STATE OF THE ARTS (Nov 14 to 20) It was, pardon our French, one hell of a week. On the awards and prizes side, you had the National Arts Council’s annual Art Awards announcing four Cultural Medallion recipients and six Young Artist Awardees; the APB Foundation’s 2011 Signature Art Prize’s five best artworks from the region, including Michael Lee’s Second-Hand City for People’s Choice Award; and home-grown artists Jane Lee and Vertical Submarine (who also made their theatre directorial debut last week at TheatreWorks) bagging international awards at the Celeste Prize 2011. Major event highlights included Kevin Spacey performing in Richard III, the second Affordable Art Fair Singapore and the seventh Future Of Imagination performance art festival (which was preceded by a Rooted In The Ephemeral Speak edition that saw Loo Zihan re-enact a previous performance by Josef Ng). The Asian Civilisations Museum unveiled its new exhibition on centuries-old Indian textiles; SingTel beat local publishers by announcing Skoob, a new e-book service; the Arts And Culture Strategic Review committee continued with a new round of public forums, this time held in Mandarin and Malay; and producers of the controversial Singapura Lion City announced that it will be going on hiatus. Last week’s downer came courtesy of acts of vandalism on, as of presstime, two elephant sculptures at the ongoing Elephant Parade public art exhibition.