supply and command

Dalrymple on English riots and Amy Winehouse

British intellectual Theodore Dalrymple has this to say about the riots in the ever more disunited Kingdom. And he takes a mighty whack at a recently-beautified British Icon. Merciless but entertaining, as always:

Relatively poor as the rioting sector of society is, it nevertheless possesses all the electronic equipment necessary for the prosecution of the main business of life; that is to say, entertainment by popular culture. And what a culture British popular culture is!

Perhaps Amy Winehouse was its finest flower and its truest representative in her militant and ideological vulgarity, her stupid taste, her vile personal conduct and preposterous self-pity.

Her sordid life was a long bath in vomitus, literal and metaphorical, for which the exercise of her very minor talent was no excuse or explanation. Yet not a peep of dissent from our intelllectual class was heard after her near canonisation after her death, that class having long had the backbone of a mollusc.

Turner Likes Heidelberg!

Transcultural Tapestries

St. Trophime in Arles, Southern France, is a magnificent medieval church that served as the Cathedral of the archdiocese of Arles until 1791, when Arles became part of the archdiocese of Aix. Inside the refectory on the north side of the twelfth-century cloisters, visitors can admire a number of seventeenth century tapestries stemming from the ateliers of Felletin and Aubusson (former County of La Marche, now part of the Creuse département). During the seventeenth century, French tapestry-making gained in significance and eventually took over the leading position from Brussels. The ateliers of Aubusson and Felletin were then placed under the supervision of the Royal manufactures of Gobelins and Beauvais (the Marche county had been part of the domains of the French crown since Francis I. seized it in 1527).

"Le combat entre Tancrède et Argant", St. Trophime, Arles; taken by FJM on 27 August 2009

The Provence region was an important market for these ateliers. Notarial deeds indicate the presence of tapestry merchants from Aubusson and Felletin who sold to churches and the local nobility. The tapestries of St. Trophime are arranged around the theme of Jérusalem délivrée ("rescued Jerusalem") and mainly display scenes from the life of Godefroy de Bouillon, who led the first crusade and ruled the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the eleventh century. 

"Godefroy de Bouillon écoutant l'ange Gabriel", St. Trophime, Arles; taken by FJM on 27 August 2009

The World's Largest Painting

Martirio e gloria di S. Pantalon by Giovanni Antonio Fumani (1645-1710), ceiling painting of the Chiesa di San Pantalone Martire, Venice. Painted between 1680 and 1704 (excerpt).

  
Taken by FJM on 18 March 2009

Venetians proudly claim this to be the largest painting on canvas in the world. (That's right: not a fresco, but painted on a gigantic canvas stretching over the entire church ceiling.)

This post is intended to investigate the truth value of this claim. Whoever spots a larger canvas painting anywhere in the world is welcome to leave a comment.

Quote of the Month: Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn on how to become a professional writer:

"The first thing is: you just have to do it. If you sit around waiting for the great opening sentence, you will never write anything. My father was an art expert and, for years, was planning to write a book on art. He used to leave notes for himself by the telephone, and the note would be "go to post office, pay gardener, write book". And, of course, if you just leave notes by the telephone, you never will write the book. A lot of it is just doing it. When [...] you're like a cocky young punk, and you can't quite understand why it is that some of these guys who you think are just middle-aged bores who haven't written anything interesting in 25 years are holding down all the jobs: my limited experience in the editing rooms of newspapers is that often it's because they're the guys who are reliable, that if you say "we need this by 5pm" they deliver it by 5pm. We have this awful phrase "he's just phoning it in". You'd be surprised, from the editor's point of view, how grateful you are for the guy who phones it in. Compared to when it's 5 o' clock and you haven't got the copy. I think at a certain level, you just need to be reliable, you've got to get on and do it. If you really don't want to be spending a couple of hours a day writing, you really should not be writing. I'm a painfully slow writer compared to a lot of people. I'm always horrified when I hear people saying how long they take to write a book. It comes very slowly to me. But even when it comes slowly, you've got to actually sit down there and do it."

Couldn't have stated the philosophy of this blog any better!

(Found in Conversations with History)

Calvin Needs a Bailout

Greg Mankiw reminds us of this 15-year old "Calvin & Hobbes" episode, which weirdly fits into the current economic situation (why would that be?).

"It's Growing Rapidly...

...I wonder if we should regulate its consumption of mortgage-backed securities!"

Paul Krugman as a tragic cartoon hero, albeit only with a small guest part.

The Coolest Music Ad Ever

[h/t Sophie]

This is Pornography!....??

      

The Royal Academy of Arts is going to open an exhibition on Lucas Cranach the Elder on March 8. Among the masterpieces on display will be his magnificent Venus (1532), which was also intended as the main poster for the show. Now, it seems like the Royal Academy will have to rethink its advertising strategy, as the Guardian reports:

Wearing nothing but her best necklace, a wisp of gauze and a foxy expression, Venus has been delighting connoisseurs for almost 500 years - but she has been banned from the underworld, as London Underground has decided she is likely to offend rather than enchant the capital's weary commuters.
[...] "Millions of people travel on the London Underground each day and they have no choice but to view whatever adverts are posted there. We have to take account of the full range of travellers and endeavour not to cause offence in the advertising we display," a spokesman said.
London Underground advertising is vetted by a firm called CBS Outdoor, and Venus seems to have fallen foul of the guideline that advertising should not "depict men, women or children in a sexual manner, or display nude or semi-nude figures in an overtly sexual context".

Having traveled on the London Underground for the past five years and endured countless of tasteless ads (without ever complaining), I can't help thinking that anyone who would be "offended" by a Cranach painting must either be nuts or a survivor from Victorian Britain. Plus, I fail to see the "overtly sexual context" here. Can anyone please elucidate me?

This is not Pornography!

Having experienced the netherworld of the French National Library last month, I somehow felt obliged to also see London's counterpart, the Seduced exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery. For there is, in my view, nothing as sublime, nothing as stylish, and nothing as acrobatic as classical pornography. I made my way to the Barbican last weekend and found it stunning. Not because of the 2000-years-old Roman sculptures and vases with explicitly sexual motifs; not because of the countless Indian Kama Sutra depictions; not because of the Japanese Shunga drawings, the oversized European oil-on-canvas paintings of Leda and the Swan, the Kinsey report's secret photographs, or the sado-maso pictures of Robert Mapplethorpe. It was purely worth it for the sake of discovering the work of Jeff Koons, a renowned New York artist (but not famous enough to be known amongst ignorant people like me) who, at the beginning of the 1990s, enjoyed a brief but passionate liaison with Ilona Staller (aka "La Cicciolina"). Staller, a former porn-star turned Italian MP who, in 2003, offered to make love to Sadam Hussein in order to prevent the Iraq War from taking its course, became the star of Koons's "Made in Heaven", a series of photographs silk-screened in oil on to canvas, depicting the couple engaged in sexual acts. The works are held in Koons's typical Kitsch-style and purport a subversive-yet-intensive notion of beauty that leaves one in no doubt that pornography can be art. From the exhibition catalogue:

Koons is interested in celebrity, and in the United States the film industry guarantees the widest fame. The American porn industry outstrips Hollywood in terms of financial return, and Koons wanted to make a film with a porn star, and was attracted to La Cicciolina because she wa also, incredibly, a politician. The film was never made, but the publicity was [...]. The porn industry is worlds apart from the established art scene, and Koon's appropriation of its aesthetic is in keeping with his aim of making high art out of low. More than this, he explained that the Made in Heaven series  'is based on my viewing the Masaccio painting  Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. I tried to remove bourgeois guilt and shame in responding to banality and dislocated imagery. The best vehicle for me to be able to do that is to operate on the level of sexuality.'
[...] The large oils on canvas were intended to evoke the grandeur of Salon paintings. Koons has said they are a declaration of his love for the Baroque and the Rococo. In one painting, Koons references Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe of 1863, which had caused such a scandal at the Paris Salon.

Interested 18+-year-olds may find some excerpts from the series below the fold.