The Big Question: Should the rich be paid to keep their paintings in the country?
Flat Lake Literary & Arts Festival, Clones, Co. Monaghan, Ireland
If, as Bill Clinton suggested, the Hay literary festival is akin to Woodstock, then the Flat Lake literary and arts festival in Clones is like a fringe event at Glastonbury. Located on the sprawling Hilton Park estate, the festival is organised by the local novelist Patrick McCabe (author of The Butcher Boy) and the Welsh film director Kevin Allen, who is tied to the estate through marriage. The pair cooked up the festival, now in its second year, while collaborating on a potential screenplay. The whole thing is subsidised largely by the proceeds of an art auction held at last year's event, at which a Damien Hirst spin painting sold for €95,000 (£76,000).
Millais Everett, Sir John: The Vale Of Rest (1858-9)
The debate about labels in art galleries is usually clear-cut. Pro-labellers believe that there are certain things viewers need to know before they can appreciate a work of art. Anti-labellers believe that fascination should come before information, even at the risk of puzzlement – and that to interrupt the encounter between viewer and art with a wordy little sticker is a kind of vandalism.
Francis Bacon: A brush with Bacon
The first celebrated Francis Bacon was born in the Strand, during the reign of Elizabeth I. He was raised as an English gentleman, and wrote elegant essays upon morality, taste, public virtue and private manners. The second, a descendant of the first, was born in a nursing home in Dublin to English parents, and became a self-taught painter whose canvases, when they were first widely shown in the 1940s, provoked exclamations of disgust, horror and near-incredulity. Would the first have acknowledged the second socially? It seems rather unlikely.
Pope angry over crucified green frog sculpture
A sculpture of a crucified frog threatened with eviction from Bolzano’s new modern art museum after being condemned by the pope, the minister of culture and local right-wing politicians is staying where it is.