I got an email out of the blue from an Italian painter called Luca del Baldo, who said that he had done a portrait of me, which I had never acknowledged and so had been left out of the book he has published of his imagined portraits under the title The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality, published by a German press, de Gruyter. Since it is not every day that someone does a portrait of me and since I retain an interest in the nature and character of portraiture – what makes a good portrait and what differentiates it from a photograph – I have added it to the miscellany of images which readers have to endure as the price of the blog.

I have just been sent a copy of an article in the Financial Times, which, since I am not a subscriber, I would not normally have seen. It is a warning against complacency on both sides of the Atlantic.

https://mailchi.mp/243e15287dcc/if-it-did-happen-it-can-happen?e=d4e5b13694

It is only right at the end of his book that Fernando Domínguez Rubio makes clear the underlying polemical reason for writing his book. Is it really worth the simply gigantic financial and ecological cost to preserve so many works of contemporary art in the store rooms of the Museum of Modern Art when so many of them will seldom or never be seen ?

He outlines the growth in the collection as more and more is acquired which is less and less easy to preserve in its pristine condition, like old ladies kept in the freezer after their death. What’s it all for ? Sometimes it’s made to seem a vanity project with fundamental, but essentially unfathomable purposes, as objects are locked away for eternity not in Manhattan, but Queen’s.

It’s certainly a set of questions worth asking and when you read of the amount of skill and energy which goes into preservation, the project of modernism and its apparatus in museums is made to seem psychologically and ethnographically strange.

The final chapter of Still Life is faintly terrifying. It’s on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Fragility’, detailing the immense and frequently futile efforts which have to be made to keep digital art still working, owing to the very rapid changes in digital technologies. It starts with a work by Naim June Paik which can only be kept going by the intervention of a single TV repair shop in Lower Manhattan and ends with an interactive video work, IWYTWM which turned out to be essentially inoperable at the moment of its acquisition.

It reminded me of Nicholson Baker’s wonderful book Double Fold about his efforts to preserve hard copies of long runs of American newspapers, of which the only surviving library copies were being thrown away once they had been put on microfiche. But it turns out that many of these technologies are fugitive, they all have to be renewed every four years, so much of history, as well as art, will disappear into thin air.

I was recommended a new book about museums called Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum. It’s a deep dive – a very deep dive – into the workings of the Museum of Modern Art, written by a sociologist, Fernando Domínguez Rubio, at the University of California, San Diego, working under Chandra Mukerji, who has herself, very unusually for a sociologist, written about the gardens of Versailles. What is impressive about the book is that he treats everything about the internal workings of the museum, the nature of works of art, how and why they are acquired, the processes of their care and conservation, the ways they are displayed, with the same, deeply scrupulous care and attention, trying to understand the processes involved with intelligence and sympathy as well as critical detachment, which marks it out from much museological writing where the critique is paramount, rather than the empathetic understanding. I found it strange and very fascinating, because it makes it clear the extent to which museums are strange places, following their own rules of engagement, judgment and obsession.

The retreat back indoors, with only the sound of constant sirens outside in the Mile End Road, means that my photography is back indoors.

I notice that in the streets, everyone avoids one another, fearful of infection, and the London Hospital is full up. It’s as it was in March. But worse, because now the government has lost all credibility, the acolytes of Trump, whose populism they subscribed to and followed until this week, when they are making frantic and faintly pathetic attempts to distance themselves:-

There is an aspect of the history of Dunelm House, Durham’s former Students’ Union building, which may by now have been forgotten. In about 2000, the National Portrait Gallery was offered it as a possible site to display part of its twentieth-century collection through the agency of Northern Arts, Durham City Council and the University of Durham. It is an astonishing and fine building in a wonderful location on the River Wear. But it turned out that it was going to cost a gigantic amount to repair and adapt, so the project came to nothing. So, it is not just a question of listing, but finding the funds for imaginative re-use. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/jan/05/work-to-preserve-the-beauty-of-brutalism?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Given that Romilly’s exhibition in Bruton is now closed of necessity because of the lockdown, we were both rather cheered to receive such a beautiful photograph of one of the works:-

Following the piece about the effect of Brexit on the art market yesterday, I see that there is an addendum today : we are not going to follow Europe’s very strict regulation of the antiquities market. I presume this is a harbinger of what is to come: whenever Europe tightens rules to prevent illegal trafficking, we will liberate them to retain or develop our competitive advantage. I can see that some people may regard this as a benefit, but I’m not convinced we want to become an offshore, gangster state.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/britain-abandons-eu-regulations-cultural-heritage-1935331?utm_content=from_artnetnews&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=EU%20Jan%207%20AM&utm_term=EUR%20Daily%20Newsletter%20%5BMORNING%5D

My daily exercise was acting as a courier of a birthday present to Clapham – an unexpectedly long way even by the fastest route and curious because of the whole of London now being so quiet, although that was partly because I came back through the back streets of Vauxhall, past street names redolent of its rural past, but no longer so – large swathes of social housing, intermingled with pockets of gentrification. I ended up at Borough Market – very quiet – and Leadenhall Market – totally deserted. I was struck by the juxtapositions between new and old behind the Lloyd’s building:-