Thursday, April 30, 2020
About Captain Tom
Captain (now Colonel) Tom Moore, who has raised over £30 million for NHS charities is inevitably going to become a contested symbol of the current epidemic. At the moment (it’s his 100th birthday today) he’s all but untouchable, but, splendid as his achievement is, more cynical souls know that things like this don’t just happen without some serious behind-the-scenes lifting from PR and marketing people. But nobody wants to point this out right now, for fear that his (doubtless quite accurate) image as an ordinary old soldier just trying to help out will be damaged.
In an odd way he has much in common with Harry Leslie Smith, the crotchety Corbyn fan who devoted his last years to railing against the evils of austerity and supporting the NHS. But of course Captain Tom has been embraced by mainstream media in a way Harry never could – because that prickliness, of course, was just as much Harry’s brand, and he was just as much a PR confection as Tom.
In Situationist terms, Tom represents a recuperation of the Harry brand, the plucky old soldier who still wants to do his bit – but this time, doesn’t want to ask too many awkward questions.
Monday, April 27, 2020
About guest posts
Just received an email:
I’m reaching out because I wanted to contribute in creating some 🔥 content for Culturals Now.To be fair, maybe it is time for a rebrand.
Monday, April 20, 2020
About Malevich
I’ve been impressed by the ingenuity of so many people taking up the Getty Museum Challenge and whiling away the lockdown hours by recreating art masterpieces with whatever they have to hand. Behold, my own humble contribution, an attempt at replicating Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White.
Wednesday, April 15, 2020
About a dissertation
I finished my MA course last year, and submitted my dissertation in September. It’s been prodded and poked and evaluated and checked for plagiarism and moral turpitude and probably verrucas, but I was waiting until I’d officially graduated to spread the picture on a wider screen. The current pandemic, of which you may have heard, has rather put paid to that, so sod it, here it is.
There are a couple of typos in there, and a few things I wish I’d expressed a little more cogently, but there we are. It’s about 15,000 words, so you should be able to get through it more quickly than you did The Irishman. Take care now.
There are a couple of typos in there, and a few things I wish I’d expressed a little more cogently, but there we are. It’s about 15,000 words, so you should be able to get through it more quickly than you did The Irishman. Take care now.
Sunday, April 12, 2020
About Fran Lebowitz
From The New Yorker, Fran Lebowitz on lockdown:
The only thing that makes this bearable for me, frankly, is at least I’m alone. A couple of people invited me to their houses in the country, houses much more lavish than mine. Some of them have the thing I would love to have, which is a cook, since I don’t know how to cook. And I thought, You know, Fran, you could go away and you could be in a very beautiful place with a cook, but then you’d have to be a good guest. I would much rather stay here and be a bad guest. And, believe me, I am being a bad guest.(Thanks, Clair.)
Saturday, April 11, 2020
About conceptual art
This week, I unearthed something that I wrote in 2003. To put it in context, it was an entry for a competition run by the Spectator magazine, seeking essays on the subject of conceptual art. It was shortlisted but didn’t win; as a result I was invited to a pleasant champagne reception at the Speccie offices, where I made the acquaintance of the bizarre and ultimately tragic writer known as Fergus Gwynplaine MacIntyre and, less interestingly, one Boris Johnson.
It’s a bit dated, from the reference to a long departed dog to the casual references to Young British Artists as if they were copper-bottomed celebrities; and some of the observations regarding Magritte, Duchamp et al will seem pretty well-rehearsed, tired even, to anyone who’s spent any time on this blog. And right now, its insistence on seeing art close up, in all its flaky analogue glory, is too poignant. But overall, it’s less embarrassing than I’d have guessed. What do you reckon?
From Troglodytes To Tracey: The Concepts Of Art
The desktop of the computer upon which I type this essay bears the image of my dog, Bert. Occasionally, in whimsical moments, I pick Bert up, and place him nose-to-nose with his alter canis. Bert, of course, is unimpressed. Dogs do not seem to respond to two-dimensional images, even of themselves. In a similar vein, there is the story of an explorer who transported a Polaroid camera into the heart of Papua New Guinea, where he took photographs of the tribespeople. But when the locals saw their own images, they did not register the connection between themselves and the shiny rectangle. These may be the same tribespeople who regard the Duke of Edinburgh as a manifestation of divinity, but I’m not sure.
Neither the perplexed Papuan nor my dog is stupid. They were, or are, simply unaware of the concept – and I choose the word deliberately – that a combination of coloured marks on a flat surface is meant to represent a moving, breathing, multi-dimensional entity. Representational art is something that we all take for granted, from The Very Hungry Caterpillar to the finest works of Titian and Velazquez and Delacroix and Stubbs. We see a picture of a jolly man in an unfeasible hat, and we say: “That is the Laughing Cavalier”. But, of course, it isn’t. It is some paint on a canvas, intended to convey to us the idea, the concept, of a laughing cavalier.
When Magritte painted the image of a pipe, then wrote underneath “Ceci n’est pas un pipe”, he wasn’t being cute. He was telling the truth. It isn’t a pipe. It’s a picture of a pipe, and the link between the two is something that we have learned.
“All right, already,” you sigh. “Enough of the Gombrich manquĂ©. You’re supposed to be convincing me of the merits of bisected cows, of grimy bedspreads, of Madonnas constructed from elephant dung.” Patience. I’ll be getting into bed with Tracey shortly.
Every so often, A Big Idea shakes the art world. The initial reaction of most people is a dodgem ride between outrage, contempt, incomprehension, and indulgent amusement. The Big Idea might become the norm, but some people continue to hold to those views. So, Picasso and Braque saw that most shapes could be broken down into geometric forms. Today, most people have got the hang of Cubism, but plenty still think it’s infantile doodling. Five centuries before, Brunelleschi noted that big things look smaller when they’re further away. He was instrumental in defining the Renaissance standards of perspective. But that doesn’t stop some people preferring those delightful medieval landscapes and allegories, where everything seems piled on top of everything else.
And why should it? Some of the earliest surviving examples of representational art are the cave paintings of Lascaux, discovered in 1940. In our terms, they are not realistic depictions of men and beasts, but they are close enough for us to see the connection. However, imagine the anonymous daubers of Lascaux being transported 15,000 years or so into their future, and a wee bit north, to the Louvre. Consider what they might make of, say, The Apotheosis of Henry IV and the Proclamation of theRegency of Marie de Medicis on May 14, a characteristically flamboyant everything-but-the-kitchen-sink work by Rubens. Perspective, shadow, the illusion of a third dimension, the rich palette, the classical and religious references, the wobbly chins and bosoms – Messieurs Ugg and Ogg would, one suspects, see it as a meaningless pattern, no more than gaudy wallpaper. They would be as receptive as the Papuan with the Polaroid, as comprehending as my dog. Or they might have the same reaction that the Pope had when Giotto, with an arch-conceptualist masterstroke, communicated his genius to the pontiff by drawing a big, red, plain, but perfect, letter ‘O’.
It was a similar sense of confusion that posessed the aesthetic arbiters of the Paris Salon in 1863, when they refused to exhibit works by Edouard Manet. It was not just the impropriety of a female nude in the company of males in contemporary dress (Le DĂ©jeuner sur l’herbe) that befuddled them. It was the combination of blotches and flecks, the almost mask-like countenances of the subjects – damn it, it was simply a bad painting. And yet, less than 150 years on, Manet and Monet and Renoir are ubiquitous on posters and tea-towels, almost to the point of tedium. We have learned them. We have grasped the concept.
“OK, you smartarse sophist. So all art is conceptual. So far, so glib. But you know the stuff I’m talking about. Chaps from Goldsmiths who roll their own cigs. Lights going on and off. Surely you can see they’re different from Renoir and Monet? Splodgy Parisiennes with cherry lips, and nice bunches of flowers, I can hang them in my living room. I wouldn’t put that head made of frozen blood in my lavatory.” Talking of which… If that whole Goldsmiths/Saatchi/Jopling/Turner Prize/Tate Modern posse has a single starting point, it is Marcel Duchamp’s exhibition of a pseudonymously signed urinal, in New York in 1917. “It was the idea that mattered,” Duchamp said later, and he expressed his disdain for the precedence of execution over concept by knocking up so many copies of his definitive works, that, in some cases, nobody knows where the original is. Duchamp’s rejection of “artistry”, his reaction against what the critic Robert Lebel called “the senseless glorification of the hand” succeeded in the sense that it annoyed people. As part of that mighty rush of bourgeoisie-baiting that included Stravinsky, Pound and the Dadaists, his work is a crucial emblem of the 20th-century aesthetic credo, where cosy popularity equates to second-rate mediocrity.
But the Great Conceptualist, and his little tadpoles, the Hirsts, Quinns, Emins, Chapmans, Turks, Muecks, Wallingers, have not managed to kill art. Maybe accidentally, they did it a great service. You may well not want Quinn’s head, or the grotesque mannequins of Jake and Dinos, or Tracey’s absent Christmas tree, above the telly. But you might not want a life-size replica of the Sistine Chapel either. The “glorification of the hand” that Duchamp so hated, combined with the cheapness and accessibility of modern printing and other reproductive technologies, has rendered many fine paintings into clichĂ©s. By the time I saw my first real Dali, in New York’s Museum Of Modern Art, its ubiquity on the walls of moderately intense teenagers created an inevitable sense of anticlimax.
With the shark, and the bed, and the sheep, and the tent, however, we knew that a reproduction could never do justice to the original. We can only appreciate the grisly impact of Marcus Harvey’s Myra Hindley portrait when we see the thousands of tiny hand prints that form it. We only shudder at Ron Mueck’s sculpture when we almost trip over it. Jake and Dinos Chapman’s fantastical rendering of the Holocaust only makes sense when we walk around, blending into the crowds of mutant Nazis and staggering skeletons. Duchamp’s urinal only makes sense because of its setting – it shocks simply by being in a gallery. And so we go to galleries. In our hundreds of thousands. Now, it would be foolish to argue that only conceptual art can pull in the punters. Monet was so popular that the Royal Academy turned into a 24-hour waterlily fun palace. But I would contend that it was Sensation, at the same venue a couple of years before, that made going to art galleries an essential activity. If people cannot sate their aesthetic appetites on calendars, postcards and novelty erasers, they’ll just have to flippin’ well enter the belly of the aesthetic beast. They’ll have to get into the habit of looking at art.
Conceptual art is not always pleasant, or easy on the eye. Neither is the work of Bosch or Goya or GĂ©ricault. Conceptualists can be tiresome. I doubt if Michelangelo was always fun to wake up to. If sheer niceness were a condition of artistic worth, we would have forgotten Swift and Waugh, and the latest Mills and Boon would win the Booker Prize. But there is another reason that lovers of Giotto or Rubens or Manet should at least look kindly (if not fondly) on the conceptualists. Lovers of Proust are sniffy about Harry Potter. But the myopic warlock gets the X-Box generation reading books for pleasure. Which, surely, is a good thing? By being loud and media-savvy and ugly and iconoclastic and rich, the children of Duchamp – Marcel’s new wave – are dragging people into looking at, arguing about, loving, hating, doing art. All art. From the Lascaux cave paintings, via Giotto or Rubens or Manet, to… well, whatever comes next.
Which, surely, is also a good thing?
Thursday, April 09, 2020
About Elvis Costello
I’ve probably told this tale 20 times, but I did a phone interview with Elvis Costello once. I was expecting – indeed, deep down, hoping for – spleen, invective, bitterness, all the stuff that characterised his public persona, but he was charm personified, relaxed, modest and polite. He even apologised for being five minutes late. The bastard.
I thought of that just now when I found another interview with EC, from a few years before mine, in which he says something that seems to sum up his attitude particularly (and mine, to an extent):
I don’t think that I’m particularly awkward. It just seems to me that everybody else is awkward.
Friday, April 03, 2020
About coronavirus
2016 was the last year that seemed to be characterised by lots of famous people dying and now as then the relative significance given to one dead celeb over another speaks volumes, dragging into its orbit issues of taste and class and the dreaded canon. Who, ultimately, matters more, the bass player of Fountains of Wayne or the fat one from Little and Large?
And if you don’t think there’s anything worse than death...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)