Arts

This post contains a valuable commercial opportunity for someone, but I’m giving the advice for free. If I were a publisher of art-books, a commissioner of programmes for a channel like BBC4, or the editor of an art magazine or a Sunday supplement, I’d be desperately trying to do something on the photographs of Gustav Szathmary. Szathmary was the lover of the well-known German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, and the “Modersohn-Becker Museum”:http://www.pmbm.de/ in Bremen, Germany currently has an exhibition of his work. (He was a composer and an inventor of photographic equipment too.) I toured the exhibition yesterday with another academic (and anonoblogger) who, like me, was there for the “Social Justice Conference”:http://www.gsss.uni-bremen.de/socialjustice/ at the GSS at the University of Bremen. We were both stunned by the Szathmary’s portraits of his friends. The pictures, from about 1905, are so natural and lively that — allowing for changes in clothing in some cases — they could have been taken at any time up to last week. There’s hardly anything about Szathmary on the internet (8 hits on google and 9 on allthweb) and the only way you can see any of the photos is by “downloading the German catalogue”:http://www.cupere.de/pdf/gustav_szathmary.pdf (only a small selection, right at the end of this enormous PDF) or by visiting Bremen. There’s also “an html-page on Szathmary”:http://www.cupere.de/gustav_1.htm , linking to the catalogue, but without any of the relevant pictures.

(BTW, if anyone actually is a commissioning editor etc., reads this page, acts on it, and something comes about, I’d appreciate a free copy or an invite to the opening etc.)

Update: See also Gwydion the Magician’s take on “Gustav Szathmary and Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler”:http://gwydionthemagician.blogspot.com/2005/03/joys-of-bremen-elfriede-lohse-wchtler.html .

UPDATE: See the link from Andrew’s comment below: Szathmary appears to be a spoof character wholly invented by artist Dirk Hennig. Doh!

I suppose that every Brit who reads this site already knows about this, but the rest may not. The die-hard fans seem pleased, but it is very hard to tell whether that is just a function of the relief they feel.

When I first heard about the return I had a conversation with my favourite pop star (no, I won’t tell you who that is) who expressed skepticism: on the grounds that the only way the series can sell is by Americanising it. My skepticism is more based on the fact that the post-war social-democratic consensus is so long dead that a show that self-consciously embodied it would now seem weird; but if the doctor were not a social democrat he would not be the doctor. However, at least the Americanisation thesis seems false, given the star’s disavowal of both sexism (ha!) and RP.

Mad Melanie Phillips has started using the subject-line “Weimar Broadcasting Corporation” for “her”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001080.html “rants”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001081.html against the BBC. I have to say, it sounds rather a good idea. How about “these guys”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar for a new board of governors:

bq. Weimar is one of the great cultural sites of Europe, since it was the home to such luminaries as Bach, Goethe, Schiller, and Herder. It has been a site of pilgrimage for the German intelligentsia since Goethe first moved to Weimar in the late 18th century. The tombs of Goethe, Schiller, and Nietzsche may be found in the city, as may the archives of Goethe and Schiller.

And we’d still be able to turn over to Channel 4 for “Wifeswap”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003305.html …..

I saw Clint Eastwood’s _Million Dollar Baby_ last night – an extraordinary, savage little film – but there was one element that left me puzzled. When I read the Washington Post’s “review”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55030-2005Jan6.html of the film a couple of weeks ago, I’d been amused by the reviewer’s description of Eastwood’s character, Frankie, as someone with ‘hidden depths,’ who “reads Yeats in Gaelic.” I’d assumed that this was a mistake made by the reviewer – Yeats didn’t write in the Irish language, and if my memory is correct, his ability even to read in the language was scanty to non-existent (unlike his friend, Lady Gregory, whose translations of Irish myths Yeats relied upon). But the reviewer was correct – the film does depict Frankie as reading what seems to be an Irish language book of poetry, including Yeat’s “The Lake-Isle of Innisfree.” The film leaves the viewer with the very strong impression that the Irish language version of the poem is the original – Frankie starts reading it in Irish, and then gives the English language version for the benefit of his non Irish speaking audience. I’d put this down to traditional Hollywood ignorance except that Eastwood is a careful film maker, and the meaning of another Irish phrase is at the heart of the film. So what’s going on? A little bit of dramatic license (the most probable explanation – but a bit disappointing)? Or is Frankie a little bit of a fraud (certainly when he reads the Irish language aloud, it’s almost unrecognizable – he doesn’t know how to pronounce it at all)? Or is there something else going on entirely?

Update: some spoilers in the comments thread below.

Susan Sontag is dead from leukaemia; the New York Times has an “obituary here”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/books/28cnd-sont.html?ex=1261976400&en=f88d1db2e18c3c3b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland.

A cleaner at Tate Britain has taken a “work of art”:http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=555511 that takes the form of a bag of rubbish, and thrown it away.

This is a _colour_ photograph of Lake Windermere last Thursday afternoon! Fortunately there were other things to do and among them was a visit to “Blackwell”:http://www.blackwell.org.uk/index.shtml , the masterpiece of Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott. It is a wonderful example of the Arts and Crafts Style, brilliantly conceived and stunningly decorated. It also incorporates work by other leading designers of the period, most notably William de Morgan. It is, I think, worth a very long drive to visit. We also caught the “Sickert and Freud exhibitions”:http://www.abbothall.org.uk/exhibitions/exhibitions.shtml at Abbot House in Kendal before a much sunnier trip up to Scotland. Normal blogging will resume shortly.

The tragic aspect of my migration to the US is this. I was born middle-aged, in a country where middle-age was considered something of an achievement. I used to look forward to the time when I’d be able to complain with my peers abut the state of today’s youth, and not be complaining about them. But then, at 22, I moved to a country in which nobody is middle-aged — even old people pretend to be young, until they are so doolally that the game is up. And I only truly settled in this country around the time that my chronological age caught up with my natural inclinations. So here I am, a genuinely middle aged in a culture that doesn’t even recognise, let alone celebrate, the phenomenon.

Here’s a show about what is now regarded as middle-age but used to be old age. I especially recommend it to Ophelia Benson, and invite private emails from anyone, including her, to explain why I particularly recommend it to her. The prize is….

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“The latest parlour game”:http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/archives20040704.shtml#82118 , via both “Norm”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/07/choose.html and “Chris Brooke”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_07_01_archive.html#108912007834711318 .

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Check out the “speech”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1230169,00.html made by art critic Robert Hughes at Burlington House last night, and note the following judgment:

bq. I don’t want to disparage dealers, collectors or museum directors, by the way. But I don’t think there is any doubt that the present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological. As Picasso’s biographer John Richardson said to a reporter on that night of embarrassment at Sotheby’s, no painting is worth a hundred million dollars.

I wonder what they’ll make of that over at “Marginal Revolution”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ ?

On Saturday night we went to a performance of Sheridan’s “The Rivals”:http://www.bibliomania.com/0/6/284/2000/frameset.html at Bristol’s “Old Vic”:http://www.bristol-old-vic.co.uk/ , which has some claim to being the oldest working theatre in Britain (a claim that is carefully qualified to exlude some rivals, though). A very enjoyable evening, complete with a reminder that anxieties about the corrupting effects of new media (internet, the telephone etc) had been fully awakened by the 18th century. Libraries were identified as the cause of moral decline in this exchange between Mrs Malaprop and Sir Anthony Absolute:

bq. Mrs. Mal. There’s a little intricate hussy for you!

bq. Sir Anth. It is not to be wondered at, ma’am,—all this is the natural consequence of teaching girls to read. Had I a thousand daughters, by Heaven! I’d as soon have them taught the black art as their alphabet!

bq. Mrs. Mal. Nay, nay, Sir Anthony, you are an absolute misanthropy.

bq. Sir Anth. In my way hither, Mrs. Malaprop, I observed your niece’s maid coming forth from a circulating library!—She had a book in each hand—they were half-bound volumes, with marble covers!—From that moment I guessed how full of duty I should see her mistress!

bq. Mrs. Mal. Those are vile places, indeed!

bq. Sir Anth. Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge! It blossoms through the year!—And depend on it, Mrs. Malaprop, that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last.

“The Guardian leader today is about Jack Vettriano”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,3604,1175661,00.html “the self-taught Scottish painter of melancholily erotic encounters laced with a subliminal narratives”. Vettriano was the subject of an over-respectful treatment by Melvyn Bragg on British TV the other day. Pointing out the Mr V is now very rich (£500,000) and that the public buys posters of his work in large numbers, the leader-writer asks:

bq. Why is the most popular artist in Britain still shunned by its publicly funded galleries?

To which the answer is, simply and obviously, that his work is kitsch rubbish and that the curators of galleries have an elite function of educating the public and shouldn’t pander to their prejudices. (On this anti-democratic note, I’m off to New York for a week, where I’m sure that neither the Metropolitan nor MOMA have sunk so low as to be hanging Vettriano.)

Not bad. Not my choice though.

Dan Dennett has an example somewhere where he imagines that someone discovers the score of a hitherto lost Bach cantata. But by an unfortunate co-incidence, the first few notes are identical to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” thus preventing us from ever having the experience eighteenth-century Leipzigers had of the music. Pauline and I have an interest in Art Nouveau, and, surfing ebay to see what there was for sale, she stumbled on “an exquisite brooch”:http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2696908359&category=58553 designed by Charles Horner of Chester in 1895 or 6. From the description:

bq. The brooch is decorated with a flyfot symbol. In Western traditions, the flyfots arms each represent one of the four elements, and the extention symbolizes that element in motion; thus representing life and movement. It was also used by the Maya, Navajo, Jains and Buddhists. In Scandinavia mythology it represents Thor’s hammer.

Did you know what a flyfot is? No, neither did I.