England Art And Culture

Here's this week's competition. We had another brilliant mailbag of entries last week, so please keep sending in your suggestions. To recap: The Telegraph Cartoon Caption Competition is a weekly bit of light relief – with a prize! Every Thursday I will post a cartoon relating to that week's news. It may be straightforward, it [...]

Art Since yesterday's visit to West Park Museum in Macclesfield might have been a surprise for some readers, I thought I'd re-post the links to previous visits. The explanation for why I've been doing this is in the first entry, for Southport's Atkinson Gallery. Accrington - Haworth Art Gallery Altrincham - Dunham Massey Birkenhead - Williamson Art Gallery and Museum Blackburn - Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery Blackpool - Grundy Art Gallery Bolton - Bolton Museum, Art Gallery and Aquarium Burnley - Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museums Bury - Bury Art Gallery and Museum Chester - Grosvenor Museum Kendal - Abbot Hall Art Gallery Lancaster - Lancaster City Museum and Ruskin Library, Lancaster University Liverpool - Sudley House, Tate Liverpool, University of Liverpool Art Gallery and The Oratory Macclesfield - West Park Museum Manchester - Whitworth Art Gallery Oldham - Oldham Art Gallery and Museum Port Sunlight - Lady Lever Art Gallery Preston - Harris Museum and Art Gallery Rawtenstall - Rossendale Museum Rochdale - Rochdale Art Gallery Salford - Salford Museum and Art Gallery and The Lowry Southport - Atkinson Art Gallery Stalybridge - Astley Cheetham Art Gallery Stockport - Stockport War Memorial and Art Gallery Warrington - Warrington Museum and Art Gallery Wigan - The History Shop Which leaves ... Carlisle - Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Coniston - Brantwood and Ruskin Museum Grasmere - Wordsworth and Grasmere Museum Knutsford - Tabley House and Tatton Park Liverpool - Walker Art Gallery Manchester - Manchester City Art Gallery Runcorn - Norton Priory Museum There's actually less than I thought ...

The full-colour silent era footage that caused so much excitement online recently is almost like science-fictionReading this on mobile? Click here to view the videoLondon looks itself and other in this footage. For a 21st-century viewer it is like watching a science-fiction film in which almost everything is the same until you notice little differences that betray a completely alien quality. The past is another country, but in Claude Friese-Greene's film of the capital's streets and sights it is a place disguised as our own.This is because this 1926 footage, which is currently a Twitter talking point, was shot in colour. Friese-Greene and his father William pioneered their own method of shooting in colour, back during the silent era: it is a byway of cinema history, an experiment that never caught on. In fact, it is part of a lost history of rival technologies in which Britain was an early leader – the Friese-Greenes fought a legal battle in the House of Lords with the rival Kinemacolor method before both were eclipsed by the American success story of Technicolor.Reading this on mobile? Click here to view the videoSo there's this haunting little film, in which Claude Friese-Greene demonstrates his colour method by revealing the green embankment, the brown Thames, the dark stones of the Tower, the blue of a policeman's uniform as he directs traffic.It's easy to see why this clip from Friese-Greene's documentary The Open Road has become an online hit. It mirrors our nostalgia perfectly, in this age of revitalised royalism and Ukip-ish invocations of England's lost green and pleasant land. Here is an uncanny full-colour glimpse of a time when even London looked innocent.The policeman directing traffic is a case in point. There is plenty of traffic on the roads – carts and drays as well as motor vehicles – but it all stops timidly when a London Bobby raises his hand. People cross the road under his protective eye, then he lets the traffic move forward.Reading this on mobile? Click here to view the videoOn the pavements, people walk by in small quiet groups. Even crowds filmed at Petticoat Lane market are properly dressed, in brown suits and hats, and mill with what can only be called gentleness.Another friendly policeman appears patrolling the Embankment in a scene that is captioned as a "romantic" view of London. Beyond him the Houses of Parliament glow in sunlight, in a vision of an orderly, humble, relaxed Britain.Of course it is an illusion. The film was made to show in European cinemas and gives a tourist view of the great city. In reality, there were tanks on the streets of the capital during the 1926 General Strike.But we are all tourists in our past, a place that gets sweeter with distance. Eerily silent as it may be, this placid vision of London tickles fantasies of a kinder, more secure age. It is a national idyll in living colour.Silent filmLondonJonathan Jonesguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

We always look forward to seeing the catalogue for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize land on our desks here at 1000 Words and this year is no different. Featuring a selection of meaty essays by David Evans, Christopher Bucklow, Gerry Badger and Ian Jeffrey it is a veritable banquet for the brain - one that provides a perfect accompaniment to an exhibition that arguably offers the most expanded view of what photographic practice is, or can be, since the prize’s inception. Below is a series of video interviews with the four finalists: Mishka Henner, Cristina de Middel, Chris Killip and Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin that are worth sitting down to watch. The winner will be announced at the award evening on 10 June 2013. To read our review of the shortlisted artists and their work click here. Who gets your vote?

Remember last year when bloggers and friends of The Culture Vulture were invited to Leeds Met School of Art, Architecture and Design for a behind the scenes tour of the Final Year Show? Well they've only gone and asked us to do it again. Tuesday, June 4th, in The Rusty Building.

We asked @LeedsCitizen and daughter if they'd like to see the legendary musical, Blood Brothers, at The Grand on Monday night. Here's what they made of it - class, curses, crying and culty things.

The new episode of #A.I.L - artists in laboratories, the weekly radio programme about art and science i present on ResonanceFM, is aired this afternoon at 4pm (London time.) Helen Pynor, Head Ache (detail), from red sea blue water series, 2008 Today i'm talking with Helen Pynor. You might have seen one of Helen's most striking photos in bookshops and on the tube last year, it showed a brain in all its organic glory and was on the book cover and on the posters advertising the exhibition Brains: The mind as matter, which opened last Spring at the Wellcome Collection in London. Helen Pynor has a background in science but later studied visual art. Three years ago she also became a doctor of philosophy. Her practice combines biological science and visual expression to explore the inside of our bodies, and to investigate the relationship between the physicality of the human body and its culturally constructed status. During the show we will be talking about how she managed to get her hands on a fresh human brain but Helen will also discuss some of her broader projects such as The Body Is A Big Place, a large-scale installation that explores organ transplantation and the thresholds between life and death. Peta Clancy and Helen Pynor (sound by Gail Priest), The Body is a Big Place The show will be aired today Wednesday 22nd of May at 16:00. The repeat is next Tuesday at 6.30 am (yes, a.m!) If you don't live in London, you can catch the online stream or wait till we upload the episodes on soundcloud.

Theatre Secret's in generic mode again this week talking about other people in other places and lookatmeism. Within she talks about a "Young Actor Pal" who could be anyone, attending a meal that has a very famous person hold forth who could also be anyone. Without names or faces, I'm not sure what we're meant to draw from it other than that human beings walk around, breath, are sometimes arrogant and often have dinner, all at the same time. It could just as well be that "Young Actor Pal" is Secret herself in which case she's using an anonymous fictional friend within an anonymous column for the purposes of an anecdote which makes her look clueless, but the philosophical implications of that would be enough for a whole series of Adam Curtis films. So here's a parody of an Adam Curtis film about Adam Curtis's films: Also today, The Guardian published this interview with casting directors which says more about the profession than the first six of Secret's columns. Here's Doctor Who's casting director Andy Pryor on receiving presents: "The worst," he says, "is when you get a card with a teabag in it, and the card is filled with glitter – so that when you open it, it goes all over you. They say, 'We just wanted to get your attention.' It's like, 'Yes you did. Now we've got to clean this shit up.'" Pryor then goes on to admit that they have cast roles on the strength of unsolicited approaches. I wonder who.