Category Archives: Culture

Band Aid 40 fails to reach UK Top 40 in opening week

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All-star version of Do They Know It’s Christmas?, spliced together from previous versions, falls short of the No 1 success of those earlier hits

The 40th anniversary version of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? has failed to enter this week’s Top 40, reaching No 45.

The new version of the song was made up of performances spliced together from three previous versions, in an arrangement by producer Trevor Horn. But despite featuring the unusual A-list juxtaposition of George Michael, Sinead O’Connor, Chris Martin, One Direction and more, the new version has not yet matched the success of its predecessors, which each went straight to No 1 in 1984, 2004 and 2014.

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Crypto entrepreneur eats banana art he bought for $6.2m

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Conceptual work created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan was sold at auction in New York last week

The cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun has fulfilled a promise he made after spending $6.2m (£4.88m) on an artwork featuring a banana duct-taped to a wall – by eating the fruit.

At one of Hong Kong’s priciest hotels, Sun, 34, chomped down on the banana in front of dozens of journalists and influencers after giving a speech hailing the work as “iconic” and drew parallels between conceptual art and cryptocurrency.

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Silvia Pinal, star of Mexico’s Golden Age of film, dies aged 93

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Over a career that spanned seven decades, Pinal was a muse to director Luis Buñuel, appearing in 60s classics such as Viridiana

Silvia Pinal, an actor from Mexico’s Golden Age of cinema and muse to the director Luis Buñuel, has died aged 93.

Pinal got her start in theatre in the 1940s, working with the director Rafael Banquells – the first of her four husbands. She became a star in 1950 aged 18, when she appeared opposite two of Mexico’s biggest comedic film stars: Germán Valdés (Tin-Tan) in The King of the Neighborhood and Mario Moreno (Cantinflas) in The Doorman. In 1952 she appeared alongside heartthrob Pedro Infante in A Place Near Heaven.

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Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs denied bail for a third time over ‘serious risk’ of witness tampering

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Judge rules that the court ‘doubts the sufficiency of any conditions’ that place trust in Combs to follow bail rules

Sean “Diddy” Combs has been denied bail for the third time by a judge in New York City who described him as a “serious risk” for witness tampering.

Prosecutors had previously accused Combs of trying to contact prospective witnesses from jail in an attempt to create “narratives” to influence public opinion as well as potential jurors for his impending sex trafficking trial.

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Plan to cut Berlin arts budget will ‘destroy’ city’s culture, directors warn

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Leading theatre figures warn ‘drastic’ reduction in funding will cause bankruptcy and harm city’s tourism appeal

Plans to slash Berlin’s culture budget by tens of millions of Euros have led to a huge backlash, with leading venues saying they have been forced to cut performances and others warning they will be pushed into bankruptcy.

About 450 institutes that are reliant at least in part on state subsidies, from theatres and opera houses to nightclubs and galleries, have formed an alliance in an attempt to force a rethink over the €130m (£108.6m) cuts. At around 12 to 13% of the current annual budget, they have been described even by those proposing them as “brutal”.

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Jim Abrahams, co-creator of Airplane! and The Naked Gun, dies aged 80

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Famed comedy writer and director, who was also involved in Ruthless People and Hot Shots!, died of natural causes

Jim Abrahams, the writer-director involved with hit comedies Airplane! and The Naked Gun, has died at the age of 80.

According to his son Joseph, who confirmed the news to the Hollywood Reporter, he died of natural causes at his home in Santa Monica.

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Drake claims UMG and Spotify ‘artificially inflated’ Kendrick Lamar’s diss track Not Like Us

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Feud escalates as rapper’s lawyers file two petitions alleging Universal Music Group and streaming giant conspired while also accusing them of defamation

Drake has launched two legal actions against Universal Music Group and Spotify, alleging they conspired to artificially inflate interest in Kendrick Lamar’s diss track about him, Not Like Us, while suppressing his own music, as well as accusing them of defamation.

In a petition filed to the New York supreme court on Monday, attorneys for Drake’s company Frozen Moments LLC accused UMG and the streaming service of having “launched a campaign to manipulate and saturate the streaming services and airwaves”, using various tactics to make Lamar’s song more popular.

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‘Opera should be an unstoppable art form’: Royal Opera announce Netia Jones as associate director

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The Royal Ballet and Opera have created a new role, allowing Jones to drive development and new commissions

The Royal Ballet and Opera today announces that Netia Jones has been appointed to the newly created position of associate director of The Royal Opera.

Over the past two decades the British-born Jones has carved a career spanning opera, theatre, concerts and immersive installation projects as a director, designer and video artist. Recently she directed the Royal Opera’s first ever virtual reality opera Current, Rising, and her staging – as director and designer – of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Garsington Opera this summer was hailed as “stylish and very funny”.

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Wales may introduce visitor levy for people staying overnight

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Proposal would give councils option to charge 75p-£1.25 a night to help alleviate pressure on local services

People who stay in Wales overnight, including children, are set to be charged a visitor levy under a scheme that could raise up to £33m a year to be ploughed back into tourism and culture.

All visitors would be charged 75p a night to stay in campsites and hostels and £1.25 for all other accommodation including hotels, B&Bs and holiday lets.

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Norway launches Jon Fosse prize for literary translators

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The award will be the biggest of its kind in Europe and aims to celebrate the work of an overlooked and underpaid profession facing an existential threat from AI

Norway is launching a new translation price that is one of the most highly endowed of its kind in Europe, in an attempt to boost a “partly invisible” and often poorly paid profession increasingly under threat from machine translation.

Named after the Norwegian novelist and playwright who won the 2023 Nobel prize in literature, Jon Fosse, the Fosse prize for translators will reward one author every year with 500,000 NOK (£36,000) for making “a particularly significant contribution to translating Norwegian literature into another language”.

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Palestinian artists plan Gaza Biennale as ‘act of resistance and survival’

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Project involves showing work in Gaza but also sending works across Israeli siege lines for exhibiting worldwide

Palestinian artists in Gaza plan to stage a “biennale” exhibition as an act of defiance against Israel’s military onslaught and to focus attention on the plight of the territory’s 2.3 million people under more than 13 months of bombardment.

About 50 artists from Gaza will exhibit their work within the besieged coastal strip, and are looking for art galleries to host exhibitions overseas. But in order to hold their work to the eyes of the rest of the world, the artists are facing a unique challenge: how to get their art across Israeli siege lines.

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Bonhams auction house facing claims it is selling looted Roman antiquities

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Third-century Roman plate and bust of Emperor Hadrian alleged to have links to man convicted of illegal dealing

The auction house Bonhams is facing calls to withdraw a Roman antiquity from its forthcoming London auction amid claims that it was looted from Turkey.

A third-century Roman silver plate, decorated with a depiction of a river god, is lot 62 of the 5 December auction and is estimated to sell for between £20,000 and £30,000.

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‘It’s been a lot of detective work’: Madame de Pompadour’s £1m wall lights discovered in Yorkshire hotel

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Four gilt-bronze sconces that lit up home of Louis XV’s mistress are set to go on sale at Sotheby’s in December

For almost 140 years, four massive gilt-bronze wall lights have hung in the 18th-century drawing room at Swinton Castle in Yorkshire, now an opulent luxury hotel.

Guests will almost certainly have noticed the one metre-high rococo appliques with their entwined branches decorated with leaves, berries and cherubim, and passed them off as impressive reproductions of more valuable original works.

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Glicked double bill may not match Barbenheimer buzz, experts say

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Gladiator II and Wicked filling up theatres but unlikely to replicate phenomenon of Barbie-Oppenheimer release

The great Barbenheimer clash of summer 2023 – when Barbie came out on the same day as Oppenheimer – will for ever be a part of cinema history for capturing the public imagination and bringing audiences back to cinemas in droves after years of Covid-induced antipathy.

So it’s unsurprising, that in an attempt to recapture some of the excitement, fans have come up with a new portmanteau: Glicked, used to refer to the face-off between Gladiator II and Wicked this week.

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Armed gang steal jewels from French museum’s £6m ‘national treasure’

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Thieves fired shots and took parts of 1904 work by goldsmith Joseph Chaumet from Hiéron Museum

Armed robbers snatched jewels worth millions from a work by the famed Parisian goldsmith Joseph Chaumet classed as a national treasure, in a brazen heist at a French museum.

The thieves arrived on motorbikes at the Hiéron Museum in Paray-le-Monial, in central France, at about 4pm local time on Thursday. Three entered the building and one stood guard outside, said the local mayor, Jean-Marc Nesme.

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Katy Perry wins appeal in trademark legal case against Sydney fashion label Katie Perry

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Australian designer says she is devastated and heartbroken by US singer’s successful appeal, adding ‘trademark isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on’

International popstar Katy Perry has had a court win in her long-running trademark battle with an Australian fashion designer over her Katie Perry trademark loungewear.

Sydney designer Katie Jane Taylor, who sells clothes under her birth name Katie Perry , sued the singer in October 2019 because the performer was selling her own merchandise.

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Malian singer Rokia Traoré to be extradited from Italy to Belgium

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Italy’s highest court rejects musician’s appeal after she was arrested in Rome in June over child custody dispute

Malian musician Rokia Traoré, who was arrested in Rome last June over an international child custody dispute, will be handed over to Belgium in the coming days after Italy’s highest court rejected her appeal, her lawyer said on Wednesday.

Traoré, 50, a former goodwill ambassador for the United Nations’ refugee agency UNHCR, was arrested on 20 June at Rome’s Fiumicino airport under a European arrest warrant.

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The Apprentice actor Sebastian Stan says Hollywood stars are ‘afraid’ of Trump

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None of his peers would appear with him on a chatshow the actor claimed, setting an ominous precedent for the industry’s interactions with Trump after he comes into power

Sebastian Stan, who stars in The Apprentice, a biopic of Donald Trump focusing on his association in the 1970s with lawyer Roy Cohn, has said that other actors in Hollywood are too “afraid” of the president-elect to participate in press with him.

Stan claimed that he had failed to find a single peer who would appear opposite him in the Actors on Actors series run by industry magazine Variety, in which key awards contenders quiz each other.

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Percival Everett wins National Book Award for fiction with retelling of Huckleberry Finn

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Everett’s novel, James, which focuses on Twain's enslaved character Jim, won the $10,000 prize

Percival Everett has won the $10,000 National Book Award for fiction, one of the US’s most prestigious literary prizes, for James, his acclaimed reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The 67-year-old author was also shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize for James, which focuses on Huckleberry Finn’s enslaved character Jim. The Guardian’s Anthony Cummins called the book “gripping, painful, funny, horrifying” in his review.

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