CityLife - Arts

There isn’t an art student in the land that wouldn’t be excited about being picked out by a working artist as one to watch.

If there has been a surprising hot potato in the recent round of national and local council budget cuts, it’s been the news that 500 UK libraries are threatened with closure.

Dirty nappies, temper tantrums, bedtime stories – three universal features of anyone’s childhood. CityLife’s favourite?

Like a freeze-framed explosion in a wardrobe owned by Dynasty’s Alexis Carrington, is how curator Bren O’Callaghan describes elements of Samantha Donnelly’s new Cornerhouse show, Contour States.

The annual Holocaust Memorial Day has become an international point of reflection on the atrocities of war as well as an opportunity to talk about tolerance, difference and international genocide.

It was probably a Tweeter that put it best when DJ and writer Dave Haslam announced his latest Close Up event would be with Labour MP David Miliband.

A digital reader made by a well known online book retailer was at the top of many people’s Christmas wish lists in 2011.

Burning things has become one of the greatest symbolic gestures of the modern age.

It has to be decades since metal music was so popular and groups of skinny boys walked around with long wavy hair and stitched on patches on the back of their denim vests.

Curator Sean Baggaley couldn’t be more excited about Gallery Oldham’s latest exhibition, Michael Shaw’s breathing parasitic beast of a sculpture that looks like it’s devouring the lighting rig.

As great symbiotic stories of artistic development go, the friendship between photographer Kevin Cummins and seminal Manchester band Joy Division is one of the most famous in music.

If there is a feature that best sums up the work of American artist Rob Jones it’s attention to detail.

Search engines, emails and information processing sound like the sort of topics normally only discussed in dingy IT departments or nerdy computing magazines – but one Didsbury-based writer has turned them into poetry.

Plonk a box of Lego in front of anybody and they’ll inevitably dive in and start building.

Vintage bikes, life-long friends, and an arduous roadtrip following in the footsteps of the world’s most written-about revolutionary: it sounds like the basis for a Hollywood movie.

Exactly 250 years after the Bridgewater Canal opened, it remains a focal point for many communities who live and work along it.

H K (‘Nali’) Gruber is one of the most engaging and friendly people you could ever meet. He’s also a brilliant musician – and highly gifted composer. The BBC Philharmonic has made him its composer-conductor.

If you’ve ever spent hours lost in the virtual world of The Sims – the globally popular computer game where you build and live out an utterly fictional life – then you should probably know who Stanislaw Lem is.

Exhibition asks questions about the future of books

The digital age has revolutionised the way we consume information, the way politicians reach us and even the way we cast our votes.