Gormless

Great art and poor quality control at the Southbank Centre

Working as a London journalist means a constant source of guilt. Every day my inbox is filled with press releases for completely unmissable exhibitions, gigs, plays, films, experimental dance-art multimedia performances, and restaurant openings. It makes me feel like a night spent swigging coke floats in front of Big Brother is a night wasted.

The Southbank Centre - finally reopened this month after two years of restoration - is the worst culprit. Every week seems to bring a new exhibition, gig, or performance that I feel dreadful for missing – and that’s speaking as someone wholly indifferent to classical music, which is supposed to be the main attraction.

So last Friday, I carefully arranged to meet up with my old university buddies just round the corner from where the Southbank were staging their latest dance/art/performance/parkour/etc/etc multi-media extravaganza. It was all free, and taking place out of doors, so all I had to do if I wanted to see it was drag everyone out of the White Hart by 9 o’clock.

With a hundred dancers clambering all over the Royal Festival Hall, extravagant costumes, and pounding music, they’d obviously spent a ton of taxpayers' money on it. Unfortunately, they’d forgotten to get all these people to do anything interesting, apart from that jerky, angry dancing that performance artists always regard as a sign of a truly original mind at work.

Publicly-funded art, eh? It really is the most astonishing waste of money. Or at any rate, that was the conclusion we reached as we soaked up the booze with a meal in the (excellent) new Canteen under the RFH. Ninety-one million pounds they’ve spent, on creating a venue where the terminally pretentious can hire a hundred dancers to pranny around on a roof with no worries at all about whether anyone might actually want to watch it.

And then after our meal, we stepped out onto the riverside exit, the glorious building (once described as a ‘monstrous carbuncle’ by Prince Charles) rising behind us, and started spotting Antony Gormleys. The lifesize casts of the artist’s body, lonely figures caught all over the London skyline, are an absolutely gripping piece of art, 31 moments of stillness, solitude and thought, where the evening’s earlier performance had been all about noise and motion without intelligence or wit. The moment was rather spoiled by a group of boozy Welsh girls who spotted the well-endowed statue nearest us, and started performing amusing sex acts on it, but public art is supposed to be all about interactivity, isn’t it?

The public have voted with their feet on this one: Gormley’s show at the Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery has just entered their top five ever exhibitions, joining Picasso, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and Leonardo Da Vinci, and knocking Van Gogh into 6th place. It’s an amazing achievement for a contemporary artist and a vindication of the power of free art to inspire people. If only they’d stick to people with real talent…

Festival Floods

Glastonbury was pretty muddy, but forecasters are warning that fans at this year’s Reading Festival are going to be synchronised swimming rather than dancing. The festival site is in one of the areas worst affected by the flooding earlier this summer, and most of the planned camping fields are still completely unusable, while heavy rain this week might leave part of the site underwater.

Tractor Tax on Chelsea Wealth

Owners of gas-guzzling, road-hogging 4 x 4s are going to find themselves out of pocket soon, as the Mayor of London introduces a vicious £25-a-day Congestion Charge on the vehicles. The vehicles are popularly known as 'Chelsea Tractors', and with this price rise coming so soon after the extension of the Congestion Charge zone, Chelsea’s residents are starting to wonder if the Mayor might have a little vendetta against them

Ramsay's Restaurant Nightmare

TV’s Mr Angry is starting to lose his lustre according to the eight thousand gourmet diners who voted in this year’s Harden’s restaurant survey. Gordon Ramsay is now officially only the second best restaurant in the country, after Marcus Wareing’s Petrus. This probably won’t be too upsetting for Gordon (he owns Petrus), but he might be a bit more worried about the suggestion from the guide’s publisher that the food in Ramsay at Claridge’s is "mediocre" and that he is spending too much time on television, and letting standards slip. Hopefully poor wee Gordon’s millions of pounds and international fame will be a consolation to him in these troubled times.

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