Another one from the National and another obvious choice. Self Portrait at the Age of 63 by Rembrandt. It’s so human. This isn’t the kind of thing people normally mean by ‘minimalist’ but I think it is a kind of minimalism. The best kind, perhaps.
The Greatest Painting in Britain Poll is being run by the National Gallery and the BBC to find the best-loved painting in a UK collection.
I’m using it as a reason to post some of my favourite paintings. No. 1: Portrait of a Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling by Hans Holbein the Younger, ca. 1527. It’s technically brilliant, it has cute animals in it, and it’s vaguely surreal. Why has this impassive-looking young woman been painted with a starling and squirrel? The colours don’t look quite right on either version I found. There’s a larger (but rather washed out) version where it’s easier to see what’s going on here.
Seth Abramson has a post at his blog explaining the aesthetic basis for the new online poetry journal, The New Hampshire Review.
Specifically, he thinks that too many online publications are too gimmicky, too self-consciously ‘web’ and have lost touch with the qualities that make a good print journal. So no advertising, no Flash, no wacky layouts or un-navigable sitemap. The NHR is designed to showcase the content, not the ingenuity of the designers.
All those ambitions are admirable – although it’s worth pointing out that they are the ambitions of any good web designer. I don’t think its necessary to invoke the idea of ‘a print journal on the web’ to see the merits of clean design, a clear layout and an emphasis on the content.
More seriously, for me, the emphasis on ‘print’ virtues has lead them to produce a site which not only looks like a print journal but looks like an old-fashioned one. The painting on the front, the typeface of the title and the general look of the thing all make it seem decades out of date. It doesn’t need to be bleeding-edge design, but it could certainly afford to be a bit sharper, a bit less stodgy-looking.
I nearly posted a comment to that effect on his blog, but it seemed like rather tactless timing.
I’ve been following the discussions about eclecticism (of taste, of anthologies) among the poblogs.
My initial reaction was that it was being intentionally divisive – in the Silliman mode of needing to denigrate the competition to justify yourself. But I just remembered how true it seemed when I once heard someone say “I just don’t understand how you can like both the Pre-Raphaelites and Vermeer”.
That’s a pair that means more to me than the ones KSM has come up with, which either involve poets whose work I don’t know very well, or jazz musicians. It would be an interesting game making up similar pairs, although I’m still uncertain whether people’s taste is as coherent and predictable as that.
A different question is whether one should embrace these divisions as an inevitable truth, or try and cultivate a broad appreciation of different work. You don’t want to be so open-minded that you blunt your critical faculties, but an insistence on the impossibility of eclecticism is likely to be self-fulfilling.
A couple of days ago I went to see an exhibition called Folk Archive at the Barbican.
That website includes lots of the exhibits but the pictures are annoyingly without all the contextual information that helps make sense of them.
It was an exhibition of contemporary British folk art, but that term was interpreted extremely broadly; the exhibition includes (some of these are photos rather than the actual object): trade union banners, graffiti, prison art, modified cars, costumes from traditional festivals, prostitute calling cards, sectarian murals, shop signs, painted false nails, football fanzines, protest placards, crop circles, sand castles, flower arrangements…
The sheer range of objects makes it hard to know what to say. Many of them were complete tat – unremarkable examples of mundane objects – but seeing them all together one did get a sense of a huge wealth of amateur, unofficial creativity. I enjoyed it and found it curiously cheering.
Some mad video of people running through the streets of Ottery St Mary carrying burning tar barrels on their shoulders to celebrate Guy Fawkes Night. And the Burry Man of South Queensferry. And other oddities. It made the modified car rallies and the Mods and Rockers reunion look like part of a long tradition.
Jonathan, Laurel and Emily have commented on whether it’s possible to write (read) a poem without a layer of irony.
What I find odd is a tendency to conflate irony with self-awareness. Self-awareness may be a necessary condition for irony, but I can’t see that they are the same thing.
I’m English and middle class, so I live among people for whom, in everyday life, sincerity is often a faux pas. Irony is the default mode of conversation in social situations. But that doesn’t mean you can’t turn it off.