Law of Unintended Consequences, Tory Division

Are they idiots? Do they think? Wait a minute, let me rephrase that: why don’t the idiots think, apart from the fact that they are idiots? OK, so they didn’t realize that pensioners (the voting-est segment of the community) would be upset to have their pensions hacked away. And they didn’t realize that if they capped tax-relief on charity rich people would (d’oh!) give less.

Now we find that in their enthusiasm to remove any semblance of civic society, our luverly government has ensured (unintended, I have no doubt: they strike me as the kind of people who move their lips when they watch television) that if the libraries they have devastated reconfigure themselves as volunteer institutions, they will be breach copyright regulations when they lend books, and that PLR payments (the pennies paid to authors per book-loan, to compensate for lost sales) are not permitted on any books that they loan.

Nice one.

The price of artistic agony

Let’s hear it for Svetlana Voronina. Who she, I hear you cry?

The redoubtable Ms Voronina has taken a case to court in Russia, suing the Bolshoi Theatre for 1 million roubles: the price of her ticket back, and damages “for the moral agony experienced when watching the performance” of Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila in the controversial staging by Dmitri Chernyakov which reopened the theatre after its gadzillion-dollar restoration.

Sadly, the case was thrown out, but bravo to Ms Voronina, for quantifying the agony. A million roubles is £21,000, or $34,000, so it’s not as though she were asking for a lifetime of luxury for having to endure what she described as “a refined psychological experiment on the audience, a mockery of Glinka and his opera”.

Certainly I’ve sat through performances like that — a particularly nasty Calixto Bieto Don Giovanni at ENO comes to mind, and I once endured The Phantom of the Opera — compensation is surely owing to me for having to watch that sodding chandelier go up and down and up and down — the most moving part of the evening.

So let’s think of who else to sue — nominations?

People-like-us Syndrome

I left my bicycle in the London Library’s bike-shed yesterday. The shed has a lock that can be opened only by library members, and so I didn’t bother to chain the bike to one of the stands. I usually do, but it was a Sunday, the library was closed and I figured the odds were that few if any other members would be opening and closing the door, potentially letting strangers in. During the week, I chain the bike when I leave it there, but I don’t bother to double-chain the basket, which detaches, the way I do when I leave it on the street.

Notice that I was only worried about strangers. I noticed that too, when I thought about locking/not-locking it. It never occurred to me that a library member would steal my bike. I mean, they’re London Library members. They’re people like me!

I make those kind of unconscious decisions all the time, and I’m sure we all do. It’s OK to leave my scarf on a seat, because only university members come here; it’s not OK to leave my book there, ‘anyone’ might come across it. There are in-groups and out-groups in my head. And for some reason, my in-groups (library members, shoppers at one specific — but not any other — farmers’ market, neighbours) have no dishonest people in them, no liars, thieves, cheats.

All the more shocking, therefore, when I read this morning that at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, publishers were losing up to 75 per cent of their stock to, well, looters — 75 per cent can’t really be called petty pilfering, can it? My assumption, automatically, is that some ‘they’ group — outsiders — came in and perpetrated the thefts. Because I can’t get my head around the fact that book people would steal. They wouldn’t, would they? Even though I know there are statistically as many liars, cheats, thieves among my professional cohort as anyone else’s professional cohort.

I know it, but I don’t believe it.

‘Either way I find you disgraceful’

Well, we’re back to ‘what/who are critics for’ this morning. I reviewed a new (excellent) production of Sweeney Todd on Tuesday night (here). I liked it a lot (the clue was in the five stars I gave it). There were elements I liked less, which I covered — mostly the casting of Michael Ball as Sweeney. I didn’t hate him, but didn’t think he was great either. I thought he did ‘well enough’, but wasn’t, ultimately, charismatic enough, or vocally strong enough, to carry this really heavy part.

So far, I would have thought, so uncontentious. Lord knows, I’ve given much more negative views with monotonous regularity. But apparently not. Hot on the heels of the review came this beautiful thought from [name suppressed to protect the very silly]:

Read your review of Sweeney Todd. Interesting to me that, when everyone else is praising Michael Ball, you chose to be negative. I am not sure whether you have some personal grudge or you are just in the wrong profession. Either way I find you disgraceful.

The immediate urge, naturally, was to respond, ‘Mum, I told you never to write to me at work!’ I heroically suppressed it, though with regret.

But this email continues my ongoing fascination with how we regard reviews, and critics, which seems to reflect on how we regard art itself.

First of all, it assumes that a general view (‘everyone else’) is by definition correct — that, indeed, there is a correct, and therefore an incorrect, view of any single performer. Then, even if I accepted that, which of course I don’t, it extrapolates to assume there are only two reasons for dissenting from the general view: personal animus, or incompetence.

I might, of course, indulge in both. I might nurture a secret hatred for Michael Ball because he hit me on the head with a Lego brick when we were in kindergarten. (Disclaimer: I was not in kindergarten with Michael Ball. To the best of my recollection, I have never been hit on the head with a Lego brick by anyone, although I think many have wanted to.) I might also be entirely unable to tell a good performance from a bad one. The former would be unacceptable, and I should rightly be unemployable if that were the case. (I mean, not about the Lego, you understand: the secret-hatred-disguised-as-a-review.) And I might be incompetent. Which should also make me unemployable.

But the odd thing about this email was that my reservations about Ball were a couple of lines in an otherwise rave review. I unilaterally declared Imelda Staunton a Living National Treasure (to be protected by legislation). I liked the direction, the set and the lighting. In that I was in agreement with most other reviewers. So does that mean the emailer thought I was only incompetent for one paragraph, and competent for the remainder? Did she wonder if I had a personal connection to Ms Staunton, or Messrs Kent, Ward and Henderson, which meant I was prejudiced in their favour, and thus ‘disgraceful’ once more?

I realize I’m attempting to make sense out of what makes no sense. But I’m interested because these views make no sense in a very common way: they suggest that there are absolutes in the arts, that things are either good or bad, and that collective wisdom can recognize this. Both elements of this idea are, to put it in academic critico-theoretical-speak, horseshit.

There. I feel better now. Bring on the Lego!

 

 

Philistines inside the gates, part 2,037,047

This is just bile, so you may want to move on — move along, move along, says the mental policeman, nothing to be seen here that isn’t seen every other day.

But if you want to stick with me for a moment, nothing I am about to say will surprise you. In Britain, the Tories have decided today that the roads of the country should be sold off. There isn’t enough money to repair them, but there’s enough money for a commercial company to take profits out of them. Yes, you work that one out.

And while you’re doing it, spare a thought for Nicholas Hoare, one of civilization’s beacons. He owned three bookshops in Canada — OK, so it’s not a cure for cancer, nor did he discover life on Mars. But he created three points where people who wanted to think, to reflect, could come together; where people could explore more than their own small worlds. In effect, he created three small spots of mutual respect and decency.

This is not a story of changing reading habits, or the velociraptor that is Amazon. This is a much sadder, and more brutal story. Two of the three shops, faced with rent hikes of 72%, will now be forced to close. And who is this rapacious landlord? Well, it’s the government, the National Capital Commission, the crown corporation that ‘looks after’ (I use the inverted commas advisedly) federally owned land.

And the government is permitting — probably egging on — these shocking price hikes. Nothing to do with us, guv, their spokesman says. We can’t help it, can we, if the land has become more valuable. No discussion, no mediation, just pay up or piss off. We don’t care what kind of shop you have — we can probably get a fast-food place in there, or maybe even that holy grail, a mobile-phone shop. Then we’ll be laughing.

I have, here, nothing clever, nothing funny to say. Just shame on you, Canadian government. Shame on you, NCC. I hope, when you go home after a long day closing down businesses that people value more than in just dollars and cents, when you go home at night, and your children want you to read them a story, you spare a thought for Nicholas Hoare.

Dickens at Westminster, a ceremony in tweets

Dickens’ 200th birthday, the ceremony at Westminster Abbey. (Live tweeting taking place under cover of the Order of Service, so as to be as unobtrusive as possible: all spelling/typos sic.)

Dickens' most recent biographer arrives.

Archbishop of Canterbury arrives.

David Hockney, once again, with feeling

I’ve just been to see the David Hockney show at the Royal Academy, which is amazing. Some of the (more idiotic) reviwers are praising with faint damns, I think because he’s popular, therefore they’d better look austere and elite. Tuh. (Noise of contempt.)

An iPad drawing, 'The arrival of spring in Woldgate, 2 January', courtesy the artist/RA

I am slow to praise, and my friends tell me I carp too much. Yet my considered response yesterday was ‘The man is a fucking genius.’ The work on show at the Royal Academy is almost entirely work from the last few years, but in 2006 the National Portrait Gallery had a retrospective which was a revelation. My review from that, and from a concurrent gallery show, from the Times Literary Supplement, below:

David Hockney

A Year in Yorkshire: Annely Juda Fine Art (to 28 October)

Portraits: National Portrait Gallery (to 21 January 2007)

 There are three David Hockneys, I think, and only one of them matters. The first one, and the least important, although the most intrusive, is the public David Hockney, the 1960s owl-bespectacled mop-top turned 21st-century curmudgeon, the one who writes letters to the newspapers and fusses about what the modern world is coming to. He is amusing or irritating, depending on one’s own personality, but he is also easily pushed aside. The second David Hockney is more difficult to overlook. This is the David Hockney of reproductions, the Hockney of A Bigger Splash and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy – not the paintings themselves, but of postcard and poster reproductions. This David Hockney is troublesome, because he stands in the way of the real David Hockney – and more worryingly, he stands in the way of a clear view of the real David Hockney’s work.

For the surprising fact is, David Hockney’s work does not reproduce well, does not give a good idea of the real thing. This is the case with many artists – Francis Bacon springs most readily to mind. But reproductions of Bacon’s work look just plain bad: unclear, muddy and fussy. Unless one is of the ‘all modern art is a scam’ school, the paintings look so bad in reproduction that it is always immediately clear that they must be poor facsimiles. Reproductions of Hockney’s works, however, look sensational. They are vibrant, clear, and full of Pop-y joie de vivre. They are slick and cheery, picking up and even intensifying Hockney’s great graphic strengths. Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-71) is not just an iconic image of the 60s and 70s. It is also one of the Tate’s best-selling postcards, and it was number 5 in the BBC’s poll of ‘The Greatest Painting in Britain’ (as well as being the only 20th-century image to make the list). The image, almost certainly, is far more often seen in reproduction than it is in reality.

Without access to the actual artwork, therefore, one can easily lose sight of the fact that the reproduction is only a pale reflection of the reality. Even when one knows Mr and Mrs Clark well, and knows how reduced it becomes in reproduction – how the whites, from Clark’s cigarette, forward to the cat, back to the balcony railing, forward to the white table and lilies, back again to the white line on the wall, how these whites, that in the painting hold the composition in a tension of combatative planes, vanish and flatten completely in a photograph. Then there are the fluctuating proportions (a telephone nearly half the size of a lamp, and the same size