Putin's friend Gergiev set to conduct as Italy breaks ban on pro-Kremlin artists
But Pina Picierno, a vice-president of the European Parliament, has told the BBC that allowing Gergiev's return is "absolutely unacceptable".She calls the star conductor a "cultural mouthpiece for Putin and his crimes".Ukrainian human rights activist and Nobel laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk said the invitation by the regional government was "hypocrisy", rather than neutrality.Russian opposition activists have also condemned the director's sudden return. The Anti-Corruption Foundation, of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, wants his concert cancelled and is calling on Italy's interior ministry to ban Gergiev's entry to the country.
Before Russia's full-scale war in Ukraine, the virtuoso Gergiev was a regular visitor to stages in Italy and across Europe, despite his closeness to Putin.His long and illustrious career includes stints at the London Symphony Orchestra and Munich Philharmonic.But the invitations to Europe stopped abruptly on 24 February 2022.Hours before the first Russian missiles were launched at Ukraine, Gergiev was on stage at Milan's La Scala opera house. Urged then by the city's mayor to speak out against the war, Gergiev chose silence.He was promptly dropped from the bill.Abandoned by his manager, despite calling Gergiev "the greatest conductor alive", he was then fired as chief conductor in Munich and removed from concert schedules across the continent.That's why the invitation from Italy is so controversial.Pina Picierno, who is from the Campania region herself, says her call to stop the event is not Russophobic."There is no shortage of brilliant Russian artists who choose to disassociate themselves from Putin's criminal policies," she told the BBC.The European MP, who says she has received threats for her work exposing Russia's hybrid warfare, warns that allowing Gergiev to perform would be both wrong and dangerous."This is not about censorship. Gergiev is part of a deliberate Kremlin strategy. He is one of their cultural envoys to soften Western public opinion. This is part of their war."
The cultural controversy erupted in a week when Italy was hosting heads of state from all over Europe to reaffirm their support for Ukraine and discuss how to rebuild the country once the war is over.Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been a strong and consistent critic of Vladimir Putin from the start. But her culture ministry is one of the backers of Un'Estate da RE, which has invited Gergiev.A senior MP from Meloni's Brothers of Italy party, Alfredo Antoniozzi, has described Gergiev as "simply a great artist"."If Russians have to pay for the mistakes of their president, then we are committing a kind of cultural genocide," he argued.Last month, Canada formally barred Gergiev from entry and declared it would freeze any assets.But the European Union has shied away from formal sanctions against the conductor, who has avoided voicing open support for the war.Gergiev has been a vocal supporter of Putin since the 1990s, later campaigning for his re-election and backing Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.He was handed management of Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre, in addition to the Mariinsky Theatre, taking over from a director who signed an open letter against Russia's war.Gergiev is a state employee, but in 2022 an investigation by Alexei Navalny's team uncovered properties in several Italian cities that they say he never declared. They also alleged he used donations to a charitable fund to pay for his own lavish lifestyle.The activists argued that was Gergiev's reward for his public loyalty to Putin.The BBC has so far been unable to reach the conductor for comment.A spokeswoman for the European Commission, Eva Hrncirova, has clarified that the Un'Estate da RE festival is not receiving EU cash: it is financed by Italy's own "cohesion funds".But she added that the commission urged European stages not to give space "to artists who support the war of aggression in Ukraine".In Campania, the artistic director who crafted this year's festival programme declined to comment. A spokesman was confident Gergiev's performance would go ahead, though – despite the controversy."Yes," he assured the BBC. "For sure."Additional reporting from Rome by Davide Ghiglione.
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Times
16 minutes ago
- Times
Divided over Gaza: the Israeli soldiers who fight on and those who refuse
Like many young Israelis, Captain Ron Feiner had spent hundreds of days since the October 7 attacks as a reservist — in his case 270. But when he got his fourth and most recent call-up in May to serve in Gaza, he refused. He could have cited medical or psychological reasons, so-called 'grey refusal', but the 26-year-old student at Haifa University wanted to make a point. 'I am appalled by the never-ending war in Gaza, the neglect of the hostages and the relentless death of innocents,' he said publicly. 'I am morally unable to continue serving as long as there is no change.' Last month the platoon commander became only the second reservist to be jailed for refusal to serve. 'I had been thinking about it a long time,' he told The Sunday Times. 'But to refuse to stop serving is very unusual and can have consequences for your future.' Feiner was speaking at his parents' house in the rural town of Ben Ami, western Galilee, where he had been staying to protect himself from the threat of Iranian missiles, many of which were fired at Haifa. Sentenced to 25 days in prison, he ended up serving only one, because he was released on the first day of the war against Iran. The commander of the military jail wanted to reduce the number of inmates in case of a missile strike. Like most Israelis, he was positive about that war — not just because it got him out of jail — but also seeing it as a strategic and lightning success. He was, however, 'highly suspicious about the timing' given that Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, had been facing mounting protests against the war in Gaza in the preceding weeks. Now Feiner hopes that President Trump, in his quest for a Nobel peace prize, will push Netanyahu to end the war in Gaza, having helped him out last weekend by dropping bunker-buster bombs on Iran's nuclear plants. Ron Dermer, Israel's minister for strategic affairs, is expected at the White House on Monday and there is widespread speculation of a new deal. 'We think within the next week we're gonna get a ceasefire,' Trump told reporters on Friday night. 'I think it's close. I just spoke with some of the people involved. It's a terrible situation.' After 20 months of fighting, Israel is still mired in a grinding war of attrition and facing growing international condemnation. Much of the Gaza Strip lies in ruins and more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed or have died of hunger, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. On Saturday, Israeli strikes killed at least 60 in the strip, health officials said. The past two weeks have seen horrific scenes of hundreds of Palestinians shot while queuing at distribution centres run by a controversial new Israeli-American operation run by Trump's former faith adviser. Such images have quietened the worldwide outrage over October 7, when 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered by Hamas and more than 250 taken as hostages to Gaza. When the attacks happened in 2023, Feiner was among thousands who volunteered immediately, having previously served for four years in the army. 'I packed my bags even before I was called,' he said. 'I was hearing what was happening at the Nova festival and got messages about people I knew who had died that day — men who had been under my command in the army. So I came home from university, took my mum's car and was ready to go.' Many felt the same. About 300,000 Israelis showed up for reserve service — the largest recruitment since the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Initially, Feiner was sent to the northern border with Lebanon. 'The assumption was that Hezbollah would join in the fight and maybe they would have if we hadn't gone there in such big numbers,' he said. But as operations dragged on in Gaza, he began to have doubts. 'They said they wanted to destroy Hamas, but Hamas is still there. They said they wanted to bring the hostages back and we had a deal to do that, but they ended the ceasefire. They said they wanted to end the war as soon as possible so we could get back to our lives and education, but we're all serving as reservists for 300 or 400 days. They said they're doing all they can to prevent humanitarian crisis in Gaza and not kill civilians, but that's not what we see.' When Feiner was called last month to join Israel's offensive, which had restarted on March 18 after the collapse of a two-month ceasefire with Hamas, he refused. Israel had once again blocked humanitarian aid from entering the strip and seized large areas of Gaza, displacing hundreds of thousands more people. Meanwhile 50 hostages remain, 24 of whom are believed to be alive. 'It was clear to me they were not trying to end the war and it's OK for them to keep hostages there in the tunnels as an excuse for Netanyahu to keep the war going and stay in power. To me that was a bright red line.' Feiner is not alone. Like him, Yuval Ben Ari, a social worker in Haifa, had been enthusiastic about serving after October 7 — even though the former infantryman had previously quit the army in protest against operations in the West Bank. 'I was 41 but still in shape and when October 7 happened I could see this was something else and we needed people,' he said. It took him almost a year to join a unit, but became part of the ground offensive in Lebanon from November 2024 to January. After that he was sent to Rafah, a southern city of Gaza. 'I was completely shocked,' he said opening his laptop to show photos of ruins. 'Everything was completely destroyed. This was a school, that was a university … Yet after a while it becomes your normal.' 'All I could see was shooting and killing and relocation, so two million people are now in less than 20 per cent of Gaza and constantly being moved from place to place. The Israeli army doesn't look at them as humans any more, just waiting for them to die.' Eventually, he got a lift to the border, returned to his base and handed over his hand grenade, weapon, ammunition and combat gear. 'I told them what you are doing is wrong, apart from the fact you are sacrificing the hostages, and needs to stop.' He wrote an anonymous article for the liberal paper Haaretz headlined: 'What I saw in Gaza: A Soldier's Warning.' Not only did he lambast the destruction and killing, he also warned: 'The reserves are collapsing. Anyone who shows up is already indifferent, bothered by personal problems or by other matters. Children, lay-offs, studies, spouses.' With the war now going for 632 days, large numbers of reservists have been in uniform for more than half of them and tens of thousands have served for more than 200 days — a magnitude unprecedented in Israel's history. Spending so much time away from family and work, people have lost jobs and relationships. However, helicopters flying over the beaches of Tel Aviv bringing the wounded to the military hospital tell of another cost. Since the start of the war, 435 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza and 6,000 injured. Many reservists have been quietly refusing to go back. Some reports suggest attendance has dropped to as little as 50 to 60 per cent. Recruiters are resorting to advertising on Facebook. For a military that depends heavily on reservists to fight its wars, it's a looming crisis and has made even more unpopular Netanyahu's push for a law enshrining the widespread military exemption for Haredi or ultra-orthodox Jews. Haredi parties are key allies in his governing coalition. Such a move has angered the more committed reservists. Matan Yaffe, 40, a Harvard graduate and social entrepreneur, who has served 350 days since October 7, admits as a married father of five boys aged four to 12, that 'military service has affected everything — my wife worries, I miss my sons and I had to step away from running my NGO'. He said: 'But October 7 affected our existence, whether we could live here or not and the price we're prepared to pay for being here.' As for many, it was personal. A friend's parents-in-law were murdered in Be'eri kibbutz and another friend, Omri Miran, is still being held hostage. On his way to enlist, Yaffe set up a crowdfunding emergency appeal which raised eight million shekels for the victims of the attacks. He has done two tours of Gaza from November 2023 to January last year followed by April to June as well as two stints in the north of Israel. He was called up again last month. Like Feiner and Ben Ari, he was shocked by what he saw, but in a different way. 'What struck me most was I can hardly remember a single home that didn't have bombs, ammunition, RPGs — often in the kids' rooms. Or they had entrances to tunnels. We have all this discussion about how much Hamas is being supported by the people, but when you get there you see it's 90 per cent. It's mind-blowing.' Asked why so many Palestinians are being killed, including women and children, he insists: 'Hamas want destruction and killing. We need the people of Gaza to tell Hamas we don't want you.' 'I'm not saying there aren't atrocities happening in Gaza and some might be committed by us,' he added. 'But this war was forced on us by October 7 and we're not killing people or demolishing buildings because we want to — it's because we must diminish the threat.' 'No one wants to be there,' he said. 'I'm a social entrepreneur who sets up NGOs to make the world better. It's shit to be there, but I want to be able to raise my sons and know no one will be able to slaughter my wife or take them into the tunnels of Gaza.' But the longer the war goes on, with a mounting death toll and images of starving children spread on social media, the harder it is for Israel to claim, as its officials often do, that its military is the most moral army in the world. Last week, The Sunday Times spoke to a lawyer attached to a battalion in Gaza who explained how they signed off on attacks. He said the three criteria for an offensive were: 'distinction' (whether it is distinguished as a military target), 'proportionality', and 'precautions'. 'This is complex urban warfare fighting an enemy embedded in the population and you cannot imagine how much we are doing everything to avoid civilian casualties,' he said. 'It's like fighting with our hands tied behind our backs. We use the smallest munitions to avoid collateral damage. Not everything is perfect but if we there is any reports of misconduct, we investigate.' Among those investigations was a report released on Friday from unnamed Israeli soldiers who said they had been told to fire at crowds near food distribution sites to keep them away from Israeli military positions, even though they posed no threat. Netanyahu dismissed the reports as 'blood libel'. Israel has been accused of war crimes in the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice. 'I've been in the aid sector 42 years and never seen anything like this,' said Dr Younis Al-Khatib, head of Palestine Red Crescent Society, who was in London last week meeting parliamentarians and ministers. 'What's going on in Gaza, with the ignoring of international law and militarisation of aid delivery, is setting a dangerous precedent.' Though his organisation has 1,000 staff in Gaza and several thousand volunteers, he said they are 'useless' in the face of a near-total Israeli blockade on water, medicine, fuel and food. 'We're facing an iron wall,' he said. 'Children are dying from starvation and we cannot do anything. We've reached a point where we're useless, we're doing less day after day.' Although being in Israel can sometimes feel like a parallel world with little discussion of the plight of people in Gaza, things are changing, said Yali Maron and Maayan Dak, both human rights activists. The pair organise weekly silent protests outside airbases in Israel, holding up photos of children killed in Gaza with their names and dates of death. 'We live near a base,' explains Maron, 'and since the beginning I've been shouting at the skies: 'Stop! You are killing people.' So we decided to go directly to the people who can stop it.' 'For a long time it was taboo to say anything against what was happening in Gaza but in the last few months since Israel ended the ceasefire that has changed. Now thousands of people are protesting.' In April an open letter was published, signed by 1,000 air force reservists and retired officers. 'The continuation of the war does not contribute to any of its declared goals and will lead to the death of the hostages,' they wrote. 'Every day that passes is further risking their lives.' Since then similar letters have appeared from almost every branch of the military, including elite fighting and intelligence units, and highly decorated commanders with more than 12,000 signatures. One retired general, Amiram Levin, even said it was time for soldiers to think about disobeying orders. 'The risk of being dragged into war crimes and suffering a fatal blow to the Israel Defence Forces and our social ethos make it impossible to stand idly by,' he wrote. Nobody feels more strongly about the need to end the war than the families of hostages still being held in Gaza. Dani Miran, 80, has a long white beard he has been growing since his son, Omri, 48, was abducted from the Nahal Oz kibbutz where he worked as a gardener and Shiatsu teacher. Standing in what is known as Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, he wears a T-shirt with a photo of Omri playing with his daughter, Roni, now three. 'She asks about him every day,' he said. While his two other sons are more hawkish, believing the war in Gaza is needed to exert military pressure on Hamas to release their brother, he wants it over. 'I feel Netanyahu is more interested in his own survival than bringing back the hostages but maybe now he is on a high from Iran he can turn to our abandoned children.' On Friday night some family members met Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, and his wife to convey the same message. 'Now the war with Iran is over we should make ending the war in Gaza the most important thing,' said Ilan Dalal, father of Guy Gilboa-Dalal, 24, who was kidnapped from the Nova festival along with his best friend, Evyatar David. 'We know from others released they are being held in a very narrow tunnel just one metre wide, beaten, starved and kept chained most of the time. The tunnel is booby-trapped and there could be an accident anytime — we need to get them out.'
Telegraph
23 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Tim Davie turns on BBC staff over Bob Vylan failings
The director general of the BBC has said staff at Glastonbury had the authority to cut Bob Vylan's performance from the air, as he appeared to blame them for broadcasting chants against the Israel Defense Forces. Tim Davie told Parliament's culture, media and sport committee on Monday that ending the broadcast was an 'option open to those on the ground on the day,' but that they had not taken action. During a performance at the festival, the punk rap duo encouraged the crowd to join in chants of 'death, death to the IDF', in reference to the Israeli military killing thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. The performance was carried live and remained available on BBC iPlayer for several hours, leading to severe criticism of the corporation from ministers, MPs and anti-Semitism campaigners. In a letter to MPs, Mr Davie appeared to blame those working at Glastonbury, which he also attended, for the mistake. 'There were individuals present at Glastonbury who had the authority to cut the livestream after appropriate consideration,' he wrote. 'Those individuals had access to advice and support offsite should they have considered it necessary.' But the director general refused to answer a question from Dame Caroline Dineage, the committee's chairman, over whether cutting the live feed was discussed during the performance. He wrote: 'You will appreciate that the answer to this question is currently being considered through the appropriate internal processes. 'What we can say is that cutting the livestream was an option open to those on the ground on the day.' He added that the corporation was taking immediate action on the 'failings', including 'ensuring proper accountability for those found to be responsible for those failings in the live broadcast'. The BBC has since changed its rules so that high-risk artists are not broadcast live. Mr Davie said in his letter that Bob Vylan were assessed as a 'Category A' risk for broadcast, while Kneecap, another band performing at the festival, were considered even more risky. Kneecap was not streamed live, but the corporation decided that Bob Vylan could broadcast. Mr Davie said that 'other mitigations were considered and were put in place' for Bob Vylan's performance, but conceded that 'there were failures in our coverage which led to offensive content being broadcast live'. He added: 'I deeply regret that such deplorable behaviour appeared on the BBC and want to apologise to our viewers and listeners and in particular the Jewish community.' The incident led to an intervention on Sunday from Dame Melanie Dawes, the chief executive of Ofcom, who said that public trust in the BBC had been weakened by the broadcast. She called on executives to 'get a grip quicker' on similar situations in future. 'A problem of leadership' Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, said that the fiasco had exposed 'a problem of leadership' at the BBC, and sources close to her suggested she expected to see members of staff fired for the mistake. Mr Davie's letter came on a day of turmoil for the BBC, as it published two other investigations into the Gregg Wallace debacle and the decision to air a documentary about the conflict in Gaza that featured the son of a Hamas official. The boy was interviewed without reference to his father's role. Campaigners have called for Mr Davie's resignation over the documentary, which the BBC has since acknowledged did not meet its editorial guidelines. Gideon Falter, chief executive of Campaign Against Antisemitism, said: 'If the BBC were an accountable organisation, senior executives would be scrambling to save their jobs. 'Instead, it's the usual weasel pledge to 'update some guidelines'. This is appalling. 'Under director general Tim Davie, the BBC has gone from national treasure to national embarrassment. He needs to go.' Danny Cohen, former director of BBC Television, added: 'This looks like a classic case of 'deputy heads must roll' and that is nowhere near good enough.'
Times
26 minutes ago
- Times
Damien Hirst and plagiarism: ‘All my ideas are stolen anyway'
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb to plagiarise as follows: '1 v.t. Take and use as one's own (the thoughts, writings, inventions, etc., of another person); copy (literary work, ideas, etc.) improperly or without acknowledgement; pass off the thoughts, work, etc., of (another person) as one's own. 2 v.i. Practise or commit plagiarism.' Damien Hirst, who has been accused, not for the first time, of pinching the idea for his best work, A Thousand Years (1990) — the one with the cow's head, the maggots and the insect-o-cutor in a vitrine — from his Goldsmiths contemporary Hamad Butt, is probably used to it by now. Indeed, in 2018 he stated in a filmed interview with fellow artist Peter Blake, 'All my ideas are stolen anyway,' claiming that he was told by his tutor Michael Craig-Martin, 'Don't borrow ideas, steal them' (possibly Craig-Martin had Picasso's famous adage in mind: 'Good artists copy, great artists steal'). That, Hirst said, was when he realised 'you don't have to be original' — and Blake agreed. 'Nothing is original — it's what you do with it.' Still, Butt's Transmission, which is about to go on show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London as part of Apprehensions, the first big survey exhibition of his work, does indeed have remarkable similarities in its ideas and execution to Hirst's work. Shown at Butt's degree show, also in 1990, but developed earlier in prototype in his studio (and seen there, claimed Butt, by Hirst, who overlapped with him at Goldsmiths for two years), it was a multipart work, one element of which was Fly-Piece, a cabinet containing sugar-soaked paper inscribed with enigmatic statements, and fly pupae, which hatched, digested the paper and then died. • Damien Hirst at 60: My plan to make art for 200 years after I die It doesn't take a genius to see why Butt, who died of Aids-related complications in 1994 aged 32, felt Hirst had appropriated his work, and the critic Jean Fisher, who taught both artists, referred to Butt's 'clear influence on Hirst'. The Times approached Hirst for comment. But this is just one of many times Hirst has been accused of plagiarism, which in art is notoriously difficult to prove. In 2010 Charles Thomson, founder of the stuckists, collated a list of 15 examples for Jackdaw Magazine. Some were supported by the artists in question, such as the Los Angeles artist Lori Precious, who said she went into 'a state of shock' after seeing Hirst's butterfly works and noting their resemblance to her mandala works made of butterflies. (Hirst has never publicly acknowledged Precious's remarks, which were not made through legal representation, and told Blake that he got the idea from Victorian tea trays.) Some were Thomson's assertion, such as the similarity between Hirst's early medicine cabinet works and Joseph Cornell's 1943 sculpture Pharmacy. Hirst's press officer at the time described the article as 'poor journalism' and said they would be issuing a 'comprehensive rebuttal'. If this exists, I can't find it. John LeKay, once a good friend of Hirst's, has claimed the artist has repurposed a number of his ideas, including skulls covered in crystals, which LeKay first experimented with in 1993, and has intimated that Hirst's In the Name of the Father, 2005, which featured the corpse of a sheep splayed to resemble a crucifixion pose, was probably inspired by his own 1987 work This Is My Body, This Is My Blood, which does the same thing but without preserving it in formaldehyde. • 25 moments that made Tate Modern — seeds, spiders and sharks LeKay also claimed that Hirst got the ideas for his pickled animal works from a catalogue LeKay lent him, for the Carolina Biological Supply Company, which sold science education products (which is a perfectly reasonable and valid place to get ideas — they don't usually just come out of thin air). Hirst declined to comment on the claims. He did agree, in 2000, to pay an undisclosed sum, out of court, to two children's charities when Humbrol took umbrage at his large-scale bronze sculpture Hymn, describing it as a direct copy of the company's Young Scientist Anatomy Set, designed by Norman Emms (apparently Hirst's young son had one). Mostly, though, claims have gone unanswered. In 2017 Jason deCaires Taylor claimed there were 'striking similarities' between his underwater sculptural installations, which he has been making since 2006, and the works that made up Hirst's Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, exhibited at that year's Venice Biennale. Hirst denied that he had breached copyright and a spokeswoman said he had been interested in 'coralised' objects since the 1990s. In 2022 he exhibited a suite of paintings of cherry blossom at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, which depicted dark branches against a pale blue sky, with petals made of dots. The English artist and writer Joe Machine told a newspaper that he thought when he saw them that he was looking at his own earlier paintings. (A stretch, to be honest. Stylistically they're not particularly similar and it's not as if artists haven't been painting cherry blossoms for centuries. To me, they just look like Hirst has rather savvily combined his dot motif with a tried-and-tested subject matter to appeal to the large east Asian market.) • Read more art reviews, guides and interviews The fact is you cannot copyright an idea. It's true that Thomas Downing was doing spot paintings in the Sixties. So did John Armeleder in the Eighties. Part of the fury around Hirst's alleged appropriation of ideas is that he's made so much more money out of them than anyone else — his success has created its own market, regardless of the quality of the work, which is variable to say the least. I doubt this latest, repeated accusation will make the slightest difference to Hirst's reputation. People know what they're getting with him, and Butt's Transmission, which the Whitechapel will show with the insect component remade for the first time since his degree show (Butt reportedly destroyed Fly-Piece after Hirst's work was shown) is likely to remain a frustrating footnote in art history. And as Dominic Johnson, curator of the exhibition, carefully remarks in the catalogue: 'It's always interesting to consider how and where artists get ideas from especially when working in shared spaces or contexts (as was the case for so many of the YBAs and their peers), as there is inevitably always going to be a degree of cross-pollination — conscious or unconscious.' Still, Picasso's pithy soundbite doesn't mean that stealing makes you a great artist. Mediocre artists steal too. And maybe the suggestion that A Thousand Years, in my opinion Hirst's finest work (he made it aged 25; he's 60 now and nothing he's done since has been as good, not even the shark), was heavily reliant on someone else's idea might, on darker nights, give Hirst a moment's pause.
