2013
Sarah Kent
A traditional Korean house has appeared at Tate Modern. And with its neat brickwork, beautifully carved roof beams and lattice work screens, this charming dwelling looks decidedly out of place, and somewhat ghostly. Go closer and you realise that, improbably, the full-sized building is made of paper. It’s the work of South Korean artist Do Ho Suh (main picture).In 2013, he covered his childhood home in mulberry paper and painstakingly made a rubbing of every single nook and cranny of the exterior. He left the paper in situ for nine months until the drawing had weathered to resemble an old Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In 2013 the American artist, Noah Davis used a legacy left him by his father to create a museum of contemporary art in Arlington Heights, an area of Los Angeles populated largely by Blacks and Latinos. But his Underground Museum faced a problem; it didn’t have any art to put on display and none of the institutions approached by Davis would loan him their precious holdings.The solution? Davis set about creating clones of famous artworks that feature mass produced items. Collectively titled Imitation of Wealth (pictured below) they now occupy a gallery in his Barbican retrospective. Marcel Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Grandiloquent indie-synth-pop outfit Bastille have been around for over a decade. Three of their four albums have been chart-toppers (the other one still made Top 5 and went Gold). They are no flash in the pan.Head honcho Dan Smith now presents a fifth album, &, that, he says, “feels like someone talking to you, rather than turning up the volume”. Returning to his pre-success solo incarnation, he’s trying a style of music mainly associated with thoughtful 1970s American singer-songwriters. Thing is, he just can’t help laying on the over-production.In the manner of, say, Al Stewart, Smith Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Swedish singer Tove Lo appeared at a time when female physical sexuality was being used as a raw, blunt weapon in pop, when porno chic reached an apex in music videos. Half a decade ago was the time of Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” and Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball”, thus Lo’s overt displays of sexual bravado seemed part of the same and she had big hits with songs such as “Habits (Stay High)” and “Talking Body”. Her output since, however, has proved her sensual agenda to be more than a passing foible.The bisexual Lo has pushed for a more emancipated Scandinavian attitude to sex. Her last Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It was almost exactly a year ago (January 8, 2013, to be precise) that we awoke to the news that David Bowie, far from dying, retiring, or living the half-life of a rock and roll renunciant in his Riverside apartment, had blindsided us all by sneak-releasing his first new work in a decade on the morning of his 66th birthday.The weary reflection of "Where Are We Now?” was so perfectly measured, and its nil-by-mouth marketing strategem – in which absence, to paraphrase James Joyce, became the most potent form of presence – so perfect that one wondered whether Bowie shouldn’t just quit while he Read more ...
theartsdesk
With the end of 2013 nearly upon us it's time for a last look back before we step forward into the unknown. Yesterday our rundown of the year's finest films took you from a radiant romance to a bristling biopic, but the nature of such lists means that the best is yet to come and those that remain could hardly be more different. And so - our final five.5 Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino)Writer-director Quentin Tarantino proves once again he’s a master filmmaker with this double Oscar-winning revenge drama which reinvents the Western for a modern audience. The central cast are all Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Not a year in which big names came through, and many on the list below are actually quite introverted and low-key, but none the worse for that. Among numerous global musical gems this year were the following:The Fes Festival of World Sacred Music retained its high quality with scores of top notch acts, notably the wonderful Lebanese singer Abeer Nehme singing Aramaic music with incredible sweetness and purity. The video below gives some idea:The most extraordinary act of this year’s WOMAD was a modern folk group from Italy with the unwieldy name of Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, whose rootsy Read more ...
theartsdesk
There are some that will tell you that they don't make movies like they used to. But even if that's true, film is an art-form that continues to thrive by moving with the times - reflecting change, reinventing itself and each year we're supplied with no shortage of outstanding cinema from across the globe. It's a fact that makes compiling the traditional end-of-year list far from a chore, and more like greedily picking your way through a banquet.So why have us film bods at theartsdesk plumped for a top 13 this year? Well, 13 is the number of TAD's film critics that voted in our end-of-year Read more ...
Simon Munk
Like some kind of slow-witted zombie, mainstream games (on console, mainly) have been decapitated, disemboweled and run flat over, but don't quite know it yet.The year that saw the establishing of a new wave of game-specific hardware including home consoles the Sony PS4 and Microsoft Xbox One should have been a major one for mainstream, big budget games. But most people who play games now do so on phones, tablets or their computer, not dedicated devices. And mainstream games makers seem content to chase after an increasingly narrow demographic of "hardcore" gamers.The "hardcore" are fed on Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There aren't a lot of harpists in pop. Transatlantic migrations took all sorts of instruments away from their European place of origin to become the building blocks of American music. But there was no sizeable Welsh diaspora so the harp stayed at home with its most diligent exponents. That places singer-songwriter-harpist Georgia Ruth in a musical tradition with deep roots but a less than broad reach.One of the many pleasures of her enchanting debut album Week of Pines is the way she ushers an old instrument into lush new pastures. In "In Luna" the harp has a lovely eager lilt as a kind of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Playgoers could be forgiven for thinking that they were seeing double during much of 2013. No sooner had you sat through Ian Rickson's dazzling revival of Old Times once before you returned again to watch its peerless pair of actresses, Kristin Scott Thomas and Lia Williams, swap roles. Similarly, Ben Whishaw had barely shed his Peter Pan-related persona as the male half of John Logan's Peter and Alice before lending his whiplash authority to the revival of Jez Butterworth's Mojo. There were multiple Ghosts, Midsummer Night's Dreams and Macbeths, slices of O'Neill esoterica and Read more ...
Russ Coffey
“Maybe I needed to grow up a little first/ Well it looks like I hit a growth spurt”. So goes MMLP2’s opening track and over the course of the next hour it becomes apparent this is no idle brag. The album’s dizzying mix of melody, syllables-per-minute, heart and hurt means, despite the endless plaudits being given to rival "deadly fucking serious” Kanye West, it was really the nutcase from Detroit who demonstrated the greater artistic maturity in 2013.Some may consider the term “mature” ironic given Marshall Mathers' love of adolescent word play. But that would be to misunderstand how Em’s Read more ...