On Start the Week Andrew Marr explores the state of the arts. The English National Opera has lost £5 million of funding and its chorus recently went on strike, but the newly appointed Artistic Director Daniel Kramer, hopes to turn it around. He's directing a new production of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, and the philosopher Roger Scruton celebrates the mastery of Wagner to express truths about the human condition. The biographer Franny Moyle looks at the life and career of Britain's most famous landscape painter, JMW Turner. Born as the Royal Academy was founded and British art was deemed inferior to its Continental counterpart, his work pushed the boundaries of what was accepted as art at the time. Julia Peyton-Jones looks back at a quarter of a century at the Serpentine Gallery in London, and makes a case for London as the centre of the art world.
Producer: Katy Hickman.