Why is it that, as a society, we seem to assume that talent in one artistic sphere will naturally lend itself to another? This question is most relevant when considering the recent trend of celebrities involving themselves with the art world. While it has always been common for notable public figures to acquire art collections, it is a recent phenomenon for them to seek to produce works of their own.

With highly varying commercial and critical success, celebrities such as Sylvester Stallone, Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Johnny Cash and Ronnie Wood have turned their hands to painting. London’s West End galleries are full of prints by such figures, none of them affordably priced. Indeed, some Ronnie Wood lithographs have price tags of over £3,000. For that price one could acquire a couple of Joan Miró prints.

When examining this trend, it is, however, important not to dismiss such painters out of hand, due to the assumption that their talent is necessarily consigned to only one artistic sphere. Bob Dylan, for example, has had his work exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery where it garnered a great deal of praise. While there can always be found critics keen to deride such figures’ efforts, this is not a viewpoint that one should necessarily immediately adopt.

Instead, one must question why such figures are increasingly drawn to the art world. Although amateur painting has a long tradition, it is likely that the first true ‘celebrity’ painter was Sir Winston Churchill. A prolific artist throughout his life, it was only after the Second World War, and the accompanying admiration from a grateful nation, that his paintings truly gained in popularity and became highly prized. It is within this example that the reason for why celebrities are becoming artists can be found.

Art has become the newest, most highly prized collectable. In the Victorian era, hair was collected. A lock of hair from, say, the Duke of Wellington was the most desirable collectable possible. To have such an item on display in one’s home was an indication of the owner’s prestige, wealth and, by proxy, the attributes of the person from which it came. This now applies to art. While Sylvester Stallone’s paintings may be highly appreciated by some, it is principally collected because its creator is an iconic figure. To those who, for whatever reasons, admire Stallone, such an item is a further indication of the respect they afford him while, in turn, an acquisition of prestige from ownership. It‘s certainly a strange kind of prestige.

You may have heard the name before. It may register dimly as something a parent or uncle once mentioned. You may have seen the recent and wonderful BBC production My Family And Other Animals and wondered what else this Durrell fellow wrote. The idea that this man was once one of the most popular British writers may seem far-fetched, overshadowed as he is now by his more famous brother, Lawrence Durrell (of whom you may also not have heard).

Durrell’s works are not of great literary value in and of themselves. They push no boundaries of taste or propriety, but remain wryly funny and solidly British. What Durrell did, though, was push conservation into the public eye from the 1950s onwards.

Durrell, as founder of Jersey Zoo and the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, went around the world collecting endangered animals for preservation and later re-population. His books detailed the journeys spent locating, capturing, and looking after a vast array of animals from different areas.

My Family and Other Animals, then, as the earliest in setting of Durrell’s books, is worthy of far more respect than it currently gets. It radiates charm, enthusiasm, and interest in all living creatures, and draws comparisons between the variation of animals and the weirdness of Durrell’s family. Durrell’s true talent is in his ability to treat creatures with the same level of respect and observation as he does humans. His keen-eyed sketches of the wildlife he encounters imbue the world itself with character, and the result is that a generation of readers began to feel that conservation of wildlife habitats, prevention of poaching, and the development of zoos that aim to help endangered species survive were all important issues.

Gerald Durrell was not a sophisticated writer, but he was an important one. He unceremoniously hauled the unfashionable natural world into the public eye in a post-war world which largely just wanted to lick its wounds.
Durrell’s books, in helping maintain the earth’s diversity, are, without a shadow of a doubt, canonical. It is time for a new generation to discover him.

This week saw the culmination of 20 years of anticipation, as David Lynch and Mark Frost, creators of the cult television programme Twin Peaks, announced its return for a limited series in 2016. Originally running from 1990 to 1991, the show has recently ridden a resurgent wave of popularity, buoyed by its availability on American Netflix, coinciding with the onset of 90s nostalgia. Suddenly, the mysteries of Laura Palmer, the young woman whose body washes ashore downstream of her town, the titular American idyll, were back in the zeitgeist. But in our modern age of instant gratification, are audiences ready to return to the enigmatic town of Twin Peaks, whose woods hold more mysteries than they do answers?

Whilst Laura Palmer’s mysterious death was the hook that pulled in its initial audience, it was never the show’s raison d’être. Twin Peaks toyed with its audience, alternately engaging and unnerving them. It was part soap, part noir, part horror movie, and wholly fascinating. Audiences were introduced to FBI Special Agent Cooper, who arrived in Twin Peaks to investigate Palmer’s death.

As he crossed paths with the town’s inhabitants, from high school femme fatale Audrey Horne, to the disturbed Log Lady, a soap opera cast emerged from the mystery, albeit one filtered through its creators’ twisted lens. The beguiling mix of avant-garde imagery, challenging ideas and soapy theatrics, found in the show’s cliffhangers and revolving door cast of long lost relatives, proved irresistible. And so the central mystery receded into the background, just another reminder of the darkness lurking around the town’s edges.

The show was a massive hit. Unlike anything previously attempted on television, it took the vision of a great American auteur from the art houses, and placed it in America’s living rooms. It was like nothing the masses had seen before. Dark, twisted, and pulpy, the show, like all of Lynch’s strongest work, delved into the psychosexual rot beneath the facade of American domesticity. The nation was hooked. In a time before the cable channel explosion of recent years, the show dominated conversation, regularly pulling in over 20 million viewers. Its young cast found themselves on the cover of Rolling Stone, on talk shows and red carpets. It was a phenomenon – and yet it fizzled in the blink of an eye.

The show’s grand ambition was both its greatest strength and its fatal flaw. From Blue Velvet to Mulholland Drive, Lynch’s work is marked by a fascination with mysteries, rather than their solutions. Laura Palmer’s murder was never meant to be solved. But the show’s bosses felt this inappropriate for the long-form medium of television, where viewers’ interest must be retained for weeks on end.

They forced Lynch and Frost to solve the case midway though the second season, and the show never recovered. The resolution came too quickly, too clumsily, and the show floundered without a backbone. Ratings slid, and the show was cancelled after only two years. That Lynch would follow up the show with the misguided big screen adaptation Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, both a prequel and sequel to the show, further tarnished Twin Peaks’ once-sterling reputation. And so a cultural behemoth limped its way out of the spotlight.

But now the show is preparing to return, yet questions still remain about where it will fit in a television landscape so vastly different from the show’s heyday, when audiences had access to only a small handful of channels. Will Twin Peaks finally get the elusive Lynch back behind a camera? Will new fans lose interest waiting between episodes, when they’re so used to watching them all in one go? Can Twin Peaks stand out against the strength of today’s programming, even whilst these new shows are steeped in its DNA? That the series is planned to be a one-off event suggests a definitive end, a solution to a mystery. Isn’t that what went wrong the first time around?

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★★★★☆
Four Stars

There is a scene in David Fincher’s latest movie, Gone Girl, that will make you spit out your popcorn, nachos, or whatever other high-calorie comfort food is typical of your soft, bourgeois life. Thanks to Fincher’s habit of making very long films, by the time this scene comes around you will have spent a good two hours wondering if, perhaps just this once, he has chosen subject matter that doesn’t live up to his usual gritty standard. Then a bottle of wine, an attempted rape and a pair of box cutters are thrown into the mix and you remember that this man’s mind produced the likes of Se7en and Fight Club, and wonder how you could have been lulled, once again, into such a false sense of security.

This scene is a good litmus test when it comes to the tone of the whole movie. Gone Girl, as the title suggests, begins as a movie ostensibly about an apparently normal middle-class Missouri couple played by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, until the latter goes missing, leaving nothing but signs of a violent struggle which all point to her husband as her killer. It’s hard to say more without giving any of the numerous twists and revelations away, but as anyone who has read the original source material will know (the book is an adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel of the same name), very little is as it seems.

Fincher is lucky in that the material he’s working with is rich. In Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, he has two reliable and experienced actors who bring multifaceted characters to life with almost disturbing ease. When Affleck’s character, Nick, appears initially not to care about his wife’s disappearance, one can’t help but partially join in with the baying media who all scream “He did it!” Happily, too, the eponymous girl is hardly gone for most of the film thanks to flashbacks looking at the breakdown of her marriage and eventual vanishing. Pike gives what turns from a standard performance as a perfect trophy wife and all-American poster girl into a far less sympathetic, calculating survivor, and makes the viewer wonderfully uneasy during every one of her scenes. These performances couple perfectly with Trent Reznor’s delightfully chilling soundtrack. Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails fame, brings the same industrial, pulsing beat to the film that he did on previous Fincher collaborations like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Social Network, with the ever-present ambience going from ponderous to terrifying in a matter of seconds. 

The movie is too slow-paced at the beginning. Whilst Fincher does well to set up the illusion of a happy marriage, a good twenty to thirty minutes could be cut from the beginning of Gone Girl with little loss of quality. The director does up to fifty takes when shooting a scene, and the obvious perfectionism means much is included that needn’t be. The dialogue also suffers from some sort of buddy-cop syndrome; every character is cynical in the extreme, and they all talk to one another like they’re starring in a police procedural. Of course, in the case of the cop characters this makes sense (they are starring in a police procedural), but when Nick’s sister tells him early in the movie to go home and “fuck his wife’s brains out” with a totally straight face, you wish that there could be at least someone around who doesn’t speak with total snark by default.

Ultimately, the flaws in the movie are disguised by layer upon layer of intrigue. The message that no-one really knows anyone around them until placed in an extreme situation is an old one, but this is no mindless rehashing of the likes of Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible or even Fincher’s own Dragon Tattoo, even where comparisons with the sexual violence of either film are valid. Instead, Gone Girl builds at a steady, even pace before exploding into a disturbing look at human psychology and the dynamics of power and manipulation. It is David Fincher at his fucked-up best.

There are two directors in the Ashmolean when I arrive: Dr. Sturgis, the new man, took over on October 1st; but it is Professor Christopher Brown, art historian, who has occupied the post for sixteen extremely successful years who I am here to see.

Brown’s interest in the history of art began at school when, in 1964, he became fascinated with Goya after an exhibition at the Royal Academy. Despite this early interest, he ended up at St. Catherine’s, Oxford, studying History. “While I was doing my History degree here,” Brown recalls, “I attended classes given by a very remarkable Belgian scholar called Delaissé, Bob Delaissé, who was at All Souls and taught a post-graduate diploma in the History of Art. I was bewitched by him, and bewitched by the subject, which was early Netherlandish painting and manuscript illumination.”

After completing Delaissé’s year-long diploma, Brown was inspired to continue his studies, registering for an MPhil at the Courtauld Institute.

However, it was at this point, at the young age of 23, that he was offered a job at the National Gallery. “So I went there, and was very fortunate to get that job, as the Curator of Dutch and Flemish paintings, because frankly at that moment I didn’t know much about Dutch and Flemish paintings, except for the year that I’d done at Oxford. But in those days, appointments were made more on promise than achievement.”

Brown’s promise paid off, as he eventually became Chief Curator in 1989. Nine years later, he moved to the Ashmolean, which he describes as “the most important museum of art and archaeology outside London in the country”.

At an interview for the job, Brown made it clear what he thought was the key issue for the Ashmolean “Was the University willing and keen to open up the museum, show the collections to a much broader public than had been the case, and bring the museum into the 20th, if not the 21st, Century?”
This desire to democratize the museum as an institution has defined Brown’s career. “I’ve always had a deep belief in the public importance of museums,” he enthuses. “They are great public educational institutions. I think it’s interesting to compare for example how Florentines use the Uffizi or how Parisians use the Louvre — which are both charging museums, of course — and how Londoners use the National Gallery. I think the great joy of a free museum is that you can drop in for relatively short periods of time. Between trains at Charing Cross, you pop over to the National Gallery and look at Pierro della Francesca’s Baptism, which is of course one of the very greatest works of art in the entire world.

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“I think that the way people used museums in 1971 and the way they use them today is entirely different. People now treat museum-visiting as a very important part of life and a very ordinary part of life. Going to a museum now is in a sense a very natural activity. It’s not something that you have to get dressed up for, and put in your diary months ahead. You think of going to museums as part of everyday life.”

Indeed, statistics show that more people now visit museums every year than go to football matches, and although one might think of a football crowd as far removed from the Ashmolean’s target audience, Brown stresses the importance of attracting people from all backgrounds. “We have made real efforts here to attract audiences who do not naturally go to exhibitions. We’ve gone to particular trouble to do that, with, I think, some success.”
So it seems as if the importance of the museum, especially in Britain, is growing rapidly. “I think that the key to it is that museums are essentially educational institutions. You find out about your own history, and about many different cultures. To understand other cultures by their artefacts is something which, surely, we must all, in our joined-up world, try to do.”

In sixteen years, the Ashmolean has gone from 200,000 visitors a year to a million, and Brown attributes this success primarily to the £61m worth of rebuilding that he oversaw shortly after taking the job.

“I remember when we topped out the building [in 2008], which was an extraordinary moment. It was pouring with rain, and when you top out, of course, you don’t have a roof, so it was quite a damp occasion. But it was very exciting. The Vice Chancellor performed the ceremony, but then I spoke to the assembled throng, and there was a real sense of excitement as the building went up.”

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The Ashmolean in its current form is of course an iconic sight not only to Oxford students, but to countless others, and Professor Brown’s achievement in bringing it to its current level of popularity as the most-visited museum in the country outside London is truly staggering.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

As the lights went up, there was no sound from the sea of harrowed faces around me, and that perfectly sums up ’71, a highly accomplished film debut from director Yann Demange that follows Gary Hook, a young English soldier deployed to Belfast for riot control at the height of the Troubles in 1971. It is a gritty, uncompromising piece of cinema that follows the horrifying experiences of Hook as he is left behind by his platoon and must navigate the hostile streets of Belfast pursued by Catholic Nationalists who want him dead.

After opening with a bloody boxing match, the punches keep on coming, with brutal violence and frequent use of shaky cam – each as nauseating as the other. It is in essence, though, a true thriller, with chilling tension maintained through long scenes of quiet and a sense that there is immediate danger around every corner.

’71 sets itself up as a Northern Irish period piece, but it quickly becomes apparent that, despite the accents and some brief lessons in cultural history, it is a film about the nature of war much more generally. Hook has no specific grievance with either side in the conflict, but he falls victim to the cultural divisions of the country in which he is stranded.

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There is a superb interaction between Hook and a young Protestant boy who can’t believe that Hook doesn’t know to what religion he belongs, or why, being from Derby, he should dislike Nottingham, which says a lot about the confused motivations of any faction to fight another that is common to most conflict. Some characters are terrified to help Gary because he is a British soldier but do so anyway, again questioning what really divides people.

A key theme of the film is the effect of war on young men. Though we discover little about Gary’s home-life, he and his brother seem to have been raised in a care-home, and there is no mention of their parents, so they must look after each other. Lost and disoriented in Belfast, Gary is reduced to such a level of innocent immaturity and solitude that he ends up being led around the city by a child who, while scarily hardy to violence and street-life, is also endearingly still young enough to be impressed at meeting a soldier.

Gary’s most direct Irish counterpart is a young man of similar age called Sean – masterfully portrayed in a truly chilling turn by Barry Keoghan – who is affected by events of the war just as tragically as Gary, linking them by age even though their decisions are very different.

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In an ensemble of great performances – Sean Harris is very powerful, to name just one – Jack O’Connell, combining the emotion he showed in TV drama United with the gritty determination from last year’s Starred Up, elevates the character of Gary Hook and enables him to hold centre-screen throughout. It is a role that doesn’t involve much dialogue, because Hook is often either alone or hiding his accent from those around him. However, frequent close-ups of O’Connell reveal a fantastic range of facial and bodily expressions that build a fantastically nuanced character without the need for many words.

Some scenes of prolonged rioting can feel almost too much like real footage to fit in with the rest of the film, and the conclusion of Gary and Sean’s story arc is perhaps a little predictable, but these are small grievances.

’71 does everything it needs to and more to create a thriller that seldom loosens its grip on the audience and is also a worthy war film, combining some of the moody build-up of wartime landscape of Apocalypse Now with the documentary-like immersion of The Hurt Locker to offer a new perspective on war and the life of young soldiers in an army that claims to “look after their own” but falls short of the needs of many.