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Author: VisionaryArt Editorial

A Christmas Carol returns to Hexham with a star cast, and The Snow Globe opens for the under-sixes
Queen’s Hall Arts and Triple Treat Theatre have announced the cast of A Christmas Carol, which opens at Queen’s Hall in Hexham on 5 December and runs to 2 January, and a new production for children under six, The Snow Globe, which runs in the Studio from 5 to 31 December.
Elijah Young, best known for playing Stewart in the BBC sitcom Smoggie Queens, joins the cast of the Dickens adaptation. His theatre credits include Black Dark at Live Theatre and Showstopper at Alphabetti Theatre, and he has appeared in Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators.
The cast of A Christmas Carol at Queen's Hall: Elijah Young, Jude Nelson, Zoe Lambert and Bob Nicholson. Photo: Queen's Hall Arts.
He is joined by County Durham actor and singer Jude Nelson, whose stage work includes Our Friends in the North at Newcastle’s Theatre Royal and Live Theatre, The Sunderland Story at Sunderland Empire and Book of Crow at Live Theatre. Nelson previously appeared at Queen’s Hall in Remarkable Robin’s Extraordinary Christmas Adventure.
Zoe Lambert returns to Hexham after last year’s Red Riding Hood. Her career in the North East spans more than 35 years, with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Northern Stage, Live Theatre and Northern Broadsides, and screen credits including Coronation Street, Emmerdale and Tracy Beaker Returns.
Zoe Lambert returns to Hexham after last year's Red Riding Hood. Photo: Queen's Hall Arts.
The cast is completed by Bob Nicholson, actor, theatre maker and co-director of Triple Treat Theatre, who appeared in last year’s Red Riding Hood and was previously co-artistic director of Kitchen Zoo. The production is written by Nicholson with Caroline Liversidge and Paula Penman, and directed by Penman.
“As a director, it really doesn’t get much better than creating a show with a cast this talented,” Penman said. “Along with our very own Bob Nicholson, I’m absolutely thrilled to welcome back the brilliant Zoe Lambert, alongside two North East favourites, Jude Nelson and Elijah Young.”
Elijah Young, known for Smoggie Queens, joins the cast of A Christmas Carol. Photo: Queen's Hall Arts.
The creative team includes Amy Watts on design, Kate Hunter Parker on puppets, Jeremy Bradfield on composition and sound, Stuart Hannaran on lighting, Sophie Teasdale on AV and stage management, Richard Flood on production and VonFox on media.
A first theatre visit for the under-sixes
Alongside the main stage show, Triple Treat Theatre presents The Snow Globe in Queen’s Hall’s Studio, written by Nicholson with Liversidge and Penman and directed by Nicholson. Hexham-raised actor-musician Eleanor Cobb, who trained at RADA, leads the production; her credits include Do Birds Hide to Die? at the Coronet Theatre and the Prague Fringe, and she recently co-wrote and directed Blocks Falling at Charing Cross Theatre.
The Snow Globe, Queen's Hall Studio, 5 to 31 December: Eleanor Cobb. Photo: Queen's Hall Arts.
“We’re so excited to welcome Triple Treat Theatre back to Queen’s Hall this Christmas,” said Katy Taylor, artistic director and chief executive of Queen’s Hall Arts. “They’ve built a wonderful connection with our audiences, and with such a talented cast bringing this much-loved story to life, we’re looking forward to another very special festive season in Hexham.”
Eleanor Cobb, Hexham-raised actor-musician, leads The Snow Globe. Photo: Queen's Hall Arts.
A Christmas Carol runs from 5 December 2026 to 2 January 2027 and is suitable for ages 6 and over. The Snow Globe runs from 5 to 31 December and is made for children under six and their families, with relaxed performances. Tickets for both are on sale at queenshall.co.uk or through the box office on 01434 652477.
Queen’s Hall Arts Centre, Beaumont Street, Hexham NE46 3LS.
November 5, 2026
How to Avoid Clichés in Art Writing
To avoid clichés in art writing, swap every stock phrase for an observation that could only be true of the work in front of you: its materials, its size, the order in which it was made, what your eye does as you look. A cliché names an effect (“haunting”, “bold”, “a dialogue between”) without naming its cause, so the fix is almost always to find the cause and write that down instead. The rest of this guide shows where art clichés come from, what serious critics and editors have said about them, and a practical routine for cutting them out of a draft.
Where the habit comes from
A cliché is language somebody else has already shaped, and the writer is only pressing it onto the page. It feels safe because it has been used before, and that is exactly why it carries no information about the work you saw.
Art writing is unusually exposed to this. Much of what critics read before a visit is promotional: press releases, wall texts, auction and sale catalogues. In 2012 the artist David Levine and the critic and sociologist Alix Rule published an essay in the journal Triple Canopy that gave this house style a name, International Art English. As Andy Beckett explained in a Guardian guide to artspeak, they built their case on thousands of exhibition announcements published since 1999 by e-flux, the New York subscriber network for art professionals, and ran them through Sketch Engine, a corpus tool developed in Brighton.
Their findings are a catalogue of what to avoid. According to the Guardian’s account, they found that “the real”, used as a grand abstract noun, appeared 179 times more often in International Art English than in standard English, and that fashions in vocabulary came and went by year. In their words, “usage of the word speculative spiked unaccountably in 2009; 2011 saw a sudden rage for rupture”. They also observed that the style “always uses more rather than fewer words”. If you soak in press releases before writing, those words will arrive in your draft uninvited.
What Orwell said about art criticism
The sharpest warning is eighty years old. In “Politics and the English Language”, first published in Horizon in April 1946 and reproduced by the Orwell Foundation, George Orwell singled out art criticism by name. Words such as “romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless,” he wrote, “in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader.”
His example still stings. One critic praises “the living quality” of an artist’s work; another notes its “peculiar deadness”; readers shrug and call it a difference of opinion. If the words were black and white, Orwell argued, everyone would see that language was being misused. The lesson for reviewers is that a judgement made of vague words cannot be tested, and so it cannot be trusted.
The same essay lists six rules. The first is the one that matters most here: “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” The third, “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out”, is the editing principle behind the checklist further down. The sixth, “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous”, is a reminder that the aim is clarity, not a new set of taboos.
Phrases to retire and the questions that replace them
Most art clichés fall into a few families. Each one can be broken by a question that forces you back to the object.
- Effect words such as “striking”, “haunting”, “evocative” and “powerful”. Ask: what did you look at first, and what made you keep looking? Write that.
- Inflation such as “a bold statement”, “masterful”, “breathtaking scale”. Ask: how big is it, in metres, and what does that size do in this particular room?
- Relationship formulas such as “a dialogue between”, “explores the tension between”, “interrogates”. Ask: what are the two things, where are they placed, and what happens visually where they meet?
- Timelessness such as “timeless”, “universal”, “speaks to us all”. Ask: when was it made, what was it responding to, and who was it made for?
- Texture fog such as “rich surface” or “painterly”. Ask: what is the paint actually doing, and with what tool?
A useful test is portability. If a sentence could be moved into a review of a different show without changing a word, it is a cliché, however elegant it sounds.
Use the vocabulary of making
The quickest route away from mood words is the language studios and conservators use, because it describes things you can see. The National Gallery glossary defines impasto (from the Italian for dough) as areas “heavily built up with paint layers”, where “brush or palette knife marks are usually clearly evident”. That gives you a concrete sentence where “textured” gave you nothing.
The same glossary separates a glaze, a transparent film laid over a lighter colour that modifies it without hiding it, from a scumble, a thin layer lighter than what lies beneath. It explains that the ground beneath a painting changes how every later colour reads, noting that Poussin used reddish grounds and Rembrandt brownish ones. Once you know those terms, “glowing” can become “glazed over a pale ground”, which is both more accurate and more interesting.
Tate’s Art Terms glossary is useful for the same reason. Its entry on chiaroscuro gives the literal meaning, light-dark, and adds a point many writers miss: the term is generally only worth using when contrast is a prominent feature of the work. Technical words are a tool, not decoration. Use one when it tells the reader something they would otherwise have to see for themselves.
This approach suits other media too. For sculpture, say whether something is cast, carved, welded or assembled. For photography, name the print process and the paper if the label gives them. For video, give the running time and whether it loops.
Let verbs carry the description
Adjectives are where clichés breed, because they let you report your own reaction. Verbs push you to describe an action, either the artist’s or the image’s. “A dynamic composition” says very little. “The diagonal drags the eye from the bottom left corner to a single lit window” says what the composition does.
Two cautions apply. First, flashy verbs can become clichés of their own; “interrogates”, “unpacks” and “problematises” are the action words of International Art English. Second, one strong verb per sentence is plenty. If every line is busy, the reader stops seeing the work and starts watching the writer.
Comparisons need the same discipline. Saying a young painter “recalls” a famous name is a shortcut unless you say precisely what is shared (a palette, a way of cropping the figure, a type of brushwork) and where the two part company.
Read writers who look hard
The best protection against borrowed phrases is a stock of good models. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, first published in 1972 and based on the BBC television series of the same name, remains a model of plain sentences used for complex ideas. Its opening argument, that “the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled”, is a better starting point for a review than any adjective.
Gallery professionals are aware of the problem too. In the Guardian piece, Polly Staple, then director of Chisenhale Gallery in London, observed that many visitors “don’t even look at the programme sheet” because they do not want to read writing about art. That is a commercial and cultural cost of jargon, and it is a reason to write differently rather than to stop writing.
Outside the art world, the Plain English Campaign, which officially began in 1979 to campaign “against gobbledygook, jargon and misleading public information”, offers a broader frame. Its targets are public documents rather than exhibition reviews, but the principle transfers: if a reader cannot act on or picture what you wrote, the sentence has failed.
An editing routine that works
Clichés survive drafting; they are removed in editing. Read your draft with suspicion, ideally the next day.
1. Highlight every adjective and adverb. Keep only those that add information (size, colour, material, date). Cut or replace the ones that add only emphasis.
2. Search your draft for the usual suspects: “explores”, “dialogue”, “tension”, “striking”, “evocative”, “timeless”, “the viewer”. Each hit is a prompt to ask what you actually mean.
3. Apply the portability test sentence by sentence. Anything that could describe another artist’s work needs a specific detail or a deletion.
4. Check every technical term against a reliable glossary such as the National Gallery’s or Tate’s, and drop any term you would struggle to define aloud.
5. Compare your text with the press release. If any phrase matches, rewrite it in your own words or quote it openly and say what you think of it.
6. Read the piece aloud. Inflated phrases often sound fine on screen and hollow when spoken.
None of this demands a special talent. It demands time in front of the work and a willingness to replace a comfortable phrase with a harder, truer one.
Further reading and practice
If you write reviews regularly, keep a private file of phrases you catch yourself using, and check new drafts against it. Revisit Orwell’s six rules before a big piece; they take a minute to read. For a wider sense of how independent critics approach exhibitions, browse the reviews and essays on Visionary Art, and the criticism collected by the writer and editor Maria Bregman at mariabregman.com.
The goal is a review a reader could check by walking into the gallery: every claim pinned to something visible, every judgement backed by a reason. Fresh language follows from that, not from hunting for unusual words.
Photo: Tomidaooooooo, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
November 5, 2026
Hexham Lantern Parade returns on Friday 13 November
Hexham Lantern Parade returns on Friday 13 November 2026, presented by Queen’s Hall Arts with the support of EGGER. It is the first parade since a break in 2025.
Queen’s Hall Arts Centre, Hexham. Photo: Victuallers, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Illustrative image, not from the event.
What is planned
Northumberland artist Elaine Porter Nelson has been commissioned to make a giant woodland-inspired lantern celebrating Kielder Forest, which will lead the parade through Hexham. She is making it with local children aged 5–13 through holiday clubs and workshops. Elaine has more than 20 years of experience in willow sculpture, lanterns, parade structures and community art, and has worked on Amble Lantern Parade, Alnwick Garden Light Parade, Stockton International Riverside Festival and The Light in Durham.
Live music comes from Northern Monkey Brass Band, a North East collective of drummers and brass players who mix New Orleans funk with original music and brass versions of pop songs.
Practical details
Everyone is welcome. The parade gathers at the Bandstand in Sele Park, Hexham, from 6pm on Friday 13 November. Families are encouraged to bring their own lanterns, using battery-operated lights only. A how-to guide for making a lantern is on the Queen’s Hall Arts website.
Details are from the organiser, Queen’s Hall Arts, a registered charity and arts centre in Hexham. Official information: queenshall.co.uk. Visionary Art is not the organiser; please check the organiser’s site before making plans.
November 3, 2026
How Typography Shapes Meaning
Typography shapes meaning by deciding how words look before anyone reads them: the typeface, weight, size, spacing and layout tell readers what kind of message to expect, how much to trust it and in what order to take it in. The effect is measurable. In a 2012 online experiment for The New York Times, roughly 45,000 readers judged the same passage, and those who saw it set in Baskerville were slightly more likely to agree with it than readers shown other fonts. History, habit and context do the rest, which is why the same sentence can feel official on a road sign and absurd in a cartoon font.
The evidence that type changes belief
The best-known test of this idea was run by the filmmaker Errol Morris. In “Hear, All Ye People; Hearken, O Earth”, published on The New York Times Opinionator blog in August 2012, he described a quiz in which readers were shown a passage by the physicist David Deutsch about the chances of an asteroid striking Earth. Each participant saw the text in one of six randomly assigned typefaces: Baskerville, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans and Trebuchet.
More than 100,000 people clicked on the page and around 45,000 completed the quiz. The data were analysed by David Dunning, a psychology professor at Cornell. His verdict was that “Baskerville is different from the rest”, with what he called “a 1.5% advantage” in agreement relative to the average of the other fonts. He added that the advantage “may seem small, but if that was a bump up in sales figures, many online companies would kill for it.”
Two cautions belong alongside that result. The effect was small, and it came from one uncontrolled online sample. Yet it fits what designers have long argued: letterforms carry a tone. Dunning reached for the word “gravitas” to describe Baskerville, and contrasted fonts that are “a little bit more tuxedo” with informal ones such as Comic Sans.
Serif, sans and script as signals
Most readers cannot name the typefaces around them, but they recognise the families. Serif types, with small strokes at the ends of letters, are strongly associated with newspapers and books. Times New Roman is the clearest case: it was commissioned by The Times in 1931, conceived by Stanley Morison of Monotype with the lettering artist Victor Lardent, and first appeared in the paper on 3 October 1932. Its later spread to almost every personal computer turned a newspaper face into the default look of documents, essays and forms.
Sans serif faces read differently. The geometric Futura, designed by Paul Renner and released in 1927, is built from near-perfect circles, triangles and squares. Renner was not part of the Bauhaus, but his type shared its ideas, and it still carries an air of interwar modernism whenever it is used.
At the informal end sits Comic Sans, designed by Vincent Connare and released by Microsoft in 1994. It was modelled on comic book lettering to imitate the tone of speech bubbles. That origin explains both its popularity in classrooms and the discomfort people feel when it appears on serious notices: the form says one thing and the content another.
History travels with the letters
Typefaces accumulate associations over decades, and some of those associations are political. In Germany, blackletter (Fraktur) and roman type (Antiqua) coexisted well into the twentieth century, and each acquired ideological meaning in the long Antiqua–Fraktur dispute. The ending is often misremembered. Although Fraktur was promoted as “German” type in the early Nazi years, an edict signed by Martin Bormann on 3 January 1941 discontinued it, claiming without basis that it consisted of “Jewish letters”; one apparent motive was that roman type was easier to use in occupied countries.
That history explains why blackletter now carries such mixed signals: medieval manuscripts and early printing for some readers, newspaper mastheads for others, and for others still the uniforms and propaganda of the 1930s. A designer who chooses it is citing all of those at once, whether they mean to or not.
London offers a gentler example. Johnston, the Underground typeface, was commissioned in 1913 by Frank Pick from the calligrapher Edward Johnston and introduced in 1916. It has been the corporate type of London’s public transport since the London Passenger Transport Board was founded in 1933, and in 2016 Transport for London commissioned an updated version, Johnston 100, from Monotype for the centenary. A century of use means that a few letters in Johnston are enough to suggest London itself.
Hierarchy decides the order of reading
Type also shapes meaning by controlling sequence. Size, weight, colour and space tell readers what to read first, what belongs together and what can be skipped. Public sector designers treat this as a system rather than a matter of taste. The GOV.UK Design System publishes a type scale in which, on large screens, the largest standard heading is 48 pixels on a 50 pixel line and body text is 19 pixels on a 25 pixel line. The scale has, in its own words, been “tested and iterated for readability on different devices”, and a recent update increased the size of text on small screens to improve legibility (checked October 2026).
The lesson for anyone setting a catalogue, a wall text or a website is that every level of the hierarchy should mean something. If three different sizes of heading appear without a reason, readers will invent one.
Signs, safety and public type
Few typefaces carry more practical meaning than those on British roads. Transport was created between 1957 and 1963 by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert for the Ministry of Transport’s committees on road signs. Their signs were first tested on the Preston bypass in 1958 before appearing on the M1 a year later. Kinneir and Calvert found many foreign examples “somewhat harsh” and instead drew a more rounded letter with distinctive tails on the a, t and l to aid legibility at speed. The same pair designed Rail Alphabet for Britain’s railways.
The rules that govern road signs today sit in the Department for Transport’s Traffic Signs Manual, whose chapters were updated to reflect the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2016. Here typography is a matter of safety, and the design choices that made Transport legible also made it feel calm and authoritative. GOV.UK pages now use a font family called New Transport, a name that points back to the motorway signs, so the lettering of the road also became the lettering of tax returns and passport forms.
Accessibility is part of the meaning
A message that some people cannot read has a narrower meaning than its author intended. The international Web Content Accessibility Guidelines set a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text at level AA. The W3C explains that the higher figure accounts for “moderately low visual acuity, congenital or acquired color deficiencies, or the loss of contrast sensitivity that typically accompanies aging”. It also warns that thin or unusual fonts can render with lower contrast than their colours suggest.
Organisations that advise readers with particular needs, such as the British Dyslexia Association and the RNIB, publish guidance on clear text, and it is worth reading before designing anything for the public. In galleries the same principles apply to wall labels: viewing distance, lighting and glare can undo a careful choice of font.
Practical checks before you choose a typeface
For anyone designing an exhibition, a publication or a small gallery website, a few questions help make type work for the message:
- What does the face already mean? Look up its history. A typeface with strong period or political associations will bring them along.
- Does the tone match the content? The Morris experiment and the Comic Sans story both show that readers notice when form and content disagree.
- Is the hierarchy doing a job? Limit yourself to a small number of sizes and weights, as the GOV.UK type scale does, and give each one a role.
- Can everyone read it? Check contrast against the WCAG thresholds, test thin weights on real screens and print, and view wall texts from the distance visitors will stand.
- Will it survive the setting? A face that looks refined on a monitor may break up on textured paper or under spotlights.
For deeper study, the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading offers degree courses, research and a short Type Design intensive course, and maintains its own collections and archives. For writing on design and visual culture more broadly, see the reviews on Visionary Art and on artculture.uk.
Why the form of words matters
Every case above points in the same direction. A typeface is a set of shapes that people have learned to associate with institutions, eras, places and moods. Times New Roman began as a newspaper’s solution to a printing problem; Johnston began as a railway company’s identity; Transport began as a motorway safety measure. Each now carries meanings its designers could not fully control.
That is the practical point for writers, curators and designers. Choosing type is part of saying something, and readers will take the shape of the letters into account even when they cannot explain why.
Photo: Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
October 29, 2026
Documentary vs Fiction and the Question of Artistic Truth
Documentary is not automatically more truthful than fiction: both are constructed, and the difference lies in the promise each makes to the viewer. A documentary promises that its material is not invented, which is why broadcasters such as the BBC treat any fabrication presented as fact as a breach of trust. Fiction makes no such promise, so its truth is judged by insight, coherence and honesty of feeling rather than by evidence. The most interesting films of the past century sit on the line between the two and make the viewer think hard about which promise is being made.
Where the word documentary comes from
The term itself was born inside an argument about truth. According to the history of documentary film, the Scottish filmmaker John Grierson coined “documentary” in a review of Robert Flaherty’s Moana, published in the New York Sun on 8 February 1926 under the pen name “The Moviegoer”. Grierson defined the form as the “creative treatment of actuality”, a phrase that admits openly that shaping, selecting and arranging are part of the job.
Grierson was more than a theorist. The University of Stirling, which holds his archive, records that he was born in Deanston in 1898, directed Drifters (1929) about the British herring fishing industry, ran the film units of the Empire Marketing Board and the General Post Office in the 1930s, and became the first head of the National Film Board of Canada in 1939. His name lives on in the UK through the Grierson Trust, which runs the Grierson Awards for documentary and factual filmmaking.
The documentary promise and its limits
Flaherty’s own Nanook of the North (1922) shows how early the compromises began. The film’s central figure was played by the hunter Allakariallak, and the interior igloo scenes were shot in a specially built three-walled structure because a real igloo was too small and too dark for Flaherty’s bulky camera, as the production history of Nanook of the North records. Although Allakariallak normally hunted with a gun, Flaherty encouraged him to hunt in the manner of his ancestors. None of this stopped the Library of Congress selecting the film in 1989 for the first group of 25 titles in the US National Film Registry.
The lesson is not that documentary lies, but that every documentary is made. The camera changes behaviour, the edit selects, music guides emotion and a narrator frames meaning. What separates honest work from deception is whether those choices distort what actually happened.
That is exactly where modern broadcasting rules draw the line. The BBC Editorial Guidelines on accuracy state, at section 3.2.3: “The BBC must not knowingly and materially mislead its audiences. Content producers should not distort known facts, present invented material as fact or otherwise undermine audiences’ trust in the BBC’s content.” The key phrase is “present invented material as fact”. Reconstruction, stylisation and selection are allowed; passing off invention as record is not.
How fiction tells the truth
Fiction starts from the opposite agreement. Nobody believes the characters existed exactly as shown, so a drama is free to compress years into minutes, merge several real people into one, or imagine a scene no camera could have witnessed. What it owes the audience is plausibility of behaviour and honesty about human experience.
The clearest British example is Cathy Come Home, the BBC television drama directed by Ken Loach in 1966. The BBC World Service programme Witness History describes it as a hard-hitting film that “changed British ideas about homelessness”, telling the story of a young woman who lost her home, her husband and then her children. It used a documentary look, yet its force came from a constructed story that made a statistical problem feel personal.
Fiction can also carry factual weight that institutions find uncomfortable. Peter Watkins made The War Game for the BBC in 1965, a dramatised documentary imagining the effects of a nuclear strike on Britain. Writing for The Conversation, the researcher John Cook describes how declassified Cabinet Office papers show Whitehall’s involvement in the decision not to broadcast it. The film went on to win the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature and was not shown on television until 1985. A work built from staged scenes was judged by the Academy as documentary truth.
Herzog and the case for ecstatic truth
No filmmaker has argued the point more provocatively than Werner Herzog. His “Minnesota Declaration”, first read at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on 30 April 1999 and published on his official site, opens with a challenge to cinéma vérité: “It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.” Point five follows: “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”
In another essay, also reproduced among his published texts, Herzog adds a memorable warning against confusing information with understanding: if only the factual mattered, the truth “at its most concentrated must reside in the telephone book”.
Herzog’s position is a useful provocation rather than a rulebook. Broadcasters and journalists still need the factual floor he dismisses, and a viewer has a right to know when a documentary has invented something. His argument is strongest as a reminder that facts alone do not produce meaning.
Films that blur the line on purpose
Some of the most admired films in cinema history live in the border zone, and they are worth watching precisely because they make the contract visible.
- Close-Up (1990), by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, retells the true case of Hossein Sabzian, who impersonated the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The BFI’s entry on Close-Up notes that it mixes 16mm footage of the real trial with re-enactments performed by the family, Sabzian and others playing themselves. It was placed 17th in the 2022 Sight and Sound greatest films poll, which drew ballots from 1,639 critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics. Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a non-fiction “city symphony”, came ninth.
- The Thin Blue Line (1988), by Errol Morris, uses what Morris’s own site calls “expressionistic reenactments” alongside interviews and a Philip Glass score. It is credited with overturning the conviction of Randall Dale Adams for the 1976 murder of a Dallas police officer. Stylised, staged images served the pursuit of a factual truth.
- The Act of Killing (2012), directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, invited men who took part in mass killings in Indonesia to dramatise their own past in film genres of their choosing. The film’s official site lists Herzog and Morris as executive producers and quotes Herzog calling it “unprecedented in the history of cinema”. Here fiction became a method of documentary inquiry.
When fiction is mistaken for fact
The opposite risk is drama that audiences read as history. Netflix’s The Crown became the British test case. In November 2020 the then Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said, as reported by NBC News, that the series was “a beautifully produced work of fiction” and that Netflix should be clear about this at the start, adding: “Without this, I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact.”
The episode shows that the problem is rarely invention itself. Every historical drama invents dialogue. The difficulty arises when a production borrows the authority of record, such as real names, real dates and archive-style imagery, while its scenes are imagined. The more a drama looks like documentary, the more viewers expect documentary standards.
How to judge truth in any film
A few questions work for both forms and help a viewer decide what kind of trust a film has earned.
1. What promise does the film make? Check the credits, the publicity and any opening caption. A “based on true events” line is a very different claim from a documentary label.
2. Are reconstructions signposted? Morris and Kiarostami make their staging obvious; deceptive work hides it.
3. Who is heard and who is absent? Selection is unavoidable, but a fair film shows awareness of the voices it leaves out.
4. Does the emotion fit the evidence? Music and editing can make a thin case feel overwhelming, in fiction and documentary alike.
5. What happens when you check? Read beyond the film. Festival programmes such as Sheffield DocFest and critical writing often discuss method openly.
For a gallery audience, the same questions apply to photography, painting from life and video installation, where the line between record and interpretation is equally unstable. Readers who want more on art and moving image can browse the wider coverage at Visionary Art, and for criticism focused on film the writing of film critic and documentary director Maria Bregman is a further resource.
The real difference
The useful distinction is not true against false but evidence against invention, and honest against dishonest. Documentary earns trust by not fabricating what it presents as record, even while it shapes, stages and selects. Fiction earns trust by being faithful to how people think and behave, even while every event is made up. Grierson’s “creative treatment of actuality”, the BBC’s ban on presenting “invented material as fact” and Herzog’s “ecstatic truth” are three answers to the same problem, and a thoughtful viewer can hold all three at once.
Photo: Achim Raschka, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
October 27, 2026
Playing the Living: Borisov, Garfield and the Portrait Problem in Artificial
By VisionaryArt Editorial
Portraiture has always had a difficulty with living sitters. They can answer back, and the audience can compare. Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, which screens as a Gala at the BFI London Film Festival on 11 October, asks two actors to play men who are alive, powerful and still in the news: Andrew Garfield is Sam Altman, and Yura Borisov is Ilya Sutskever, his co-founder at OpenAI. The film has not yet been shown in Britain. From the accounts that came out of its New York premiere, the two actors solved the portrait problem in opposite ways.
Borisov: giving up the likeness
Borisov has described reaching a dead end with Sutskever a few days before the shoot. He has said that he then remembered the two of them share a birthday, took that as connection enough, and stopped trying to imitate the man. The character on screen is described as inspired by Sutskever, not copied from him.
Painters will recognise the move. A likeness can be accurate and lifeless; a portrait that gives up some accuracy can find the person. By most accounts the decision paid off. The Guardian’s Owen Myers calls Borisov ‘the heartbeat of the film’. In Variety his work has been described as possibly the performance of the year, a character who is hard to warm to at first and who wins the audience as he starts to warn about what is being built. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney argues that Borisov’s quiet, thoughtful playing supplies the humanity without which the film would turn bitter.
Garfield: the likeness sharpened
Garfield goes the other way, towards caricature in the old sense of the word: a likeness with the features pushed. Myers calls him ‘brilliantly slimy’ and describes an Altman who ends up as a man with ‘a victim complex’. Other reviewers praise Garfield for holding charm and manipulation in the same face.
The risk in this approach is the one caricature always runs. Myers thinks Garfield plays Altman as ‘more effete than he actually is’, and finds that choice strange, since in his view there are plenty of other reasons to laugh at a technology oligarch. Exaggeration only works when it exaggerates the right thing.
The frame around them
The Guardian’s review suggests the film itself leans the same way as Garfield. Myers describes ‘clangingly obvious visual metaphors’, among them a car accelerating over a foggy Golden Gate Bridge. The score is by Damon Albarn. Mark Rylance appears as Geoffrey Hinton, the scientist the young Sutskever visits in 2003 in the hope of a job, and Monica Barbaro plays Mira Murati. Simon Rich wrote the screenplay.
Guadagnino has said that what interests him is less the technology than the people who own it, a small group with radical control over how society is organised. That is a portraitist’s interest. It also explains why the casting matters more here than in most films about real events: if the faces do not convince, there is nothing else for the argument to stand on.
What London will be looking at
Borisov received an Academy Award nomination for his supporting role in Sean Baker’s Anora. Neon, which distributed that film and now distributes this one, reportedly plans to put him forward as lead actor for Artificial, with Garfield in the supporting category. So the Gala audience will be watching a contest inside the film as well as the one in the story: two methods of playing a living person, side by side.
The festival runs from 7 to 18 October 2026.
Image: Yura Borisov at the Toronto International Film Festival, 2024. Photo: Frank Sun, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
October 8, 2026
The Fashion Week That Happens Outside London
By VisionaryArt Editorial
The interesting thing about London Fashion Week, which runs from 17 to 21 September 2026, is how much of it is not in London and not a fashion show.
The catwalks themselves remain what they have always been: invitation-only, industry-only, closed. What has changed is the programme that now surrounds them. Fashion Britain, the British Fashion Council’s public strand, lists more than a thousand events across Bristol, Dundee, Edinburgh, Liverpool, London, Manchester and Newcastle. Its anchors are not fashion venues but art institutions – V&A Dundee, Baltic in Gateshead, the Walker in Liverpool, Manchester Art Gallery, M Shed in Bristol, East Bank in London.
This sits inside the council’s Strategy 2030, built around access, creativity and growth. Laura Weir, the BFC’s chief executive, has described the regional programme as being about decentralising fashion.
What decentralising actually looks like
A museum in Dundee hosting fashion during London Fashion Week is a small act with a large implication. It says the week is a national season rather than a London event that the rest of the country reads about afterwards – and it places fashion inside the same buildings that hold the region’s art collections, which changes who sees it and how seriously it is taken.
The same logic runs through the schedule in London. Birmingham City University presents a showcase, part of the council’s stated aim of highlighting emerging talent from outside the usual studios. Geordie Campbell arrives on the menswear schedule. Neither is framed as a regional curiosity; both are simply on the list.
Sound, ritual and the refusal of the runway
Two events this season abandon the runway as a device, and both replace it with something closer to a rite.
The label 5000, supported by the Paul Smith Foundation, unveils a new collection through an immersive sound bath: an audience held inside sustained tone rather than seated along a raised platform. J.L-A.L stages an immersive presentation followed by an afterparty with Puma. Saul Nash, a designer whose work has always been closer to choreography than to styling, presents Masquerade at the Truman Brewery. At East Bank, Music Is Black brings FLOHIO and the Blues Project.
What these share is duration. A runway show is eight minutes of frontal images optimised for a camera. A sound bath cannot be photographed usefully at all. Choosing the second means accepting a smaller audience in exchange for an experience that has a beginning and an end rather than a highlight reel – an old argument in performance art, arriving in fashion through the side door.
The city that is not the centre
There is a further layer. The Chelsea Arts Festival runs alongside the week, the National Gallery hosts a panel with the British Fashion Council and ELLE UK, and London Design Festival and Frieze Sculpture are open across the same days. Fashion in September is not a discipline holding its own event; it is one strand in a fortnight where design, sculpture and clothing share an audience.
For a publication that looks at culture from outside the capital, this is the useful reading of the season. The centre still exists – the invitations, the front rows, the houses returning with new creative directors. But the things worth travelling for are increasingly at the edges: a university showcase, a gallery in Gateshead, a room full of sound in which a collection is revealed without a single model walking towards a photographer.
Provincial is not a lesser word. It describes the position from which you can see the whole arrangement, including the part the centre takes for granted.
It began in a car park
The decentralised version of the week is closer to its origins than the glossy version is. The British Fashion Council was founded in 1983, and the first London Fashion Week was held in 1984 in a car park at the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington: fifteen shows, among them Vivienne Westwood, Ghost and Betty Jackson. The week only acquired an institutional address much later – Somerset House from 2009 to 2015, then 180 Strand from 2017 – and gave it up again in February 2020.
Since then there has been no centre, only a schedule. Once you accept that, the regional programme stops looking like outreach and starts looking like the same organism doing what it did at the start: using whatever room is available.
Who the regional programme is actually for
Two audiences meet in it, and they want different things.
The first is the visitor who will never receive an invitation, and for whom a panel at Manchester Art Gallery or a talk at V&A Dundee is not a consolation prize but the only version of the event that was ever going to be accessible. The scale here is real: more than a thousand events, in seven cities, over five days.
The second is the designer who lives outside London and has been told, correctly, that the industry is concentrated in one postcode. A university showcase on the London schedule and a national programme with institutional venues do not remove that concentration. They do make the first step shorter, and they put regional work in front of the same audience rather than a smaller one.
What criticism owes these formats
A sound bath does not review well. Neither does a masquerade, a choreographed presentation or a room in a gallery where clothing is shown between paintings. The standard fashion review – a list of looks, a verdict on the silhouette – has nothing to say about any of them.
That is a gap worth filling rather than complaining about. The tools already exist in performance criticism: duration, proximity, what the audience is asked to do, what the room does to the work. Applied to a collection revealed inside sustained sound, they produce a more honest account than a gallery of frontal images ever could.
Fashion spent a century teaching people to look at clothes from the front, in a line, at speed. The most interesting part of this September is happening to one side of that line, and mostly outside the city that gives the week its name.
Sources: the British Fashion Council’s Fashion Britain programme, the provisional London Fashion Week schedule (20 July 2026, subject to change), and the guide to the week published by the London BGTC Society.
September 16, 2026
A Bear With a Fake Past: What a Museum Sees in Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear
By VisionaryArt Editorial
There is a pink teddy bear in the Young V&A collection. It is boxed, it was made by Thinkway Toys in 2011, it carries the museum number B.104:1-2012, and it smells of strawberries. The catalogue notes that the character first appears as a kind-hearted and wise caretaker and turns out to be closer to a ruthless warden.
It also records the detail that makes the object worth thinking about. Unlike the rest of the Toy Story cast, this bear was not based on a toy that existed. He was invented for the film, and Pixar then produced fake 1980s advertisements so that audiences would believe they had simply forgotten him.
So the museum is holding the merchandise of a toy that never had a first edition. The reproduction came first. The original is a fiction.
Designed to be remembered
Most nostalgia objects work by being old. This one works by being designed to feel old, which is a different and much harder brief.
Look at what the designers had to solve. The bear needed to read as a product of a specific decade without being a copy of anything in particular, because a copy would have been recognised and the illusion would collapse. He needed the proportions of mass-manufactured plush rather than the proportions of a character drawing. He needed wear built into his silhouette: the slight droop, the softness that suggests a toy that has been carried.
And he needed a smell.
That is the part that interests me most, because scent is the one material in the object that the film cannot show. On screen, characters tell you Lotso smells of strawberries. In the room, the object simply does. The physical version is not a souvenir of the film. It completes something the film could only describe.
Very few pieces of licensed merchandise contain information absent from the work they license. This one does.
Cuteness as a technology
It has become common to explain the bear’s enormous popularity in China by pointing at his shape: pink, round, soft, huggable. The observation is correct and slightly lazy, because roundness is abundant and queues are not.
What separates Lotso from the general supply of soft pink things is that his design carries a contradiction, and contradictions hold attention.
He is built for comfort and written for cruelty. The film gives him a backstory of abandonment that is genuinely sad, and the object gives you a body that asks to be held. Owning it means holding both facts at once: this is the thing that betrayed everyone, and it is the softest thing in the room.
Theorists of cuteness have argued for years that the cute object is never simply pleasant, that it carries a strain of pity, vulnerability and even aggression. Lotso is an unusually clean demonstration. He is cute in the way that requires you to know something painful.
The object outlives the picture
There is a version of this story in which a museum acquiring film merchandise is a minor curatorial gesture, a nod to popular culture. That reading undersells it.
Consider what the acquisition actually preserves. Not the film, which is preserved elsewhere and by other means. Not the design drawings. It preserves the moment at which an invented memory became a mass-produced physical thing, complete with its box, in a decade when the manufacture of false nostalgia became a standard commercial technique rather than an eccentric one.
We are now surrounded by it: the deliberately grainy photograph, the synthesiser preset that stands in for a childhood nobody had, the reissue of a product that was never issued. Lotso is an early and unusually honest specimen, because the fabrication is documented. Pixar made the fake adverts. The museum wrote it down.
Fifteen years from now, that catalogue note will be the most valuable thing attached to the object.
Why it belongs in an art conversation
Artists have been working with manufactured memory for decades, and the strongest work in that area tends to share Lotso’s method: build the artefact first, let the history be inferred, and allow the viewer to supply the feeling.
The difference is scale and intent. An artist making a fake archive is asking you to notice the fake. A studio making a fake archive is asking you not to. That gap is where the interesting critical question sits, and it is not answered by dismissing the bear as merchandise.
The object in the V&A does not need defending as art. It needs looking at as evidence: of how thoroughly the tools of conceptual practice have been absorbed into commercial design, and of how effective they are when nobody is told they are being used.
A pink bear with a plum nose, a strawberry scent and a childhood that never happened. It is on the shelf, boxed, waiting for someone to ask the obvious question about where its past came from.
The object referenced is Lots-O-Huggin’ Bear, Thinkway Toys, manufactured 2011, Young V&A collection, museum number B.104:1-2012, viewable by appointment at V&A East Storehouse.
August 9, 2026
Get to Know Xinyu Xu: A Rising Star in the World of Arts and Culture
By VisionaryArt Editorial
In the shifting landscape of contemporary art, where identity, technology, and politics converge, a new generation of artists is redefining what it means to create. Among them, Xinyu XuXX—known professionally as Xinyu Xu—stands out as a figure whose work bridges cultures, disciplines, and emotional registers with remarkable fluidity.
The Artist
Born in Hunan, China in 1998, XuXX (she/it) is a Chinese-born, London-based artist and screening organiser. Her educational journey reads like a map of artistic migration: a BA in fashion design from the China Academy of Art, a Graduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, and an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Each institution left its mark. From the China Academy of Art, XuXX absorbed the discipline of craft and the language of fashion. From the Royal College of Art, she gained the conceptual framework to move beyond design into pure artistic expression. At Goldsmiths, she found the community and critical context to develop her practice into something wholly original.
The Practice
XuXX’s work is fundamentally interdisciplinary, spanning moving image, installation, and performance. Her practice centres on feminist eroticism—specifically, the erotic capacity to form connections, transmit energy, and create intimacy across time and territory.
“Her work is interested in how image as a non-human body creates visionary erotic experiences as a method for activism,” Al-Tiba9 Contemporary Art noted in a 2023 interview. “Inhabiting space for those bodies behind it.”
This is art that refuses categorisation. XuXX’s moving images are not documentaries or narratives in the conventional sense; they are immersive experiences that engage the viewer’s body as much as their mind. Sound, movement, and visual texture combine to create environments that feel simultaneously intimate and expansive.
The Work
XuXX’s image work has been exhibited between the UK and China, including Omitted References at The Art Pavilion in Mile End Park, At the Edge of Safe House, and Our Bodies Are Portal at Asylum Chapel. In Beijing, she curated Double Interval at Three Shadows Gallery—a group show in Huangshan that explored the boundaries between moving image and physical space.
As one of the organisers of @If Splash as Your Whistle, a programme showcasing queer, diasporic moving images and films through multimedia art events, XuXX has positioned herself not just as an artist but as a cultural facilitator—creating platforms for marginalised voices in the moving image community.
The Philosophy
What distinguishes XuXX from many contemporary artists is the philosophical depth of her practice. She does not merely represent identity; she interrogates the mechanisms through which identity is constructed, performed, and experienced.
“Anyone who can empathise with subtle things or for others and convey those feelings through their medium to create a special world can be considered an artist,” she has said. This definition—generous, inclusive, and deeply human—reflects her approach to art-making: not as a solitary pursuit but as a form of connection.
Her interest in eroticism is not gratuitous; it is strategic. By engaging the body’s capacity for pleasure and vulnerability, XuXX creates art that bypasses intellectual defences and speaks directly to the viewer’s emotional experience. In a world increasingly mediated by screens and algorithms, this tactile, embodied approach feels both radical and necessary.
The Future
At just 27, Xinyu XuXX has already achieved what many artists take decades to accomplish: a coherent body of work, a committed community, and a practice that resonates across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Her trajectory suggests an artist who will continue to evolve, challenge, and inspire.
As she moves deeper into her career, XuXX carries with her the influences of two cultures, the training of three institutions, and the vision of an artist who believes that art’s highest purpose is to create connection. In the world of arts and culture, that is a rare and precious gift.
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For more on emerging artists and contemporary art, explore our coverage of [new voices in the art world](/category/art/) and [cross-cultural creativity](/category/culture/).
July 9, 2026
Nikas Safronov: The Artist Who Fooled the World with Putin’s Trump Portrait
By VisionaryArt Editorial
In the grand tradition of art as diplomacy, few works have provoked as much intrigue, speculation, and controversy as the portrait of Donald Trump that now hangs in the White House Grand Foyer. Painted by Russian artist Nikas Safronov and gifted by Vladimir Putin in March 2025, the work depicts the American president with bloodied ear and raised fist—echoing the July 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. It is a painting that is simultaneously propaganda, prophecy, and provocation.
The Commission
Safronov, one of Russia’s most famous artists, was contacted by “some people who said they want me to paint Trump as I see him.” He did not initially know who his visitors were, though he suspected the Kremlin. “There are clients who do not go into details,” he explained.
The commission was straightforward: paint Trump as he appeared after the Butler rally. But Safronov’s interpretation transcended mere portraiture. The painting shows Trump with blood splattered across his face, his right fist raised in defiance, the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan skyline rising behind him like monuments in a dream.
“When I started the portrait, I realized this could bring our countries closer,” Safronov told CNN. “And decided not to charge any money because I suspected what this painting was for.”
The Reveal
The painting was delivered by Trump’s envoy, real estate mogul Steve Witkoff, who described it to Tucker Carlson as “a beautiful portrait” that clearly moved the former president. For weeks, the portrait remained a mystery—its existence known, its details hidden.
Then, in April 2025, Safronov revealed the work to CNN, confirming what many had suspected: this was not merely a gift but a calculated act of soft power. The Kremlin confirmed the portrait’s authenticity. Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov described it as “an absolutely personal gift” to “his American colleague.”
Safronov’s account added layers of mystique: Putin had contacted him personally to emphasise the commission’s importance, telling him the flattering portrait was a crucial step in improving Russia’s relationship with the United States.
The Artist
Nikas Safronov is no ordinary painter. Known for celebrity portraits—he has painted Pope Francis, Kim Jong Un, Narendra Modi, and Madonna—he occupies a peculiar position in Russian culture: simultaneously respected as a serious artist and scrutinised for his flamboyant public persona. He has appeared nude in widely circulated photos, boasts about his sexual exploits, and claims to own a 17-room, 7-billion-rouble penthouse near the Kremlin.
Safronov once claimed to have dreamt his own fame into being, keeping detailed dream journals and asserting that his visions shape his path. He dabbles in numerology and claims to feel “energetic imprints” from the people he paints. In 2021, Putin bestowed upon him the title of “People’s Artist of Russia” for “great merit in the field of fine art.”
The Art World’s Response
The portrait has divided the art world. Some critics see it as a masterful piece of diplomatic theatre—a work that accomplishes through visual language what formal negotiations cannot. Others dismiss it as kitsch, a propaganda piece unworthy of the White House’s walls.
Safronov himself has been characteristically bold in his assessment of competing works. When Trump denounced a portrait of him in Colorado’s state Capitol building as “truly the worst,” Safronov compared it to “provincial Soviet portraits of collective farm chairmen” and offered the help of Russian artists in training their American counterparts.
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts has acquired a Safronov work for its research collection—under its former director, who was subsequently ousted, adding another layer of controversy.
Art as Diplomacy
The Trump portrait is not the first time Putin has used art as diplomacy. Similar symbolic gifts were given during the earlier Trump presidency, including a Soviet-style poster that found its way into Mar-a-Lago’s decor. The tradition of gifts between rivals dates back centuries—from Faberge eggs to diplomatic portraits—and Safronov’s work fits neatly within this lineage.
What makes this portrait unique is its timing. Delivered during delicate negotiations between the US and Russia over Ukraine, the painting occupies a space between decoration and oracle. It is, as one commentator noted, “a symbol of how power sees itself, and perhaps, what it hopes to become.”
In the White House Grand Foyer, where it now hangs—displacing an official portrait of Barack Obama—the painting serves as a daily reminder that art, in the right hands, can be the most potent form of diplomacy.
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For more on art and geopolitics, explore our coverage of [art as political expression](/category/art/) and [diplomacy and cultural exchange](/category/culture/).
July 8, 2026