Cries & Whispers

THE VENICE BIENNALE is almost upon us. It's the single most prestigious event in the international art calendar, attracting entries from all over the world. Britain, as usual, is sending a representative. And, as usual, it's a man - Richard Hamilton. In 98 years, we have only twice chosen a woman - Barbara Hepworth in 1950 and Bridget Riley in 1967, when she shared the British Pavilion with Phillip King. This year there were several women on the shortlist, including Gillian Ayres, Paula Rego, Rachel Whiteread and Alison Wilding, but none was successful. The British entry is organised by the British Council, which also organises our entry to the second most prestigious, and second oldest biennale, the Sao Paulo. Now, the Council is an august body, and it knows what it likes; and what it likes, apparently, is Richard Hamilton, who was also selected as the British entry for Sao Paulo as recently as 1989. It is surely a coincidence that the Council's selection committee is chaired by Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate Gallery, which has hosted several Hamilton retrospectives, most recently in 1992. This column has nothing against Hamilton, one of the inventors of pop art and a leading figure in the British art world for more than 30 years. But it is concerned that Hamilton's figure now looms so large that Council members are hardly able to see beyond it.

IT'S A well-known fact that musicians from the former Soviet Union spend most of their time on tour to the West in pursuit of the money, food and Marlboro cigarettes they can't obtain back home. But the Moscow Chamber Opera took matters to a new extreme at the Brighton Festival last week when it got itself banned from the breakfast room of the Royal Albion Hotel for, collectively, eating too much. By the time the company had descended on the buffet there was nothing left for the hotel's other guests - rarely in the history of human endeavour had plates been piled so high or with such expertise - and as a result the singers were segregated for the rest of their stay to a separate eating area where their intake could be rationed. Anglo-Russian cultural exchange may not recover from this slight.

JUST WHEN you thought it was safe to get this far down the column, I have an item of CD news that is too good to ignore. The rock magazine Vox has just done a survey of its readers; the results, printed in the July issue, speak for themselves. Asked whether CDs were overpriced, an 'astonishing' 99 per cent of readers replied that they were, with 55 per cent claiming that pounds 9.99 was a fair price for a new release (as opposed to the current average of pounds 12- pounds 14). Asked to sum up their feelings about the record industry in general, a sizeable majority (64 per cent) ticked the box marked 'There are a few honourable exceptions, but a number are just out to make money, with no real interest in music'. Record company executives, who have claimed that this campaign lacks the backing of the man, or woman, in the street, might also be interested to know that one answer failed to register on the scale: a thudding 0 per cent of Vox readers felt that, dammit, 'Yes, they are honest about their prices and costs, and are genuinely interested in music'. My colleague Peter Snow might be tempted to call it a landslide.