the producer has shrugged off commercial and artistic disappointments to continue operating in the business on such a prolific scale.

Latham’s movies, it seems, have been funded almost entirely by the UK taxpayer.

Loads of films that are really pretty crap.

So, why? One answer is Sturgeon’s Law. Another is that the system is set up to do this.

Make a film in Britain, get not tax relief but actyually tax grants. Make the movie, report an inflated budget (film financing is famously creative), get the tax grant. By inflating the grant is actually more than the cost of making the film.

Profit!

And that, really, is it.

The answer, of course, is to stop the tax grants to films.

Bugger the luvvies….

This place I call home has again and again stood against what was being promoted by southern Britain, or the industrial north. And we need to push back again, because we live in an age of ecological collapse, the climate crisis and the accumulation of wealth and power that would make anyone before this age gasp – a love of nature, or a questioning about how we live in it, are not peripheral issues; they are among the biggest questions we must now grapple with. Our effect on the planet is now so great, everywhere, and so all-affecting that we have created a new epoch: the anthropocene.

James Rebanks is getting all pompous again.

Somehow I’m able to predict that part of the solution is going to be continued subsidy to upland sheep farming. Difficult to know how I’m able to divine that but I am, really, pretty sure.

Artists have created visualisations of the impact of the climate crisis on some of the world’s most recognisable landscapes, in a project to highlight the environmental effects of tech consumption.

So, take a piccie, run it through an AI as if it’s 30 metres underwater. Done.

How many times has this been done already?

Mark Maslin, a professor of earth system science at University College London, used climate modelling to examine the low-end and top-end damage at each location. His findings were interpreted by a group of artists for the show at the Last Shot Gallery by Back Market. The artistic works are not intended to be taken as literal predictions of what will happen in these locations, but to raise awareness of the threat posed by climate breakdown.

Ah, so it’s not, in fact, art at all. It’s propaganda.

Maslin said the environmental impact of tech consumption was estimated to account for 6% of the human-driven climate crisis; double that of the aviation industry.

And it’s all Elon’s fault. That’s the new bit, eh?

In some ways, it is scarcely worth responding to Kemi Badenoch’s pledge to end “rip-off” degrees such as – we presume – performing arts, English, design, sociology, anthropology, media and psychology.

Yes, yes, the disgusting engineers are having a go at the luvvies.

Slashing arts degrees because they don’t make enough money, you say? First of all: what on earth do you think the purpose of human life is? Isn’t it something like: “pursue joy, deal justly with your fellow humans, love well, try to understand and see as much of this beautiful world and of the richness and variety of human culture and experience as you can before you die”?

None of which requires a degree of course.

The creative industries are a powerhouse for the British economy. The UK has some of the best talent in the world in film and television (for the benefit of Badenoch, that’s “performing arts”). Not just actors but producers, lighting experts, directors, camera operators, graphic artists, CGI experts, makeup artists, costume creators, casting mavens.

High-end television production companies from around the world come to Britain to make great work. Performing arts is a huge industry for Britain. The creative industries add £124bn of value to the UK; the University and College Union (UCU) called Badenoch’s plans “economically illiterate”.

None of which requires a degree of course.

Perhaps we really should replace all arts degrees with something in basic logic?

In The Woman in Cabin 10, Netflix’s new potboiler, Keira Knightley plays a fearless justice warrior, a lone voice of dogged truth in a maelstrom of corruption, and this is not her first foray into such terrain: six years ago she played the whistleblower Katharine Gun in Official Secrets, the 2019 film about some pretty dicey US and UK behaviour before the Iraq war.

This time round she’s a journalist, though – and not just any old hack, a Guardian journalist. Exhausted and possibly traumatised by a crusading investigation she has just finished about some bad people doing bad things, she accepts a trip on a billionaire’s yacht for a breather, only to discover that billionaires are also bad. You cannot call that a spoiler, even though it technically is one. You’re reading the Guardian, for Pete’s sake.

Doesn’t work, does it? All Guardian journalists are bigger tits than that.

This is all wholly true, of course:

“Olaudah had been passed on through a network of people,” says Marshall. “He got exchanged over four or five times. He didn’t see a white man until he got on the boat. That’s the slave trade too. It’s not just the boats. It’s not just the trip across the Atlantic. It’s everyday people who wanted some value from whatever was transpiring during the slave trade, people who participated as freelancers to get what they could. They didn’t care any more about abducting children than anybody else.”

So why does he think people choose to ignore these sorts of stories?

“Because they don’t fit the narrative of white people evil, black people good. It doesn’t fit.”

But The G says:

Which makes his new series, painted just in time for this show, all the more unsettling.

Why is simple – and what should be thoroughly well known – history unsettling?

The BBC has admitted to serious and unacceptable flaws in the making of its Gaza documentary, saying public trust in its journalism has been damaged.

Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone failed to disclose that its child narrator, a 14-year-old boy named Abdullah, was the son of a Hamas official.

In a statement, the broadcaster also revealed that the boy’s family had been paid for his involvement.

Hoyo Films, the independent production company, knowingly misled the BBC about the child’s links to Hamas, but the corporation said it should have carried out its own checks.

Just a thought, but how much independent journalism has there been out of Gaza? So when a fulkly formed and – so I’m told – rather well made documentary pops up then…..

A gallery ordered by police to take down a painting of a naked cowgirl has opened an exhibition of dozens of nudes in protest against “provincial prudery”.

Nekkid cowgirls not so much.

Apparently so:

Theatres and drama schools have been offered “plus-size inclusivity training” to tackle “fatphobia” and help the industry become “more inclusive for bigger bodies”.

Kim Tatum dreams of playing Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard’s exquisite former star of silent films. Mariah Louca longs to perform as Dangerous Liaisons’ evil schemer Marquise de Merteuil. And for Reece Lyons, it’s the monstrous ambition of Lady Macbeth that makes her the ideal role. But, until attitudes within British theatre shift, it’s unlikely these talented performers will get to play their dream characters. Despite their skill, training and accolades, trans women just don’t seem to get cast in cisgender roles.

“I have never seen a trans woman on stage play a mother or a love interest,” Offie-award-winning Lyons says. “Why don’t we come to mind for that?” Lyons is sitting on a low couch in a light-streamed room across from Tatum and Louca. Frustrated with the constant obstacles they face in the industry, the three actors are calling for trans women to be put on an equal footing for cis roles.

Sigh.

One obvious answer is that you’re a bloke so casting will be influenced by that. But let us move on from such obvious prejudice. It’s already well established that Eddie Redmayne wouldn’t get that trans part these days. Because cis is not allowed to play trans, obvs. If them’s the rules then them’s the rules. But basic fairness would then insist that trans don’t get to play cis.

Either it’s all dress up and casting is entirely open to the vision of the director and everyone esle gets to shut the fuck up – or it isn’t. And if it ain’t then you’re screwed, right?

Running the cash-strapped Southbank Centre: ‘We feared Cate Blanchett would get stuck in a lift!’

Is, as we know, “If she’s fugly, she can”.

The point is not that pretty women – even beautiful ones – cannot, by definition, act. It’s that some people – male and female – get acting jobs simply because they’re so stunning looking. An actual ability to act is not a necessary requirement for a job as an actor that is.

However, if we find someone who does not have those stunning looks who also gets acting jobs then the assumption – even, if we are to take the law seriously, not something that is wholly necessary – is that the individual can act.

If she’s fugly she can.

Sydney Sweeney has hit back at a “shameful” Hollywood producer who criticised her acting ability and asked, “Why is she so hot?”.

The actress, who was nominated for two Emmys this year, said that she felt “unjustly disparaged” after hearing the comments made by Carol Baum.

Earlier this week, Ms Baum told the audience at a film screening that the 26-year-old was an “actor that everyone loves now” but that she “didn’t get” the hype surrounding the White Lotus star.

“I said to my class, ‘Explain this girl to me. She’s not pretty, she can’t act. Why is she so hot?,” Ms Baum, who teaches at the University of Southern California, said.

Ms. Sweeney has a couple of distinctive assets which may – or may not be – the basis of her career. Thus not a proof, either way, of the law – as yet.

So, the question becomes, who thinks she’s going to be gaining headline acting jobs in 20 years time?

The BBC, Ofcom and now the British Museum – why do the Tories keep interfering in cultural appointments?
Charlotte Higgins

You take the money from politics then politics will determine how much money there is and who gets it.

That’s actually the point of politics, to decide over the disposition of our shared and communal resources.

Non-disabled Richard III actor to press on despite calls for recast

How dare they use a non-Royal to play dress up?