Laura Gascoigne May/June 2018 Was Stone Age society more open-minded than ours? In December, just before Instagram was flooded with pictures of Kim Kardashian’s 37-year-old butt crack, Facebook decreed that an image featuring the front bottom of the 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf was “dangerously pornographic” and removed it, until forced to apologise two months later to the statue’s owner, the […]

Laura Gascoigne March/April 2018 In the Royal Academy’s Tennant Gallery a man in goggles is lurching around waving his arms like someone conducting an orchestra on ketamine. It could be a piece of performance art, but it’s too amusing. In fact the man isn’t air-conducting, he’s air-drawing and the results are appearing in real time on a screen. Time is […]

Laura Gascoigne January/February 2018 You get a better class of junk mail in Hampstead. Recently a ‘stiffy’ (in the polite old-fashioned sense) arrived from something called ‘The Restory’. From its sober shade of indigo with silver lettering I guessed it announced the opening of a restaurant in a former rectory, but no, it advertised an “on-demand shoe and handbag restoration […]