THE BRITISH THREAD II

The area with malaria? Is that like the flagon with the dragon or the vessel with the pestle?

Thanks for the medical notes, Mathos. I read somewhere recently that mosquitoes don't carry malaria of themselves, they only pass it between hosts, i.e. they've got to feed on an infected person to be able to pass it on. Another chicken and egg conundrum.

Smorgie how can I "make" you do anything when you've got more balls than any man you've ever met? :wink:

Apparently if Scotland had not been bankrupted by this failed (sabotaged) venture, there would have been no Union in 1707 and England would have had to go it alone.
And then where would you be?

Steve wrote-



The explanation Steve is the one that was developed in the early 1900s to criticise what was referred to sometimes as "Art tourism". The criticism was effective enough to lead to abstraction in art. It basically involves using people and their daily lives as a vehicle or a stage on which to display the techniques of artistic expression from what is, by definition, an elite position. Gauguin obviously springs to mind, or Lowry, but Picasso was also accused of it. It led eventually to such things as emptying cans of paint onto a large canvas on the floor, riding a uni-cycle around on it for a while, framing the result and selling it to a wealthy patron for a million bucks so he could have a picture on his wall which he felt couldn't patronise people to any degree and was therefore superior to most of the pictures in the New York Museum of Modern Art ofr whatever it is called.

Mathos is a member of the School of O-Level Literary Bullshit. It is an offshoot of Journalism but it doesn't talk down to people and is readily understood by all classes.

I can explain it more fully to some extent but I have to go to the pub now otherwise my friends will be deprived of my company.

Spendy says he's got friends.

Do we believe him, children?

You can suit yourself Mac. And so can your "children".

Just remember though that the next time you see a work of art you don't understand don't go braying that it's "rubbish" just because you are out of your depth on it.

I see hes full of Extra Smooth and lecturing on where to see Art whilst in America. There are many just like him in New York who'll tell one where to go for a few bucks with which they can buy some MAd Dog 20/20.

Mathos, have you ever tried to eat a Durian fruit along your treks east.

You know that Mona Lisa picture?

I think it's rubbish!

She's not even smiling proper...

Mornin' everyone!

x

Dissected beasts in formaldehyde? Unmade beds?

Bray! Bray!

BTW your latest post seems to take the opposite position to the one just before, or maybe that's just another thing I don't understand.

My, my! How could you ever think you could match Spendius' superior mind, McT?

"Glasgow kiss" exported to NYC

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/10/smeaton.hero/index.html

Farmerman Asked

Mathos, have you ever tried to eat a Durian fruit along your treks east.

Hi Farmer, nice to see you about! The smell from Durian fruit is awful, rather like a blocked up sewer pipe might stink! The hotels normally have signs at the entrances in Bangkok and such places, in Durian season, which I think is around February,

'NO DURIAN FRUIT ALLOWED IN HOTEL'

I know one or two people who eat it on a regular basis when it is available, I understand from their comments that it tastes very nice, but I have never been tempted. If I was in need of food and it was all there was, yes of course I would eat it regardless.

It grows on trees, a large fruit, and like coconuts falling, people have been killed by the same.

smorgsie wrote-



What is depicted in that picture doesn't have a sense of humour.

Mac wrote-



Not at all. I never said anything in my "tourist art" post about what I think of it. Rubbish is something that has no point to me. If it's there it has a point to somebody I suppose.

Mathos's descriptions, his form of tourist art, like your pic from the ivy covered whatsit, are like empty plastic bags as far as I'm concerned. They are artless. The displaying ego is all there is. If it was cockadoodledooing outside the window at 6 am I would shoot the flipper.

I could take a map of the Yorkshire Dales and write a more colourful description of travels in those desolate regions without shifting off my couch.

The only purpose of Mathos's Journeys in the East is Mathos and what a big dick he is compared to us silly sods who are supposed to be drooling with envy or admiration and I find it difficult to feel either of those emotions about anybody who has got to his stage in life and still can't read or write worth a blow on a ragman's trumpet. His descriptions are the equivalent of what Olympia would look like if he painted it.

And he could have gone somewhere else and that "quite a nice town" would never have had a mention and none of would know that it's quite a nice town. And he would have had to appreciate a foreign culture in some other place where he stopped for the night.

Talk about patronising.

I thought of a work of art myself. You get a 6x8 canvas and put a fence around it. Throw some cans of paint on it and put two fighting cocks in, When they've finished you let it dry and hey presto "The Cock Fight". Or two bulldogs to get "The Dog Fight". I don't mind patronising cocks and bulldogs. That's why I wouldn't do " A Sabine Wrestling Match". I don't patronise women. Blokes are okay. Artists became sensitive to the charge that they were patronising their subjects. Even Nature can be patronised.

If Mathos brings back some photos the subject will be the same in them all: what Mathos condescended to point his camera at in some place he had condescended to visit in order to make the same point, to which I alluded earlier, endlessly, for ever and ever.

I don't like foreign tourists coming here to look at our quaint ways just because they are bored with their own quaint ways. Although they do put some foreign exchange on the side of the balance that Mathos has removed it from.

suspendysewell,

What IS dipicted in it?

I know it's a false smile, psychologists have said that, but what IS dipicted?

x

well i like gauguin claude monet eduard manet etc (bid dubious about etc) because was recently dragged around the impressionists at the seaside exhibition at the Royal Acadamy. Particularly liked one painting the name of which I've forgotten by some one famous. I think it had some blue and green in it.

So Mathos is into Art as lived in the jungle? I'm really into this conceptual art stuff. Last year went to the Baltic centre in Gateshead where there was a room with hundreds of tiny loud speakers dangling from bits of string. Really most inspiring.

Mac wrote-



The subject is not so simple I'm afraid. I can only offer disconnected jottings not in any order of importance.

The Hurst tests the limits of acceptability which is an artistic purpose.

As there is a cow it might be reasonable to assume that the other animal carcasses he uses are female. But I don't know. The cow is. The female as "object" in art is exceedingly conservative. Christian.

Art needs to go forward. It does that. In needs to shock. It does that. It needs to enrich the artist. It does that when money is the objective measure of society's approval. It provides entry into social circles. It is novel, has impact and an effect on the target market.

An artist decides what is art. Most critics are journalists who could just as easy being writing about cookery or sport or motor cars. That's a job too aiming at a target audience. The only real critics of art are other artists.

In the "International Style" of the 30s beauty and function are essentially identical. The inner workings of an animal, a female, which can't be seen when it's alive, are functional and thus beautiful by definition. The facade of The Algonquin contains functionless decorative effects and to that school is thus ugly. Obviously, the Provincial bourgeois reactionary style with find it beautiful and the Hurst ugly. But the latter can easily be shown to be an affected prejudice stemming from non artistic considerations and out of date.

It amazes me that anyone can be shocked by Hurst's image in a society which approves of millions of abortions and experimentation on live animals. The image might remind some people that abortion is not an abstract concept no matter how many blinds are drawn around it and that animals are not simply objects. It might at least remove some mental blinds.

It provides a talking point for the chattering classes.

By aggravating the fuddy-duds is brings them into view. It may descend from those schools of art which traced the catastrophe of 1914-18 and 1939-45 (and others) to the values enshrined in the nation state and what lay behind those values which was, and is, the ambition of the human reason and its products; namely science, culture and civilised behaviour.
Aggravation might be the name of the game.

The Emin might serve to make more real the abstraction of Molly Bloom's bed so that it ceases to have that twee romanticism so beloved of the male fantasy. Or the bed of the lady one might be chatting up or those of the flash bints pictured in the Sunday Supplements after 8 hours. If you don't fancy waking up in that don't invite yourself back. They secrete.

Smorgsie peeks into that stuff now and again.

Anyway- both release some imaginative power in some viewers. The spectator gives it meaning. So they pass the I.A. Richards Test for those which a Constable can't do anymore.

Its lack of portability is okay because it is aimed at public rather than private display.

It might be worthwhile adding that the structural functionalism of the International Style (functionality=beauty) runs over into the social sciences.

If Religion is functional it is beautiful by definition. The service in Liverpool for the kid proved the "marriage" of the two ideas.

bloody hell spendy

have you stayed at the Algonquin?

Will Russia win by more that 2 goals?

smorgsie wrote-



I have only seen it twice but on those occasions it was perfectly clear. It's a bit like those faces in foliage that you sometimes see. When you see them they are clear but often if you look again later you can't find them. I've not been able to see it for years now but when I did it was right there. Twice. From learning from an art critic what was there it was a long while before I could discern it and on both occasions I had been at the weed. One might need to dislocate one's mundane perceptual abilities.

Francis might tell you.

Steve-

I've not seen Russia play for years. I expect England to win. I hope Heskey plays. And James.

My brother in law is an artist of some note, and has exibited. He paints in what I believe is the cubist style though I know little of art and it's not to my taste...

I prefer a nice Louis Wain.

I'm simple like that.

And working class.

And thick.

It's an easier life being thick, I don't have to think about evolution, the cosmos, the meaning of a painting of a woman with a pretend smile...

I'm too busy grafting for a living. And anyway, who am I going to talk to about such things? If I spoke about La Gioconda to my friends, they would think I was mental. We don't discuss such things, we only talk about going out to the pub and the national lottery.

x