Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World

(The National Portrait Gallery, 21 December 2025)

Beaton's failing as a fashion photographer lies in succeeding as a fashion photographer. People like to connect with other people, and fashion can serve as a catalyst. The subject of the photograph is always the connection, never the fashion itself. There is precious little of human connection in Beaton's photography. Beaton was an aesthete, not a humanist.

Fashion photography as a genre is generally rather good not (only) because its subject matter is beautiful but also because it is answerable to the objective metric of market success.

Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary

(The Photographers’ Gallery, 20 December 2025)

One becomes a photographer because one does not find what one is looking for in others’ photography. For this to be true, one’s tastes must be rather niche. With niche tastes, one is unlikely to create that which many others would find pleasing. As a result, most photography is bad. 

“No politics, no whining” is not an uncommon refrain on bulletin boards. The photographs from Mikhailov's exhibition would not have belonged on this board.

The Importance of Being Earnest

(The Noël Coward Theatre, 20 December 2025)

The production diminishes Oscar Wilde’s characters by erasing their principal traits: class, Englishness, sex, and manners. The time and the place are gone. All that is left is director Max Webster’s lazy caricature of the here and the now. All history has been abolished. The future that remains is the perpetual depreciation of the now.

In Webster’s now, only a priest and a governess—perhaps also Lady Bracknell—remain straight. Actors and actresses adopt an improbable menagerie of manners and speech patterns. The text is true to Wilde but is often recited as a mantra in a foreign tongue; Shakespeare is spoken thus when the meaning eludes the player. What remains of Wilde is carried and carried out by Stephen Fry in his two scenes.

If one believes that historical figures ought not to be judged by present-day prejudices—whether those prejudices are correct or mistaken—then one also ought to be sceptical of ascribing modern-day mannerisms and affectations to each and every character in Wilde’s classical play. By rejecting the past, the production insulates the present from scrutiny by comparison and thereby denies the future.

Webster’s is a decadent production in the best sense of “decadent.” It illustrates how a society in which the past looked exactly like the present would have no future.

Pastkartes Ziemassvētkos

(Latvijas Nacionālais Teātris, 17 December 2025)
One may assert the inferiority of AI companions relative to human friends because humans are shaped by their unique circumstances and friendships, whereas AI is trained on generic text and, therefore, in some ineffable way, is less human and, so, is inferior. This criticism may become untenable rather soon. AI may not become more human. Humans will become more AI because they will end up being trained on largely the same data. These data will consist not only of shared X and Instagram feeds but also in increasingly expansive conversations with AI, from whom humans will adopt both factoids and style. There will be silos. Within silos, though, humans and AI will become directly comparable, and not in the favour of humans. Some–the Amish-lite–will refuse to be trained on the common feed and the common AI and will stick to human friendships. Most won't.

Viss Par Ievu

(Latvijas Nacionālais Teātris, 13 December 2025)

Acting is properly mid-Atlantic. Each actor and each actress comes across as perfectly cast, which is a testament to each individual's great craft because the pool of actors is limited by the company. The night's cast included Evija Krūze (Margo Channing), Agate Marija Bukša (Eve Harrington), and Daiga Kažociņa (Karen Roberts), alongside mainstays such as Normunds Laizāns ("director") and Egons Dombrovskis ("playwright"), among others.

The game is bigger than you think. The game surprises, catches one unawares, and often disappoints. The part of one that remains unchanged after such surprises is often not the best part.

The world is imperfectly just, imperfectly meritocratic. Taking matters into one's hands by bending the rules to restore justice (typically to one's advantage and typically through deception) may contribute to or subtract from the overall justice. 

Meistars un Margarita

(Rīgas Dailes Teātris, 12 December 2025)

Every now and again, when one thinks nothing is left to be invented in theatre, a production comes along that shatters the status quo and sets the tone for theatre for decades to come. This is one of those productions. In this production, camerawork is not a gimmick, a distraction, or a way to save on a painted backdrop. And it is good.

Acting is good. Every character is meticulously crafted. Every actor is convincing. Ieva Segliņa shines, and so do Artūrs Skrastiņš, Arturs Krūzkops, Madara Viļčuka, and Niklāvs Kurpnieks.

The production is staged like a ballet, expansively, meticulously, in CinemaScope. Every remark is perfectly timed. Every musical number is interrupted perfectly.

Harold Bloom used to say: “The only method is yourself.” He was referring to literary criticism. The same maxim applies to morals. The self is the ultimate authority on what is moral. Following one's cultivated moral tastes is the best one can do. A life lived to cater to one's tastes is the only moral life there is.

El Inspector Llama a la Puerta

(Teatro del Centro Cultural Helénico, 21 November 2025)

The play (An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestly, directed by Otto Minera) espouses utilitarian ethics and a Parfitian notion of identity and rejects moral luck. If five people have inflicted enough misery to drive a girl to suicide, it does not matter in the end whether this amount of misery was inflicted on one girl or was spread over five girls, none of whom might have committed suicide. The aggregate guilt remains the same. 

All the character arcs are flat. The play's protagonist is a British upper-middle-class family in the early twentieth century. It is unclear how to project the eccentricities of the British class system from over a century ago onto a rather different society and language. The production lacks physicality.