Scales

(We are now working in European Equal Temperament.)

A scale is any sequence of intervals (notice: not notes) that adds up to 12 semitones. Think of any bonkers combination, and someone somewhere will have a guitar tutorial explaining why it should be the very next thing you learn.

A key or mode is a scale plus a starting note (the "tonic") that then defines a sequence of notes. We say "the key of G-Major" scale or "the Major scale". (Musical speech is sloppy, so we also say "the Major key" or "the G-Major scale".) Two keys are equivalent if they have the same scale. “Scale” = intervals; key = notes.

There are a number of well-known seven-note scales:

Major / Ionian Mode: Tone-Tone-Semitone-Tone-Tone-Tone-Semitone
Natural Minor / Aeolian Mode: Tone-Semitone-Tone-Tone-Tone-Semitone-Tone
Harmonic Minor: Tone-Semitone-Tone-Tone-Tone-Tone-Semitone
Lydian Mode: Tone-Tone-Tone-Semitone-Tone-Tone-Semitone
Mixolydian Mode; Tone-Tone-Semitone-Tone-Tone-Semitone-Tone
Dorian Mode: Tone-Semitone-Tone-Tone-Tone-Semitone-Tone
Phrygian Mode: Semitone-Tone-Tone-Tone-Semitone-Tone-Tone

The Ionian, Aeolian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Phrygian modes are often called Church Modes, as they were used in early choral singing.

There are two well-known five note (pentatonic) scales:

Major Pentatonic: Tone-Tone-Minor Third-Tone-Minor Third
Minor Pentatonic: Minor Third-Tone-Tone-Minor Third-Tone

Two well-known six note scales:

Major Blues: Tone-Tone-Semitone-Minor Third-Tone-Minor Third
Minor Blues: Minor Third-Tone-Tone-Semitone-Minor Third-Tone
(Minor Third = 3 semitones)

Exactly one scale of only tones: Whole-Tone: Tone-Tone-Tone-Tone-Tone-Tone (There are two keys: C and C♯. After that the notes repeat, so starting on D gives the same notes as starting on C.)

Exactly one scale of only semitones: Chromatic: Semitone (x12)

If you want to see something truly out of control, look at the eight-note diminished scale.

You're An Artist If You Say You Are

There's a scene in a wonderful movie called Dinner Rush...

 

 (Not this scene, but it gives you an idea how good a film this is)

...where a pompous celebrity art critic says to Summer Phoenix's aspiring painter / waitress...

You're an artist if you say you are. You're a successful artist if....

...and then he's interrupted by his entourage.

I've often wondered how to finish that line.

It's subtle, because there's "being an artist" and being a writer, painter, sculptor, interior designer, architect, and all those other activities that fall under "the arts".

You're a writer if you sit down and write pretty much every day. You're a successful writer if you finish some of the stories or projects you start, (because you will waste time on bad ideas)

But then there's "being a writer" as a profession, as participation in a social / cultural scene.

You're an author if you've been published and paid for it. Once. That's what the Society of Authors says. You're a successful author if you keep being published. (Because almost nobody makes a living from writing.)

There are successful authors who are by no means artists. There are artists who write stories, who write little and don't spend much time schmoozing.

So what makes someone a successful artist?

It's not about being a successful practitioner, and it's not about being recognised by the in-crowd of agents, critics, editors, gallerists, academics, journalists, and other bureaucratic nabobs.

What I notice about people I call `artists' is that a) they can work and express themselves in multiple media; b) they are quick to experiment with new technology that may help them produce something; c) they have their own voice / tone / style. You can identify their work more or less immediately.

You're a famous artist if "everyone" knows your name.

You're a rich artist if you have lots of money.

You're a successful artist if you develop your own voice and use that voice to produce work in whatever media you can use.

And most probably you will be poor or working a day job. Those are the stats.

Why I Let My Art Newspaper Subscription Lapse

Dear Editor,

My subscription to Art News ran out recently and I am not renewing.

I thought I would tell you why.

I made a mistake subscribing in the first place.

I thought Art News would be to the art-world what, for instance, the FT is to business.

Sure you have a certain amount of insider favour-trading and re-cycling of press releases in the FT, as in any newspaper.

Along with articles about how Western Civilisation will crumble if the Government gives one penny less to the Arts than it did last year.

That goes with the territory.

It's the delicate souls a-flutter at a two-hundred year old transgression of this year's taboo.

The use of -isms to splash `political' meaning onto empty work.

When a museum `apologises' for its `implication in slavery', its PR department counts the column-inches it generates.

I am not interested in the moral character or beliefs of artists / curators / gallerists / researchers / restorers / dealers / whatever else.

I want to read about the work they are doing.

Not what they are saying to demonstrate their candidacy for in-group membership.

So I didn't renew my subscription.

Regards

A Former Subscriber

Sir Anish Kapoor On Political Art

So I quote from Anish Kapoor's editorial in the January 2022 Art Newspaper:

There is no question that the arts and an education in the arts is deeply connected to human rights, to Black Lives Matter and equal opportunity, for all...and then of course the tragedy of global warming and the 80 million refugees in our world today.

(For those who are blissfully ignorant of the Artworld, Sir Anish Kapoor is a sculptor and painter, and as Establishment a figure as could be, with honorary degrees and prizes out the wazoo.)

So I have a question. Why isn't art deeply connected to the problems of unemployment and under-employment in the UK? Or to the horrendous social problems caused by the trade in cocaine and heroin? Or to the health issues of pharmaceutical companies replacing perfectly adequate generic drugs with new, patented and therefore expensive, drugs that are not actually any more effective? Why is it not connected to the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries? Or to the issues of free speech raised by the ownership of broadcast media and publishing by a handful of multi-nationals? Why isn't art connected to the problems of dysfunctional nutrition across the world?

Or any of a thousand other issues?

Because those are the wrong kind of issues.

The "right kind of issue" meets two criteria:

First, it must offend as few people in the Artworld as possible. Buyers, curators, civil servants in the Department of Culture, journalists, gallery owners, and other assorted gate-keepers.

Second, it must create paid employment and funding amongst the "right kind of people". Arts graduates. Bureaucrats. Activists. NGOs. Artists. Documentary film-makers. And lawyers. Especially lawyers.

"Human rights" allows one to pick and choose from a wide range of genuine abuses. The Uighyrs in China are perfect: it is pro-Muslim, which pleases the Arab buyers in the Artworld, and is anti-CCP, which pleases everyone else in the world outside the CCP itself.

"Global Warming" is even better, since assigning a tragedy to "climate change" means we don't have to think about a practical solution (Rising water levels? How about building sea and river walls? Oh. Excuse me for being the engineer.) but can kick it down the road to be solved when we solve the "real problem".

"Refugees" provides lots of work for lawyers and NGOs. All the expense borne by the taxpayer. None of the inconvenience borne by the Right People inside their gated communities. It allows the Right People to identify the Wrong People, since illegal immigration is a touchstone issue.

By contrast, sorting out the drug problem means giving money to the Police, Border Forces, and other such Wrong People. So does dealing with the problems of persistent unemployment, though it's a different set of Wrong People who benefit.

Follow the money.

Pretentious Art Commentaries (More)

I don't usually link to someone else's work, but in this case, it's just so apposite to the recent Tate Modern post about BS commentaries accompanying art. It's a post by the legendary Dave Trott (okay, legendary if you know the UK advertising business) and it's about the same subject, but from a participant's point of view.

It's here.

Fear of Music: Why We Like Rothko But Not Stockhausen

I read David Stubbs' Fear of Music and Mars by 1980 recently. The second is a history of electronic music in the West, focussing heavily on the bands of the 1970's - 1990's. The first is an attempt to understand why Basquiat sells for millions, but David Bailey is pretty much broke. (You know who Derek Bailey is, right? See, that's his point.)

 

(Why you don't know who Derek Bailey is)

Stubbs love of this kind of music, from Edgar Varese to Sonic Youth, is sincere and deeply woven into his youth. He knows whereof he speaks.

So do I. I have a special section in my CD collection, where I keep Ligeti, Xenakis, Boulez, John Cage, Penderecki, Edgar Varese, Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and even Sally Beamish. Anyone interested in music should know some of this stuff, and my dutiful listening was well before streaming. (You should stream it. Most of these people are dead, have academic jobs or quite enough money.) The only recording made by Mirror/Dash is in my Quboz favourites. I commend Olivier Assayes' film Noise to you: I was rooted to the sofa. As an undergraduate I went to the only performance at my university by Derek Bailey. I have heard Iskra 1903 on late-night Radio Three programs. In the right circumstances, I do like a bit of noise guitar. Those circumstances are not frequent, but Stubbs' book has made me think I should devote a little more time to the genre over the next few months.

 

(Stockhausen's Kontakte: I found it so you don't have to.)

A little bit of theory.

There are two broad business orientations: producer, and, consumer. The producer makes something, tries to sell it, and then blames the public when they don't buy it, or tries to get a Government grant to subsidise his operation. The consumer finds out what he can provide that the customer wants, checks that the customer is willing to pay an economic price, and provides it. Producers tend to think they are mis-understood and the audience doesn't want to put in the work to appreciate their challenging work. Consumers tend to follow the money and can have a wilting effect on high culture.

Old-school publishing houses used to do both: they had an imprint for books that the public would buy but were not what anyone would call fine literature, and the money from that subsidised the low but prestigious sales of the fine literature. The publisher had social cachet from supporting well-connected authors, paid for by books the public wanted to read. It worked fine until the conglomerates came along, and dumped the fine literature imprints, because why lose money?

The Romantic conception of the artist is pure producer. The artist has their vision, is driven to produce what they have to produce, and it's the public's task to understand it, like it, and buy it. Otherwise the Romantic artist either starves to death, or gets embittered or cynical while living off a private income.

What is striking about the development of noise / electronic music up to about 1970 is just how much of it was supported by universities, Ministries of Culture, and State broadcasters. Everyone from Stockhausen to Delia Derbyshire was paid for by the taxpayer. After that, it seems to have moved into the private sector, with the invention of the Mood Synthesiser and its successors, until a simple Mac Air has ten times the music-making capabilities of the entire European avant-garde scene in (say) 1960, and with a friendly user-interface. State subsidies is very producer.

Stubbs is a producer. He likes weird noisy music and can't understand why the rest of us don't. He thinks it's our fault - after all, we can take Jackson Pollock, so why won't we listen to Edgar Varese? Why does Warhol sell and Xenakis doesn't?

 

(Ameriques by Edgar Varese. David Stubbs loves it.)

For one thing, the comparison is off. The pictorial analogue of a lot of the music he is taking about, is not Rothko or Pollock, but an especially impasto'd de Kooning at his misogynist peak, or a raw meat paintings by Chaim Soutine. Not what anyone wants to look at just before lunch in the restaurant at the Tate Modern. Or afterwards.

(Xenakis is more like this)

For another, the expectation is off. Avant-garde music is not the only art-form with small audiences. Go to a fringe theatre in London (when this nonsense is over). (I have been in one where there were more people in the audience than on the stage.) Morvern Callar, one of the best films of 2002, had a total first-run audience of about two thousand people in the whole UK. Unless they are an established name, a poet is lucky to sell fifty copies. So are some novelists. Many papers in science and mathematics are comprehensible to perhaps ten people in the world. All those people beavering away in Head Offices producing powerpoints, are doing so for audiences of less than twenty.

Small audiences are the norm. Large audiences need an explanation.

The avant-garde music scene is nowhere near as socially sexy as the avant-garde art scene was and the pop / contemporary art scene is now. The rich gather and network at Christies and Sotheby's, not at the Wigmore Hall. The reason is very simple: they can buy art, but they can't buy music.(*) The era of the court composer is over - blame the repeal of the Corn Laws.

The arts are not an examination that the audience has to pass. With some exceptions. If you don't like the music of J S Bach, you can say so and not listen to it. If you say that it is bad music, well, you would just be wrong. Audiences show their dislike of Luciano Berio by staying away. If they say it is bad music, well, they would be wrong about that. If they said it was wilfully harsh, discordant, and lacked a decent groove, could anyone disagree?

And then there's the whole attitude thing. Here's Evan Parker, a legend of the British avant garde music scene.



You can't dance to it. You can't **** to it. You can't study to it. You can't play along with it.

On the other hand, here's Kim Gordon, who has been doing this stuff for literally decades.



You can't dance to it. You can't **** to it. You can't study to it. You can't play along with it. But I couldn't stop watching and listening.

In an earlier post, I said that, amongst other things, art had to be self-sufficient. A piece had to stand on its own. Another thing art has to do is fascinate, a verb that descends from 'bewitching'. It has to reward our attention and focus, to let us sink in to it. Maybe we sink in meditatively, as before a painting in the National Gallery, or we give ourselves up to it, as with a favourite dance track.

A lot of avant garde music is intentionally off-putting and detached. It doesn't let us in, but keeps on slapping us about with sudden noises and shocks. Most people don't respond to that: I don't. Perhaps David Stubbs does. But he is in a minority.

And that's the answer to his question.

(*) The exception, and it's the only one, is the one copy of a Wu Tang Klan album Once Upon A Time In Shaolin. Its history is worth reading.

Thoughts After A Visit To The Tate Modern

I went to the Tate Modern recently. I had to book, but I don't mind. It stops me changing my mind when I wake up and the weather is c**p (again).

It's a very different collection of exhibits from the last time I went, in the Before Times. A few of those exhibits were accompanied by some socially-significant rhetoric, but mostly it originated from the artists. (*cough* Joseph Beuys *cough*)

But now, it seemed to me, everything has to relate to one of a well-known handful of Good Causes. Pollution; climate change; all the complaints of feminism; war; poverty; immigration; capitalism and its related -isms, such as consumerism; Britain leaving the EU...

Just one example, a 1952 photograph by Mitch Epstein, taken in West Virginia.

And here's the blurb that goes with it.

I will spare you a line-by-line review. I wrote one, but it's more painful to read than it is to write. Its implication is that the photograph is valuable as a work of art because the photographer addresses Good Causes in the right way.

I demur.

To ask the timeless question: what is art? Anything can be, because of or despite its creator's intentions. One condition is that a work of art should be self-contained. It can refer to other cultural items, as with Claude’s 1648 Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca

and the viewer's appreciation of it can be enhanced by knowing the references. I have no idea who Isaac and Rebecca were, and why they might be in that landscape, but I can look at Claude's painting for quite a while. The landscape alone holds my attention.

My appreciation of the painting as art does not and should not depend on the references.

Epstein's photograph is, for all its technical skill, not an image I find engaging. Knowing that it had one social message for him, and that the curator has linked it to others, may make me look a little longer to see if I agree, but I've moved on in a couple of minutes.

Claude's intention was to produce a decorative and absorbing landscape, and he threw in the marriage group to give it a sense of scale, and because maybe it would mean something to the client who commissioned it. Epstein's intention was to produce what amounts to low-key agit-prop, and if the picture was captivating, then so much the better.

Claude is an artist, Epstein is a journalist. And to re-affirm: journalists can produce art, but despite their intentions, not because of them.

The difference between museum blurbs and those of auction-house catalogs is striking. If you've never read a contemporary art auction catalog from Christie's or Southeby's, it's quite the revelation. A major work for sale is put into the context of the rest of the artist's output; the circumstances of its creation are set out; any cultural references in the work are tactfully noted, as if jogging the purchaser's memory; it may be compared and contrasted to work by other artists; and, of course, its provenance and exhibition history are carefully noted. Those guys know how to sell a painting.

If I'm going to spend money on it, I want to know that the painting is genuine, and what is its story. And I need to like it as an image. Because my interest is the image, not the interpretation, I do not care about the artist's views on this week's social issues, or his or her morals. I care about the quality of the work.

The "Good Causes" approach puts the artist's opinions and moral character front and centre: artists with the 'wrong' opinions, or an unfortunate period of their lives associated with the wrong causes, don't get shown. The quality of their work is not judged on its ability to hold and entrance the eye, but on the "issues" it "addresses".

If you really cared about pollution, you would put the money towards cleaning it up or preventing it, not buying an art-work that tells you what you already believe. If the Tate really believed it, maybe it could donate some of its vast riches to cleaning up some pollution, and leave a blank space on the wall with the blurb "We spent your taxes on preventing this beach getting dirty again, instead of buying a photograph of it when it was dirty, and leaving it dirty."

Though, if we put up the documentation of the work clearing and protecting the beach, wouldn't that be a performance piece?

Sounds like a win-win to me.

Now That's What I Call A Kitchen Utensil Draw!

Yep. My cleaned-out, throw-away-the-stuff-I-haven't-used-for-a-year utensil draw.

Left to right: cheese-slicer, grater, hand whisk, tongs, strainer, egg-decapitator, soup ladle, big spoon with holes for taking stuff out of water, whisks for electric mixer, spatula, peeler, de-corer, can opener.

These things matter.

Your utensil draw says a lot about you.

Especially if you don't have one. Or it's dirty in the corners.

Which I do, and it isn't.

Just so you know.

What I Got Out of the Basquiat Exhibition, Boom For Real

Anonymous asked me what I got out of the Basquiat exhibition, Boom For Real, at the Barbican. And when I started this, I had read a bit of the latest Art Monthly, and that contained a review of the exhibition.

Artworld reviews have a number of rules, and one is: the greater the reputation of the artist, the higher their auction prices, the less it’s considered au fait to ascribe political motives and meaning to their work, or to judge it against the political requirements of the bien penseurs’ bien pensants. Bringing issues of Jewish identity to reviews of Mark Rothko would be simply crass, and the reviewer that did it might never be invited back. An artist starting on their career is going to get the full treatment, in which the slightest brushstroke will ‘challenge notions of (insert identity politics straw man here)’.

Basquiat has made the auction prices. He will never be in the Great Museums, but every serious and fabulously rich collector has their Basquiat. He is one of the few artists who is a success in the market without needing the validation of being exhibited in the temples of contemporary art. People who know visual imagery like his work and buy it. I was surprised to learn that Patrick Demarchelier has one, because his glossy, well-lit, kind and gentle style is the antithesis of Basquiat’s. So he should be hors de merde politique, but Art Monthly seems to think not.

Art Monthly is wrong. Basquiat does not need politics to contextualise his work. If you want to do that, watch Downtown 82 and Julien Schnabel’s movie. If you want to understand how his work made the hit it did, you will need to know about the 1980’s New York art market, and there’s enough about that in Basquiat: A Quick Killing In Art. The exhibition covered as much as a visitor needed to know, leaving them to wonder who 'Boone’ was that they should be so nastily portrayed.

There is a group of creative people who stand as a judge of their audience, rather than the audience standing in judgement of them. J S Bach, Ravel, Debussy, John Coltrane, Raymond Chandler, Henry James, Leonardo da Vinci... you get the idea. You can like or dislike their work, but if you think it’s bad that just proves you don’t know squat about music, or painting, or literature, or whatever. And yes, it is possible to not like a body of work, while accepting that it is important and good work. For a long-ish time, that was my position on Basquiat. I could see he had the touch. Look at one of his paintings and it won’t “go away”, it won’t fade in your visual field. The damn thing stays there and keeps bringing your eye back to it.

Others have borrowed the style, but they don’t quite get the sublime confidence that comes out of every one of Basquiat’s jagged marks.

It’s that sense of sheer confidence that I get from his work, and it’s like having a glass of cold Coca-Cola on a hot day. Papa Hemingway said that “the first draft of anything is shit”, and that’s the curse of literary production. Basquiat found a way of making a first draft - and one I’m sure he thought about and planned before starting - that was good enough. Hip-hop is not about polish but the spontenaity of performance, after a lot of practice out of the public eye. Inspired by that, Basquiat started somewhere and added bits here and there until the painting was enough. His paintings feel as if painted in one session with no going back - much as the best early hip-hop feels it was recorded in one take. Thought about and with bits prepared, but put together once and once done, over, never to be repeated.

There’s a scene between Rene Ricard and JMB in the movie goes like this:

RR: “It’s Benny, he wants to know why you’re not at band practice.”
JMB: “Oh man I forgot”
RR: “You’re a musician, you paint in your spare time. Like Tony Bennett?”
JMB: “I didn’t know Tony Bennett painted.”
RR: “My point exactly.”

Were those Ricard’s feelings or Schnabel’s? That the music and other work was a distraction from his painting? Schnabel’s movie talks a lot about ‘painting’ and ‘painters’, but not so much about artists. It misses the point, which is that Basquiat had, for a few brief years, the touch, in whatever he did. There’s a subtle distinction between a musician who also paints - think Miles Davis or Joni Mitchell - and an artist who paints and makes music, and puts together a garden and designs plates. An artist works in many media, as Schnabel himself turned to making movies and writing a book. Basquiat was an artist who happened to major in painting, and made music and social-critcism graffiti as well.

So to the paintings on show. My main reservation about the pictures in the exhibition as that there were too many with white backgrounds. Like Yves Klein, who is better in blue, Basquiat is at his best when he uses colours as a base for the painting. His sense of colour is unique and striking, and in the end, it’s why I’d want one on the wall. Right opposite a Cranach the Elder and a Hals group portrait.

Basquiat Becomes One Of My Things

I saw Julian Schnabel’s movie Basquiat when it came out in the UK, and it lifted my spirits something wonderful. I was intrigued by the Basquiat’s art - although the paintings in the movie are by Schnabel, Jeffery Wright and other assistants.  For a long time Basquiat was on my list of “Good Artists Whose Work I Wouldn’t Want On My Walls”.

(Jeffrey Wright actually painting a school-of-Basquiat.)

There was an article on Marion Maneker’s Art Market blog earlier this year about the fact that, though Basquiats do well with collectors and at auction, art museums don’t have many if any. There are none in Tate Modern. I had the answer as soon as I finished reading the sentence.

Imagine a Basquiat next to all those paintings in Tate Modern: it would simply drown them out. You would realise how damned polite all those Surrealists and whatever all else’s are. From memory of the collection there, only the Rothkos could stand up to the competition.



This sent me back to looking at his paintings again. I bought the affordable and well-illustrated book from the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and turned the pages looking at the pictures. This time around I found myself thinking that I wouldn’t mind having some of these on the walls. Whatever it was I had seen but couldn’t respond to, I could no respond to. So a couple of weeks ago, I saw the larger Now’s The Time (published by Prestel and pretty darn affordable) in Waterstone’s Piccadilly and snapped it up. And a pleasure to look through it is.

This happens from time to time. Something I’ve dismissed, ignored or simply filed as “Not My Thing” suddenly becomes one of my things. Time. Experience. More reading, looking and listening. Remind me to tell you how I came to like, rather than simply admire Eric Rohmer’s movies.

That Black Female Iron Man Rumour

It seems that Marvel Comics is going to make Iron Man a black female in the next series, and she’s modelled on and will be played by Rianna in the movie. Because of course movie. This is getting people’s knickers in a twist. Here’s why you should expect nothing less.

Disclaimer: I do read comics. Transmetropolitan. Fables. Ex Machina. Fuse. Smoke and Ashes. Sex Criminals. Channel Zero. The Filth. Global Frequency. And in earlier days adult days: Love and Rockets. Watchmen. Elektra. In childhood, we’re talking The Eagle, the Beano, MAD magazine. Plus everyone watched Batman on TV. Most of the stuff I read now is published by Vertigo (which is a DC Comics imprint). Good comics are out there. The only superhero movies I have in my DVDs are... Constantine. Yup. That’s it.

I was never one for the superhero comics. I preferred those WW2 / Korean War comics that Roy Liechtenstein riffed on later in the iconic WHAAM!

I wouldn’t read a Marvel or DC comic for all the shelf space they take up in the basement of Forbidden Planet on Shaftesbury Avenue. I’m waaaay hipper than that. I get my comics at GOSH in Soho.

Marvel and DC have been on a Diversity jag. Iron Man being one of many. Various other characters formerly white, male and heterosexual are being made black, gay, female or combinations thereof. Marvel is owned by Disney and DC is owned by Time Warner. Nobody knows how those guys think. Or even if. Disney makes its money from trips to Disneyland / World and its cable TV networks . Comics aren’t even on the graphic. Movies, of which Marvel Studios is just one amongst Pixar, Lucasfilm and Touchstone and Walt Disney, make half as much as the theme parks. Disney want you watching its cable and going to its theme parks. And not to put a Gauntanamo blow-up doll there...


Time-Warner makes $28bn revenue. I don’t think the majority of that comes from comic book sales. Or even movies. It comes from cable subscriptions.

I did have my own theory about why Disney and Time-Warner would be prepared to throw their comic franchises to the SJW’s for some PR to protect their cable TV franchises. But then I decided it was nonsense. But it was one theory. There are others. First, that Disney and Time-Warner employ morons or do stuff because somebody senior enough thought it was a good idea. Second, that they researched this properly and it came out well, so they know what they’re doing. Third, that the research was slanted for it to come out well. Fourth, that they are part of a plot to demonise white masculinity. Fifth, that they know something about the market that the comic fans don’t.

Now I would never underestimate the capacity for big companies to act utterly dumb. Like Columbia Pictures with Ghostbusters. It is after all a division of Sony, and what the hey does Sony know about Western Culture? Kick-ass females are a thing in Japanese culture. Time-Warner bought AOL. I am however trying hard to think of a bad move Disney made in movies.

Let’s give these guys the benefit of the doubt. Let’s suppose they think they know something about the market that comic fans and I don’t. Suppose their research asked women a question like this: If a big adventure or science fiction film had a female leading character, I would be more inclined to see it. That’s how research companies phrase these things. How would a girl not say YES to that, unless she said: Uh like there’s just no like way you would get me to like ever see a movie like that. So now they have research saying that if they put a female lead in, they will get far more female viewers than they will lose white males. I’m betting that’s what has happened. Whether that research holds out at the box office? Well, if this article in Forbes is accurate it seems the girls do see films that have “strong female leads” - and lots of CGI and maybe male eye-candy helps as well (the Divergent series isn’t exactly short on pretty boys). It also looks like girls read comics: there are blogs and everything.

What the guys liked about comics and superheroes was that it was somewhere they could go that the girls weren’t. Somewhere they could go that was untainted by female silly, whimsy, crazy and bitchy. Somewhere that understood them. And now the girls are moving in and spoiling it all.

In which case, it’s time to leave. That’s what men do when too many women move in: we leave. Man flight. Find something else. Spend money on it. The market will grow. But don’t let it get too successful or the big corporations will move in and then the girls will arrive again.

So no, superhero comic lovers, you are not on the front lines of cultural warfare. You’re on the receiving end of properly conducted business. They know you will eventually leave them, but you know what? They are going to replace every one of you with a girl. Sounds like a good deal to me. Your whinging is what they want: Look, the creepy people don’t like it, so it’s safe for you girls to go to the cinema when it’s showing. Heck, soon girls will be seen in comic shops, and then it will be Game Over.

Capitalism turns everything to its advantage.

What to do with a £35m Rembrandt

The Trustees of Penrhyn Castle recently sold a Rembrandt portrait for £35m to a foreign buyer. The export license has been temporarily withheld to allow a UK institution to raise the money. More details can be found at Bendor Grosvenor’s excellent site.

If a bunch of private and wealthy individuals want to stump up £35m for the painting, by all means let them. If a bunch of charities want to, they must consider if there aren’t better uses of the money. Unless their aims are pretty much limited to “financing old estates by the purchases of assets from those estates” the chances are that there will be better uses of the money. “Better” here meaning “more closely aligned with the purposes of the charity”.

The real question is: under what circumstances can the tax-payer be rightly asked to stump up enough money to build several hundred homes for nurses and teachers, just so a canvas can go on hanging in a castle hundreds of miles from anywhere? “Sentiment” is not an acceptable answer. “Because otherwise the taxpayer would be stumping up for regional subsidies that they don’t have to now because tourism generated by the canvas” is an acceptable answer.

Art has two sources of economic value: its price to a buyer; and the NPV of the cash flows it generates as an exhibit. When art can’t be sold – as for example the Rothkos at the Tate Modern – its economic value is in its drawing power and the ability of the museum to extract money from visitors. (So those Rothkos at the Tate really aren’t worth the $200m or so that his auction prices would suggest.) If a buyer is willing to pay way more than the exhibit value, the seller is getting a good deal. I don’t know how much money Penrhyn makes, but it can’t be enough if they’re thinking about selling a Rembrandt.

The Rembrandt is worth £35m to the mystery buyer, because the buyer gets to enjoy it and whatever other benefits it brings. It is quite likely that ownership of a painting like that could lead to deals that would easily yield more than £35m. It is quite unlikely that anything like that much would gained if the painting remains in a castle in deepest Wales. It is not worth £35m to the taxpayer. Or to any kind of consortium.

But it is worth £35m of other people’s money to the Trustees of Penryhn. (Or £22.5m after tax, according to Grosvenor.) In fact, it’s worth any amount of other people’s money. Anything is. What the Trustees are really after is having their cake, the Rembrandt on the wall, and eating it, £22.5m in the bank to pay for the roof.

Nope. If they want the money, they can let the Rembrandt go to where it can do some good: the National Gallery, or the NPG. Or they could start renting it out for exhibitions and charge a decent rate for it.

But but but.... isn't the value of Art above mere grubby money? Shouldn't we keep it because Heritage and The Nation?

Art is not an essential part of our national identity, like, say, secure borders and a requirement that all dealings with British government organisations (social security, for instance) are done in English. (But I digress.) Art is, for all the attendance figures at museums and the queues of young foreign students at the Tate Modern, a minority occupation that takes a fair amount of reading, looking and changes of mind to appreciate. Also money. Art books aren’t as expensive as statistics text-books, but they aren’t cheap either. Art is not a spiritual substitute for religion, though we may get spiritual feelings from the contemplation of certain works. Neither is the mere looking at art a form of self-improvement: that comes with the discipline of learning and appreciating more. If you think that simply looking at art is improving, just examine the faces of all those young foreign students being dragged round the Tate Modern.

That's not the argument to keep the Rembrandt in the UK.  The argument is that it is more valuable at Penrhyn than it is in some mansion in Dubai or Peking. Because the setting adds, or subtracts, to the experience of seeing the painting. Old Masters make more sense in old castles than they do in new starchitect buildings.

So how about this, which I think Dr Grosvenor suggests as if it would never happen. How about we sell the Rembrandt, but it has to stay in Penrhyn? The owners can let it travel and keep the income, and they can pay the insurance as well. They get a bunch of private viewing days at the castle. And of course, they can sell it on. Under the same conditions.

Curators + Extremists = Win-Win PR

Towards the end of January this happened

An artwork depicting high-heeled shoes on Islamic prayer mats has been removed from an exhibition after a Muslim group warned of possible violence in the wake of the Paris attacks. The French-Algerian artist, Zoulikha Bouabdellah, withdrew the work from an exhibition in a northern Paris suburb with a large Muslim population after an Islamic group told local authorities it could provoke “uncontrollable, irresponsible incidents”.

A few days ago, a film called 50 Shades of Grey opened and this happened 

As stars Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson walked the red carpet in London’s Leicester Square with director Sam Taylor-Johnson and author El James, who wrote the original novel, protestors made it clear they would not be among the four and a half million cinemagoers who have already bought tickets to view the movie this weekend across the globe. The group, which calls itself 50 Shades is Domestic Abuse, said it was determined the film should not arrive in the UK unchallenged.

A few years ago, Tate Modern included Richard Prince’s notorious painting of a naked 10 year old Brooke Shields in its Pop Life show, and this happened

Tate Modern has bowed to pressure from London's Metropolitan police and permanently removed a controversial photograph of film star Brooke Shields from public view. The image, which depicts the 10-year-old actor nude and heavily made up, was originally taken in the 1970s for a Playboy publication, then reproduced by artist Richard Prince in a 1983 work entitled Spiritual America. It had been a key part of Tate's Modern's Pop Life show, which also contains works by Warhol, Jeff Koons and Cosey Fanni Tutti, but the room containing it was sealed off following a visit by officers from the Met's obscene publications unit two weeks ago.

Even the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid got in on the act last year, with a tiny piece of work about burning churches by a group you will never hear of again.

I am not going to go on a rant about freedom of speech and artistic creativity. Someone did that in the case of the Tate, and they missed every relevant point while discussing a bunch of meaningless art theory twaddle. This isn't about freedom of speech and political correctness.

 It’s the PR coverage, stupid.

Many curators now look for at least one piece that one or more single-interest activist groups (aka “extremists”) might take exception to, maybe by some kind of public demonstration, or threatening communication that the PR department can pass on to the Press. If the Press does its job properly, everyone wins: the artist gets their name out there, as does the gallery, and as do the extremists. Everyone gets a sound-bite in favour of their cause (the extremists) or of some highfalutin’ principle (the gallery, the artist).

But most of all, everyone gets to feel, for a brief moment, as if they matter a sparrow’s tweet.

There is little that matters less in this world than modern art, except the views of a single-issue group. (I like art, even modern art, but I don’t think it matters.) A junior product manager putting together a "compelling" Powerpoint slide to persuade the product team to persuade the marketing team to alter the wording on a brochure has more impact on the world than a modern artist or a single-issue-extremist. And if there is one group of people haunted by the sense of the pointlessness and utter insignificance of their jobs, it’s junior product managers. So the artists and gallerists and curators get in on the politics game, because that makes their daubs significant. This creates an over-heated world in whch it matters if Dasha Zukova sits on a couch that looks like a black woman . Everyone got props on that one, especially Claire Sulmers, editor of FashionBombDaily.com, a fashion blog of which you will never hear again in your life.

The curators do it deliberately (I don’t think the Zhukova chair incident was deliberate: Russians just don’t get the American way of moral posturing). In fact, I would be utterly unsurprised to learn that the PR departments of the galleries and museums, uh, prompt some of the groups who subsequently object.

Capitalism turns everything to its advantage. Absolutely everything.

Should you think I’m being a trifle conspiratorial, well, way back in 1997 Charles Saatchi put the infamous Myra Hindley children’s handcasts painting in his Sensation show at the Royal Academy. Someone threw eggs and ink at it. Other people cried. The painting was taken down and cleaned, but not put up again. The queues were round the block.  This journalist got the point.

Caillebotte, Bridge at Argenteuil, National Gallery

Sundays I go to the gym, have breakfast at Balans on Old Compton Street and then spend some time in the National Gallery looking at one painting for a long while. Any painting that catches my eye, and it's always a different one each time. This time I went into the Impressionist section, looked around and realised "Jeez, these guys could freaking draw". None of your optically-assisted stuff, sheer freehand drawing skill. This was not how I thought about them ten years ago. My reactions to the Impressionists have changed through the decades. Late teens / twenties they made these wonderful evocative paintings - well Sisley and Pissaro and some Monets. Thirties and forties I saw them as little better than talented Sunday watercolourists, shallow and pretty. This Sunday the sheer bloody skill and surety of touch hit me. Lovely pictures, evocative and technically superb - because it takes a really good technique to be loose and still get the perspective correct.

Right now there's a Gustav Caillebotte on loan from a private collection. He's the critic's and historian's Impressionist, and there's a modernity to his framing and pictures that suprises even now. Here's a glimpse...

and here's the link so you can look at it on-screen, but you really should see it live. Take, oh, twenty minutes to gaze at it. It's well worth it.

And then wonder how long he practiced doing flicks of green to suggest  those wavelets on the Seine. Do I practice anything for that long? Do you? Does anybody who isn't an athlete or a musician?

(Minor edit: 27/1/2023)

Damien Hirst at Tate Modern

I have been for a long time as convinced as I am of anything that Damien Hirst's art is a fraud. I have no idea about his sincerity, I don't know him. But I do know his work, and I've just come out from the first major exhibition of it ever in a world-class museum, the Tate Modern. There were various rumours in the art press about how important his collectors thought a major retrospective would be for the value of their collections, I mean, for the artist's reputation, so we should be able to take this as the best of his work.

What did we get? Medicine cabinets, animal and fish vitrines, pills in glittering showcases, spot paintings, three big spin paintings, some medical equipment cabinets, cigarette butts, and the butterfly room. I'll come back to the Real Live Butterfly room later. All these works were produced by assistants in workshops all over the world - though he closed a lot of them in 2008/9. I'm guessing White Cube still has all the unsold Hirst paintings a gallery could ever not want. Heaven alone knows what the notional value of it all was: £100m at the height of the boom, maybe £20m-£30m now? Of course, that's one reason the collectors needed the Tate's endorsement.

You need to know where I'm coming from. I can spot a Pollock that works from one that doesn't, and the same for Barnett Newman. I have a blind spot for Cy Twombley, but on Tuesdays I feel it's my fault, and I'm quite happy for Manzoni to can his shit and exhibit the cans. I thought Spiral Jetty was amazing when I first learned about it sometime in my late teens. I could happily have a Crevelli and a Boldini and a Rothko on my walls - if I had walls strong enough and large enough and if someone were to be so generous. I know that a work or an artist can be the real thing and yet I don't like it, which is how I feel about Basquiat's work. The real thing in art is as subtle, mysterious and utterly present as it is in acting, or politics or cooking. You know when a meal has been slapped together and when, however simple, it has been made with love. Knowing this is not genetic, it's not "evolutionary", it is "cultural knowledge" (but that's the point) that takes reading, looking, learning and practice, and one thing I'm saying is that if you put in the work, you will agree with me, or at least understand why I have this opinion.

I walked through Hirst's exhibition and wondered how on earth anyone could buy it - not just the work, but the whole act. My art detector remained resolutely silent. There's no point explaining why I think Hirst's art is fraudulent. If I say "it lacks X" the rules of modern art-babble allow the reply "Well, that's the point, it's interrogating the idea that art should be X". Hirst's art is supposed to be as much conceptual as representative and physical, but these are ideas you wouldn't bother to have, rather than ideas that, having seen them, you wish you had had. Medicines in cabinets might work if there was some subject linking the medicines together - but there isn't. It's just a collage of boxes. One instance of an idea is conceptual art, a hundred are just a production-line commodity.

The only thing that ever gave me pause about Hirst was the fact that Saatchi backed him. Now I think that Saatchi saw in the young Hirst a good self-publicist, networker and organiser, someone who could (have others) turn out easily-identifiable pseudo-art works for the ordinary millionaire with no actual understanding of or feeling for art. Saatchi backed Hirst as a business proposition, not as an artist. Hirst's is art for people who don't get art, in the same way that Jane Campion's films are movies for people who don't go to the movies. Buy a Hirst, put it in your boardroom, foyer or lounge, spout the art-babble the gallery gave you, and all your friends and visitors will have to assume you are therefore smarter and hipper than them, because you get it, and they don't.

Artists have sub-contracted parts of their work to technicians before and will do so forever: you don't really think that Hals, Rembrant and all those guys painted those ruff collars? There were craftsmen who specialised in it, as there were specialists in painting rugs, curtains and voluminous clothing - they were called "tapestrymen". There's nothing wrong with sending the routine stuff out to a tapestryman - just as there's nothing wrong with a novelist letting their editor give the first draft a good going-over - but an artist can't send out the whole thing. Then they are a designer or an architect. A lot of the work of certain of the big names feels to me as if they really were out of the room when it was done and shipped. These are exactly the artists Banksy is parodying with the Mr Brain Wash thing. Warhol was always on the Art side of the line, Koons can be either side, Hirst is always on the design side. A Warhol has that extra something we need art to have, but a Hirst doesn't have that magic, it's soul-less. Art without soul is usually just bad design.

He even manages to strip the soul and magic out of exotic South American butterflies. The idea of a room full of fancy butterflies doing whatever they do isn't a new one, though keeping the whiteboards on which their pupae were stuck might be. A proper interior designer would have somehow recognised and reflected the exoticism of the butterflies in the colour of the walls, the floorboards and the furniture, while the mechanisms of heating and steaming would have been rendered invisible. It would be a room for rich people to sit in, perhaps to lightly sauna in, and enjoy the sight of the butterflies. So it was difficult to see the point of the peice: was it about the birth-life-death cycle of these wonderful creatures? Was it about their presence? Who knows? When one of the butterflies landed on one of the children in the room, it should have somehow made them part of the artwork. But it didn't, it just made them a kid with a butterfly on their shirt.

W H Auden's Canzone

I don't really do poetry. T S Eliot, of course, he's like Beethoven, even if you don't do classical music you like Beethoven, and even if you don't like poetry, you can be impressed by Eliot. And Mayakovsky, of whom I have a two-volume Russian edition of his complete poems. Sylvia Plath, but then I like Joni Mitchell as well, so call me a sensitive girl. And W H Auden. You would think that if I like Auden, I would like Spender and all the war poets and probably Keats as well. But I don't. I just like Auden. Canzone is my favourite - but you have to get the right edition of his works to find it - and I'm not sure I can explain why. It has a view of life and our place in it that rings true to me, but I'm not actually sure it makes a lot of sense, rather like Joni Mitchell's The Jungle Line. It sounds wonderful, so who cares?

Canzone - W H Auden
When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,
We cannot choose what we are free to love?
Although the mouse we banished yesterday
Is an enraged rhinoceros today,
Our value is more threatened than we know:
Shabby objections to our present day
Go snooping round its outskirts; night and day
Faces, orations, battles, bait our will
As questionable forms and noises will;
Whole phyla of resentments every day
Give status to the wild men of the world
Who rule the absent-minded and this world.

We are created from and with the world
To suffer with and from it day by day:
Whether we meet in a majestic world
Of solid measurements or a dream world
Of swans and gold, we are required to love
All homeless objects that require a world.
Our claim to own our bodies and our world
Is our catastrophe. What can we know
But panic and caprice until we know
Our dreadful appetite demands a world
Whose order, origin, and purpose will
Be fluent satisfaction of our will?

Drift, Autumn, drift; fall, colours, where you will:
Bald melancholia minces through the world.
Regret, cold oceans, the lymphatic will
Caught in reflection on the right to will:
While violent dogs excite their dying day
To bacchic fury; snarl, though, as they will,
Their teeth are not a triumph for the will
But utter hesitation. What we love
Ourselves for is our power not to love,
To shrink to nothing or explode at will,
To ruin and remember that we know
What ruins and hyaenas cannot know.

If in this dark now I less often know
That spiral staircase where the haunted will
Hunts for its stolen luggage, who should know
Better than you, beloved, how I know
What gives security to any world.
Or in whose mirror I begin to know
The chaos of the heart as merchants know
Their coins and cities, genius its own day?
For through our lively traffic all the day,
In my own person I am forced to know
How much must be forgotten out of love,
How much must be forgiven, even love.

Dear flesh, dear mind, dear spirit, O dear love,
In the depths of myself blind monsters know
Your presence and are angry, dreading Love
That asks its image for more than love;
The hot rampageous horses of my will,
Catching the scent of Heaven, whinny: Love
Gives no excuse to evil done for love,
Neither in you, nor me, nor armies, nor the world
Of words and wheels, nor any other world.
Dear fellow-creature, praise our God of Love
That we are so admonished, that no day
Of conscious trial be a wasted day.

Or else we make a scarecrow of the day,
Loose ends and jumble of our common world,
And stuff and nonsense of our own free will;
Or else our changing flesh may never know
There must be sorrow if there can be love.

Sir John Lavery's The Tennis Party

The other Sunday I had one of my days in town: the Glasgow Boys exhibition at the Royal Academy, lunch in Soho, Slackistan at the ICA, and afternoon hot chocolate, Love and Other Drugs at the Apollo Cinema and ending with a quick swim at the gym. Which is after all a hundred yards from the Apollo.

The Glasgow Boys exhibition was pleasant. A bunch of thoroughly professional painters making perfectly acceptable art. Nothing that makes you go "wow!" or makes you wonder if they would notice if you took it off the wall and hid it under your jacket. This one caught me.

It gets better as you look at it. There's the gate to the court, open as if to let us in. The way the figures seem to be caught in movement - especially how the central players. Then there's the way the dappled light points into the court, leading the eye, the light on the chicken wire at the back of the court on the right, the way the spectators are grouped, and finally the trees, forming a backdrop but not overwhelming the scene. That fence around the court is extraordinarily well-done: it's the same height all the way round - a detail that many painters would not bother with.

I found myself smiling after a while and was sure I could hear the sound of the match - shades of Blow-Up. It's a small painting of a small subject, but nonetheless charming for that. And there's nothing wrong with charming, especially when it's this well done.

September Holiday (Not Much)

I was on holiday last week. I didn't go away, in fact, because the sky was grey, the air full of some fungus that set off histamines in my bloodstream after ten minutes, the temperature neither hot nor cold, the air damp, there was nothing much on at the movies, plus I do not have £1,000 to blow on air fare, hotels and decent meals in, say, Nice or Paris, so in fact, I stayed indoors at home. I listened my way through a fair chunk of the Mariss Jansons' mix of Shostakovich's fifteen symphonies. I read a couple of books, kept trying to get started on Sartre's Being and Nothingness - which is a lot to get started on - and finished watching the first series of The Guardian, which is not a newspaper but a series about a corporate lawyer who has to work as a child advocate or go to jail for doing drugs. It's pretty good. Also I kept waking up at 05:45. I wanted to sleep late - 08:00 would do fine. But no, there I was, bouncing around at 06:00.

And at some point, it dawned on me that it's not me who doesn't get it, it's the management in The Bank. The senior management and the talk they talk? I thought they are smart people being cynically manipulative, but now I know they are ordinary, dull people who actually believe what they say and do. None of them would last a day in a real private sector company, though they might survive in British Telecom or Cable and Wireless. They read pop management books if they read at all. Somewhere inside they know that the whole financial services sector is a badly-run mess, and they think it's cute.

Anyway. On the one day I did go into town, I passed by the Lazarides gallery and had a look at the Botulism exhibition by a Brooklyn artist called Bast. I liked a lot of it. Here's one - Utz - that caught my eye even if it is beyond my wallet. The gallery were kind enough to send me a pdf catalogue.

As ever - if you need me to take this down, I'll be happy to oblige.

Also I downloaded and tried Evernote which is a cloud notebook application. It's way useful - I now draft stuff in Evernote rather than Open Office Word  - and it's on my MacBook Pro and Asus netbook. It's right up there with Dropbox as a must-have.

(Roughly) How The Great Art Bubble Worked

I bought a DVD of Ben Lewes' 2009 documentary on the Great Art Bubble while visiting the Tate Modern last Tuesday. I watched it a couple of times and let the whole thing simmer in my unconscious for a while. Lewis never did work out what was going on, or if he did, his lawyers told him not to explain it. But the following Sunday I got it. It's almost as complicated as explaining a credit default swap, but that's why everyone got away with it for so long. It's not something you'd think up for yourself unless you worked in the markets (I don't, but I didn't think it up, I just figured it out afterwards).

Here are the ingredients: 1) a low cost of borrowing, 2) a bank or banks willing to lend a reasonable amount of the value of an artwork to its owner, 3) a thriving but very secretive private sales operation, 4) a thriving and very public auction market, 5) an acceptance by all concerned that the auction market sets the price of an artwork (however temporarily), 6) a small enough number of insiders who “all know each other”, 7) a sufficient supply of outsiders, marks and newcomers, 8) a supply of recognisable but essentially commodity-like artworks.

Now suppose you own four of Andy Warhol's Jackie screen prints. You bought them for, say $50,000 each. You put one up for auction with Sotheby's and ask me to bid for it: I can go as high as $500,000. You will be bidding by phone, to create the appearance of genuine activity and to make sure the price gets up to target. The auction comes, I bid and “buy” your Jackie for $500,000. You pay Sotheby's the seller's premium and cover me for the buyer's premium. Since you're an insider, you get a discount on both. You hand me $500,000 of your money so I can pay Sotheby's so they can pay you $500,000 of your money. Net zero. You have now established (item 5) a new record price for a Warhol Jackie. Not bad huh? Especially since you get your Jackie back in a “private sale” which is as fake as the auction sale but keeps the paperwork straight. (Because I paid with your money – remember?)

Here are some ways you can benefit from this little maneouvre. You can borrow some money from the bank (item 2) against the new value of your four Jackies. Since the other three of your Jackies look just like the fourth (item 8 and the important one), it's easy for the bank to lend me you, say, 50% on the new value of your Jackies (item 2). So you have $1m, on which you are paying perhaps 4% (item 1).

Or you could sell one of your Jackies privately (item 3). Believing the auction price (item 5), the buyer is expecting to pay $500,000, but most likely will be thrilled to get it, after a little fake negotiation, for, say $200,000. You have certainly sold it for more than you could have done before the auction. Anyway, the buyer doesn't care, because they aren't using their money, they can borrow it from the bank (item 2).

Even if I had to pay Sotheby's the full auction price, I can negotiate delayed payment terms. Like maybe a year. Which gives me plenty of time to sell a couple of my Jackies at the new, improved price. I'll get the money back and make much more profit than I would have done selling at the pre-auction price. Is it risky? Yes. But then that's part of the rush for these guys.

And there's even a chance that some third party follows our bids up, and at a pre-arranged price (say $400,000) we both drop out and let them have the painting. Which will be real money from a real sale. Double win.

It's a rich man's game – you have to pay auctioneer's premiums, interest, insurance, packing and storage and none of those things are cheap in absolute terms. But it can beat the heck, on a risk-reward basis, out of leaving your cash on the overnight markets. And you get to hang out with some cool people, read about yourself in the papers and maybe score with some of those pretty girl who hang around the art world.

The commodity nature of the art – Hirst's Spin and Dot paintings and those endless Murakami's to name but three – is essential to the game. Bankers don't know much about art, they have no idea why one Victorian painting of a country lane is worth ten times more than another one. If they wanted valuations, they would have to hire an art consultant or ask the auction houses. But one Spin Painting looks like another. (And one Monet Haystack looks just like another as well. Red Jackie, Green Jackie, Yellow Haystack, Blue Haystack. These guys weren't the first to produce commodity art.) So if one Spin painting goes for $6m, so should the next. It's also why the publicity is so important: the bankers need to recognise the names. The books, the exhibitions, the jargon-filled articles in the Art magazines – all these go to creating and improving the artist's brand.

Seems too fantastical to be true? Do you really believe that these dealers actually hand over those sums of money when they buy their own artists? Do you really believe that Roman Abramovich, a man smart enough to get $12bn out of Putin's Russia, really handed over $80m of his own actual cash for a Francis Bacon painting? When he knows the only people with more money who buy paintings are the Arabs, so he has no market to sell on to? Anyway, if he wants to throw away money, he has Chelsea.

No. If something sounds crazy, it usually is. What I've described – and the endless variations a skilled trader can play – is about how it has to be. All that art was bought with money borrowed at low rates against a hefty fraction of its auction value. The real sales happen at much lower prices in private deals, and while the majority of auction dealings in regular artists are as kosher as auctions ever are, the dealings in the big-name brands are best assumed to be, well, fake. And if you're looking for at least one of the banks prepared to lend, why do you think UBS sponsored all those art fairs? Oh, and yes, all the auction houses know what's going on and yes they are that, well, client-focussed, though others may prefer the harsher word 'unscrupulous'. Read the books about them.

Niki de Saint Phalle

I've recently finished reading, though will be looking at the illustrations of for some time, Pontus Hulten's book on the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle. The book started as an exhibition catalogue, so the illustrations are wonderful and the artist's working life is outlined well, but the text is just a tad, errr, fawning. All the books on her are catalogues and there's a Foundation to look after her artistic estate and reputation, so for a while a real biography is out of the question.

(Photo mine, Nice 2002)

Some things have to be read from, rather than in, the text. Married and a mother at twenty-one, a few years as a conventional mother gave her a nervous breakdown and she took up painting as a therapy. Now I don't believe in lifestyle-induced nervous breakdowns. Having a life you can't make work doesn't help, but a full-fledged breakdown needs either an unstable personality or chemical assistance. An unstable personality would show in other ways. Perhaps in becoming an artist, separating from your husband and not having much to do with your children. This is not unconventional behaviour, but it is irresponsible. Either that or having two children when you really did not want to live your mother's life over again was irresponsible. It's also clear that she underwent some kind of episode during the years she spent making the Tarot Garden. Refusing to take painkillers and treatment for arthritis to the point where your hands become almost unusable is not, as they say, “normal behaviour”. People don't do that unless they are drinking too much or taking non-prescription drugs. Or of course going mildly doo-lally. She mentions years feeling “stoned” from the medications the doctors gave her.

(Photo mine, Nice 2002)

At one stage she considered suicide, but that is nothing. Not to have considered suicide at some stage of your life just proves you are a block of wood. As long as you are considering it, comforted by the thought, sustained through whatever emotional hell it is by the possibility that you could end it all here and now – as long as you're feeling the pain and considering it, you're not going to do it. Suicides are not done in a wallow of emotion, they are done when the emotion is over and can't get in the way of the practical preparations and the final moment when some banal act will take your own life. You can't be feeling to do that.

(Photo mine, Nice 2002)

The book doesn't examine the commercial side of her life – an artist's commercial life being until recently rather more mysterious than their sex life. She was one of the more successful artists in Europe – though her friends chipped in to provide the $4m she spent on the Tarot Garden over a twenty year period. In 1982 or thereabout she was asked to create a perfume (choose one made by a nose and design the bottles and packaging) and one of the copy-lines is “As controversial as the artist who made it”. Scanning the blogs it seems that those who liked it, are wild about it.

(Photo from Atalier Naff blog)

I remember seeing a documentary about a French art dealer, who was a little sharp around the edges, and in one scene he's wandering round an exhibition, picks up a little figure from a stand and says “It's a Nana, he (the stand's owner) doesn't know what he's got”. Her "best known" work is the Stravinsky Fountain for the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

(Photo from Niki de Saint Phalle Foundation website)

Niki de S-P is one of those quirky artists whose work you either get or not and like or not. If I lived along the Mediterranean the bright colours and rounded shapes of the Nanas would be perfect. In the grey light of suburban London they would look as out of place as Penelope Cruz in a Burger King. If you haven't run across her work before, it's well worth the look. And let's face it, anyone who makes paintings by filling various containers with paint, plastering them onto a canvas and then shooting at the containers with a .22 rifle, has to have something going for them.