We had the Friends’ annual Christmas Carol Service in St. James’s, Piccadilly this evening, one of the best events of the Royal Academy’s ritualised year, partly because Lucy Winkett always manages to give it a good atmosphere – mostly secular, about the celebration of Christmas myth, but with the very faintest whiff of doctrinal ritual.   We sang all the best known carols – ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen’, ‘In the Bleak Mid-winter’ (Holst), ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ (I think this is what I had to sing to get into my prep school choir), ‘Good King Wenceslas’ (an odd setting by Bob Chilcott) and ‘Hark, The herald-angels sing’ in a wonderful setting by David Willcocks, who was still Director of Music at King’s when I was an undergraduate (not that I made the effort to appreciate it).

We drove to Forest Hill through the infinite reaches of south London.   However often I go through it and however well I think I ought to know it, I find it infinitely baffling the way Rotherhithe bleeds into Southwark, which itself turns into Deptford, then through Brockley to Forest Hill, which we discovered is a hill, with a view all the way across London:-

When we went to the discussion between Tanya Harrod and Phyllida Barlow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery about the nature of craft, I had not had an opportunity of reading Tanya Harrod’s excellent and comprehensive anthology of writings on the topic which has been published by the Whitechapel. Over the weekend, I have been grappling with the range of writings, many of them sociological and philosophical, which demonstrate very clearly how comprehensively the boundaries have blurred between the activities of art and craft, which once upon a time, rightly or wrongly, seemed more clearly differentiated: art more obviously about creative freedom in the ways in which materials are manipulated; craft an activity in which manual skills have been creatively applied to, and manipulated, traditional materials, but within inherited boundaries of practice.

One of the essays in the book is by Edmund de Waal, a short one, on attitudes to craft in Black Mountain College, including Anni Albers’s book On Weaving. This was written in 2005, just at the moment he was making the transition from craft to fine art. His work presumably epitomises the shift in categories, having trained as a potter in Canterbury, Sheffield and Japan and initially highly esteeemed, and heavily involved with, the world of the crafts, now migrated into the world of fine art. One could argue that the work is the same, the hand and eye the same, and that all that has happened is a shift in ontological classification. But it is not quite as simple as that because there is a shift also in the way that one judges the work: from viewing it for the quality of its making to seeing it in series; and a difference in the way it is displayed, and, most decidedly, a shift in how much the work costs. Maybe this does mean that the categorisation is in the mind of the viewer as much as that of the maker.

Rowan Moore has written an interesting piece about the future of retail in tomorrow’s Observer.  

I’m interested in this topic, as my readers will know, because in East London, where he and I both live, there is a great deal of pleasure to be gained from small-scale, locally based places of consumption:  the local farmer’s market, small traders like Mouse Tail Coffee Stores in the Whitechapel Road and the Green Truffle in the Roman Road, Breit, the new bread shop under the railway arches off Vallance Road, which I wrote about last week.   These sorts of shops are opening up, not closing.   They are not big monoliths, but versions of the sorts of shops which still thrive in Paris and Rome:  run by individuals, specially sourced, which are protected in those cities by legislation rather than priced out of business as in much of London by extortionate rent and rates;  and are a pleasure to be in unlike the chains which have so obviously crucified the high streets.  

Today was Small Business Saturday in Tower Hamlets.   Something to celebrate:-

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/dec/01/everything-must-go-what-next-for-the-high-street-new-retail-empty-shops?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_WordPress

We went to Cathie Pilkington’s Christmas sale in her ACME studio off Bonner Road.

Greeted by the fat baby:-

Her studio is full of relics of her exhibitions:-

And spooky individual works:-

We went last night to a discussion at the Whitechapel Art Gallery between Tanya Harrod, who has just published a volume of writings on the subject in a series under the joint imprint of MIT Press and the Whitechapel, and Phyllida Barlow RA, whose work is so obviously interested in the use, if not the mess, of ordinary materials and the materiality of making.   It became clear that the volume represents a very broad range of possible approaches to the idea, and meaning, of craft, such that I can just about see that Phyllida’s work, which I first became aware of in the exhibition she did in the old Lutyens bank next to St. James’s Piccadilly, might represent one end of the spectrum:  using materials spontaneously and without too much deliberate care in order to subvert the conventions of their use and to create works of art which shock by their vital unexpectedness.

I have been going through the sale catalogue of one part only of Gavin Stamp’s architectural library, which has been issued by Janette Ray, an architectural book dealer in York (other parts of the library has been cherry picked by friends or issued by other booksellers).   His books demonstrate the astonishing range of his architectural taste – not just ample Victoriana and books about Alexander Thomson, war memorials and Lutyens, as are to be expected, but collecting in depth on design, early photography, India, railway stations, and Plečnik.   It is also a reminder of how much he himself wrote, including an article on St. Martin’s Church, Delhi in the Architectural Review, which he bound and inscribed ‘To Mum and Dad’, a book on early photographs of London, countless talks and contributions to exhibitions, and his book on power stations, as illustrated by Glynn Boyd Harte (luckily, I already own it). A great man.

Every so often I meet people who are much more knowledgeable than I am about the terms of our departure from Brexit:  who have actually read the detailed terms, as I haven’t, and regard it as the best available, if complicated, and potentially deeply undesirable, terms of departure, which have been secured as the result of lengthy negotiation with Brussels.   The question then is as to whether or not the House of Commons will accept the terms as agreed in their vote on December 11th.   The answer is, probably, but not inevitably, not.   The current arithmetic suggests that the vote will be lost by somewhere between 20 and 50 votes.   Then what happens ?   The vote could be put to the country on a three-way vote between remaining in Europe, accepting the deal as currently proposed, and crashing out (pure Brexit).   If the vote on the current deal is lost, Mrs. May would probably have to resign unless she agreed to put the vote to the country.   If she resigned, who would take over ?  Who knows ?

I left out of my recent post the exciting fact that Charles I was Exhibition of the Year and I was pleased that both Per Rumberg and Desmond Shawe-Taylor, its curators, were there to collect it.   I remember discovering that Per Rumberg had travelled from Yorkshire to Piccadilly on Boxing Day last year to check that Gallery 6 had been painted exactly the right shade of red and this scrupulous attention to the detail of display helped to give the exhibition its memorable beauty:-

https://www.apollo-magazine.com/exhibition-of-the-year-winner-apollo-awards-2018/

I am recovering from the mild shock of travelling on the Central Line to Mile End carrying a magnum of Pol Roger and a large framed certificate naming me as the Apollo Personality of the Year, a lovely and unexpected award for being the Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy in its 250th. year.   So, after a mere 24 years of running national museums (or the Royal Academy which is an equivalent), I can prepare to hang up my clogs and enjoy the champagne.
https://www.apollo-magazine.com/personality-of-the-year-winner-apollo-awards-2018/