A fair bit of talk lately of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band celebrating its 50th Birthday. Likewise, plenty of interest in Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains the blockbuster exhibition at the V&A. The TLS covers both in this review of related books. While a fan of the Beatles, I don’t have any great fondness for Sgt. Pepper’s, similarly with Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Both arguably the greatest of albums by anyone, but both far from the best by either band. On the matter of Their Mortal Remains, the consensus seems to be that it’s a stunning success. I didn’t see the Bowie Is or Bjork exhibitions that started this trend but I found the Floyd exhibition to be politically limp and technologically flawed. Which reminded me to reread an older review from the New Yorker regarding the Bjork exhibition fiasco.
‘Curating is undemocratic, authoritarian, opaque and corruptible.’ Stefan Heidenreich produces this week’s talking point for curators.
The Imperial War Museum North in Manchester has opened its new Wyndham Lewis exhibition Wyndham Lewis: Life, Art, War, the largest since the 1950s. The Telegraph reviews, noting the exhibitions is sadly not definitive but conveys Lewis’ promising but ultimately pitiful career.
This piece is a few weeks old and something I forgot to include in last week’s list – Joseph Fronczak at Jacobin on A Hobsbawm’s Long Century, a lengthy study of the historian, his commitment to communism and his place now, at the beginning of a new long century.
Paul Brobbel 
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