First Drafts
The Prospect magazine blog
Prospect
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9th February 2010
Where should it go? Just one of the many unusual pieces in The Museum of Everything
The last chance to visit The Museum of Everything, a marvellous temporary museum currently open in Primrose Hill, is fast approaching—it closes this Sunday, 14th February.
Packed into a warren of corridors, cubicles, and awkwardly shaped rooms this is a quirky exhibition of marginalised art of the past 200 years, which has at various times been labelled art brut, outsider art (the most popular term), folk art, naive art, visionary art and, occasionally, Sunday painting.
All the work is that of untrained artists, operating outside the commercial art world, in remote or impoverished communities and sometimes in mental institutions. The unusual space and lack of consensus it promotes over what art really is, encourages discussion over where art should go in the museological scheme of things.
Read Prospect’s art critic, Ben Lewis, on The Museum of Everything and the dangers of bringing this genre too far into the mainstream.
For further details visit their site: www.museumofeverything.com
Prospect
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8th February 2010
Edward Burra’s Harlem (1934)
Afro Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic
Tate Liverpool, 29th January-25th April, Tel: 0151 702 7400
In 1993, Paul Gilroy, now professor of social theory at LSE, wrote the groundbreaking book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. He identified a network of black cultures surrounding and crisscrossing the ocean, connecting Africa to North and South America, the Caribbean and Europe, all contributing to the powerful, hybrid, syncretic culture of the African diaspora. Gilroy argued that the contribution of this culture to 20th-century modernism and contemporary art has been consistently diminished. “Afro Modern” seeks to redress the balance.
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David Killen
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5th February 2010
By NAF, Prospect’s cartoonist of the month.
Brian Eno
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4th February 2010
I like those strangely boxy little electric cars. I like the message of their looks. They defy the traditional sleekness of car design and instead make a point of their functionalism. They say “OK—we may look a bit funny but we use a third of the energy your car is using.” They advertise their owners’ rethought priorities. They’re nearly as cool as bikes.
On the same spectrum are two small items of recent domestic technology. The first is a little box with a screen which shows, in watts, how much electricity you’re using. Switch on a light, and the figure goes up by 60 watts. Turn on the kettle and it goes up by another 3,000. Within hours of installing this box—which takes a couple of minutes—your energy usage changes. I discovered I’d been drawing a constant 140 watts for the last 15 years—for nothing (a defunct alarm system hidden in a cupboard, a fax machine on standby for faxes that nobody sends). I now use about 30 per cent less electricity.
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Edward Davey
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4th February 2010
Hay Cartagena comes to a close
The day began with an early morning interview with Judith Thurman, the distinguished biographer of Isak Dinesen and Colette, and writer for the New Yorker on fashion and books. We begin by talking about Michelle Obama and fashion. Judith speaks of Michelle’s achievement: like Jackie Kennedy, and unlike Princess Diana, she has understood the need to “mount the pedestal, hold your pose, and create a persona,” to fulfil the role of “old-fashioned consort” to the holder of office. Judith thinks that Michelle has been able to speak to different elements of America, including the majority of the population which keeps to a core of puritan, old-fashioned values.
Michelle’s is a “robust glamour,” though, with none of her feisty, opinionated intelligence reined in, and sexy too—a “wholesome marital sexuality,” as Judith puts it. All this explains her consistently high approval ratings (80 per cent) throughout the year, independent of the vicissitudes of her husband’s political life.
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Tom Streithorst
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3rd February 2010
With YouTube, everyone can be a director now
“It’s 2010—time to get off of the Titanic and get onto the lifeboats,” Kevin Anderson, the Guardian’s digital research editor, told me. I wasn’t pleased. I thought: ”But the Titanic has an orchestra, a well-stocked bar, fine Egyptian cotton sheets. The lifeboats have nothing but freezing cold water.” I was at an event at the Frontline Club which sought to ask how the news industry will survive the next decade. Will the internet save it, or kill it? I came out convinced the internet will be good for journalism, but probably be bad for me, a journalist.
For news consumers, the internet rocks. Wikipedia allows us to find out everything about just about anything—no need to take the bus to the British Library. The best writing about the financial crisis hasn’t been from traditional journalists but rather in blogs from academics like Simon Johnson or traders like Barry Ritholtz. Riverbendblog may have been opinionated and occasionally inaccurate, but it gave a better picture of life in Baghdad in the dark days of 2005-06 than any western journalist could. Ten years ago we would not have heard these voices. Now they are omnipresent.
And that is why the internet is bad for us journalists. It used to be hard to get published. We used to have a limited number of newspapers, magazines, television stations. If you worked for one of them, you had a guaranteed audience, which meant your editors could pay you a decent wage, fly you halfway around the world and put you up in a nice hotel. Today the internet allows anyone with any interest to get his work into the public eye. Naturally, market share has splintered and industry profits are down.
Kevin Anderson continued: “You used to be able to charge monopoly rents. No more.” And it’s undeniably true: the internet has removed barriers to entry and so democratised the industry. With YouTube, everybody can be a director. With Wordpress, everybody can be a pundit. When supply goes up, price goes down. Too bad for those of us who used to be directors or pundits. Probably good for the rest of the world.
Philip Hunter
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2nd February 2010
Under fire: a periodic attack from within
The peer review process, by which scientific research is accepted or rejected by leading journals such as Nature and Science, has come under one of its periodic attacks from within. This might seem an arcane matter to the general public, but it does matter to us all because peer review governs the quality of medical research that leads to the development of new treatments. The drugs we are prescribed a decade from now for a range of conditions—from cancer or heart disease to allergies—may hinge on peer review today. It can also influence the scientific advice ultimately determining major policy decisions—for example, about climate change.
The problem is that cutting edge research can only be properly assessed by specialists in the field who are, to some extent, rivals and may be subliminally at least motivated to produce slightly negative comments. In many fields there is just a handful of leading specialists around the world who both produce original work themselves and also peer review each other’s work.Such an arrangement may be the only one to ensure suitably expert assessment, but does inevitably elicit bouts of paranoia among scientists when their research submissions are either rejected as a result of negative comments from reviewers, or bogged down with requests for extensive further experiments that may take several years.
The latest complaint seems more than paranoia, however, since it came from 14 leading stem cell researchers in an open letter to all the major journals—journals in which scientists must publish if they want be taken seriously in their field and have their work funded. The accusation is essentially that self interest governs some of the peer review comments and therefore decides which research is published and ultimately taken further.
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A S H Smyth
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2nd February 2010
Frayn: attending Galle this year
Thursday: three hours down to Galle with Pradeep Jeganathan, noted anthropologist, shortlisted short-story writer, and member of my “post-war literary” panel. Started Out of Sheer Rage, which is the Tristram Shandy of literary criticism inasmuch as, halfway through, the subject—Geoff Dyer’s proposed study of DH Lawrence—is still “not yet born.”
Woke this morning (Friday) in agony, on the floor of Ru Freeman’s hotel room. Apart from a shared lift yesterday evening, Ru Freeman does not know me from Adam.
Effortful recollections of last night’s writers’ welcome drinking session. Met the man who played the brigadier in the recent film version of The Road From Elephant Pass (a garment manufacturer in real life). Also met Rana Dasgupta, the bright young Delhi-based novelist whom I’m supposed to interview at some point, and his wife, the artist Monica Narula. And met Ulrik Plesner, renowned Danish architect and colleague of G Bawa—until Plesner got married, anyway (the history of Sri Lankan modern architecture, ex-pats included, is a litany of homosexual tantrums). Then (re)introduced myself to Michael Frayn, whom I interviewed a couple of years back—nothing doing, until I mention that he thought I’d come to fix the door knobs and then I discovered he had not in fact adapted the play about which I was supposed to be asking him questions. “Ah,” he says, “yes.” He was smiling, but all the same I made a note not to bother him for the rest of the weekend.
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David Killen
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2nd February 2010
By NAF, Prospect’s cartoonist of the month.
Edward Davey
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1st February 2010
In conversation: Ian McEwan
The highlights of Saturday morning were two sensitive, probing and humane interviews of contemporary authors, Paolo Giordano and Mario Vargas Llosa, conducted by one of Colombia’s most celebrated contemporary writers, Hector Abad Faciolince. Faciolince is best known for his autobiographical work El olvido que seremos, a searing account of the political violence in Medellín—the second largest city in Colombia—in the 1990s which led to the assassination of his father, a prominent university professor outspoken in his condemnation of para-military, drug-related violence (a work now being translated into English by the prize-winning translator, Anne McLean).
Faciolince is a generous, kind, and erudite man, and his conversation with Paolo Giordano, in Italian, drew out many of the facets of the 28-year old author from Turin, whose novel La solitudine dei numeri primi (The Solitude of Prime Numbers), has been a worldwide publishing phenomenon. Giordano, a physicist who is to present his doctoral thesis next week, spoke about the tormented adolescence of Alice and Mattia (the two principal protagonists), his literary influences (including Ian McEwan), and the process of writing the book itself. For a young man (enviably) caught up in perhaps unexpected global success, Giordano seemed kind, unassuming, reflective and critically aware.
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