Year: 2007

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Nature

Exciting Bird News!

Admittedly, it’s not actually a very exciting bird, even for a birder, looking as it does rather like a drabber-than normal town pigeon. And due to poor light, streaky window glass and so on, it’s a rubbish photo:

But it’s a new species for the garden: Stock Dove, Columba oenas. I don’t really expect to see them in London, but I’ve noticed them getting a mention from time to time at Regent’s Park Birds, so I was slightly readier for it than I might have been. It’s possible that they pass through the garden occasionally and I usually assume they are normal pigeons; or perhaps they’re spreading into London; or perhaps it’s away from its normal wintering grounds because of the current cold snap. Who knows.

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Other

thoughts on England vs Spain

If Peter Crouch didn’t spend the first half hour of a game treating defenders to his best imitation of a mountaineer trying to swarm up the north face of the Eiger, he might be more likely to get decisions going in his favour later.

Shaun Wright-Phillips and Kieron Dyer have both still got the qualities that made them exciting when you first saw them, but I think we’re going to have to give up on the hope that one them will suddenly turn into Christiano Ronaldo.

I’m really sick of hearing Alan Hansen come out with some version of “Well, obviously they’re better than us at actually using a foot to control a ball, but maybe if we run around fast enough and relentlessly enough, we’ll distract them.” it’s not that I think he’s wrong, I just want it to be England who are, in that weirdly double-edged phrase, a ‘good technical side’. Of course technique isn’t enough on its own, and there are other quailities that go into making a successful sportsman, but there must be some degree of correlation between technical excellence and, you know, winning stuff.

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Culture

Art at Christie’s

I went to the preview today of an auction of Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie’s. It made me think I should go to see art at auction houses more often.

What you don’t get is a curated exhibition, with the pieces arranged around some kind of (hopefully) illuminating theme. It’s a rather random selection of work determined by what happens to come up for sale. But there’s no entry fee, the paintings are well-displayed, it’s less crowded than exhibitions at major London galleries tend to be, and the staff are more deferential, even though they must have taken one look at me and realised that I was unlikely to be splashing out a few million quid for a Renoir. And the catalogue (expensive, but there are copies chained around the place for you to consult) gives loads of information about the work.

There were some nice paintings, too; Cezanne, Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky, Degas, Modigliani and so on. I rather liked Portrait d’Eugène Lamy by Gustave Caillebotte and this bull by Oscar Dominguez, for example, as well as some nice Vuillards. Most unexpected item: Giacometti chairs.

Of course the other thing that makes an auction different from a gallery is that all the work has an estimated price on the label. So you can find out that an awful marshmallowy Renoir group portrait of a lesson is worth 2.5 – 3.5 million pounds:

Isn’t that horrible? It’s interesting, though, trying to get some sense of who’s hot and who’s not in the current art market. Despite the price tag on that one, Renoirs were generally estimated at less than I expected; the Schieles on the other hand were pretty expensive.

It would be quite interesting if places like the National Gallery had valuations displayed on the labels. Would you be able to resist being swayed by the number of zeros? Of course they’d never do something so vulgar, and they’re probably quite keen to appear above such things, but I’m sure museums, academia and the art market have a symbiotic relationship. If an artist’s reputation is on the rise, I’m sure curators and collectors are affected in much the same way.