EDIT: and a quotable quote.
Another wonder of nature.
Tag: news
Someone took a hammer to Fountain by Marcel Duchamp. Which is the famous sculpture made from a urinal. I just found the BBC’s phrasing annoying:
A 77-year-old Frenchman has spent a night in custody in Paris after attacking a plain porcelain urinal considered to be a major artwork.
‘considered’ to be a major artwork? It’s one of the iconic artworks of the 20th century! I can’t believe that 88 years after the event, the BBC still feels the need to prevaricate about it. Not the Daily Mail or the Sun, but the BBC, a serious news organisation and a major cultural broadcaster to boot. Fuckwits. What kind of philistinic culture do we live in?
I don’t insist people should like Fountain, and if you wanted, you could argue it’s a kind of work which has been a rather uninteresting experiment and should be relegated to a footnote in art history. Or whatever. But the idea that we have to have the same stupid, boring, pointless argument about whether it’s art, over and over again – aargh!
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Tomorrow’s News Today
This story from Avant News made me laugh.
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Muslim Miss England
England is sending our first Muslim competitor to Miss World – the really rather attractive Hammasa Kohistani, whose family came to the UK as refugees from Afghanistan. Since her presence in the competition is two fingers up to the Taleban and religious nutjobs generally, I hope she does well. But I’m still slightly disappointed we’re not going to be represented by Miss Bolton, because apart from the fact that she’s also very attractive, she has the fabulous name of Peace Blessing Oybio. So many parents would have chickened out and called her either Peace OR Blessing, but thankfully the Oybios hold themselves to higher standards.
I’m glad to see that Miss England is more attractive than Misses Scotland, Wales, Ireland or Northern Ireland. Miss Wales particularly looks like a moody cow. Though that may be the photographer’s fault.
No entrant from Iran this year, I notice.
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The Red Crystal
A red ‘crystal’ has joined the Red Cross and Red Crescent as an emblem for ambulances and relief workers. This is because Israel refuse to use either the Cross or the Crescent, and other Middle-Eastern nations refuse to accept a red Cross of David.
What they really ought to do, of course, is scrap the Red Cross and Red Crescent in favour of just one politically and religiously neutral symbol – the crystal, presumably. But it took them ten years to come up with the current compromise, so don’t expect that to happen any time soon.
The Times reports today that a property developer in Scotland has had to come up with new plans for a housing estate to accomodate a large rock after locals protested that digging it up would disturb the fairies that lived there. Or possibly because Pictish kings had been crowned on it – their stories seem to be a bit mixed, but they seem to have agreed that moving the rock would be bad juju.
Given my general scepticism about all things New Age and supernatural, you might expect me to be exasperated by this. But no, I think it’s great. One of the things I really liked in Japan was that, when you went walking in the country, any prominent landscape feature – a big rock, a waterfall – would usually have a little shrine on it or by it. The shrines were extremely rudimentary – often just three bits of rock arranged into the rough shape of a torii gate, like a little tiny dolmen about a foot high – but just enough to indicate that the spot was important. This picture gives you some idea of the shrines I’m talking about, although it’s taken at Kamakura, a big temple site, not just some random bit of the Japanese countryside.
In Japan, the shrines would be to kami – Shinto nature spirits – but really, kami, fairies, it’s all the same thing. Now I don’t believe there are actually fairies or spirits living in every prominent rock or ancient tree; but the practice humanises and enriches the landscape. Just the fact that it picks out striking things and says ‘look at me’ gives a focus to the landscape. When we talk about respect for nature, it tends to be in an environmental context; respecting whole ecosystems. There’s a lot to be said for respecting your local big rock.
My uncle had a cottage in Wales. In one of the fields nearby was a standing stone. I’m not talking Stonehenge here; just a long thin rock sticking about two feet out of the ground. For all I know, it was actually put there by a couple of bored locals as a gag, but it doesn’t matter, somehow; the fact that it’s there makes the field a special place in a way no functional building would.
I think a lot of Andy Goldsworthy’s work has the same appeal – it’s the non-destructive, respectful engagement with the landscape, to give it a human aspect without de-naturing it.