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A TIME FOR "REFLECTION" AND "DOLLAR BILLS"

Art.view — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:58:48 +0000

Works by Doig and Warhol starred in an auction-room drama at the post-war and contemporary sales this week. Art.view reports from New York ...

From ECONOMIST.COM

This week in New York, the post-war and contemporary art market had its bi-annual check up. Christie’s went first, selling 39 of 46 lots for a total of $74.1m on November 10th. It was less than a quarter of their $325m total exactly two years ago, but still a respectable outcome given the difficulty of obtaining consignments. No one wants to sell their art during a recession unless they have to. Remarkably, few collectors seem to be in that position and, if they are, they feel safer off-loading behind the scenes than at public auction.

Sotheby’s evening sale was much more robust, selling 53 of 55 lots for a total of $134.4m. That sell-through rate—96% by lot, 98% by value—hadn't been seen since 2004. An astounding result given the times. The estate of Mary and Louis Myers, Ohio arts patrons, provided the first 20 lots of the evening, but the chief earner was Andy Warhol.

The most talked about work of the week was Warhol's “200 One Dollar Bills”, an historically important, hand-drawn silkscreen painting from 1962. Until the day before the sale, the identity of the consignor, described in the catalogue as having a “distinguished private collection”, had been a well-kept secret. Then word slipped out that it had belonged to Pauline Karpidas, a London-based collector. Back in 1986 Mr and Mrs Karpidas had paid $385,000 for the picture, the highest price ever paid for a Warhol at auction during the artist's lifetime.

Tobias Meyer, Sotheby's chief auctioneer, opened the bidding at $6m whereupon Alex Rotter, a Sotheby's specialist on the phone with a client, immediately doubled the bid. The price escalated in million-dollar increments so quickly that it was hard to tell where the bids were coming from. Philippe Ségalot, an art advisor, Jose Mugrabi, a dealer who owns some 800 Warhols, Abdallah Chatila, a Lebanese collector, and two other Sotheby's staff members, Loic Gouzer and Bruno Vinciguerra, together nodded and waved the lot all the way up to its $39m hammer price. In the end, Mr Vinciguerra won the picture for his anonymous buyer for $43.7m with fees. It was the second-highest price ever paid for a Warhol at auction, exceeded only by “Green Car Crash”, which sold in May 2007 to Philippe Niarchos for $71.7m.

The price proves the adage that real masterpieces retain their value in almost any economic climate. As Mr Ségalot affirmed, “The date, subject matter, composition and condition are all fantastic. The painting probably sold for the same price as it would have two years ago.”

Christie's also enjoyed a runaway lot that provided auction-room drama. “Reflection (What Does Your Soul Look Like)” (left), an exquisitely rendered, psychologically complex painting from 1996 by Peter Doig, a British artist, was consigned by César Reyes, a Puerto Rican psychiatrist who owns a number of the artist’s works. Seven bidders pitched for the painting and four of them were still in the game at $8.8m, well over the high estimate of $6m. After that, the lot bore witness to a duel between Jay Jopling, a British dealer (who is thought to have been bidding for Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian collector), and Marc Porter, Christie's president, who had an insistent client on the phone. In the end Christie's chief auctioneer awarded “Reflection” to Mr Porter's telephone bidder for $10.2m, even though Mr Jopling offered a bid just as the hammer was coming down. The dealer did not look happy. It was a shame as another few increments could have led to a world-record price for the artist.

Francis Outred, Christie's European head of post-war and contemporary art who brought in the Doig consignment with his New York-based colleague, Andy Massad, said: “Some people saw ‘White Canoe’, which commanded £5.7m ($11.2m) in February 2007, as a symbol of the art market bubble, but three of the four highest prices for Doig have been made this year. Doig's market has continued to grow throughout the recession. It's a reflection of quality and a testament to the way Peter has moved forward the boundaries of painting.” Many assume that Russians have made the Doig market, but Mr Outred asserts that the four main contestants for the work included an American, an Asian and a European (which could include those from the former Soviet Union).

It's rare to see artists at an auction, but Mr Doig was seated with the consignor of the painting, which suggests that Mr Reyes might have offered a cut of the proceeds to the artist. However, Mr Doig admitted to “no more than curiosity”. With them was Gavin Brown, a New York dealer who has been exhibiting Doig's work since 1994 and sold “Reflection” to Reyes for $24,000 in 1996. After the sale, Mr Brown was jubilant. “This result, if nothing else, suggests the landscape has been readjusted to something based on truth and beauty. The cynical age of Damien Hirst, et al, might well have passed. Now we all have to use our eyes!”

(Art.view appears each week on Economist.com.)

Image credits: Sotheby's (top); Christie's (above left)

YOU'RE MY PUMPKIN, PUMPKIN

Ariel Ramchandani — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:38:01 +0000

I worry for food obsessives this time of year. How easy it is to spend all your time googling brining techniques and your money on that pedigree heritage bird. And please don’t walk into traffic while pondering how to make gingerbread not too crisp and not too chewy.

Freaks, myself included, who already siphon off too much time preoccupied by bacon or burgers or quinoa are way over stimulated in the mudslide of time between Halloween and New Year's Eve. It is truly a food season—authentically and comfortingly seasonal before seasonal was trendy or understood to be important. The cookies are nice, gravy is a little bit of liquid sunshine and I'm always pleasantly surprised by the siren song of fall vegetables. If spring and summer are ripe for fruit fetishists, autumn is a time when humble roots and tough leaves reign supreme.

The obvious MVPs are squash and friends, both sweet and savoury. Their seductive allure can inspire manic behaviour at the farmers' market—wandering through sighing, stroking every pumpkin while wondering whether they long to be curry, pie or crème brulee. Their crooked noses, warts and stems make these gnarled veggies seem empathetically homely. Forlorn, funny-looking, they want to be used. Heidi Swanson, author of the 101 Cookbooks blog (and a favourite pumpkin pie recipe) described her parsnips recently as "waiting patiently on the sideline, quiet as church mice". My butternut squash is doing the same.

Even the greens are exciting. I've decided it's time to dehydrate my own kale (having spent a little too much time on the blog I heart kale). I’m not so interested in raw food, so instead of following the site's approach and roasting them for seven hours at a low temperature, I think I’ll use the recipe that makes kale seem like French fries. I'll blast those green cuties, cover them in olive oil and sea salt and maybe cayenne. Kale freaks, back off.

~ ARIEL RAMCHANDANI

Picture Credit: WhitA (via Flickr)

DEFINING THE NOUGHTIES

Nick Coleman — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:13:50 +0000

In the second instalment of defining this decade, Nick Coleman talks to the director of the Whitechapel Gallery and Tina Brown, among others ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2009

ANDY BECKETT, Journalist and author of “When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies”
Hoodies
Most teen styles in this decade looked back to earlier trends: skinny trousers were originally a 1960s working-class style that cropped up again in the 1970s new wave; emos were really just a re-working of the 1980s goth. But the hoodie belonged to the Noughties. I don’t believe it was just about the ASBO generation hiding their faces from CCTV, either. It’s more practical than that. If you spend all your time hanging around on the street in a coldish, wettish country, a hood will keep you warm, and stops the rain spoiling your hairstyle. Plus it creates a safe anonymity for a teenage boy to hide in: if you’re a skinny, pimply 14-year-old who has to deal with a lot of confrontation, putting your hood up means that, from behind at least, someone might take you for something more dangerous than you really are. Interestingly, it’s one of the few examples of working-class style that crossed all class boundaries: though I don’t think you’d catch him in huge, hip-hop sweatpants, even Prince Harry has been seen in a hoodie.

JULIA PEYTON-JONES, Director of the Serpentine Gallery, London
Apple. Instant landmarks. Price tags
On any future film set seeking to represent the decade, technology, and in particular Apple, would have to be central. Architecture too. It’s not that no one was aware of architecture or design technology before, but it was in this decade that these things became embedded in our lives. Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Sir Norman Foster: landmarks for eternity appeared worldwide. Think of Dubai and what it represents: the idea that things can appear out of nowhere as if ready-made: it didn’t exist a moment ago and now here it is, fully formed. And what underpins this is the thing that underpins everything else: the pound or dollar sign. This was the decade when it became completely acceptable that there was a price tag for everything.

TOM HUNTER, Photographer
Mega pixels
Pixellated images are a very important part of the look of this decade. With the twin towers, Abu Graib and so on, most of the images we saw were very pixellated: a lot of them were shot at distance on video cameras or cellphones. These were not the Hasselblad images we got back from the surface of the Moon in the 1960s. Plus everyone has a phone on them now and everyone is recording stuff all the time, so the low-res, heavily pixellated image is very much the means by which we see things. Imagery is no longer the preserve of professional image-makers.

ILSE CRAWFORD, Interior designer
Eindhoven
The Design Academy Eindhoven is an integrated school in the Netherlands. It’s become really quite cult in the design world; it’s often described in the press as being the best design school in the world. Many people who have surfaced in the past ten years have studied there: Tord Boontje, who famously did the blossom chandelier, or Hella Jongerius, who started a rapprochement between industry and craft. They’re people who substantially changed the face of not just design, but retail and the way things are presented—moving from a controlled, very functional look to something that is emotional, expressive and poetic, that has a connection with craft. So I’d say the DAE sums up the “look” of the decade—but then I would say that, because I teach there.

IWONA BLAZWICK, Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London
Frieze
Art in the Noughties is like the 1960s, you get a crossover between art, music and film. It’s very interdisciplinary. There’s a lot of sliding around in the spaces between. Plus you see the power of the market, embodied by ArtForum and Frieze magazines. Their look is very sophisticated, very polished; gorgeous and sparkly and beautiful. It’s quite different from the slightly scabby, DIY street-aesthetic of the 1990s.

STEPHEN BAYLEY, Design commentator
iPod. Anti-modernism
You could characterise the first decade of the 21st century in terms of style, architecture and products and so on—in which case the iPod is an obvious thing to mention. But the iPod is significant not for the way it looks but for the way it changes the way we think. Equally, e-mail means we write more—not on paper, I grant you, but we do write more. And these seem to me to be the significant things of this decade. And Google, which is immaterial, is quite the most significant thing of all.

I do think we’re coming to the end of a sort of sinusoidal wave, which began just after the second world war, in which life was all about making more, consuming more and so on. In architecture this is quite clear. The Chelsea Barracks is the last gasp of the Richard Rogers school of modernism. And much as I admire Rogers, he is now as much an historical anachronism as Quinlan Terry.

TINA BROWN, Editor of the Daily Beast
Bernie Madoff’s smile
Madoff represents an era on trial. Because even when we didn’t know what was going on, it was going on; and his 150-year sentence represents the frustration and the fury that we all feel at how many high-rollers made out like bandits. The sight of that greedy little smirk pasted on Madoff’s face throughout every one of his hearings sums up the past ten years: he is the icon of the Noughties.

Picture Credit: JasonRogersFotographie

(Nick Coleman is former arts editor of the Independent.)

JAZZ IS NOT DEAD

Gary Moskowitz — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:54:34 +0000

Long before we debated what real punk-rock was, what true hip-hop was, or what made indie-rock authentic, jazz heads grappled with what is and isn't jazz music. Now, the debate is whether jazz is dying off or not.

Not long ago Jae Sinnett, a jazz drummer, composer, educator and radio personality, told NPR that jazz is dying because people are falling out of love with it. Hip-hop, Sinnet says, stole jazz's thunder. He also blamed club owners for removing pianos from their venues to save space over the years.

Sinnet's claims are not unfounded. The Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout reported in August that the audience for America's great art form was withering away, based on data in the latest survey of public participation in the arts. According to the report, America's jazz audience is not only shrinking, it's aging. Attendance at jazz performances has dropped 30% since 2002. The median age of concert patrons in 2008 was 46; in 1982 it was 29.

These numbers bear out anecdotally. I have a hell of a time convincing friends to go to jazz shows with me, so I tend to go alone. And I often feel like I'm one of the youngest people in the room, even though I'm in my 30s.

Teachout said the problem is that most Americans see jazz as a form of high art. Sinnet confirmed that "the masses don't understand the music," largely because there are fewer places to hear it. Getting "these kids" to "realise [jazz] is something worth their time is difficult because they don't hear it on TV or MTV." The word "jazz" itself has even become sandbagged with lofty associations (Time Out London goes so far as to call it the "J Bomb").

Perhaps jazz simply needs to be rebranded, recharacterised as music that can speak for people again (even frustrated youth). Quite a few new bands are revitalising the form in exciting ways, mixing elements of jazz (theory, improvisation, culture and composition) with other styles to create music that is often hard to label or categorise.

Skerik's Syncopated Taint Septet, a jazz ensemble formed in Seattle in 2002, often refers to their music as "punk jazz". But their songs, such as their thunderous version of Charles Mingus's "Moanin", have much more to do with Thelonious Monk than with Darby Crash. (Disclosure: I once played in a side project with the group's drummer). Then there's Chicago's Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, which is more marching band than jazz band, like instrumental hip-hop. (Members are sons of Kelan Phil Cohran, a jazz-man who played with the Sun Ra Arkestra.) Sasha Frere-Jones of the New Yorker claimed that the band has "absorbed the biggest electronic music of the last century (hip-hop), filtered it through America’s century-old classic music (jazz), and made it portable."

Dakah, a hip-hop orchestra in Los Angeles, and the Shotgun Wedding Hip-Hop Symphony in San Francisco both have classically trained string musicians, horn players and percussionists in their ranks. The result is a mix of jazz-band virtuosity and improvisation performed with the enthusiasm of funk and the bounce and bravado of hip-hop. In London the Mercury Award-winning band Led Bib combines Hammond organ, electric bass and drums with two alto saxophones to create what they call "death jazz", a driving, pulsing, rock-influenced machine. The band regularly draws an enthusiastic 20- and 30-something, earplug-wearing hipster crowd. The Helsinki-based Five Corners Quintet mixes up-tempo, 50s-era jazz with contemporary club rhythms (a steady bass-drum beat) to create swingy party music. At a London concert earlier this year, the room was full of 20-somethings.

These horn-based musicians offer a fine gateway for J-Bomb sceptics to explore the possibilities of brass, woodwinds, percussion, improvisation and even jazz.

~ GARY MOSKOWITZ

Picture credit: Infrogmation (via Flickr)

ZOMBIES AND HEARTS OF DARKNESS

Brett McCallon — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:32:24 +0000

Cultural stereotypes, charged politics and a fraught colonial history make Africa a tricky setting for a video game. Brett McCallon describes his discomfort playing "Far Cry 2" and "Resident Evil 5" ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

As a rule, most games are set in one of three places: a generic modern military scenario; a generic fantasy world (think "Dungeons and Dragons"); or a generic science-fiction landscape replete with space marines. I was pleased, then, to learn that both "Far Cry 2" and "Resident Evil 5", two big releases from the last year, use the seldom-explored setting of Africa.

These games ventured into tricky territory, given Africa's long history of colonial exploitation. Their approaches seem uniquely informed by the cultures of the two developers—"Far Cry 2" (pictured below) is from Ubisoft in Montreal, while "Resident Evil 5" (pictured top) is by Capcom in Japan—and both make significant mistakes in attempting to balance the continent's exoticism with a sense of its fraught past. While playing each game, there were moments when I found myself profoundly uncomfortable. In one case, the experience was unsettling enough to cut my playtime short.

Games are not known for their subtlety, and the "Resident Evil" series is perhaps one of the least subtle of a crass lot. These games chronicle the battle between the sinister Umbrella Corporation, which periodically unleashes new varieties of zombie-creating viruses on an unsuspecting world, and various good-looking law enforcement types who oppose these efforts. Their plots are delivered with all of the tact and nuance that this rivalry merits. Clearly there were bound to be problems when this hamfisted, if well-regarded, series came to Africa.

The heroes' opposition to world takeover by the undead takes the form of shooting thousands of zombies, preferably in the head. Until now, the series' action consisted of white protagonists shooting mostly caucasian-ish zombies. When the first trailers of "RE5" debuted in 2008, many were shocked by scenes of white men pumping the skulls of rampaging black Africans with lead. "Wow, clearly no one black worked on this game," observed N'Gai Croal, a former Newsweek games columnist, at the time. He pointed out that the Japanese development team had managed to recreate the kind of racist imagery that was employed in the 1930s and 40s to depict blacks, and Africans specifically, as savages.

It bears noting that this "RE5" scenario is not unlike the previous game in the series, which opened in a spooky village in the Spanish countryside. The problem lay in Capcom's neglect of the complex and tragic history of the new African setting. "It would be like saying you were going to do some sort of zombie movie that appeared to be set in Europe in the 1940's with skinny, emaciated, Hasidic-looking people," said Croal. "If you put up that imagery people would be saying, 'Are you crazy?' Well, that's what this stuff looks like. This imagery has a history."

To their credit, Capcom seemed to have taken this criticism to heart. When the game was officially released earlier this year, its opening segment featured a veritable ethnic rainbow of zombie variety. This change deflected much of the pre-release grumbling, yet the fact remains that far more insensitive imagery awaits gamers later on in "RE5". Several levels in, players find themselves facing enemies deep in a swamp. And while the game is set in modern times, these enemies are wearing versions of traditional African costumes, including grass skirts, wooden masks, shields and spears. Spears. Clearly, the design team wanted to create an interesting variation on the standard, modern dress that enemies wear in preceding levels. But to any western gamer who has seen films like "Zulu" or the original "King Kong", the imagery is almost unbelievably racist.

I don't pretend to understand the attitude that the average Japanese game developer or gamer has to the legacy of western anti-African racism. But I do know that however unfortunate the imagery in the game was, it didn't make me stop playing. The game felt thoroughly Japanese, and I could rationalise it as the product of a culture that had a different history and different norms than my own.

"Far Cry 2", on the other hand, features a much more realistic and much more serious approach to its African setting. The player takes on the role of a mercenary who is tasked with assassinating "The Jackal", an arms merchant who has been supplying both sides of a civil war. In many ways it's an excellent game, and initially I found myself deeply interested in this setting and its denizens. But as I continued conducting missions for one or the other of the game's armed, warlord-led clans, I found myself increasingly upset about my place in this world.

Clearly, this was deliberate—the references to "Heart of Darkness" and "Apocalypse Now" are impossible to ignore. I feel certain that the design team set out to make players question their own humanity amid assassination assignments. Still, the experience was profoundly unnerving. My personal breaking point came when one of my fellow mercenaries, a man who was my character's best friend, asked me to (as I recall) help him hijack a shipment of medicine and sell it to the highest bidder. I hit "eject" and haven't gone back to the game since.

It's hard to explain why being asked to participate in a fictional theft (that was doomed to be hijacked by another fictional militia anyway) was the trigger that made me abandon "Far Cry 2". On the surface, it seems far less fraught than the shooting of natives in "Resident Evil 5". Perhaps the issue here is that "Far Cry 2" based its moral quagmire on regional problems that I feel culturally responsible for. I felt disconnected from the Japanese team's offensive choices, the product of attitudes that are very different from my own. But the western-developed game was asking me to recreate a form of exploitation that white westerners like me have been committing for centuries. For this I respect the game in many ways, but I'm not sure I'll ever care to play it again.

Picture credit: Capcom, Ubisoft

(Brett McCallon is a writer based in New Orleans. He writes regularly about gaming for More Intelligent Life.)

PHILOSOPHY FOR DILETTANTES

Molly Young — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:17:11 +0000

For those who lack a natural fondness for abstractions, philosophy is a discipline best experienced in bite-sized pieces—on a Teaching Company tape for the commute, say, or in a profile of Peter Singer for the New York Times Magazine. Now we also have Tamler Sommers's new collection of philosophy-driven interviews, "A Very Bad Wizard".

Sommers is a professor of philosophy at the University of Houston and the go-to guy for interviews with philosophers at the Believer, five of which are included in this volume published by Believer Books (a division of McSweeney's). His subjects include Philip Zimbardo, Frans de Waal, Michael Ruse and Jonathan Haidt. Topics span everything from evolutionary theory to moral realism to meta-metaethics (whatever that is).

What first strikes a reader about the collected interviews is not the intelligence of the voices (that is to be expected), nor the subject matter (morality, justice, free will—the usual suspects), but the decisiveness with which convictions are laid out. The topics at hand are not ones that the average person spends much time considering, despite the fact that these questions are specifically human. What "A Very Bad Wizard" demonstrates is that some people do ponder such things, and with great nuance, and often in stark disagreement with one another.

If the content of the book is an injunction to think harder, the form acts as a friendly invitation to do so. The interview is a uniquely accessible medium, with its short blocks of text and hospitality to anecdote, changes of subject and the odd spontaneous outburst. Arranged in this form, philosophy can be approached more easily than in, say, "Of Grammatology". It is a far more palatable way to read contentions that "the impossibility of free will and ultimate moral responsibility can be proved with complete certainty," according to Galen Strawson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Reading. If Professor Strawson doesn't quite have the space to prove his argument in "A Very Bad Wizard"—his interview runs to 19 pages—he's at least got a receptive audience.

"A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain" (McSweeney's Press), by Tamler Sommers, out now

~ MOLLY YOUNG

THE i-DECADE

Nick Coleman — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:43:04 +0000

Mention the 1960s or 1970s and a clear picture comes to mind of the styles of those times. But what would a picture of the 2000s look like? In our first instalment, Nick Coleman asks designers, curators and authors to pick the styles and items that have defined the past ten years ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2009

STEPHEN JONES, Milliner
iPhone. Txt spk
What is the Mini of today? Probably the iPhone. I wish I could say floor-length dresses or big green hats, but I can’t. Communication is the issue now, not freedom and mobility: iPhone, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter. This is a big sea-change: it is more about communication through the word and less about the image. OK, we have image-sharing websites now, but what is more important is text. A few years ago the lament was that nobody writes anything any more; but actually people now write a lot. The typed, rather than spoken, word is the image of our decade.

LOUISE WILSON, Professor of fashion, Central Saint Martins
Tracks and Ts. It-bags
If you looked down from Mars what you’d see would be hordes and hordes of people, all wearing a version of combat trousers and a T-shirt. As if they were off to war, or a sports track.

Because of the incredible rise of the high street, style became utterly democratised: individuality seeped away and people of every class all wore a version of the same thing, whether it was from Gap or a big label. Hence the importance of the It-bag: when everybody is equally dressed down, a bag is the only way to proclaim a high-fashion badge. Everything else was about repetition and looking backwards, from the Sienna Miller Sixties boho moment to the current Eighties revival. Happier times…

DOMINIC SANDBROOK, Author of “White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties”
iPods. Extreme materialism. Politicians cycling
People listening to iPods on their way to work—and not merely as a symbol of technology, but as a representation of a sort of introversion, a retreat within our own bubble. A sort of atomisation—one we’ve imposed on ourselves rather than one we’ve had forced on us by economic forces. I suppose you could see it as the triumph of individualism.

Of course the words written on the collective tombstone of this decade would be “reckless consumerism”. Ginormous flatscreen televisions, budget flights, the laptop, the way the Apple look has filtered down to other computer manufacturers. What was once a functional thing, the computer, has become an emblem of glamour, a projection of the consumer’s psyche, in much the way the car was 50 years ago.

Then there’s cycling. The radical reshaping of the image of cycling is something that belongs to this decade. It’s a diluted expression of environmental concern—the tree-hugging Tory on a bicycle is a very Noughties kind of emblem.

TRICIA GUILD, Creative director of Designers Guild
The “Polder” sofa
During this decade we’ve had a big reversal away from the idea that beige minimalism is the only way of being smart. If you go to the Milan furniture fair now you will see lots of colour and pattern—something I’ve always believed in. I’d particularly pick the sofa Hella Jongerius designed for a company called Vitra. It has what you’d call the shape of the Noughties: a straight line meets Rococo, where the organic and the natural strikes up an interesting rapport with modern coldness and sterility.

JUSTINE PICARDIE, Journalist and author of “Coco Chanel”
Tiny celebs. Big accessories. Dresses with wellies
The decade was in part defined by our increasing obsession with celebrity. And the bigger celebrities got, the smaller the physical space they took up. This was the lollipop look: a tiny, incredibly emaciated body carrying an enormous bag, topped by an alien-like big head with huge goggly sunglasses.

There were two ways of celebrity dressing. The first was tight-fitting: Roland Mouret’s Galaxy dress and a lot of revived Versace were very body-conscious. Its counterpoint was offhand, loose-luxe boho, as epitomised by Sienna Miller, Kate Moss and Jade Jagger. This was all about appearing not to try too hard: looking effortlessly great in a Marni rose-print dress with a pair of cut-off shorts. And maybe a pair of wellies: once middle-class mothers rediscovered festivals, “pretty”, coloured wellies were big. Boden goes to Glastonbury.

EKOW ESHUN, Artistic director, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
The Prius. iPods. Style jams
The Prius is the car of the decade. It’s unlovely in lots of ways, but it has become an icon of aspiration. And then the iPod and social networking. Something that spools from these is that we don’t really have style subcultures anymore. Instead we have a playlist culture, where you’re allowed to mash up everything around you in a sort of pick’n’mix. Someone like the slightly gothy, rocky designer Rick Owens will have his moment of mainstream high-street influence at the same time as high-concept design from Viktor & Rolf, the slightly nerdy chic of Kanye West, and, say, day-glo. You have this simultaneous jam.

DAVID COLLINS, Designer for Nobu, The Wolseley, Claridge’s Bar
Bags. Blingy lights. Throws
The Noughties seem to have been all about what I call “celempathy”—people empathising with vacuous celebrities, dressing like them, acting like them. Fame as a substitute for beauty and style, and nonconformity as just another way of making money. The look of all this gets its imprimatur from money—logoed bags carried by famous people.

As to interiors, it’s been Swarovski with everything. Also fake minimalism—trying to create a purity, but losing your nerve half-way through and chucking white fox throws and feather lampshades at it. It has not been an era of holding back.

VIKAS MALIK, Managing director of Freewheelin’ brand-communications agency
Androgynes. Converse. Nausea
In clothing, the military look was stronger than ever. Combat trousers, combat jackets, epaulettes on shirts. The silhouette of the teenager has changed—he or she is now thinner and longer than ever before. At the risk of sounding like my grandparents, the look is ever more androgynous: look at the rise of the geezer-bird and all the blokes who look like girls, they’ve invaded each other’s space. Think about the indie look—skinny cardi, skinny jeans, Converse. It’s a uniform.

But overall, the single image that I’d use to sum up the Noughties is a pool of vomit. Excess, followed by self-disgust.

Picture Credit: Declan Tm (via Flickr)

(Nick Coleman is a former arts editor of the Independent. Justine Picardie’s Coco Chanel was published by HarperCollins in October)

MY TIME WITH DEPECHE MODE IN EAST BERLIN

Cornelia Rudat — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:32 +0000

“Hi, I'm Conny Rudat. I was your interpreter at your first concert in East Berlin on March 7th in 1988.” “So I heard”, was Andrew Fletcher’s terse reply when I met him for a quick chat before Depeche Mode’s "Sounds of Universe" gig in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium over the summer. What did I expect? Did I really believe the band's bassist/keyboardist would recognise me after 21 years?

In 1987, two years before the Wall came down, East and West Berlin celebrated the city’s 750th anniversary by engaging in a bit of cultural one-upsmanship. An unspoken competition for the most attractive events inspired the East German regime to allow Western rock bands to perform, provided they agreed to be paid in East German marks (which had to be spent locally) or in kind. So Joe Cocker bought a Meissen porcelain dinner set; John McLaughlin bought high quality Praktica SLRs made in Dresden, and others spent their marks on fine musical instruments made in the GDR.

As an interpreter and translator in East Berlin, I had a unique chance to work with British and American bands and singers from 1987 to 1990. I will never forget my first job with Shakin’ Stevens, who toured East Germany in March 1987, or my last with Mick Hucknall of Simply Red in March 1990.

Depeche Mode, a British band that has long been popular in Germany (having recorded three albums in the legendary West Berlin Hansa Studios in the early 1980s), was one of the bands that benefited from East Berlin’s modest relaxation of cultural rules. I was appointed their interpreter for a couple of hours in 1988. A photo of me with the very handsome band (pictured above), taken during a press conference, hung on my bedroom wall for years.

The band is still incredibly popular in Germany. When they performed in Berlin this summer, I managed to arrange a brief meeting with Fletcher. (Unfortunately David Gahan, the band's singer, and Martin Gore, the songwriter and guitarist, couldn't be there.) When I showed him the photo, which includes Alan Wilder, my secret personal hero, who sadly left the band in 1995, Fletcher smiled and relaxed a bit.

Our conversation naturally turned to aging (we are all around the same age), our grown-up kids and the band's health (including Gahan's recent cancer surgery). Fletcher described the challenge of keeping fit for their marathon Tour of the Universe 2009. “No drugs anymore?” I asked. “Well”, he said, “music is a powerful drug.” Later, among a nearly hypnotised crowd of 68,000 fans, who had their arms up from the very first song until the very last, I conceded it had to be.

Standing this time on the other side of the stage, I vividly remembered how it felt to be part of the backstage crew. At the time it was just a job for me, like many others. Only much later did I appreciate the singularity of the experience. After the show, I went with the four musicians and their crew to an East Berlin discotheque. It did not take long before all four had groupies on their laps, but they still needed me to translate these exchanges. The situation soon felt awkward, however, and I decided to head home, fuming and perhaps a little jealous.

But I was very proud to be the one to see them off at the airport next morning. All four of them sweetly thanked me for my work and for looking after them so well, and kissed me good-bye. Their last kiss on East German soil was definitely mine. I was in heaven.

Depeche Mode: Tour of the Universe 2009 travels to London on December 15th and 16th and then heads back to Berlin on January 9th 2010

~ CORNELIA RUDAT

THE Q&A: DAVID CROMER, THEATRE DIRECTOR

James C. Taylor — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:42:56 +0000

David Cromer is one of the most in-demand directors in American theatre today thanks to his acclaimed off-Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town". Cromer has upcoming productions in Chicago (a revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” this spring) and New York (a revival of “Picnic” for Lincoln Centre Theatre is scheduled to open next autumn). His Broadway debut in “The Neil Simon Plays” was halted abruptly last week, but his off-Broadway "Our Town" continues to move audiences at the Barrow Street Theatre.

Before he left Grover's Corners for the great white way, Cromer spoke with James C. Taylor on the set. He talked about why he took on the task of injecting new life into this old play, what makes it timely (or timeless) and how Spalding Gray explained the role of the Stage Manager to him.

More Intelligent Life: What was the genesis of this "Our Town"?

David Cromer: I was simply offered the job and I took it. I’m a freelance director. I’m not associated with any companies. So, you sort of have to look for work where it comes up. This production is based on a production we did in Chicago for a company called the Hypocrites. It’s this really interesting sort of avant-garde company run by a man Shawn Grany. And he just said one day, "Would you like to direct a show for us?" And I said "Oh, wow." That felt good, because I’ve worked a lot of places around Chicago, but I feel like I don’t work at super-hip places, the cool, avant-garde theatres—I don’t get asked to direct those things. I wanted to direct "Summer and Smoke" and he wanted to do "Our Town". He just said, "We’re doing 'Our Town'. If you want to direct it – you can."

MIL: Were you unhappy about this?

DC: Look, it’s a fantastic play. I’ve known it, I’ve always appreciated it. I’ve definitely had ideas about the role of the Stage Manager over the years. But I don’t really think I ever saw myself directing it. That’s a long way of saying this was not a production where I said "I have this plan for a production of 'Our Town', would someone produce it for me?"

MIL: You certainly have created this illusion–it feels like a production that came from a singular vision.

DC: Because my job as the director is to come up with something that looks like you had to do it. You have to fall in love with it and make it look like your life’s work, even though it actually isn’t.

MIL: Was there something during rehearsal—an epiphany—that helped put the fire in your belly?

DC: I will say that it was not false, the passion we did develop for the play. It was very real. It’s always surprising what you’re going to fall in love with, right? In your career you’re like: "I want to direct whatever? I want to direct 'The Three Sisters'. I want to direct 'Hamlet'. I want to direct whatever people want to direct, whatever that show is." Then sometimes jobs come your way and a big surprise happens. The more we worked on it, the more profound our understanding of how great it was became.

MIL: Do you feel that audiences have responded to your stripped down, modern-day production because of what is going on in America today?

DC: You ask about the timing of it. People have said "Oh, the timing of it is good", but I’m not 100% sure I understand why. These are our concerns: "I puttered around the house all day; I hope that I will fall in love and get married, and I don’t want to die. And I’m terribly confused and scared about death." Those are constants. So any time you are dealing with a very well written examination of those three things—your daily life, your healthy emotional survival and your sudden lack of survival—those are pretty immediate.

A friend of someone in the cast came last night and said the play "made him think a lot about being an American." So I guess you could say the timing of it is that now the part of society that I am a part of, which is the social left, is finally getting to feel strongly about our country again, or at least feel like we’re a part of it again. What do you see as the timeliness of it?

MIL: The play speaks to the sparseness of American needs and a way of living that used to be synonymous with American life. People are being reminded of that now, and can see with new eyes just how far we’ve come from Grover’s Corners at the turn of the last century.

DC: I can see that. One of the jobs I had for a long time was teaching directing. I would say that if you are a society that has the time or money or inclination to have someone teach you about directing, this is a society that has too much free time, way too much money. Do you know what I mean? I’m not trying to be coy about it....I can’t remember who said this, but you have to look out for the difference between "relevant" and "applicable". When someone wants to do "Born Yesterday" in an election year because the guy's a lobbyist or whatever, then that’s not actually relevant—it’s applicable, but not relevant. What I think is relevant are those constants of what we’re doing [eg, living within a community, trying to find love]. So if we're in a belt-tightening time now, maybe as a country we had to go "Oh wow, we can’t study directing any more. We lost our jobs so we’re going to be home all day." So yeah, I guess that’s there too.

MIL: The play is also a reminder that people’s lives used revolve around their neighbours and family. Now many more people move away from where they grow up. But your production isn't nostalgic. It makes it clear that the inner American life isn’t that different.

DC: Well, [Wilder] wrote it that way. As a director, I’m always trying to avoid pointing. I don’t like what I call "See Plays", where you go “See, see, don’t you see!” by underlining everything. By putting us in modern dress, am I saying “See, it's just like now?" No, what I am trying to say is: "I’m going to remove the distancing technique of period costumes." Period costumes just don’t look like clothes to us. With period dress, I don’t know who anyone is; I barely know what anyone’s class is; I definitely don’t know what they’re job is—unless they’re wearing a bloody apron and carrying a cleaver, then I can tell maybe they’re a butcher. Or if he’s a doctor, he has the big mirror thing on his head. So we just wanted to get rid of distancing things, and that’s tricky, because that’s a fine line. We were always in danger of saying "See, see they’re just like us.”

MIL: I’m struck by how fast your production moves—its running time is just over two hours. How much did you tweak or edit the text of the play to fit your concept?

DC: There’s a line in the speech [the Stage Manager gives] at the beginning of Act III where he says: “wherever you come near the human race there are layers and layers of nonsense.” And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked “Did we add that line?” Once a week I meet an audience member in the lobby who says: “Did you change the script a lot because I don’t remember a lot of that.” And we did not—at all. We have one sanctioned edition from the Wilder estate, and one sanctioned and very small three-line cut, just to facilitate a staging thing. And that’s the only edit.

MIL: You also act in this "Our Town", and your turn as the Stage Manager is also different and noteworthy. You said you had some ideas about the character in a way that you didn’t have as a director.

DC: Yes, and that’s why when I got offered the job [to direct "Our Town"] I said, "Okay, but can I play the Stage Manager?” And instead of saying what he should have said—“No” or “let’s talk about it”—he said: “Okay!” And here we are. But I have to admit, it’s all stolen. I had seen on television the Spalding Gray, Lincoln Centre production [directed by Gregory Moser in 1989], which is—and I mean this in the best way—a wonderful traditional production of "Our Town". Big empty proscenium theatre, appropriate period costumes, no props, no phoney sound effects. Every thing was just right.

I watched it quite a bit—I haven’t seen it since. Spalding Gray explained the play to me. The casting of him was brilliant, because he was an actor, but he wasn’t quite an actor. He was known to us culturally as a monologist. He was a New Englander and there was nothing folksy about him, and he has these line readings that really shook me. He did a piece about how savaged he was critically in that show. But I just thought the performance was completely spectacular. It explained to me that the Stage Manager has an emotional distance from the story that I didn’t know was there.

Then you have the problem of hiring an actor to pretend that they’re the stage manager. If we’re stripping away artifice, one of things that is artificial is to have an actor pretend he’s running the proceedings. So I wanted to do that—I wanted to be a bridge between the audience and the play. And I wanted to acknowledge the deceptive warmth or pleasantness or wit of the Stage Manager who is eventually going to ignore the guy falling on his wife’s grave—which is in the stage directions. He’s going to say: “Huh? We might be the only ones in the universe,” while this guy's bawling. That’s the end of the play. You have to work backwards from that.

I was always afraid it would be difficult to talk an actor into being as plain as I was going for. So I always thought that if I seemed like a bad actor, that would be fine. I had the position as the director of the show that would allow it to be fine. That was part of the idea—I was trying to not make it a “show off” performance. I didn’t want to be the centre of it.

MIL: So you’d rather be known as a great director than a great actor?

DC: A playwright named Itamar Moses told me this: a genius is the person who places himself in the path of the highest number of fortuitous accidents. We may not have been geniuses with "Our Town", but we did have some fortuitous accidents—and we didn’t ignore them.

"Our Town" is running at the Barrow Street Theatre through January 31st 2010

~ JAMES C. TAYLOR

Picture credit: Carol Rosegg

A NEWSPAPER MODEL FROM MCSWEENEY'S

Melissa Goldstein — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:54:34 +0000

Imagine a Sunday newspaper with the following: World Series coverage from Stephen King, a love letter to NASCAR by Andrew Sean Greer, a New York Times-bestselling novelist (with his husband in tow), and a comics section weighing in at 16 pages, with work by Dan Clowes, Art Spiegelman and Adrian Tomine.

McSweeney’s, a San Francisco-based publishing company founded by Dave Eggers, is prepping for a late-November release of Issue 33 of their literary quarterly, which for one time only will come in the form of a Sunday broadsheet titled the San Francisco Panorama. At a time when most American papers are struggling to stay afloat, this issue is meant to be an homage to print journalism and all the great things it can do.

During an Authors Guild event held in his honour earlier this year, Eggers offered to personally correspond with anyone in need of a pep talk about the future of publishing. Besieged with needy e-mails, he ended up releasing a mass letter on the subject in which he wrote that if "you rework the newspaper model a bit, it can not only survive, but actually thrive." The challenge was to create "a physical object that doesn't retreat, but instead luxuriates in the beauties of print."

San Francisco Panorama is McSweeney’s’ model for a 21st-century newspaper. The formula for success, according to its publisher, Oscar Villalon, is simple: “Make a product that’s worth the cover price.” The fact that this is a one-off, $16 newspaper means it doesn't offer real tips for financial sustainability. Yet it is a beautifully produced work of print journalism, delivered in McSweeney's idiosyncratic voice (hyper-literate, self-aware, occasionally ironic) and vintage-meets-modern style. It features an introduction to NASA’s new space-weather research programme, an investigation into the cost overruns of the multi-billion-dollar retrofit of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge (by Bob Porterfield, a Pulitzer-prize winning reporter), a guide to making the perfect bowl of ramen (by Momofuku’s celebrated chef David Chang) and an on-the-ground account of the fallout from the recent Afghan election.

Like many newspaper advocates, Villalon praises both the sensuality and serendipity of reading print. “Just flipping to get from one place to another you might stumble upon something that catches your eye," he says. "That’s not to say that the internet can’t do that, but it allows customisation to such a point that if you wanted to, you could just shut off the entire world and focus on the two or three things that matter to you. And you’d never be exposed to anything else.”

Villalon hopes some newspapers will be inspired by this experiment. “Give value to people who are willing to spend a little more to get the newspaper," he says. "You don’t have to break the news right away. You can give people the bigger picture—the story behind the story. What we’re saying is play to your strengths and understand your audience."

The San Francisco Panorama will be available for purchase online and at select bookstores.

~ MELISSA GOLDSTEIN

Picture credit: stylianosm, davebowman (via Flickr)

REGINA SPEKTOR'S RAUCOUS PIANO RECITAL

Corbin Hiar — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:22:24 +0000

By the time I spotted an exuberant couple swing-dancing in the wide carpeted isles of the Daughters of the American Revolution ballroom, I'd already quit trying to guess what would come next. A Regina Spektor neophyte in a CBGB T-shirt, I knew I was out of place as soon as the DAR's chandeliers dimmed and Spektor's devoted fans began cheering. But it didn't take long before I was clapping along with the rest of the crowd.

A captivating performer with a voice like velvet, Regina Spektor has that effect on people. Raised in Moscow and then the Bronx, Spektor developed her distinctive style playing all over New York City, in small clubs, basements and synagogues--anywhere she could find a piano. Fast forward a decade and Spektor is signed with an imprint of Warner Brothers, playing a concert in one of the most patrician venue in all of Washington, DC. Her song "Chemo Limo" is rumoured to be featured on a forthcoming release from the president of hip-hop, Jay-Z.

None of these details do much to explain her utterly unique music. Combining poetic and occasionally bizarre lyrics with beautiful, halting melodies, Spektor's style is difficult to describe. Her sound has been labelled everything from "anti-folk" to blues to indie rock. MTV's James Montgomery calls it "twisty, turny, timeless and tangible music", yet others have complained that her songs are too precious. Her latest album, "Far", released over the summer, has been both praised for its ingenuity and maligned for its cuteness.

Though her recordings do occasionally border on twee, Spektor's live show is raucous. As she moved from her grand piano to face the audience for her "Dance Anthem of the 80s"--"So that's what you look like!" yelled one excited chap--I found myself swayed by her idiosyncratic charms. When she threw the strap of her turquoise electric guitar over her shoulder and let loose with "Bobbin for Apples", an unreleased gem full of amusing non-sequiturs, I became a genuine fan:

Lovely people, lovely places
I can't remember names and I can't remember faces
Someone next door's fucking to one of my songs

She also managed to dance awkwardly while singing a cappella, play the piano while keeping beat with a drumstick on a chair next to her, and touched on the other two hallmarks of a rowdy night out (drugs, rock 'n' roll) before the lights came up again.

Responding to criticism about her new album, Spektor said, "My job is not to make people happy, you know?" Perhaps not, but with a vocal range that matches her flighty lyrics and a captivating stage persona to compliment her impeccable piano playing, she is more than capable of doing so in concert.

Regina Spektor kicks off the European leg of her "Far" tour on November 30th in Birmingham.

~ CORBIN HIAR

WHO'S AFRAID OF EDWARD ALBEE?

Laura Parker — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:30:20 +0000

Edward Albee has been a force for the stage for around half a century. But while his plays endure, the man himself is a bit dated, Laura Parker writes ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

In the 50 or so years that he has been writing plays, Edward Albee has
remained unchanged as both man and playwright. This, at least, is what he said in a rare public interview at the Sydney Theatre Company earlier this year. The talk was hosted by Jonathan Biggins, an Australian theatre personality, who spent two hours asking Albee questions in front of a live audience. Having never heard the great playwright speak before, I was eager for this rare glimpse at his genius mind. What I got instead was the sense that Edward Albee is an old fogey.

According to Albee, the problem is that the world of theatre has changed in ways he disapproves of. He is especially irked by the increasing importance of a director’s vision, which is now understood to be just as valuable as what is being directed. In interviews and public speeches, Albee has been vocal about his distaste for those who neglect his strict stage directions. In his eyes, directors who foist their own vision on a production are nothing but "interpretive types that think they know our work better than we do".

Albee’s formative years were bittersweet: adopted by a very rich family who owned and managed a chain of Vaudeville theatres, he was treated to the best education that money could buy (not to mention free trips to the theatre). But he hated his adopted parents, who were racist, anti-Semitic and, worst of all (to his mind), Republicans. So he up and left New York's suburbs for the city when he was 18, and began his education in the "serious" arts, as he called them.

Literature, art, theatre and music filled his eyes and ears until one day he found himself writing his first play, "The Zoo Story" (1958), in three weeks when he was 30. Although it was rejected by producers in New York, it was successful in convincing Albee that playwriting was what he wanted to do. And there’s no denying that he has done it well. His works are biting satires of modern life and the family unit, which lay bare the tribulations of social disparity and the negative effects of an ever-changing commercial world. All in all, an heroic contribution to theatre.

During his early years Albee (pictured right in 1987) was greatly inspired by Samuel Beckett, whom he continues to revere. Albee's affinity for Beckett goes beyond their similarly dark preoccupations with the human condition. Beckett also took a hardline view of adaptations of his works. He was notoriously meticulous in his stage directions, supervising rehearsals of his plays whenever he could. He would often sideline directors to tell actors their intonations were wrong, or they were not moving the way they should, or the lights were too bright, or not bright enough. He even tried to close down one or two productions when he felt his work was being misrepresented.

Following Beckett’s death, the playwright’s licenses and rights to perform his plays fell into the hands of his nephew, Edward Beckett, who has maintained an iron-grip on his uncle’s work. He is known for refusing to grant licenses for productions that do not strictly adhere to Beckett’s stage directions.

Albee is almost certainly plotting something similar for his own legacy. He has been a vocal critic of productions that take too many liberties with his plays, such as a 2007 production of "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"(1961-62) at Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre. Staged by Benedict Andrews, a young and audacious director, this version was both terrifying and brilliant. It stripped away Albee’s stage directions and set requirements, and featured a much younger cast than the script calls for. The result was pure, alcohol-fuelled psychosexual warfare, played out on a stark and sleek stage surrounded by a glass cage. It made for a perfect example of how a director’s vision can breathe new life into an old work.

Albee didn’t see it that way. He denounced Andrews’s production, comparing such changes to musicians who tell the conductor they’re improving the piece by playing it differently. “I see and hear my play on stage in my mind when I write it,” Albee told Biggins. “I expect people to perform it that way.” He then recounted a sour experience witnessing a Bulgarian production of "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" that ran without any intervals ("Bulgarians don’t like intervals," Albee explained). Large chunks of the play were cut. Albee was outraged.

Yet on the topic of stage adaptations of Shakespeare’s works, Albee suggested that a few of the Bard’s plays could do with a trim. “We have to accept that not all Shakespeare plays are as good as others. We all know that 'Hamlet' should end with Hamlet’s death. There’s no point or need for any of that other stuff afterwards. All productions of 'Hamlet' should end with his death, but for some reason they don’t.”

The problem is not only that Albee is selective with his dismay, but that his views are so dazzlingly out of date. Theatre is an ever-growing, ever-changing medium. No progress could ever be made if everyone stuck to the rules. To interpret a work from a single point of view (that of the person who created it) is to impose an unreasonable limit on that work. Meaning doesn’t lie with the creator, but with each reader, each observer. In theatre the roles of directors and actors are increasingly important, not just for the growth of theatre but for fresh takes on old works. Albee’s wishes for ceaseless loyalty are not only difficult to implement (how can a theatre company know exactly what was intended?), but disrespectful to those directors and actors who are driving innovation in theatre.

Biggins suggested these views to Albee, but the playwright was not interested. Instead he grew increasingly rude, occasionally cutting Biggins off or ignoring a question altogether. When Albee was asked what he thought of the enduring success of "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", the playwright's best-known play, he responded that he hates it when people ask him what his plays are about. Instead, he chose to end the discussion by stating that, like all his plays, the Virginia Woolf characters were drawn from real life and did not require too much scrutiny. “It’s just a play about university professors and their wives.”

Perhaps the same can be said for Albee. Despite his enduring impact as a playwright, it seems best not to scrutinise him too closely.

Picture credit: Film still from "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?", MDCarchives

(Laura Parker is a writer based in Sydney.)

CARROLL DUNHAM'S INNER CHILD

Molly Young — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:42:25 +0000

Carroll Dunham's paintings are the kind of thing a deranged child might produce in psychotherapy. The flowers are oversized, the trees are geometric, the sky is faithfully blue and there are angry scribbles covering all the best parts. The artist's signature looms in the corner as big and blocky as an identifying handprint, and paint splatters are not an unusual occurrence. In Dunham's show at Gladstone Gallery, a dozen paintings contribute to the impression of an artist seriously in touch with his inner child.

In competition with that enfant terrible is a fierce libido at work; a quick glance around the gallery reveals an energetic fascination with female anatomy and a willingness to go all the way with it. In one corner is a vagina with pubes the colour and texture of Fidel Castro's beard. In another a vagina straddles a tree while a smear of blood makes its exit from the abyss. Over yonder a vagina keeps company with an abstract cactus. Well, why not?

This well-why-not aspect encapsulates Dunham's vibe. In a catalogue essay accompanying a recent exhibition of Dunham's work, Kate Linker wrote that "Because [his paintings] are equally inspired by Aztec and Mayan art, recent American art, pornography, and cartoons (to cite only a few sources), these pictographs indicate the long arc of Dunham's imagination and the latitude of his visual reading habits, which range from high to low, rarified to vernacular, artistic 'literature' to esthetic pulp fiction."

If variety is a defining element in the artist's influences, manic laughter is a key part of the response it provokes. Gallery-goers taking in the paintings had a hard time keeping goofy smiles off their faces. This is a rare experience in a silent Chelsea gallery, and a lucky one too.

Carroll Dunham at Gladstone Gallery, New York, through December 5th

~ MOLLY YOUNG

CHINA SYNDROME IN LONDON

Art.view — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:30:37 +0000

London’s Asian art festival was full of surprises. Art.view reports from the front lines ...

From ECONOMIST.COM

Asian art in London—the city’s week-long late-autumn flowering of dealers’ shows and daily auctions, which ended on November 7th—was characterised by some beautiful exhibitions, an unprecedented flood of Chinese visitors and an assortment of auction sales that included some lots that went through the roof, others that failed utterly and a few notable pieces that were withdrawn on suspicion that they may have been fakes.

Christie’s had the hardest time of it. Despite the bullish market for Chinese ceramics and fine art, 104 of the 319 lots offered in its November 3rd auction failed to sell, suggesting that buyers, even those who have travelled far, are quick to punish sellers who are too greedy or cataloguers who are too enthusiastic in their assessments. Gilt-bronze figures were cast aside willy-nilly, as was a consignment of bronze plaques and, perhaps more surprisingly given their popularity, a number of jade animals and figures.

An elaborately carved jade brush pot from the emperor Qianlong’s reign, which had been in the same British collection for more than 50 years, should have had collectors fighting over it. Yet the brush pot failed to raise any interest beyond £200,000 ($330,000), perhaps because the estimate of £300,000-400,000 was considered too high. A further three lots were withdrawn from the sale, including an enamelled “peach” bowl that had reportedly once been in a private Japanese collection. Despite being prominently displayed in the catalogue with a long essay by Rosemary Scott, Christie’s international academic director for Asian art, the bowl was removed by the auction house before the sale started, “pending further research”, the auction house said.

Sotheby’s was also faced with its share of greedy consignors. The sale in an English country auction earlier this year of a magnificent green jade buffalo that fetched £4.16m (including commissions) appears to have inspired other owners to dig out their own jade buffaloes; a grey version, that had once belonged to the Bulgari family, was estimated by Sotheby’s to fetch £300,000-500,000, but failed to elicit a single bid.

Yet that single disappointment was quickly forgotten among Sotheby’s successes. Chief of these was a large jade seal (pictured above) that fetched £3.6m, far above its top estimate of £600,000. In celebration of his 80th birthday in 1791, the emperor Qianlong had a number of seals made, of which this is one of the biggest on record. The Swiss consignor had purchased it in the 1970s from a well-known French private collection. The carving of the two scaly dragons on the seal is regarded by some as not being of the finest quality. But the characters on the seal itself, which translate as “Treasure of concern over phenomena at 80”, and the fact that the emperor used it to mark many of his scrolls and paintings, make this object particularly appealing to Chinese collectors with a passion for anything imperial.

“The market continues to be strong,” said Roger Keverne, the chairman of this year’s Asian Art in London week. “There is demand where there is any level of quality”. Richard Littleton, a New York dealer, secured the jade seal in the face of steady bidding from five other people until nearly the final rounds. Mr Littleton often acts for Edward Johnson, the founder of Fidelity Insurance and one of the most devoted collectors of Chinese fine art in America. Mr Johnson is known to own a scroll with the mark of this seal, and is widely believed to be the buyer.

The week’s most successful sales, both of Chinese and Japanese objects, were probably at Bonhams, even though Bonhams too had to withdraw a square cloisonné vase that featured on the cover of its Chinese catalogue. The auction house’s deputy chairman and head of its Asian art department, Colin Sheaf, has been in the business a long time and has long-standing contacts with the families of old British collectors, such as Lord Cunliffe, who died in 1963, and Edward Wrangham, who died earlier this year. This week his experience paid off.

Lord Cunliffe’s son consigned 25 archaic bronzes to the Bonhams sale. A ritual wine vessel in the classic fluted shape known as gu, estimated to fetch a top price of £30,000, sold for £378,400 to a Hong Kong collector with Mr Littleton as the underbidder. A rounded food vessel sold to a Chinese collector based in America for £490,400, more than eight times its top estimate. Robert Chang, a Hong Kong dealer, was the underbidder. Two Chinese bidders on the telephone fought over an Imperial white jade seal with a double dragon on the top, doubling the high estimate to reach £305,600. “Nothing demonstrates more clearly the art-market axiom that art goes to where the money is,” Mr Sheaf said afterwards.

London is still the centre of connoisseurship of fine Chinese objects, with about 30 specialist dealers, more than there are in the whole of Europe and America combined. So it is not surprising that the biggest treat for anyone interested in Chinese fine art this week lay within the discreet dealer showrooms a few hundred yards north and south of Piccadilly and around Kensington Church Street.

Richard Marchant and Littleton & Hennessy both had opulent shows designed to appeal to mainland Chinese taste; Priestley & Ferraro and Ben Janssens chose to focus instead on works that Westerners were more likely to find attractive. David Priestley’s Song ceramics, some of them dating back to the eighth or ninth centuries, had a quiet elegance that contrasted sharply with the hustle and bustle outside. Mr Janssens, the chairman of the Maastricht art fair, had an exquisite show of lacquerware, most of it layered tixi lacquer in black and red. By the end of the week, three-quarters of Mr Janssens’s exhibition had sold to just five buyers. Most were British or continental Europeans. Four of the five collectors bought straight from the catalogue without even bothering to view the sale, which is what you can do when you trust your dealer.

But the most interesting show was Giuseppe Eskenazi’s exhibition of seven classical Chinese paintings, which he bought between 1984 and 1990 and which he has never exhibited before. Mostly worked on tightly woven silk or paper using ink and the slenderest of brushes, this kind of painting presents the artist with particular challenges: how to avoid mistakes, how to give depth to architecture, how to render cold or moving water. A falconer with a horse is gazing at the bird on his arm with all the intensity a man can muster when trying to impose his will on a bird of prey (pictured above). The leaves of a fat watermelon, exquisitely depicted on paper, are beginning to rot around the edges, just as they would at the end of summer. One of the finest is the “Pavilion of Prince Teng”. Painted using a brush with a single hair, the buildings appear to be floating in the clouds. No Italian painting of a similar age showed this degree of depth and perspective; another sign of the sophistication of the Chinese court in the 14th century.

Picture credit: Sotheby's, Eskenazi

(Art.view appears each week on Economist.com.)

LAND OF MY FATHER: JASPER REES ON WALES

Jasper Rees — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:59:34 +0000

Jasper Rees is an Englishman with Welsh roots. After neglecting them for years, he decided it was time to explore them. So he drove right around Wales ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2009

You have to pay to get in. The cost, if you’re in a car, is £5.40 ($10). Pressing a note and two coins into a fleshy female palm, I deploy the lone word of conversational Welsh in my locker. “Diolch.” Thank you. Then push my right foot down and accelerate into the land of my fathers. There’s not initially much difference from the foreign field back at the other end of the Severn bridge. Arable land trimmed into rectangles. An unremarkable town or two. Grey clouds flattening the light. Croeso i Gymru, said the sign.

Am I really welcome to Wales? I’ve been coming here since before I can remember, the ancestral call dutifully answered at Christmas and in summer. We ploughed over the old bridge—which back then was new—westward-bound along roads which down the years became broader and smoother and faster until eventually it was possible to get from the toll gate to my grandparents 90 miles away in not much more than an hour. South Wales was reduced to a race against time, a chain of conurbations whipping by in a blur of turn-offs. Newport. Cardiff. Swansea. This was my father’s twice-yearly speed-trip back to his Welsh childhood. Quite early on in mine, the road signs began speaking in two tongues: Casnewydd, Caerdydd, Abertawe. Services: gwasanaethau. Parking: parcio. How we laughed at that one—the foreign language indebted to the master. All I knew of Wales was the road, and a house on a hill above the market town of Carmarthen. Caerfyrddin. Merlin’s Castle.

I make a left turn. An empty road delivers up pretty villages with English names: Summerleaze, Redwick, Goldcliff. I’ve always sailed past this pocket of Wales. Flat, even sunken, and riven with ditches, the countryside looks neither English nor Welsh, in fact, but Dutch. I follow a track down until a forbidding sea wall blocks the view. Setting foot on Welsh soil, I clamber up the steps and there, arrayed in front of me, is the Severn estuary, the Bristol Channel. England fans out along the horizon. I breathe in briny air. Overhead, gulls squawk territorially. Before the wall was raised, high tides would have scurried inland and drowned the fields in salt water. It’s hard to say from here where the river ends and the sea begins. It’s hard also, it occurs to me, to say where my Englishness ends and my Welshness begins. I’ve wanted to know this for ever. Which is why I am here.

My father was of that generation that was sent to school in England and never really came back. Wales was educated out of him. His emotional detachment from the scenes of his youth manifested itself in a ritual we performed every time we turned for home in a series of monstrous Range Rovers. As we crossed the bridge back into England, he made us all cheer. I could never quite work out what Wales had done wrong, but I swallowed the story that England was where it was at. Eventually there came a time when if I wanted to go to Wales it would be under my own steam. An awareness soon budded as I visited my grandmother—my grandfather having died when I was 20—that we had been hoodwinked. But hold on, I remember being shocked to realise one evening as loafy hills bronzed in the slanting sunlight, Carmarthenshire’s gorgeous.

That yearning to belong has had to sprout from barren anglicised soil. I’ve never lived in Wales. In fact I scarcely know it. But on some inchoate level I sense that I love it. It’s like having a crush on a long dead star whose face you know only in the black and white shimmer of the silver screen. There seems to be just the one way round this state of ignorance, and that way is round Wales. This is what I’m proposing to do. Go all the way round, sticking—because there must be rules—to the road closest to the sea. I see it as an obsessive-compulsive search for my inner Welshman. I’m attracted by the project of putting a girdle around a whole country. Besides, I bet it’s not been done much. If at all.

With that, I clamber down from the sea wall, lower myself behind the steering wheel, open the map, put the milometer back to zero, and turn the ignition.

What follows is a slow and winding crash course in Welshness, although they have a more resonant word for it: Cymreictod. On the surface at least, the induction is topographical. Knobbly headlands and beetling cliffs make way for windy strands of white powdery beach. Chimneys belch and cough. There are Georgian jewels and kiss-me-quick resorts.

Estuaries bite deep chunks out of the coast. Turrets of innumerable castles prop up the clouds. Mountains tumble into the sea. Along the edge of Offa’s Dyke, delineating the old border with England, empty moorlands sound like the winds that howl about them: Eglwyseg, Berwyn, Y Mynyddoedd Duon.

There’s a ton of driving to do—it’s nearly 800 miles of narrow lanes and fast lanes around the Welsh rim—but at strategic points I get out of the car and walk. And walk. Strategic because, weather permitting, in each place it’s usually possible to see along the tumultuous coast towards the site of the next ramble. From the Rhossili cliffs on the Gower to the lighthouse on Caldey Island; from St Anne’s Head at the mouth of the vast natural harbour of Milford Haven, to the headlands of St David’s; from the tiny fishing village of Llangrannog up to the river-mouth towns of Aberaeron and Aberystwyth and Aberdyfi; from the miles of beach at Harlech to the multitude of beaches on the Llyn peninsula. Up on Edward I’s turrets at Caernarfon I can look along the north coast towards the Great Orme, the hulk of rock above Llandudno. And then down the hundred-mile chain of uplands which guard the border all the way back to the Severn.

And the weather, contrary to expectation, does permit. Once or twice it rains old women and sticks, as they say in Welsh, and I can’t see beyond the fence. Mostly, though, clouds choose not to muster, there are no avalanches of fog cascading from the hills, but that’s because the weather is much better on the coasts than reputed. The sun is free to pick out vibrant blues and greens, seas and meadows partitioned by tongues of white sand and seams of black rock.

The more I stop to clamber up hummocks and take in the view, the more I am baffled by something. When you can see so much of it in one go the country seems no larger than a postage stamp. On the one hand I can see for miles. One miraculous dusk I sit on a dry-stone wall and take in the entire 60-mile semi-circular sweep of Cardigan Bay while Snowdon and her siblings bristle beyond the shore. I’ve only ever gawped at that from a plane before. Another golden twilight I look down on the long arcadian corridor of Clwyd, and beyond it the whole grand commotion of North Wales erupting. In short, Wales doesn’t go far.

On the other hand, criss-crossed by a labyrinth of ridges and ravines, it goes on for ever. Its distances are in its ups and downs, in the intestinal coils of roads pushed this way and that by Welsh geology. The trip started and ended at sea level, but the nerd in me would be keen to know the metres climbed and plummeted. I can turn a corner and find just about anything sheltering there. The narrow opening to a splendid estuary, its meadowed shores patrolled by a lone diesel train. An elegant county town hibernating in the fold of a hill. An aqueduct riding supremely overhead. A crumbling abbey long abandoned by Cistercians.

I stop at an abbey for a night. My uncle is a monk on Caldey, the little island across the water from Tenby in Pembrokeshire. The White Monks have been here since 1929, although there is proof of rather more ancient worship in the sixth-century Ogham script carved into the Caldey Stone in St Illtyd’s church. My uncle lived most of his life in England. After his mother—my grandmother—finally died at 96, he answered a summons. Unlike his younger brother—my father—he never felt the tug of elsewhere as strongly as the magnetic pull of home. The Welsh word for it is hiraeth, for which the pallid English equivalent is “longing”.

To the outsider—in this case me—it seems a hard life. In winter they wear a lot of layers under their robes. However cold it is, the brothers join prayer at 3.15 in the morning. One of my uncle’s duties is to sound the reveille, so he gets up at 2.45 and fortifies himself with a mug of tea. Other tasks include being an archivist, measuring rainfall for the Met Office and packing shortbread. But his time is mostly devoted to devotion. The monks measure out their days in Latin appointments: Terce, Sext, None (pronounced with a long o). Whenever I visit him my uncle is like the White Rabbit, always looking at his watch.

The simple life extends to the kitchen—the abbey is no place for carnivores. The evening I eat supper in the refectory is an exception—it’s a feast day and a nice paella is left over from lunch. “Absolutely no talking in here,” he tells me sternly as we go in. A silent order strikes me as an odd choice for a man of many words— he’s very Welsh in that sense—and in the kitchen afterwards the brothers are all yakking their heads off. The next morning my uncle walks me to the boat. I’m the only passenger going back to the mainland as day-trippers from Tenby step off onto the quay. He stands among them in his robes, white hair cropped above bony shoulders, and it occurs to me that my Cistercian uncle is a good advert for repatriation. Wales has rejuvenated him. With perhaps a bit of help from above.

I return to the road, where the binary nature of the place is of course underlined, even enforced, by the names of things. Such has been the success of the Welsh Language Society’s rearguard action that this is the only country I know where I can be driving to two places at once: one with an English name, the other with the name it was created to replace. To the uninitiated, Welsh words can look like anagrams of themselves. I try to exhume a grandson’s sepia memories of Welsh pronunciation. The signposts are never slow to tease the tongue: I pass through Dinbych y Pysgod and Abereiddy, Mwnt and Tywyn and Gwyr, Llanystumdwy and Rhydycroesau, Dwygyfylchi and Penbontrhydyfothau. The consonants I’m sort of on top of, but the vowels can seem as alien as Cyrillic. It’s as if they’re encrypted to bamboozle some nameless enemy. Other words are pure poetry. Why on earth say Cardiganshire when there’s Ceredigion?

And then there is the quilt of voices. As I make my clockwise circuit, the accents of the place sing and dance, narrow and fatten. The voice of the capital has a tight, parsimonious tang. The Dyfed accent in the south-west swoops and dips in a hilly lilt. In Gwynedd to the north, delicate wispy vowels flutter upwards as if wind-borne. Across the porous border of Clwyd come abrupt stabs of nasal Scouse, while farther south in Powys and Gwent impenetrable inflections form a kind of natural barrier with England.

And yet the stony imprint of past incursions is inescapable all around the Welsh perimeter. The Romans left their DNA not only in buildings but in the names for them: ponts and porths and cestyll (the plural of castell). One day I wander through Valle Crucis, perhaps the most beautiful of the abbeys erected by the Cistercians who, until the Hundred Years War, answered to the mother abbey in France. My favourite castle planted by the French-speaking Plantagenets is at Harlech. One day I walk for miles along the lengthy shore it guards, and have no company but sea birds.

Wales is a broth, thousands of years in the brewing. So perhaps there is no point in trying to pin down the moment when I felt most at home. It could have been the places I associate with my grandmother—rather more than my grandfather, who was a remote and taciturn figure. I used to be slightly afraid of him in his plus-fours as he poured throat-rasping ginger beers. My grandmother dispensed scones, cuddles and complex jumpers she would spend the year knitting. “Bach” she used to call us—little one—for years the only Welsh word I knew. They married in 1927. She was one of two children, he one of nine children, and they all married. My grandparents were, so far as I know, the only ones to stay in Wales, and she was the last of the 20 to die. I think of her in Llansteffan, where a broken-toothed old castle still proudly commands the heights above the Tywi estuary. From the many times she brought us here I retain a strong memory of old women and sticks, and the train sweetly chugging along the other shore. And then I think of her again when I get to Porthmadog, the pretty port where the slate fetches up after the scenic train ride down from Blaenau Ffestiniog. It’s the first time I’ve been to the place where she grew up. I never realised that every day she could feast her eyes on one of the most beautiful views in Britain, across wide marshy pastures towards Snowdonia. The sight is so beautiful, it comes as a fresh shock to me that by the time I knew her, North Wales was a memory to my grandmother.

If there was a moment when I most felt a surge of connection, it was on the last day. I spent the morning in Hay-on-Wye, looking for a paperback about the two Ladies of Llangollen who famously introduced the concept of the beautiful lesbian friendship to Georgian Britain. The day before I’d spent a couple of hours looking round their exquisite nest, Plas Newydd (or New Hall), full of quirky black timbering and doll’s-house detail. I spent as long in Hay hunting the book down, and eventually I found a dog-eared Penguin and returned vindicated to the car. Slowly through hedge-heavy lanes I climbed until several hundred feet higher I was up in another world: the rampart of the Black Mountains (those Mynyddoedd Duon). A thin ribbon of road traversed a bald summit—or penfoel, as they call it. The grass was dotted with dark sheep droppings. A fierce wind dragged the ambient temperature downwards. Gobbets of rain spat from restless clouds overhead. A world away from the trim civility of the little forest of bookshops below, I stood and looked far into England and farther into Wales. Up here, such questions as who comes from where are rushed away on the gale. I belong, I said to myself. I’ve circled this glorious country and I hope I feel I belong.

Fired by the surprise of this new feeling, I drove on, along the curving edge of mountains, back through the tree line and into a densely wooded valley. The lane, narrowed by foliage, plummeted. A stream kept it company. Eventually the road came to somewhere near the bottom. Fields fanned out either side, and agricultural buildings made their presence known. And then, on the left, was another ecclesiastical ruin nestling under a tall slope in the lee of the wind.

Llanthony Abbey is close to perfect. It’s rumoured that St David, the nation’s patron saint, lived here as a hermit. True or not, that was enough to persuade one and then another hermit to follow suit in the early 12th century. An Augustinian monastery was soon endowed, but within three decades the 40 monks had been driven over the border by the weather and the Welsh. In the next century a priory was built. One night in 1327 it housed the dethroned Edward II, shortly to be murdered. After the dissolution of the monasteries the buildings crumbled. Two hundred years ago Walter Savage Landor bought the estate, fired by dreams of picturesque rural seclusion, but he vanished abroad and left his creditors and mother nature to continue the dilapidation. It was in this semi-naked state that Turner captured Llanthony’s lonely ravishing roofless essence. There’s something ineffably Welsh about a place where saints and kings, writers and painters all experienced the hermit’s solitude. And now me too.

That’s another of the great things about Wales. It’s not just that the sheer foreignness of England’s neighbour is overlooked. It’s the emptiness. I say it with a slightly heavy heart, but there doesn’t seem much doubt that more people will eventually choose to cotton on to Wales’s extraordinary beauty, thanks to global warming and the global downturn. And no sea wall will be able to protect Wales’s lonely corners from inundation.

There’s a bit more driving to do, incorporating one minor disaster. As I descend towards Tintern Abbey along the south-meandering Wye, the road randomly jerks left across a bridge into Gloucestershire and proceeds for four agonising miles along the English bank before ducking back into Wales. I have to control an urge to turn round and snake back along another route and maintain the Welshness of my footprint—but there are only so many country lanes that even the keenest born-again Welshman can take. Eventually the valley drags me towards Chepstow.

The Wye, which began its journey on the same distant mountain as the Severn on the other side of Wales, rounds a final Welsh castle and consummates a muddy reunion as one river spills into the other under the old bridge. I cross to leave Wales and return to the other side. I do not cheer.

(Jasper Rees writes arts interviews for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times. "I Found My Horn", his book about relearning an old musical instrument, was published in January.)

Picture Credit: geraintwn, papalamour, qbiq, Richard0 (all via Flickr)