Thomas Sutcliffe

Reach for the sky: in Pixar's wonderful animation Up absolutely nothing has happened by chance

Tom Sutcliffe: When a film is not a film

When the Cannes organisers invited Disney/ Pixar to present Up as the opening film of the 2009 festival they made history.

Recently by Thomas Sutcliffe

Tom Sutcliffe: No fair trials in the court of public opinion

Tuesday, 13 October 2009

I heard the phrase "the Court of Public Opinion" quite a few times yesterday morning – prompted by interviews and discussions anticipating the fact that MPs were all going to get a letter from Sir Thomas Legg and a lot of them weren't going to like it.

Tom Sutcliffe: Art with the Midas touch

Friday, 9 October 2009

The Week In Culture

Tom Sutcliffe: Ban an image and the more it is noticed

Tuesday, 6 October 2009

I can't recall attending a redacted exhibition before, but by the time I got to Tate Modern's new show "Pop Life" it had, in the dictionary definition of that word, been put in an appropriate form for publication, at least as far as the police were concerned. The odd, chapel-like enclosure in which Richard Prince's Spiritual America is displayed was sealed off from gallery-goers while negotiations continued about the lawfulness of an image of the 10-year-old Brooke Shields, naked and precociously sexualised.

Tom Sutcliffe: The smiley face of extinction

Friday, 2 October 2009

The Week In Culture

Tom Sutcliffe: Drugs busts do little to crack the problem

Tuesday, 29 September 2009

Is there anything more depressing than a showcase drugs bust? There was a fine example this weekend when HMS Iron Duke made its way into the interdiction book of records by seizing five and half tonnes of cocaine off the coast of Colombia – an event that was predictably greeted as a triumph by the Armed Forces minister Bill Rammell and by the ship's captain, Commander Andrew Stacey. And, following the well-established rules of the drug-bust news item genre, we were then shown the secret compartment where the stash was found and given the estimated street value of the drug (in this case £240 million) – a piece of information that is never omitted, but always seems to me to send an oddly mixed message. Just look at how much this stuff is worth, it seems to say, and how relatively easy it is to hide it. Isn't this a business you should be thinking of getting into?

Tom Sutcliffe: How to bring death to life

Friday, 25 September 2009

You wait for years for a good corpse-sniffing description to come along and then two arrive at once.

Tom Sutcliffe: Please stop asking if my meal is OK

Tuesday, 22 September 2009

A scene from modern life: I'm in a burger bar, one of those chains that charge the gastronomically snobbish a modest premium so they can pretend that they're not actually eating in a fast-food restaurant.

Tom Sutcliffe: The art of the recession

Friday, 18 September 2009

What will unemployment do for art? In the case of the Lehman employees, reported on in this paper earlier this week, the answer was relatively straightforward.

Tom Sutcliffe: Working-class culture... that's so middle class

Tuesday, 15 September 2009

"It pains me that working-class culture is sneered at and ridiculed. Fifty years ago it was seen as noble and dignified." This is Jon Cruddas, in yesterday's paper, answering a reader's question as to whether he thinks of himself as a class warrior. It was a remark that the sub-editor responsible thought sufficiently striking to pick out in large, red type as a pull-quote... and it struck me, for two reasons. First, I wondered who was supposed to be doing the sneering and then, more to the point, I found myself asking what would count as "working-class culture", both now and 50 years ago.

Tom Sutcliffe: The word on the street art

Friday, 11 September 2009

There's a proposal coming up before Bristol City Council shortly that local citizens should be allowed to vote on whether graffiti – or street art – should be power-hosed or preserved.

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