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Front Row: Raphael's Sistine Tapestries, Michael Winterbottom, Arts Prizes in Crisis and Art History Limericks

17/02/2020

Raphael's Sistine Tapestries, Michael Winterbottom, Arts Prizes in Crisis and Art History Limericks

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Raphael's Sistine Tapestries, Michael Winterbottom, Arts Prizes in Crisis and Art History Limericks

Ten tapestries by Raphael return to the Sistine Chapel for the first time since the 1500s.

500 years after his death ten tapestries by Raphael return to the Sistine Chapel. Michael Winterbottom on Greed, his film with Steve Coogan. What's going wrong with Arts prizes.

This week the Sistine Chapel is unveiling ten tapestries by Raphael, to mark the 500th anniversary of artist’s death and now, for the first time since the 16th century, visitors can see them as they were intended to be displayed.  Anna Somers Cocks, founding editor of The Art Newspaper, reports on their significance. 

In light of controversial decisions by the Turner and Booker Prize judges to split their awards among multiple entrants, alongside recent protests around representation at the Baftas and Oscars, the resignation of the French Cesar Academy board and the #MeToo scandal that forced the cancellation of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, we ask what’s going wrong with modern arts prizes? Is there a crisis of authority in who is allowed to say what’s good or bad? Have we lost the ability to unite around a shared idea of excellence? To consider the issues Stig is joined by book critic Alex Clark and Karen Simecek, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Warwick University.  

24 Hour Party People director Michael Winterbottom discusses his new film Greed, starring Steve Coogan as a narcissistic British billionaire and fashion tycoon Sir Richard ‘Greedy’ McCreadie, whose star and power is fading.

And, after Radio 4's A History of the World in 100 Objects Front Row presents The History of Art in 100 Limericks. Angus Reid, who wrote them, performs some.

Presenter: Stig Abell
Producer: Julian May

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