The long search for a successor to Timothy Clifford, head of the National Galleries of Scotland, ended this September, but the appointment of John Leighton, director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, raises some questions. Clifford himself said he wanted an international appointment, and few doubt Leighton's quality—in the Van Gogh field, at least. What was surprising about the process was the way internal candidates for the job weren't taken seriously, despite the fact that some may have had broader range than Leighton. Among the contenders were Richard Calvocoressi, director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, who organised this year's hugely successful Bacon and Cartier-Bresson exhibitions, and Michael Clarke, Clifford's number two, the widely respected curator of some of the galleries' most successful exhibitions. Insiders report that their interviews were met with barely concealed apathy. One of the interviewing panel even fell asleep during the process, only to be woken by his mobile phone.
Is Rocky Horror best of the Royal Court?
The Royal Court's invitation to punters to vote for their five most memorable Court plays—to be revisited next year for the theatre's 50th birthday—has generated as much speculation as votes. Current frontrunners, are, in fifth place, Conor McPherson's The Weir, perhaps unsurprisingly as it was such a breathtaking, and unassuming, hit; John Osborne's The Entertainer comes fourth, and, predictably, he has also bagged the runner-up slot with Look Back in Anger, a play so central to Court lore that Osborne once mordantly suggested that his memories of the opening night, though blurry, were at least more accurate than those of all the people who claimed to—but could not have—been there. In third place is Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, back in vogue amid the continuing debate on torture. Sarah Kane's plays are getting lots of votes but, along with other playwrights the Court has championed (Beckett, Ionesco, Arnold Wesker, Sam Shepard and Caryl Churchill all come to mind), she remains lower down the list. Top of the list, as we write, is The Rocky Horror Show, which suggests that obsessive fans of the film have got themselves organised to vote en bloc. Some hope to beat them at this game; rogue Restoration scholars want to get George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer (produced in 1988) into the race, while others murmur darkly about staggeringly obscure plays. Voting continues until the end of October (www.royalcourt theatre.com/50).
Zadie's line of beauty
While reviewers line up to play spot-the-Forsterisms in Zadie Smith's new novel, less attention has been paid to the influence of the treatise from which the book takes its title: On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry, an English professor at Harvard (where Smith has recently been based as a Radcliffe fellow). When published in 1999, Scarry's book inspired some perplexity: confessional in tone, it was judged too literary for philosophers but not philosophical enough for literary theoreticians. Grudgingly, it was acknowledged to be evidence of a renewed interest in beauty—a concept regarded as deeply naff in literary academia. Six years on, however, her un-polemical polemic has become an influential text for a generation that has fallen out of love with critical theory. It's not just in Smith's novel, but in her new book of essays, entitled Fail Better (due next year), that readers are likely to see the influence of Scarry. Smith has bold plans to resuscitate literary criticism—ambitious, perhaps, but relatively modest compared to Scarry's programme: over the last 20 years her interests (beauty aside) have ranged between literary representations of torture, flowers, aviation disasters and the legal principles underpinning nuclear warfare.
