Clive Davis

BUYERS' MARKET?

A revealing pronouncement from the director of the NY Metropolitan Museum:

We have pretty much made the decision not to buy very much of this generation. There is plenty of time, if someone emerges as a major artist, to buy that artist fifty years from now.

Does that mean the value of Charles Saatchi's collection has just gone up or down?

ROBERT HUGHES, A GOOD MAN

The Australian-born art critic has published his autobiography. A thumbs-up from the Washington Post:

   Most important for the career that was to follow, he rejected "the idea that there was something inherently repressive about old art, as though the past were a dead weight that new art, young art, had to shake off." He learned that "the past is pervasive; it seeps into everything; it is the very air that artists and their public breathe," and he lost for good "a belief in the potency of the avant-garde."

He writes: "I have never regained it, and today, looking at the ever-more-feeble efforts on the part of the art world to designate its latest products as 'cutting-edge,' 'edgy,' 'radical,' etcetera, I am not in the least sorry to have lost it. Some new works of art have value of some kind or another. Others, the majority, have little or none. But newness as such, in art, is never a value."

THREE ACTS OF REMEMBRANCE

"Danny was an ordinary person, and a damn good reporter... This will be a tribute to a life that represents our culture." Composer Steve Reich describing his new work, Daniel Variations, due to be premiered in London next month. [I can't see an online link to the Guardian piece yet - will try again later. In the meantime, more here.]

Deborah Lipstadt, author of that superb account of her day in court with David Irving, reviews a new book on the history of ethnic cleansing in Europe.

Finally, I came home from holiday with a cutting from Libération about what sounds like a deeply moving exhibition by the artist Boris Taslitzky, a Communist who survived imprisonment in Buchenwald during WW2. Slightly to my surprise, I've discovered that the article is still available on the Web. The exhibition itself, in Paris, has another few weeks to run.         

BUNKER-ON-THAMES

The weather is baking, and I can barely summon up the energy to be depressed about that design for the Tate Modern extension. It's not so much the charmlessness, more the fact that it's such a boring, trendy cliche. Of course, millions of tourists will roll up in search of a free lunch,  so it will be judged a huge success.

At least the plans for the V&A's metallic carbuncle seem to have stalled.

Hmm, there's a large pile of rubble outside my living room window. It used to be the front wall. Perhaps I should just leave it there and tell everyone it's by Daniel Libeskind.

THUNDERERS

Two pieces of mine in today's Times. One is an interview with the comedian Dwight Slade, a close friend of the incendiary, Chomsky-spouting stand-up Bill Hicks. Slade is very much a man of the Left, so I was more than a little surprised to discover that he'd recently been entertaining troops in Afghanistan.

The other article is about arts blogging:

UNTIL a while ago, one of my extra-curricular activities involved visiting Manhattan clubs with a lissom New Yorker called Alizinha. Not that we had ever met, you understand, but Alizinha hosted a vivacious blog called the Brazilian Muse, full of a fan’s insights into the work of some of my favourite carioca artists. As well as reporting on major concerts, she enjoyed deconstructing Portuguese lyrics and serving up classy MP3s. In short, she was the perfect guide.

Sadly, her site is dormant now (blogs are constantly arriving and disappearing with the minimum of fanfare). Fortunately, there are always other enthusiasts to lead me astray in various areas of the arts. Most are American for the simple fact that Britain still lags two or three years behind when it comes to what even Luddites now know as the "blogosphere". A little more than a year ago, I had a series of conversations at a party with fellow journalists, none of whom had the remotest idea what a blog looked like. Why on earth, one of them asked me incredulously, would anyone want to write for free?

Well, I can think of all sorts of reasons, including self-promotion and the joy, and occasional terror, of being your own editor. Have laptop, will pontificate. (You can make money out of it as well.) But there is the additional attraction of being able to bypass the cultural conveyor belt. We like to think of artistic endeavour as a will-o’-the-wisp activity where inspiration comes from the gods, yet the truth is that the business is run as rigidly as any other industry.

Arts centres roll out their latest, best-ever autumn season, publicists prime journalists with advance copies of the latest Great American Novel, press junkets give reporters ten minutes each with Ewan McGregor. At its best, the system helps the informed reader to sort the gold from the dross. At its worst, it degenerates into an exercise in log-rolling. And as newspapers expand into ever larger, multi-section entities, critical voices grow more and more diffuse. Blogs, at least in these early, innocent days, add a nonconformist voice to the conversation. While some of the more messianic members of the online "community" talk of overthrowing the "dead tree" media, the real function of blogging is that it supplements mainstream output (without which most blogs, whether they admit to it or not, would wither away overnight).

At the moment my regular arts diet includes the Playgoer’s highly opinionated but well informed take on the ins and out of Broadway and off-Broadway (playgoer.blogspot.com). One of its main preoccupations of late has been the controversy over the planned New York transfer of the Royal Court hit My Name Is Rachel Corrie. Unlike the Playgoer, I thought the piece was an utterly conventional slab of agitprop. But there is an important principle at stake in allowing it to be staged in Manhattan without fear of upsetting political groups. The Playgoer showed more interest in that question than did many establishment journalists. Bloggers may be mildly obsessive, but the fact that some New York producers now offer them free seats to new shows is a sign of the role that they can play in helping a production to find its audience. On the political front, conservative sites such as the film forum Libertas (libertyfilmfestival.com/libertas/) are also challenging the stifling, one-party state mentality of so many Hollywood insiders.

That has to be good for the Left as well as the Right: one reason why much of our political drama is so dull is that it insists on approaching issues from the same relentlessly predictable point of view.

Blogs, by the way, don’t have to be cranky, amateur one-man bands. One site we would do well to imitate, artsjournal.com, brings together a battalion of reviewers and practitioners, among them my favourite American arts writer, The Wall Street Journal’s indefatigable critic Terry Teachout (artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight). 

Arts Journal provides a platform for the sort of give and take you normally hear in the bar after a show or a concert. One recent group discussion touched on the subject of whether technology will eventually render critics redundant.

Are we moving towards an internet-driven system where the public will prefer to debate a film or exhibition rather than read one person’s assessment? I hope it never comes to that — life is too short for blog-ins about Big Brother or the new Superman Returns film.

Some pundits believe, too, that TV drama series and the like will be increasingly shaped by online audiences. I’m not so sure. All I do know is that we journalists are going to have to get used to sharing the stage with them.

SPENCER RA

My favourite, favourite artist... Today is the 115th anniversary of his birth. If you don't know his work, the Tate is a useful place to start, while the Sandham Memorial Chapel, home to a stunning series of First World War paintings, must be one of Britain's best-kept secrets.

PS: The scholarly website set up by Spencer's biographer, Kenneth Pople, includes a section on another of the WW1 works, Travoys With Wounded Soldiers, a scene from the Macedonia front, 1916. The unassuming Spencer served as a medical orderly during the conflict, which is one reason why the Sandham series adds an unexpectedly domestic touch to the images of battle:

In December 1919 the painting joined others in the major Exhibition of The Nation's War Paintings at Burlington House (the Royal Academy.) On Preview Day, turning from Piccadilly into the courtyard, Stanley was co-opted by an imperious gentleman descending from a cab to carry his bag. At the entrance an attendant stopped Stanley and told him he could go no further. The gentleman, taking his bag, gave Stanley sixpence and went on in. Stanley had to produce his invitation card to prove that indeed he could enter because he was one of the invited artists.

TAT(E)

So it's not just me, then. Stuart Jeffries also suffers from an allergic reaction to that gigantic art bunker on the Thames:

It's the ramp. Every time I walk down Tate Modern's ramp, my spirits descend with me. Like Orpheus, I hope to climb out of this underworld with something special, but I usually come out with a migraine. And even though I have seen some terrific things (Juan Munoz's installation Double Bind, for example), it's always a relief to leave...

Nowhere in London is the hand of tourism so asphyxiatingly wrapped around the throat of art. But Tate Modern isn't just a victim of its own success. The ramp is designed for Brobdingnagian giants, not humans; the escalators whisk you through gloom; the blackwood everywhere is oppressive. Why do I keep going back? Perhaps because I ought to like it.

"Because I ought to like it..." A large part of our arts industry is built on those words. Never mind, lots of fun in the rest of the Guardian's guide to the worst of Britain's tourist attractions.

STANDARDS

An old anecdote, admittedly, but one that bears re-telling. From a dinner in honour of Hilton Kramer, enemy of all that is trendy in the cultural sphere:

The story goes that one night, when Hilton was still chief art critic of the New York Times, he found himself seated next to Woody Allen, who asked him whether he felt embarrassed when he ran into people whose work he had attacked. "No," Hilton replied without missing a beat,"I expect them to be embarrassed for doing bad work."

ASIANS AGAINST CENSORSHIP?

More on that religious art controversy, mentioned yesterday. Sunny Hundal wants to raise the stakes:

Sooner or later we will have to take a stand. We cannot let the likes of the Hindu Forum, Muslim Council of Britain, MAC, Sikh Federation etc issue press releases about the "grave insult" that actions of others have caused millions of people, when we know it is one man in his office.We need a coalition of people, from the Asian community, who are willing to stand up against censorship. Otherwise they will carry on competing with each other in the victimhood stakes.

THE ARTIST AND THE HINDU PROTESTORS

Pickled Politics brings news of what sounds like another clash of religion v art, this time in London. Sunny Hundal doesn't think much of the campaigners.