SIR Anish Kapoor has launched a broadside at “the assault on the arts in the school curriculum”, claiming it is “nothing short of criminal”. “This drift to small-nation, small-minded nationalism… is reminiscent of fascistic governments of recent times who attempted to control our imagined inner selves,” he argues.
Sir Anish, who lives in London and is one of Britain’s foremost sculptors, blasted what he described as “the current UK Government’s sinister and systematic attempt to dismantle the Keynesian project which set up ‘arts for all’.
“A population invested in the arts is dangerous, likely to be less willing to toe the party line. A population that can think and perhaps even think with feeling is the last thing a Right-wing government wants.”
He also singled out appointments to arts institutions as evidence of a worrying trend, arguing in the Art Newspaper that the Government “shamelessly disregards the arms-length principle and appoints Right-wing apologists to sit as the head of the boards of museums across the land”. No quarter.
Lytle may have to go a long way
WRITER Sathnam Sanghera despairs of photos of Downing Street interior decorator Lulu Lytle’s own flat that show an Indian kitsch aesthetic. “I can’t believe it actually,” the Empireland author tells us, adding: “I’ve written a whole chapter on the many problems caused by imperial nostalgia.” If Rishi Sunak became PM, he added, it would be too politically difficult to refurbish the Downing Street flat recently redone by Lytle: “He’s going to be cursed with this Indian changing rooms décor circa 1994”.
Oscars win gave Fellowes a bounce
JULIAN FELLOWES recalled a slice of Hollywood glamour of his own at the press night for Ava: The Secret Conversations, the story of US star Ava Gardner. In 2002 when Fellowes and Halle Berry, above, were up for Oscars, they sat next to each other at a “nominees’ luncheon” and both thought they had lost. But after they won on the night, Fellowes found Berry at Elton John’s afterparty, where they both pogoed around the room. “I never forgot that.”
Recalling a better side of Bacon
FRANCIS BACON was the talk of the town last night — author James Birch launched his book Bacon in Moscow at Hatchards Piccadilly, while over the road at the Royal Academy, a private view of a show on the British artist was in full swing. Grayson Perry told us as a young man he met Bacon in Soho: “He was always kind of wary of young artists. He came to my show but I don’t think he was that interested in it.” Fashion designer Zandra Rhodes mused to us: “I always think of him as an evil pixie.” Author Birch, whose book is the first to have been published by new imprint CHEERIO, told us: “People think he was not a very nice man, but the truth is he was a fantastic man.”
SW1A
OPEN mockery is never a good sign. After Conor Burns last night claimed Boris Johnson had been “ambushed” by a cake, Tory MP Simon Hoare writes online today: “Survived making my breakfast following a surprise encounter with a feisty French Fancy lying in wait with a tooled-up sponge finger in the kitchen”. Stay alert.
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ALSO sticking the boot into Boris Johnson is Labour MP Luke Pollard, who has just got framed a giant print reading “Boris is a liar”. He bought one for himself after getting it for a colleague in a secret Santa and tells us: “I’ll be putting it in my hallway where I do my Zoom TV interviews”. What’s the opposite of subliminal messaging?
Price is right for tributes to McCrory
DAMIAN LEWIS led the tributes to his late wife Helen McCrory with poetry readings at the National Theatre for an event created by writer Allie Esiri. Lewis quipped of the starry cast, including Simon Russell Beale and Fay Ripley: “I am sorry if you were expecting other actors… we are the best available in our price range.” Elsewhere Mica Paris performed at Ronnie Scott’s and Alistair Guy and Henry Conway were at a Burns night party at restaurant Park Row.
