We went for a freezing cold expedition to the Olympic Park for a walk, but couldn’t find anywhere to park, so wandered round Hackney Wick which seemed to be a hive of lockdown activity with cafés and food shops and a nice hole-in-the-wall where we were able to buy freshly baked ciabatta for lunch:-
Someone has kindly pointed me in the direction of an article which makes the case cogently and clearly for accepting that simulacra can often be a legitimate substitute, and possibly even superior, to the real thing, as the Victorian certainly believed. But it doesn’t persuade me that people are going to stop wanting to go to museums as the history of the last eighty years suggests that the more people can read about art, the more they look at images, the more it’s available online, the more they want to see and experience the real thing. Yes, it may be irrational, but no copy is ever a 100% adequate substitute even if – and perhaps especially if – you have to queue to see it.
I did my first online interview yesterday in connection with my book. I found it an odd and interesting experience because I was asked not so much about contemporary art museums and how they display art, which is the subject of my book, but about history museums, including the National Portrait Gallery, and how they represent the past, based round the increasingly common view that we can in some way punish people retrospectively for the views that they held, many of which were, in the light of current attitudes, clearly unacceptable and sometimes abhorrent. It’s an issue which is caught up in the current culture wars which are polarised in a way which is incredibly unhelpful. It will be interesting to see what stance the new Mayor’s diversity commission takes and I was pleased to see that it was not about taking statues down, but putting them up, which seems to me to be the right approach, diversifying attitudes to commemoration, rather than trying to abolish attitudes to commemoration in the past.
It’s a brave moment to be launching a new Festival, but the attached, based in Castle Hedingham on the borders of Essex and Suffolk, looks interesting and unpredictable in a good way – music and poetry and performance. Hard to imagine re-establishing the sense of shared community involved in a Festival after these lonely months on Zoom, but something to look forward to.
https://mailchi.mp/24de81d462cc/launching-during-lockdown-the-ea-festival-4755212?e=00bf64b2e6
On the off chance, you want to hear me talk about my forthcoming book, by which time I will (or may) have had some reviews, you can book now.
Everyone wants me to know about the future of museums. I wish I did. It’s so hard to predict what will happen post-Coronavirus. This morning, I was told that we would all be so addicted to Virtual Reality that we wouldn’t have to bother traipsing round the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa in a heaving crowd. But so far, the more art is available online, the greater the interest in its reality – to look, to experience the real thing in all its uncomfortable three-dimensionality, and I’m not yet persuaded that this will die away. Images in reproduction can never give the same frisson, nor can I be persuaded that the idea of authenticity is some make-belief delusion. It’s like saying people will no longer want to shake hands or hug. Hasn’t lockdown taught us that people don’t want to experience the world from their armchair ?
https://courtauld.ac.uk/event/the-art-museum-in-modern-times
I went out into the snow to see what it looked like – actually, not very attractive as it has mostly already turned to slush – and partly because I wanted to see what it looked like in photographs, as everyone else seems to be able to photograph the snow falling. I can’t, but tried:-
I have been reading the collected essays of Janet Abrams which have been published by Princeton University Press under the title Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bauhaus. They belong to an era which now seems as remote as the Pyramids: the medium being the large-format Blueprint with its its sense of optimism and confidence in the power of design, graphic as well as architectural; when the Independent was first launched, breaking the mould of journalism; the era of Peter Eisenman and Richard Meier; the early days of postmodern theory; when Andrée Putman was the epitome of fashionability and Frank Gehry was beginning to be known. I’m not sure how well it has all aged, but it is no doubt time for it to be excavated.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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