The Rake’s progress: last week in gossip

Introducing Rakewell, Apollo’s wandering eye on the art world. Look out for regular posts taking a rakish perspective on art and museum stories.

Jim Carrey has released a short film in which he shares his thoughts on art, life, religion and the colour teal (‘pedestrian’, apparently). ‘You really don’t know what a sculpture or a painting totally means,’ notes the comic actor, who took up art in earnest a few years ago after a difficult break-up.

Unfortunately, Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones felt much the same way about the film itself. ‘Can he be serious? Is this all a build-up to a film in which he plays a deluded character who thinks he’s an artist?’

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Giles Coren has revisited Sotheby’s Bond Street restaurant for lunch for the first time in two decades, and seemed delighted to report in The Times that the ‘legendary hideaway for naughty husbands who needed somewhere to hold hands with a shop girl’ is as good as he remembers. Really delighted: the butter sauce that came with his fish was ‘so crisp and tart it might have been the sweat of a lemon-fed leprechaun’, while an accompaniment of clams left him with a ‘finish on the tongue quite redolent of sex’. Yum.

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‘Police received a call from a member of the public reporting what they believed to be a body in the river’, Suffolk Police confirmed last week after racing to the scene in Butley Creek, near Orford. ‘The fire service and coastguard were also called to assist, but a short while later this was actually confirmed to be a sculpture.’

The troublesome effigy has been identified as A Thousand Tides, a bronze figure installed in the river over a year ago by sculptor Laurence Edwards. ‘I’ve always been a bit worried that a helicopter would spot it and want to rescue it,’ the artist told the BBC. ‘To convince someone it’s a real person is a great achievement, although I would like to apologise to the poor person who called it in.’ Suffolk Police, for their part, described the sculpture as ‘quite realistic’.

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Finally, it seems everyone’s favourite YBA has made an unannounced appearance at the Edinburgh Festival – though doesn’t that price look a little modest to you?

Meanwhile in Stockbridge… pic.twitter.com/ZIymNTIVl0

— New Town Flâneur (@NewTownFlaneur) August 13, 2017

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