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.

Serving as secretary of state for culture can do strange things to a man. Having been spotted doing the moonwalk last week with Nicholas Cullinan, director of the National Portrait Gallery, Matt Hancock has now posted a video of himself trying out Parkour moves under the watchful eye of Sebastian Foucan, president of Parkour UK.

Not to be outdone, former culture minister Ed Vaizey has been glimpsed on the Daily Politics attempting something called the ‘floss dance’. Truly, we live in strange times.

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The Field Museum in Chicago has partnered with a local distillery to produce a gin made from botanicals introduced to the city in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition – an exhibition that led to the founding of the institution itself. Meanwhile, the Cincinnati Art Museum is celebrating the return of Van Gogh’s Undergrowth with Two Figures to the institution with a beer brewed in memory of the painter. The beverage is said to pack ‘a huge juicy punch of orange, lemon, and tropical fruits, mango, and lychee.’

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Germaine Greer has been winding people up again. Presenting Rose Wylie with a prize at the South Bank Sky Arts awards last weekend, she came over all Michael Gove on the subject of arts education. ‘I think perhaps we should stop teaching art. I think we shouldn’t be teaching kids how to do it’, she told the Press Association. ‘I don’t think you can do art at school. You do art at home.’

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, Donald Trump is not Jeremy Deller’s favourite person. In an interview with the Evening Standard, the artist likened the President Trump to ‘some creepy psychotic pervert from a David Lynch film’.

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Finally, the historian and broadcaster Lucy Worsley has discovered that Waldemar Januszczak is a tough act to follow…

Got a story for Rakewell? Get in touch at rakewell@apollomag.com or via @Rakewelltweets.