The title speaks for the photos. One day I will take black-and-white photos in the rain under a dark grey sky and then I will be a real photographer.
Friday, 24 October 2025
Friday, 17 October 2025
Craig Clunas' Art In China - Oxford Art History Series
A history of art for non-professionals should be about the professional lives of the artists, what their works were, why we should be interested, what technical challenges the artist faced and solved, what innovations they made, who the patrons were or if the works were speculative, and what symbolism and allusion we illiterate modern viewers will otherwise surely miss. Something about who owns the paintings would be interesting. None of this has to be lengthy: where the artist bought their paint, when they used canvas or jute or paper, what are the identifying marks of their brushstrokes, that sort of detail can be left to essays in specialist journals, or very expensive reference books. Provenances and previous sale prices are for a catalogue from Christie or Sotheby. A little colour may help, if the artist was imprisoned by some Italian Duke, or had to flee to Portugal to escape the French, or something like that.
This is not what a post-modern art-history will give us. Post-modern commentary makes everything about power, politics, gender, and class. This is shame, because it means the texts are almost identical up to the names of people, dates and places, from one period or style to the next. Art is for rich people. Artists were not given the respect and celebrity they deserved, except for (enter names here). Women’s contributions have been erased from the record, but they probably produced better art than the men. Contributions by non-Europeans also erased from the record because White Fragility and racisim. Western art bad, indigenous art good, especially if it satirises the Europeans. Portrayals of deviance, subversive and Good; portrayals of heterosexual pleasure, patriarchal, oppressive and Bad. You know the drill.
The Oxford Art History series is full of it, and I have no idea why I bought this volume. Maybe I was expecting more.
The further back in time we go, the more art is about statues, pottery, mosaics, jewellery and other solid things that last. What remains belongs to kings, princes, dukes, bishops, knights, and wealthy merchants. If there was any pop-culture, it has almost vanished, unless it was on pottery. This is rather convenient for a post-modernist: they get to hob-nob with the rich and powerful, all the while holding their noses delicately against the whiff of modern sins, at the same time overlooking the legal and economic conditions of feudalism, which a modern middle-class person would find intolerable, but our post-modern scholars, one suspects, would rather enjoy, since they fancy themselves the courtiers of the powerful. Every now and then a satirical illustration will turn up on a wall or a jug, and the post-modern scholar will rejoice at this sign of “resistance” if it is to “colonial” powers (“resistance” to the local feudal lord was altogether too risky for the resistor for any traces to be left for us to find).
Craig Clunas delicately protests at the idea of “Chinese Art” and insists that it is “Art made in China”. The phrase “Chinese Art” suggests that there is a large body of work made in China that follows some common conventions, and over a long period of time, up to (say) 1950 or so, when modern telecommunications and travel started to homogenise those parts of the cultural world that saw a profit in it. In this sense, there is undoubtedly “Chinese Art”: elegant calligraphy, virtuosic drawing in ink of scenes and items from nature, stylised faces, and - this is something I learned from the book - huge landscapes overwhelming an event of significance in the lives of the people… what people, oh, there, almost hidden in that little house. No or few flattering portraits of emperors and their concubines; no scenes of piety at a shrine, with the client kneeling in profile to one side, as were common in the medieval times in Europe; no commemorations of famous victories… or at least none have come survived.
Where are all the celebratory paintings? Why were Chinese rulers immune to the grandiosity of their European counterparts? What were the technical challenges of painting on silk, and why did paper replace it? Why the tiny figures in vast landscapes? Why the lack of colour? Why all the painfully restrained and elegant pale blues and black and white sketching? What was the purpose of the calligraphy and stamps on an image? Why do the stamps seem so carelessly placed compared to the positioning of the calligraphy? Why did calligraphy have such a pre-eminent position in courtly society?
These questions can be answered in a paragraph at most, but require more than a paragraph of research. That’s the scholar’s job: to reduce hours of painful research and understanding to a couple of hundred words we mere mortals can understand.
My suggestion is that, big as it may be, China simply did not have the diversity of farmland and hence of crops and animals that Europe had. It does not now. Thus it could not generate the excess profits needed to support a (literally) rich culture. Also, Emperor Xuando issued the Edict of Haijin in 1434 that almost closed off the country from the rest of the world. There were Westerners - often traders and missionaries in China, but their access and influence seems to have been very limited.
Clunas mentions that there were art critics and manuals, but never quotes any. Art is more than a collection of products, it is also a practice guided by theories, and those are interesting in their own right. We do not need a huge tome of translations of art critics, but some extracts would be informative. Today there are dozens of books in print about how to draw and colour, and probably far more classes. Before the 1800’s there were, even in the Western tradition, very few books by artists about how to carry on the practice, and those help us appreciate what we look at.
Some of the illustrations are quite good - this isn't a book of high-gloss reproductions - and if you know nothing about Chinese Art.... I'd still find another book.
This is not what a post-modern art-history will give us. Post-modern commentary makes everything about power, politics, gender, and class. This is shame, because it means the texts are almost identical up to the names of people, dates and places, from one period or style to the next. Art is for rich people. Artists were not given the respect and celebrity they deserved, except for (enter names here). Women’s contributions have been erased from the record, but they probably produced better art than the men. Contributions by non-Europeans also erased from the record because White Fragility and racisim. Western art bad, indigenous art good, especially if it satirises the Europeans. Portrayals of deviance, subversive and Good; portrayals of heterosexual pleasure, patriarchal, oppressive and Bad. You know the drill.
The Oxford Art History series is full of it, and I have no idea why I bought this volume. Maybe I was expecting more.
The further back in time we go, the more art is about statues, pottery, mosaics, jewellery and other solid things that last. What remains belongs to kings, princes, dukes, bishops, knights, and wealthy merchants. If there was any pop-culture, it has almost vanished, unless it was on pottery. This is rather convenient for a post-modernist: they get to hob-nob with the rich and powerful, all the while holding their noses delicately against the whiff of modern sins, at the same time overlooking the legal and economic conditions of feudalism, which a modern middle-class person would find intolerable, but our post-modern scholars, one suspects, would rather enjoy, since they fancy themselves the courtiers of the powerful. Every now and then a satirical illustration will turn up on a wall or a jug, and the post-modern scholar will rejoice at this sign of “resistance” if it is to “colonial” powers (“resistance” to the local feudal lord was altogether too risky for the resistor for any traces to be left for us to find).
Craig Clunas delicately protests at the idea of “Chinese Art” and insists that it is “Art made in China”. The phrase “Chinese Art” suggests that there is a large body of work made in China that follows some common conventions, and over a long period of time, up to (say) 1950 or so, when modern telecommunications and travel started to homogenise those parts of the cultural world that saw a profit in it. In this sense, there is undoubtedly “Chinese Art”: elegant calligraphy, virtuosic drawing in ink of scenes and items from nature, stylised faces, and - this is something I learned from the book - huge landscapes overwhelming an event of significance in the lives of the people… what people, oh, there, almost hidden in that little house. No or few flattering portraits of emperors and their concubines; no scenes of piety at a shrine, with the client kneeling in profile to one side, as were common in the medieval times in Europe; no commemorations of famous victories… or at least none have come survived.
Where are all the celebratory paintings? Why were Chinese rulers immune to the grandiosity of their European counterparts? What were the technical challenges of painting on silk, and why did paper replace it? Why the tiny figures in vast landscapes? Why the lack of colour? Why all the painfully restrained and elegant pale blues and black and white sketching? What was the purpose of the calligraphy and stamps on an image? Why do the stamps seem so carelessly placed compared to the positioning of the calligraphy? Why did calligraphy have such a pre-eminent position in courtly society?
These questions can be answered in a paragraph at most, but require more than a paragraph of research. That’s the scholar’s job: to reduce hours of painful research and understanding to a couple of hundred words we mere mortals can understand.
My suggestion is that, big as it may be, China simply did not have the diversity of farmland and hence of crops and animals that Europe had. It does not now. Thus it could not generate the excess profits needed to support a (literally) rich culture. Also, Emperor Xuando issued the Edict of Haijin in 1434 that almost closed off the country from the rest of the world. There were Westerners - often traders and missionaries in China, but their access and influence seems to have been very limited.
Clunas mentions that there were art critics and manuals, but never quotes any. Art is more than a collection of products, it is also a practice guided by theories, and those are interesting in their own right. We do not need a huge tome of translations of art critics, but some extracts would be informative. Today there are dozens of books in print about how to draw and colour, and probably far more classes. Before the 1800’s there were, even in the Western tradition, very few books by artists about how to carry on the practice, and those help us appreciate what we look at.
Some of the illustrations are quite good - this isn't a book of high-gloss reproductions - and if you know nothing about Chinese Art.... I'd still find another book.
Friday, 10 October 2025
The Story of the Clever Little Box
Hello little box, how are you?
Do you want to go upstairs?
Let's go into the Music Room.
Here you are.
What's that inside?
Oh gosh! It's a Fender '65 Princeton Reverb! What a clever little box you are!
Shall we put it up on the Amp Shelf? So I can hear it properly when sitting in front of it?
And say Thank You and Goodbye to the Katana...
I will give you all a review next week or so.
(Look carefully at the notations on the box. Why is the amp shipped upside down?)
Friday, 3 October 2025
Southend Skies
The Met Office said it would be sunny with the odd cloud all day, but it turned out like this for most of the morning. However, the clouds and the light really was quite special. The pier is 1.3 miles long, and looking at a Maps App shows you to be in the middle of the Thames with no visible means of support. We walked out and took the rattly-clattery train back. Of course we did fish-and-chips on the seafront.
Friday, 26 September 2025
You Get What You Need - If You Can Work Out What That Is
I'm pretty sure that Mick Jagger was not setting out an approach to purchasing equipment when he wrote the immortal lines
When I was thinking about buying a camera a couple of years ago, what I really wanted was a Fuji GFX 100. A medium-format monster, a snip at £7,000 for the body and £3,000 for a lens. Call me a killjoy, but with my skills and lifestyle, I just couldn't justify that. That's Holy Grail stuff. Also, the probability of me damaging or losing a £10,000 camera are much higher than that of damaging or losing a £500 camera. After watching many reviews and looking at the major camera makers' websites, I came up with this... I wanted
When it was time to trade in the Epiphone Les Paul Standard 50's, after thinking in terms of this and that and an SG, I realised that what I wanted was a
Recently I thought that it might be nice, as well as time, to move up to a Real Valve Amp. Fender of course. (Really? There are other amp makers? Who knew?) What I wanted was
So the '65 it is. GuitarGuitar do a 30-day return. What am I waiting for?
Around the same time, I wondered if I might to get a telephoto zoom for the X-E4. Like it or not, many of the good shots available in London do need to be picked out of the surrounding visual sludge by cropping or zooming. It happens that there is a very good third-party lens - the Tamron X-mount 17-70 - for the Fuji. If I were to get a telephoto zoom, and didn't want to pay Fuji prices, nor carry around the weight of solid-metal Fuji lenses, that would be the one. So I know what I need.
What am I waiting for?
I'm waiting for my inner Scrooge to stop telling me that with my appalling guitar skills, cack-handed photographic skills and warped eye for a picture, plus my unwillingness to actually go out and shoot pictures, I cannot "justify" the expense.
If I was a forty-year-old married man with a mortgage and two children needing private education, this might be a reasonable reservation.
But I'm not. I'm an older man on the last few laps. Possessing nice gear is one of the small pleasures of life, even if one doesn't use it as much or as well as a pro would. Heck, all of it can be sold on the second-hand market.
And I don't go on holidays. Now there's an expense I really can't justify.
If it ever happens, I'll let you know. And I'll try to get some culture under my belt to write about as well.
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes
You just might find
You get what you need
When I was thinking about buying a camera a couple of years ago, what I really wanted was a Fuji GFX 100. A medium-format monster, a snip at £7,000 for the body and £3,000 for a lens. Call me a killjoy, but with my skills and lifestyle, I just couldn't justify that. That's Holy Grail stuff. Also, the probability of me damaging or losing a £10,000 camera are much higher than that of damaging or losing a £500 camera. After watching many reviews and looking at the major camera makers' websites, I came up with this... I wanted
Fuji's simplest camera with inter-changeable lenses that is good enough so I can't blame the camera for a bad pictureThat existed: it was the X-E4 that I still use now. And it's a nice bit of kit.
When it was time to trade in the Epiphone Les Paul Standard 50's, after thinking in terms of this and that and an SG, I realised that what I wanted was a
"7-lb Les Paul": two humbuckers and controls in parallel, meeting the selector switch, with a 24.5" scale length, for under £1,000There is no such Les Paul, but there is the PRS McCarty 594 SE, which the guys at GuitarGuitar in Epsom had in stock the day I visited. It too is a nice bit of kit I now own.
Recently I thought that it might be nice, as well as time, to move up to a Real Valve Amp. Fender of course. (Really? There are other amp makers? Who knew?) What I wanted was
a Fender valve amp that can be played at bedroom volumes at the edge of break-upwhich I knew to be ridiculous even as I thought about it. The 12W Princeton Reverb, the 5W VibroChamp, and never mind the 15W Blues Junior, are way too loud at natural break-up. However, I have mastered the art of getting snarly tones at around 70dB, so I don't need to rely on valve break-up. And I'm not going to be distracted by the Tonemasters and their power attenuators. Tonemasters sound almost like valve amps, but not quite. They are for pros who need to heft amps from gig to gig. Mine will be staying in one place. So the only choice is between the '65 and the '68 Princetons. The '68 has a more immediately appealing sound, but it's a little less well-defined than the '65, and I want that clean, clean sound.
So the '65 it is. GuitarGuitar do a 30-day return. What am I waiting for?
Around the same time, I wondered if I might to get a telephoto zoom for the X-E4. Like it or not, many of the good shots available in London do need to be picked out of the surrounding visual sludge by cropping or zooming. It happens that there is a very good third-party lens - the Tamron X-mount 17-70 - for the Fuji. If I were to get a telephoto zoom, and didn't want to pay Fuji prices, nor carry around the weight of solid-metal Fuji lenses, that would be the one. So I know what I need.
What am I waiting for?
I'm waiting for my inner Scrooge to stop telling me that with my appalling guitar skills, cack-handed photographic skills and warped eye for a picture, plus my unwillingness to actually go out and shoot pictures, I cannot "justify" the expense.
If I was a forty-year-old married man with a mortgage and two children needing private education, this might be a reasonable reservation.
But I'm not. I'm an older man on the last few laps. Possessing nice gear is one of the small pleasures of life, even if one doesn't use it as much or as well as a pro would. Heck, all of it can be sold on the second-hand market.
And I don't go on holidays. Now there's an expense I really can't justify.
If it ever happens, I'll let you know. And I'll try to get some culture under my belt to write about as well.
Friday, 19 September 2025
Why Cloud Drives Should Be Your Daily Drivers
(Edited 20/9/2025: In the original version, I was too focussed on device loss, and underplayed the necessity of conventional backups. The two work complement each other.)
Think of a Cloud Drive as an external hard drive attached to your computer by wi-fi + internet rather than wire. That's all it is. It behaves exactly like an eternal drive. You can treat it like an external drive: copy files to it, delete files on it, create sub-directories, even back it up. It has one huge advantage over a conventional external drive: it is not on your premises or in your possession, so it can't get taken away by anyone with or without a warrant, or soaked if the house floods, or melts in a fire, or lost if someone's kid spills their orange juice on it, or (enter description of disaster here).
We need to protect against four things: confiscation of our devices; loss of one or more devices; loss of specific data on our devices; loss of access to our Cloud account, and other Cloud-based services. We also need to handle backup of data across multiple devices, without creating a complicated and time-consuming backup routine. For some people, especially recording artists, photographers and videographers, handling large-scale data backup is part of the job, and I’m addressing the needs of people who generate smaller amounts of data.
A Cloud drive protects against losing devices, or having devices confiscated. It allows sharing between multiple devices, and usually offer a browser-based interface, allowing access from any device, as long as you remember the password. Most provide a thirty-day undelete facility to deal with stumble-thumb deletes.
Conventional hard disk backups protect against losing access to your Cloud drive account, or losing internet access. Restores or data-reading can be done to any device with a suitable data port, though if you used special software (e.g. to encrypt and compress) you will need that on the device.
Online backup services protect against loss of external hard drives and the Cloud drive.
(Professionals will usually use a Cloud drive, keeping local copies as storage allows, and use an online backup service - since they aren’t going to walk around making backups of individual employee’s laptops.)
You're already on the Cloud in so many ways. All the e-mail services keep your archives on their servers - in the Cloud. Your password manager keeps your vault in the Cloud. Apple Notes / Evernote and the others all store in the Cloud. All your social media is in the Cloud. Any product that offers multi-device access and syncing is cloud-based.
If you use music streaming, you are accessing a cloud-based music library - far bigger than anything the most obsessed audiophile could make. If you stream video, same thing.
It's the final step to put the documents, photographs, graphics and other files you create onto a drive in the Cloud. The Cloud application will create a directory on your device for its use, and anything you put in that directory will get copied up to the Cloud drive. You can tell the Cloud application you want to keep local copies, or that you are happy downloading from the Cloud drive as needed.
What gets stored in that local directory? The data I need to carry on my life, in case I lose everything in the same day (lose phone on the train, laptop stolen in the pub, dog eats the iPad... you know the kind of thing). Contact lists, schedules, programming code, drafts of novels / poems / textbooks, DAW files, reference books, my favourite photos, music tracks, videos, diary / journal, Notes app, and so on.
E-mails, contacts, appointments. On Gmail. Since 1891.
Text documents / Notes-style apps. Pffft. Doesn't matter how much I have, it likely is no more than 1 GB. Nobody can write that much in one lifetime.
PDFs and similar: Not really an issue. 3-4 GB at most for even the most avid reader. Stored in Books.
Music. No more ripping CDs into Apple Music and synching playlists to the phone. CD-quality streaming services are now affordable and allow downloading for off-line access. If I am actually going to be off-line: 5G and wireless coverage has expanded beyond anyone's wildest dreams in 2015. I keep my CDs (unless I really regret buying it), while Amazon and other downloaders keep track of what I bought from them, so the files are always there. I only really need to keep music files I downloaded or ripped, which can't be found elsewhere. That is remarkably few. (**)
(Qobuz subscribers: downloaded files are added to your Library, with a tick next to them.)
Photo / Video backup. A glance at Reddit suggests this is deeply personal: some people are hoarders and remind you that storage is cheap (which at £150 for at 5TB external SSD it is); while others are minimalists and do not want to spend time managing backups. Then there's a whole bunch of people between these extremes. I tend to the minimalist side. My intention is that Favourites and recent haven't-made-my-mind-up-yet shots will be in iCloud Photos, and everything else I don't throw out will be in directory that gets an external backup from time to time. There's a lot of prep required for this, which I'll talk about this in another post.
With my minimalist approach, I don't have a lot of data, so I get by on iCloud's 50GB plan. FLAC-ripping, RAW-shooting, Lightroom-editing, keep-everything maximalists, will be looking at least at 2TB or more. After making use of the 1TB Adobe throw in with Lightroom subscriptions. That starts to cost.
Bonus Topic: sharing across devices. One benefit of Cloud drives is that all your Windows / iOS / OS X devices can access the drives, but sharing is not compulsory. Apple devices can be customised app by app. How much you do depends on how much you trust the other people who can use your devices, and I'll let you think through how much you trust the kids not to accidentally delete photos or mail stuff to their friends. I let Files access everything it can, and share my Photos on the phone, iPad and laptop. My music apps (Sonos, Qobuz, Amazon, Apple Music) are on all my iOS devices, and I can access those services through a browser on the laptop. I don't have Books on the phone, because I can't read on it. I can get Mail and Contacts via any browser, and share the Calendar.
Think of a Cloud Drive as an external hard drive attached to your computer by wi-fi + internet rather than wire. That's all it is. It behaves exactly like an eternal drive. You can treat it like an external drive: copy files to it, delete files on it, create sub-directories, even back it up. It has one huge advantage over a conventional external drive: it is not on your premises or in your possession, so it can't get taken away by anyone with or without a warrant, or soaked if the house floods, or melts in a fire, or lost if someone's kid spills their orange juice on it, or (enter description of disaster here).
We need to protect against four things: confiscation of our devices; loss of one or more devices; loss of specific data on our devices; loss of access to our Cloud account, and other Cloud-based services. We also need to handle backup of data across multiple devices, without creating a complicated and time-consuming backup routine. For some people, especially recording artists, photographers and videographers, handling large-scale data backup is part of the job, and I’m addressing the needs of people who generate smaller amounts of data.
A Cloud drive protects against losing devices, or having devices confiscated. It allows sharing between multiple devices, and usually offer a browser-based interface, allowing access from any device, as long as you remember the password. Most provide a thirty-day undelete facility to deal with stumble-thumb deletes.
Conventional hard disk backups protect against losing access to your Cloud drive account, or losing internet access. Restores or data-reading can be done to any device with a suitable data port, though if you used special software (e.g. to encrypt and compress) you will need that on the device.
Online backup services protect against loss of external hard drives and the Cloud drive.
(Professionals will usually use a Cloud drive, keeping local copies as storage allows, and use an online backup service - since they aren’t going to walk around making backups of individual employee’s laptops.)
You're already on the Cloud in so many ways. All the e-mail services keep your archives on their servers - in the Cloud. Your password manager keeps your vault in the Cloud. Apple Notes / Evernote and the others all store in the Cloud. All your social media is in the Cloud. Any product that offers multi-device access and syncing is cloud-based.
If you use music streaming, you are accessing a cloud-based music library - far bigger than anything the most obsessed audiophile could make. If you stream video, same thing.
It's the final step to put the documents, photographs, graphics and other files you create onto a drive in the Cloud. The Cloud application will create a directory on your device for its use, and anything you put in that directory will get copied up to the Cloud drive. You can tell the Cloud application you want to keep local copies, or that you are happy downloading from the Cloud drive as needed.
What gets stored in that local directory? The data I need to carry on my life, in case I lose everything in the same day (lose phone on the train, laptop stolen in the pub, dog eats the iPad... you know the kind of thing). Contact lists, schedules, programming code, drafts of novels / poems / textbooks, DAW files, reference books, my favourite photos, music tracks, videos, diary / journal, Notes app, and so on.
E-mails, contacts, appointments. On Gmail. Since 1891.
Text documents / Notes-style apps. Pffft. Doesn't matter how much I have, it likely is no more than 1 GB. Nobody can write that much in one lifetime.
PDFs and similar: Not really an issue. 3-4 GB at most for even the most avid reader. Stored in Books.
Music. No more ripping CDs into Apple Music and synching playlists to the phone. CD-quality streaming services are now affordable and allow downloading for off-line access. If I am actually going to be off-line: 5G and wireless coverage has expanded beyond anyone's wildest dreams in 2015. I keep my CDs (unless I really regret buying it), while Amazon and other downloaders keep track of what I bought from them, so the files are always there. I only really need to keep music files I downloaded or ripped, which can't be found elsewhere. That is remarkably few. (**)
(Qobuz subscribers: downloaded files are added to your Library, with a tick next to them.)
Photo / Video backup. A glance at Reddit suggests this is deeply personal: some people are hoarders and remind you that storage is cheap (which at £150 for at 5TB external SSD it is); while others are minimalists and do not want to spend time managing backups. Then there's a whole bunch of people between these extremes. I tend to the minimalist side. My intention is that Favourites and recent haven't-made-my-mind-up-yet shots will be in iCloud Photos, and everything else I don't throw out will be in directory that gets an external backup from time to time. There's a lot of prep required for this, which I'll talk about this in another post.
With my minimalist approach, I don't have a lot of data, so I get by on iCloud's 50GB plan. FLAC-ripping, RAW-shooting, Lightroom-editing, keep-everything maximalists, will be looking at least at 2TB or more. After making use of the 1TB Adobe throw in with Lightroom subscriptions. That starts to cost.
Bonus Topic: sharing across devices. One benefit of Cloud drives is that all your Windows / iOS / OS X devices can access the drives, but sharing is not compulsory. Apple devices can be customised app by app. How much you do depends on how much you trust the other people who can use your devices, and I'll let you think through how much you trust the kids not to accidentally delete photos or mail stuff to their friends. I let Files access everything it can, and share my Photos on the phone, iPad and laptop. My music apps (Sonos, Qobuz, Amazon, Apple Music) are on all my iOS devices, and I can access those services through a browser on the laptop. I don't have Books on the phone, because I can't read on it. I can get Mail and Contacts via any browser, and share the Calendar.
Bonus bonus topic: internet privacy. I'm all for someone from Apple, Microsoft, the NSA, Five Eyes (or Five Guys, for that matter) reading my thoughts and looking at my snapshots. They might learn something. You're welcome.
(*) Having all your equipment and backup drives taken away because you made a mean tweet, or one of your darling children downloaded instructions to make an atomic bomb, or a dodgy mate sent you a dodgy image, or whatever happens to be illegal these days. They can take your devices, but they can't stop you looking at your data if you can get at it.
(**) A while ago there was a fad for ripping all one's CDs and then throwing them away. Because shelf space or something. I ripped everything to AAC / MP3 because it was the only way to download it to the music player / phone. Hence the need to backup music libraries. To become really useful, streaming services needed a) large libraries, b) CD-quality at £10 / month, c) reliable hi-speed internet and wireless, d) high-quality DAC chipsets at commodity prices. This only really came together in 2020.
Friday, 12 September 2025
The Myths and Sunflowers of Van Gogh
I bought a paperback on Van Gogh's Sunflower paintings recently, thinking that it would be another easy art-market oriented read. I've been struggling, but maybe it's the change of the weather.
Van Gogh occupies a unique place in Art World mythology. Listen to this little snippet...
Van Gogh occupies a unique place in Art World mythology. Listen to this little snippet...
(The words are taken from a famous essay by Rene Ricard, an influential 1980's art writer, and the movie it was taken from was directed by Julian Schnabel, who is an actual bona fide painter himself.)
Van Gogh didn't sell in his lifetime, except once. And that was not a sunflower.
Writing about Van Gogh is difficult. He has to be portrayed as a great artist who happened to have some mental health issues that lead to him committing suicide. There cannot be a connection between his painting and his mental health, because that would cast him as an "Outsider Artist", which would reduce his auction prices considerably, if not change the way we see the paintings themselves.
The art-history / market problem is that "great artists" usually do very well in their lifetimes and have robust mental and physical health. They may get forgotten immediately after their death because fashions have moved on(this tends to happen to composers), but they get re-discovered. The greats of the Renaissance were never forgotten, partly because their work was all over the Vatican and other Catholic churches and monasteries, and because a cult grew up around them, helped by the descendants of their patrons.
The usual course is that an artist does well when alive, because they are of the times, and then falls into obscurity and the darker parts of the museum repositories. When someone does write a book on them, it is clear that, technically competent though they were, the images do not speak to us now, but inform us of what then was like. The exceptions tend to be on the museum walls already.
Van Gogh is an exception to all these rules. If he had died in a duel, he might have been the Galois of painting, but he didn't. He died after extended periods in an asylum, and nobody ever explains why (though there is a scene in Schnabel's movie about him that suggests he was mildly unhinged).
Ricard blames Van Gogh's life for perpetrating the undiscovered-artist-in-a-garret myth, and then asserts that, contrary to that myth, part of the artist's job is to get the work where I will see it. Charles Saatchi in his collecting heyday used to do a Saturday morning round of small galleries and artist's studios, which seems to make Ricard sound a bit lazy, but I'm assuming that Ricard did his rounds as well. He just didn't knock on every garret door. He listened to the gossip, and getting gossiped about is part of getting one's name out.
Van Gogh's life is also to blame for the myth that genius-is-madness. This is very popular with artistic hacks and ordinarily-competent problem-solvers everywhere, but the evidence is to the contrary. Tesla was eccentric, not actually bonkers. The great painters were mostly competent businessmen who ran studios the size of a small movie production house, and negotiated contracts with Popes and Dukes (or at least the secretaries of the Popes and Dukes).
Personally, I late paintings a little overbearing. All those neurotic lines and strong colours, especially the sunflowers. I'm not a big fan of impasto, and yellow is not a Top Five colour. The Starry Night painting has become a meme. I'm sure there are people who genuinely like his work, and wonder how I can admire Sargant, Leighton or Velasquez.
In the end, the auction prices make any criticism irrelevant. His buyers are well-funded museums and very wealthy private collectors. I don't have the cash to argue with anyone paying $62m in 2014 prices for a vase of poppies and daises. That's as much as a decent footballer. But then, nobody actually buys footballers for that money: it's a complicated funding scheme by rich clubs for small ones. Everyone has long suspected that high-value art transactions are also disguised business deals, and one or two are known to have been.
I'm hoping the book, The Sunflowers Are Mine by Martin Bailey, will explain these valuations and the buyers' motivations.
Van Gogh didn't sell in his lifetime, except once. And that was not a sunflower.
Writing about Van Gogh is difficult. He has to be portrayed as a great artist who happened to have some mental health issues that lead to him committing suicide. There cannot be a connection between his painting and his mental health, because that would cast him as an "Outsider Artist", which would reduce his auction prices considerably, if not change the way we see the paintings themselves.
The art-history / market problem is that "great artists" usually do very well in their lifetimes and have robust mental and physical health. They may get forgotten immediately after their death because fashions have moved on(this tends to happen to composers), but they get re-discovered. The greats of the Renaissance were never forgotten, partly because their work was all over the Vatican and other Catholic churches and monasteries, and because a cult grew up around them, helped by the descendants of their patrons.
The usual course is that an artist does well when alive, because they are of the times, and then falls into obscurity and the darker parts of the museum repositories. When someone does write a book on them, it is clear that, technically competent though they were, the images do not speak to us now, but inform us of what then was like. The exceptions tend to be on the museum walls already.
Van Gogh is an exception to all these rules. If he had died in a duel, he might have been the Galois of painting, but he didn't. He died after extended periods in an asylum, and nobody ever explains why (though there is a scene in Schnabel's movie about him that suggests he was mildly unhinged).
Ricard blames Van Gogh's life for perpetrating the undiscovered-artist-in-a-garret myth, and then asserts that, contrary to that myth, part of the artist's job is to get the work where I will see it. Charles Saatchi in his collecting heyday used to do a Saturday morning round of small galleries and artist's studios, which seems to make Ricard sound a bit lazy, but I'm assuming that Ricard did his rounds as well. He just didn't knock on every garret door. He listened to the gossip, and getting gossiped about is part of getting one's name out.
Van Gogh's life is also to blame for the myth that genius-is-madness. This is very popular with artistic hacks and ordinarily-competent problem-solvers everywhere, but the evidence is to the contrary. Tesla was eccentric, not actually bonkers. The great painters were mostly competent businessmen who ran studios the size of a small movie production house, and negotiated contracts with Popes and Dukes (or at least the secretaries of the Popes and Dukes).
Personally, I late paintings a little overbearing. All those neurotic lines and strong colours, especially the sunflowers. I'm not a big fan of impasto, and yellow is not a Top Five colour. The Starry Night painting has become a meme. I'm sure there are people who genuinely like his work, and wonder how I can admire Sargant, Leighton or Velasquez.
I'm hoping the book, The Sunflowers Are Mine by Martin Bailey, will explain these valuations and the buyers' motivations.
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