Culture

Having long escaped their relegation to the softer margins of the thriller genre, women writers have provided their own take on grimmer themes, including the sexual violence that has become such a staple of crime writing today. In The Eye of the Beholder by Margie Orford (Canongate, £16.99), Cora Berger is a South African painter who moved to London after her parents were killed in a car accident. Outwardly formidable, she has a penchant for creepy, dominating men, and finds herself under the spell of a wealthy art collector named Fournier, who has a cabin tucked away deep in the Canadian wilderness. We are also introduced to Angel, a much younger woman who has a violent history – the result of horrendous sexual exploitation at the hands of her stepfather.

The Menu is a comedy-horror-thriller set in an exclusive restaurant on a private island and it gives the rich a good kicking, like The Triangle of Sadness, except here they manage to keep their food down, mercifully. (At $1,200 a head, you’d hope so.) But the diners are not spared otherwise, and it’s nastily fun, if not pure evil, and should possibly come with a warning: after this, you will never, ever wish to dine anywhere that isn’t Nando’s. The film is directed by Mike Mylod with a screenplay by Will Tracy and Seth Reiss. (Both Mylod and Tracy have worked on Succession.) The opening sees the group of diners waiting to take the boat over to the island where the restaurant, Hawthorne, is located. One is Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), a super-wealthy foodie and snob who has watched every episode of Chef’s Table multiple times and considers chefs true artists as ‘they play with the raw materials of life’.

During the 1964 debut of Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Meat Joy’ in Paris, a man in the audience tried to throttle the artist before being hauled off by three female spectators. Schneemann’s performance, an ‘exuberant sensory celebration of flesh’, involved semi-naked dancers tangling and grappling while bits of chicken, raw fish and hot dogs rained from above and buckets of paint sloshed underfoot. Since her expulsion from Bard College ten years earlier for the ‘moral turpitude’ of painting herself in the nude, Schneemann had made a name for getting naked while persisting in calling herself a painter – a claim that was just about tenable in the case of ‘Meat Joy’, less so in the case of ‘ICES STRIP/ISIS TRIP’ (1972), her one-woman performance on a London to Edinburgh festival train which started with a striptease in the dining car while reciting Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and ended with her roller-skating up and down the aisle.

Pity Arts Council England, least loved of our NGOs, understaffed and under-resourced, its arm’s-length status gnawed to the shoulder by DCMS ukases, the stinginess of the Treasury and the government’s (in some respects, welcome) indifference to our higher culture.In return for its annual grant-in-aid (currently £336 million), it is obliged to cheer-lead policies of inclusivity and diversity and step gingerly over the eggshells of elitism, racism, gender politics and decolonisation. Its hands are further tied by the requirement to operate as extensions of the social services. The diktats of Levelling Up have to be honoured. The disabled and the disadvantaged, the young and the old are all crying out to be championed.