Three great releases of lost concerts by Duke Ellington Orchestra, John Taylor & Stan Sulzman, and Joe Henderson
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The other kind of human
GAVIN O’TOOLE is intrigued by the near impossibility of grasping another humanity without projecting ourselves onto it
COGITO, ERGO SUM: Reconstruction of a Homo Neanderthalensis at the Saxony-Anhalt State Museum of Prehistory in Halle, Germany in a pose made famous by Auguste Rodin sculpture The Thinker (I think therefore I am)
[State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt/State Museum of Prehistory Halle/Public domain]
To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
The Naked Neanderthal
Ludovic Slimak, translated by David Watson, Allen Lane, £20
AS humanity grapples with the colossal implications of artificial intelligence, the emergence of an intellectual capacity distinct from our own begs an obvious question: what does it mean to be human anyway?
Instead of searching for an answer in the future possibilities of our species, we might start by looking back in time to consider the life, and sudden death, of a separate humanity.
This exercise underpins Ludovic Slimak’s book which, although at face value is about Neanderthals, employs this extinct hominid’s sudden demise 42 or so millennia ago in an allegorical search for a more profound truth about ourselves.
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