Popinjay Art

Without going into arguments about the meaning of art, it would not be too wide of the mark to say that to succeed in today's Contemporary Art market, just two things are necessary. They are: to (1) get noticed and (2) have cred.

To achieve (1) it would be sufficient to ride down the main street in Teheran dressed as Lady Godiva. This gets you noticed, but only in places like Teheran. In the rest of the world, in places where big bucks are being spent on art, the problem facing artists and gallery owners alike is how do you get noticed when people are no longer surprised by any antics?

In today's climate, the feverish and highly publicised competition between Sotheby's and Christie's provides some kind of answer. Get sky high prices for your work and people will pay attention. The mechanism for doing this is quite simple and involves gallery stooges bidding up a sample of an artist's work in return for a kickback from the gallery of most of the price paid. Naturally, because of a cynical public, it only works in tandem with a cred building operation, in which art critics play a vital and equally well remunerated role.

Which brings us to (2). Cred works as long as you have a credulous pool of punters. Lady Godiva will have an uphill task persuading the Teheran morals police that she was making an artistic statement. This may be partly due to her lack of a real message, but I put my money on her apprehenders' limited credulity. Some would call this a lack of culture, but who is right? In the cultural capitals of the world, how much investor credulity is the work of high prices? Time was when exhibition catalogues featured paragraphs of turgid prose, which the artist himself couldn't understand, let alone his poor mother, devoted to puffing up the artist's message. But today, to get credibility, it is enough for a gallery (or for Damien Hurst) to put its money where its mouth is. With enough money, the message part can be left blank.

My point is that when people are punting on stuff just because they see its price going up, you have what is called a bubble. And when the bubble pops, as it invariably does, all your cred goes down the drain along with your moolah. A white canvas with nine knife slashes which was once a statement of wealth, and may once have caused a stir at some dimly remembered exhibition, loses that meaning when prices plunge, and becomes a symbol of gullibility. At least a nice Gauguin on the wall will comfort you until the dunners arrive, but a perspex box of flies will not even serve to settle your debts. Creditors are notoriously conservative in their tastes, which, in a way, explains how they became creditors.

For those dreamers who think the market will be there to bail them out I say this: the large auction houses' practice of guaranteed sale prices, like all insurances, only serves to incite buyers - who will be future sellers - to greater recklessness, and is a safety mechanism they can ill afford to offer in a bear market.

J.K.Galbraith's A Short History of Financial Euphoria neatly describes the mechanisms behind the seventeenth century tulip bubble, lest you forget. It should be required reading for those who believe we have moved on from those years. It is as short as its title promises and should be re-read at least once every two years.

One day, I would like to talk about art, as I have a soft spot for real paintings, as a visit to my online gallery will surely show.

The rape of Changchun

So there was a bit less hoohah this year about the famous Rape of Nanking (or Nanjing). The Herald Tribune's Eamonn Fingleton writes: "For observers of Sino-Japanese relations the big news in the past week has been that there has been no news. Although last Thursday marked the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the notorious Nanking massacre, political activists in both Japan and China have been notable - so far at least - for their restraint.

"Given that the massacre, which began on Dec. 13, 1937, and continued for six weeks, was one of the worst atrocities in military history, the Chinese people would be forgiven for expressing their feelings in less muted terms."

Prize-winning Chinese writer Xu Zhigeng estimates the dead at over 300,000 dead. Maybe he won the prize for making the highest guess. Other estimates are as much as 50% lower. Wherever the truth lies, it was a sad chapter in history.

Almost as sad, in fact, as a similar massacre ordered eleven years later by a Chinese general, Lin Biao, presumably (according to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's version of events) at the behest of that arch Malthusian, Mao Zedong. Lin's actual words used on May 30th 1948 were "turn Changchun into a city of death". This was achieved by blocking all food going into the city and refusing exit to anyone, man, woman or infant in arms. Towards the end of the five-month-long agony, starving mothers were coming out to offer their babes to the soldiers who barred their exit, while begging to be killed themselves. Changchun's mayor's estimate was of 170,000 survivors out of an initial population of half a million, a higher death toll than even the highest estimate of the Nanjing massacre.

While this horror story was unfolding, I was being born in a pleasant town on England's south coast in a thunderstorm. So should I have a beef? It all comes down to the luck of the draw.

Changchun is a fairly featureless North-Eastern Chinese provincial capital city whipped by blizzards in the winter and sandstorms in the summer. Its pride is an international sculpture park intended to offset in some small measure the drabness and boredom of the place. I have only met two people connected with the city. One was a girl who was born and bred there and came to France to study. I asked her if there was a siege museum in her town similar to the one in Nanking and she didn't know what I was talking about. The other was a young gay American who had been paid $17,000 US to marry the daughter of a wealthy Changchun family to help her get the hell out of the country.

This shows that the Chinese Boss Party is capable when it so wishes, of tastefully burying memories along with the dead, and therefore the lack of fuss about Nanking should come as no surprise. As for those whose memories could not be erased, and whose faith in their country might have been shaken by the siege, some were able quietly to save up enough cash to buy a Green Card for their progeny, to avoid that most terrible of fates, extirpation of the family line, should the wind ever start blowing the other way again.

The good news is that tourists are once again welcome in Changchun. One online travelguide mentions tea shops and pubs and exotic flavours. For lovers of history the Jilin Provincial Museum exhibits glorious stories of Chinese heroes during the Anti-Japanese War (1937 - 1945).

And for those of you who find history a big yawn, you can't knock the genteel attractions of Bournemouth. As its name implies, a great place to be born.

Brainteaser

Having been advised that my blog needed livening up with some pictorial content, I decided to go one further and give you a little brainteaser. The image below contains three types of bloodsucking animals. Can you name the one hiding in the middle?

People in grass houses...

...shouldn't stow thrones.

Heart attacks are nature's way of disposing of superfluous troublesome males. This highly politically inkorect revelation came to me as a result of reading an article about red deer. Apparently they have heart attacks too. Usually it is the fate of previously dominant males who have been dethroned by a younger, stronger rival. Such individuals have outlived their usefulness to the herd and have become a nuisance and a danger to its survival. So nature does what nature does. In terms of evolution it shouldn't be too hard to sketch scenarios to explain why groups with this disposal mechanism could win battles against those without it. Killing off old rogues gives the group an evolutionary edge.

So, my best beloved, if this is true, you will doubtless want to huddle round and learn how not to become superfluous old rogues. Sod the group, I want to live! I hear you say.

In the article, which must be over twenty years old at least, the precipitating factor most commonly observed in red deer deaths by heart attack was sudden loss of territory - and the concomitant loss of control over females. Parallel situations in human society can take many forms, and territory can have many guises. An orchestral conductor has his patch, and can tell the pretty Korean cellist when to come in, while a bus conductor has his and can tell people where to get off. Some territories are unique and unassailable, while others change hands faster than boxing trophies. Humans have evolved so many ways of carving out patches that it is sometimes hard to recognize that a patch exists at all. Academic specialities multiply and subdivide, allowing some old professors a long, golden retirement, with the occasional Christmas card from former female students. New records keep being added to the Guinness book, creating new fields for excellence. With each new field, there is room for a new top dog, and groupies to cheer him on. And then along came the Internet, with its domains, personal pages, blogspots and an endless supply of virtual terrain just going begging.

So have we averted the risk?

In order not to be kicked off a throne, a good plan might be to avoid sitting on one. At the heart of any territory is that old human need: recognition. It is what drives those heart attack prone over-achievers. If we could live without that, could we avoid heart attacks?

Or if we could learn to content ourselves with recognition from our dog, could we live to see better times? What happens when the dog dies?

Now that is a question which has stumped humanity for a long time.

Homo seropositivus

We read on bbcnews that:

"Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said. Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge (...) People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species."

It is always nice to have one's ideas confirmed by theorists. Even if 100,000 is a much too generous timespan, and a Hollywood world view has blinded the man's science. A much faster-acting splitting mechanism than sexual choosiness could be HIV/AIDS.

It won't be long (in evolutionary time) before some HIV carrier populations become resistant to AIDS. They will be able to interbreed quite happily among themselves, but any attraction non-carrier populations may feel for them will always be fatal.

The privilege of being HIV negative will over time accrue to those with access to better education and information, and the means to afford blood tests for their propective partners. These could well converge with the class that Professor Curry describes as "tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the 'underclass' humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures."

The emergent overclass may appear to have all the advantages, the best schools and hospitals, choice of mates, and the power to oblige HIV positives to be tattooed at birth with dodgy equipment; but as the pariah caste becomes stronger and more resistant to HIV's pathogenicity, it will have gained one significant genetic advantage over the HIV negative Uebermensch.

But perhaps by then the overclass boffins will have figured out a way to farm underclass blood to produce a vaccine against their heinous effluences. That way bored baronets can revert to sharing a needle with the butler and poking the parlourmaid without fear of the consequences.

Sounds like heads I win, tails you lose.

Is the Koran actionable?

Muslims in the UK and other countries trying to have incitement to hatred on grounds of religious belief banned could be shooting themselves in the foot. Drafters of such a law will have to tread pretty carefully if they want to avoid having the Koran itself withdrawn from shelves.

Muslims are known to revere the text and are categorically opposed to the idea of changing one iota - or hamza - despite the book's evident need of a good editor or ghost writer to sort out its rambling, incoherent style, its ranting tone and penchant for self-serving anachronisms such as the claim that Abraham was a muslim. And that's before we even look at the legal aspects.

One group who might consider itself poorly treated if the book is allowed to continue to be available in public libraries is the growing majority of atheists which the Koran calls unbelievers. To find out if the text actually incites hatred of this group, nothing simpler than to type in the word "unbeliever" into the searchbox of the searchable online Koran.

What the search reveals is that although Allah is going to do unspeakably horrid things to unbelievers, the believers themselves are simply enjoined not to number unbelievers among their friends. So the question boils down to does sending to Coventry count as an act of hatred, or do you have to be more beastly?

An alternative way to resolve the conundrum would be to substitute the word "muslims" for "unbelievers" into the results of the search, and ask muslim lawyers if they consider the resulting sentences actionable. If so then they must be equally actionable in their original form.

They might then contend that incitement to hatred on grounds of belief does not include incitement on the grounds of unbelief . Do unbelievers not believe anything, or can it be claimed they actively believe there is no God? The simple solution to protect everyone's rights would be to insert the words "or unbelief" after belief, so that the wording reads "incitement to hatred on grounds of religious belief or unbelief".

While I feel that the book could incite impressionable minds to a paranoid world view and should therefore not be given to children, the incitement to actual hatred is not explicit enough to merit outright banning, and anyone who hates people as a result of reading it is the sort of crackpot who probably hates people without the need for literary justification.

As I said, in framing such a bill careful attention will need to be paid to the choice of words, the more so as it is too late to ask the book's author to measure his.

An ark for the Big One

One day a huge earthquake is going to make a lot of people wish they had built themselves geodesic domes.

Well of course it won't, because domes have not been on most people's radar for a while. But traditional rectangular houses have two main weak points: the right-angle joins, which fail in wooden structures; and the parallel walls, which respond in unison to directional shocks. That pretty much takes care of the whole house.

One thing which makes city planners shy away from domes is the problem of packing them together in high density districts. What do you do with the "wasted" space between adjoining circles? Also, how can you build high rise?

I have often wondered why we can't build in hexagons like bees. A bee must navigate using six cardinal points rather than our four. So our problem could be simply one of vocabulary. Were the honeycomb principle to be extended to houses or hotels with many rooms, those bodily directions - left, right, back and front - would be inadequate for giving directions to the restroom. It seems we are limited to the amount of limbs we have. If only it were second nature to think North, Earth, East, South, West and Worth - with East and West sliding down to 4 and 8 o'clock and Earth and Worth moving in at 2 and 10 - we might have less earthquake victims and more interesting brains. But to be as brainy as the bee we would need an extra pair of arms.

There is an ancient disused Koranic school out there in the Colorado desert - or is it New Mexico? - built on a honeycomb plan. When I wrote to Time's editorial board about this after the last Los Angeles quake, they buried the story.

I therefore mention it here for the benefit of Time readers who feel they are not being fully informed.