CROSSOVER is the current name of the cultural game. Formaldehyde supremo Damien Hirst "curates" Marco Pierre White's newest restaurant Quo Vadis (53 works from Hirst's own collection). Alexander McQueen Givenchy's bid for street cred calls his East End atelier his workspace" and recently contributed to a multi-media exhibition at the Barbican. The fusion currently at the Lisson Gallery is history and art, in Christine Borland's unsettling show on the Nazi doctor Mengele.
The trend towards autobiography and celebrity is most clearly exemplified by Tracey Emin, whose confessional outpourings (photography, paintings, writings and general clutter) have made her the latest media star. More outpourings from Fiona Banner in the form of a muscle building stream of consciousness paperback charting her reaction to Vietnam movies. An earlier work was her account of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, on wide screen sized paper that did double duty as a visual depiction of the desert.
Anthony Minghella's much lauded celebration of the desert in The English Patient is English only in name. From concept to execution its values are pure Hollywood, as shown by its hefty crop of Oscars, while the real English nominee, Mike Leigh's wonderful Secrets and Lies, went un-garlanded. Sports movies are regular Hollywood fodder, but David Evans's Fever Pitch, based on Nick Hornby's love letter to Arsenal FC, is a curious hybrid, not least for its crossover casting of Colin Firth, the nation's costume drama heart throb.
Fever Pitch (the book) was the first in a growing trend of cross cultural writing, exemplified by John Lanchester's food obsessed, Booker short listed and Whitbread winning, The Debt to Pleasure. Booker winner Graham Swift's Last Orders is literary a cappella, unadorned, unfiltered working class voices, cross cultural in itself.
Popular music continues to split between the club scene and the Radio 1 playlist. The Chemical Brothers, Left Field, and The Prodigy are the first named dance acts to have moved across the divide. Drum and base is slowly making inroads, (David Bowie and Everything But The Girl). The music hall tradition in British pop (with Blur as its most recent exponent) is riding high with the anarchic David Devant And His Spirit Wife. (Latest single Ginger. Great stage show.) Challengers for the top rock slot, still held by Radiohead, are Supergrass, a three piece band from Oxford (latest album In It For The Money) while the youthful and tuneful Ash from Downpatrick (the term "British" seems always to be used colonially in culture) have the teen market firmly in their sights.
On the classical front, the cult of celebrity grows apace. Nigel Kennedy's recent come back concert showed his virtuosity still wonderfully intact his accent a little less so. Forget the hype, this man is a genius. Angela Gheorghiu and Robert Alagna, the hottest operatic duo in loo years are still the public's darlings hut the pressure to stay young and beautiful may do for them yet, as it may for the lady in red herself, Lesley Garrett the first to up the ante in the opera glamour stakes. Ballet is similarly image obsessed Darcey Busseli's looks do her no harm in earning her place alongside Sylvie Guillem as the darlings of dance.
Adventures in Motion Pictures's male Swan Lake last year was a blatant attempt at a populist spectacle and, with Adam Cooper as hunk of the decade, deservedly a huge success. Its music hall/pantomime roots of slapstick, mime and extended costume is about as close as England gets to a popular art form. (Cinderella next year.)
As shown by Riverdance and Joaquin Cortes, the key to popular success in contemporary dance is folk. With no indigenous forms to draw on, the plunder is indiscriminate. The latest and hippest is Capoeira dance fused with martial art from Brazil. At the other end of the spectrum is the technology jag, where choreographers hope that video inserts and computer programmed music will make up for paucity of imagination.
IN THE theatre there is a strange dearth of homegrown plays. The Royal Court, the home of new writing, is completely Irish until the autumn. (McDonagh, Murphy, McPherson). The West End's current two hits are Art (which is French, and is soon to go up at the Gate Theatre), and Master Class, (American). Earlier this year there was East Is East, by Ayub Khan Bin, about the Asian experience of living in England. But Mark Ravenhill's homegrown Shopping and Fucking sneaked into the West End for a six week season after humble beginnings, and The Herbal Bed, by Peter Whelan at the Duchess Theatre, a whodunit about Shakespeare's daughter (featuring the Irish actor Liam Cunningham), may yet prove the sleeper of the year.
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