Arts Blog: Awards for critics who give big whacks to slack hacks

A WINNER is announced next week for The Hatchet Job of the Year Prize, a new literary award launched by the Omnivore website.

The prize promises to honour the “angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review” of the past year and the winner gets a year’s supply of potted shrimp.

Omnivore, which eruditely samples the best critical writing on the web, calls it a crusade against “dullness, deference and literary thinking”, not just a ticket to repeat the nastiest reviews – though we know we love reading them.

The Scotsman’s “page of shame” for those one-star Fringe reviews was always gruesomely fascinating, yet, while Fringe pans are certainly popular, there are those who complain that Scottish critics sometimes pull their punches, particularly on the National Theatre of Scotland front.

The shortlist for the Hatchet prize includes David Sexton’s review of The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy, the first new collection from the new poet laureate, mostly organised around the bee as a symbol – “It all feels very GSCE in the end,” he writes.

Our film critic Alastair Harkness isn’t in the running for the current prize, but he nonetheless made Omnivore’s “hatchet job of the week” recently for his take on The Iron Lady. The director, he noted, had fancifully compared her approach to King Lear. “Sadly the end result isn’t Shakespeare, although it is tragic – and for all the wrong reasons, not least of which is the sense of missed opportunity that it leaves you with.”

Strife of Brian

Early on Monday morning, a sight that was balm to the art lover’s soul: a dense queue snaking round the front of the National Gallery in London, making a giant “s” before reaching the ticket office. The queue was for the last days of Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, with its once-in-a-lifetime gathering of works by the master.

The mania for sell-out shows, which supposedly saw tickets trading on eBay for vast sums, had shifted briefly to the David Hockney landscapes, filling the walls with brilliant colour at the Royal Academy. But the Hockney show has had a hatchet job done on it by that master of calling a sacred cow a spade, the critic Brian Sewell. “My predominant response to David Hockney’s exhibition of Yorkshire landscapes at the Royal Academy is ‘Why?’ Why is there so much of it? Why is so much of it so big, so towering, so vast, so overblown and corpulent? Why is it so repetitive? Why is everything so unreally bright, so garish, discordant, raw and Romany? Why is the brushwork so careless, crude and coarse?” The show, he concludes, is the visual equivalent “of being tied hand and foot and dumped under the loudspeakers of the Glastonbury Festival”.

An Udder lottery

Tim Minchin mania, meanwhile, is building in advance of the E4 Udderbelly Festival on South Bank, run by the Fringe operators in London in July. Australian musical comic and composer Minchin, who was a new boy at the Fringe just a few short years ago, recently completed his first arena tour with the 55-piece Heritage Orchestra and penned the music and lyrics for the RSC’s hit production of Roald Dahl’s Matilda. The Udderbelly is now selling the last remaining 150 tickets for his one-off closing show at their festival by ballot for those who apply this week.

Arts and flowers

In a different vein, The Cambo Estate at Kingsbarns in Fife is offering its annual Snowdrops by Starlight excursion, an opportunity to spend time among the February fairies. Its “enchanted woodlands” are set to come alight with nine evening walks below (hopefully) starlit skies, offering the chance to trip daintily amid the artworks. These include Blanket by Fanny Lam Christie – a Hong Kong-born artist now working in Perthshire – made of delicate paper porcelain and highlighting a species of lichen, used as an index for assessing clean air. Other offerings are a Dolly the Sheep mosaic by Crieff-based Katy Galbraith and Smart Ash, an installation designed for a copse of ash trees by Margaret Bathgate.