We're delighted to announce that David Lewis, the chairman of the famous Schorr Collection, is joining the New Culture Forum Advisory Committee.
The Schorr Collection is one of the largest private collections of paintings amassed in England since World War II. It numbers more than 400 works, encompassing the Renaissance and Mannerism, the Baroque and the Impressionists. Within the collection are Old Master artists such as Rubens,El Greco, Delacroix and Cranach and Impressionists such as Pissarro and Sisley.
The collection was recently the subject of a major exhibition, The Collector's Eye, at Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery.
Peter Whittle
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Submitted by peterwhittle on Fri, 2012-01-27 12:12.
In the Telegraph today, design guru Stephen Bayley discusses the new incarnation of the Design Museum, and asks whether it serves a real purpose:
'When we opened the first Design Museum, I was concerned that it did not look so very different from a department store. I also began to muse, somewhat bathetically, about at what stage in the history of a subject someone creates a museum to cater for it. Ethnographic museums appeared when exploration was at its adventurous peak. New York’s Museum of Modern Art was established when abstract painting was a bold transgression. Thereafter, modern art became atrophied and institutionalised. And London’s first Design Museum? There’s a debate to be had here.
Soon there will be an app which allows you to point a device at an object and everything you need to know about it will pop up on the screen. André Malraux used to talk whimsically about a “museum without walls”: soon, it will be with us. I confess that if we had had apps in the Eighties, we might not have built a solid concrete museum housing a collection of objects...'
Posted in Visual Arts add new comment
Submitted by peterwhittle on Wed, 2012-01-25 10:27.
Disgust might have been a better title for Shame, says Susan Shaw
Shame, the new film from artist-turned director Steve McQueen, has been breathlessly reported as being a portrait of a sex addict (Oh, the contemporary frisson!). It is widely assumed to be a dirty flick. In fact, those seeking cheap thrills will be sorely disappointed.
While it is a study of the deleterious side effects of a culture saturated with pornography, it is in fact deeply religious in its sensibility - a modern day morality tale. Arguably, McQueen’s first feature film, “Hunger”, was far more pornographic in its intent and message, wallowing as it did in the grotesque “martyrdom” of the IRA hunger striker, Bobby Sands.
In that film, the wider political context was stripped away, (unconscionably so) and replaced by a singular focus on the literal flesh of the matter. With its excrement-stained palette, it was the cinematic equivalent of having one’s head held down a toilet for 90 minutes. Its emotional lexicon was that of disgust, conjoined with admiration for the force of its subject’s will . Sands, played with intense conviction by Michael Fassbender (pictured), was presented as a Christ-like figure, and the imagery of his pale, bony, tortured torso conjured somewhat obvious images of crucifixion.
“Shame” is also a work of religious ecstasy, graphically depicting the mortification of the flesh, this time in an ostensibly secular context. Its protagonist, Brandon - again played by Fassbinder - is a handsome but anonymous New York executive - whose life is dominated by the joyless, never-ending pursuit of emotionless sex. Appearing in virtually every scene, Fassbinder distinguishes himself by his willingness to appear naked both emotionally and physically, and in doing so takes visceral acting to a new level. He is a Brando for our times.
While the film has been publicised as an exploration of metrosexual alienation, it is actually anything but. Rather, it is a personal drama about incest. Yes, we see Brandon blowing his presumably generous salary on hookers, copulating mechanically in a mundanely imagined range of sexual possibilities (a bar pick-up, a gay sauna, a brothel threesome). However the core of the story’s sexual dynamics lies in his relationship with his sister, Sissy, played by Carey Mulligan.
Sissy is introduced into the film via a series of whining, blackmailing voicemail messages which Brandon ignores. We assume she is a spurned lover. When she arrives as a squatter in her brother’s flat, he bursts in on her in the shower, and her brash nudity and lack of embarrassment set a queasy tone. Brandon’s rage after she sleeps with his philandering boss suggests the fury of a jealous lover, not filial anxiety. The self harming scars criss crossing her arms allude to a childhood trauma, but nothing is spelt out; McQueen and his co-writer Abi Morgan leave us to join the dots.
The critical incident in the film, the grand guignol, is Brandon’s impotence in the one moment where sex may involve even a small amount of emotional involvement. He can’t get it up – because he vaguely knows and quite likes the girl, a work colleague. This is a superbly acted and staged scene, in a hotel room with a view over the indifferent Hudson river, and despite the annoying implied suggestion here that black women are more sexually authentic than white women, the awkwardness of consensual sex with a relative stranger is brilliantly conveyed. But what strikes one particularly about this scene - and it is a theme throughout most of the others - is that these characters have nothing to say to one another. They have no option, in their lack of conversation, but to get to it (or not).
After the impotence moment, Brandon immediately hires a hooker, and has sex with her splayed against the hotel window. Later, the film’s resolution takes the form of a montage of Brandon’s most decadent night on the town, culminating in shots of a threesome, and a picture of alienation so graphic and unsexy, it is a refutation of anything but a form of religious agony. Both of these scenes display a deeply disapproving authorial note about sexual exhibitionism.
In fact Shame, in the end, could have been written by St Thomas of Aquinas, such is its revulsion with the desperate sexual encounters of lonely urbanites. It is essentially puritan; its message is that we are all screwed. There is no love or pity. Steve McQueen is becoming the poster boy for the cinema of self loathing; for all its formal abnegations, Shame is a highly conservative film.
Susan Shaw is a director and cultural commentator
Posted in Film add new comment
Submitted by peterwhittle on Mon, 2012-01-23 09:33.
In Standpoint Magazine, Amir Taheri has written a powerful article about the rapid rise of Islamism in post-revolution Egypt:
Is the Arab Spring morphing into an Islamic Winter? The question is haunting those interested in the outcome of the series of political earthquakes that, from the start of 2011, have shaken most of the 21 member states of the Arab League. Those who remember the initial days of the Arab uprising on Bourguiba Avenue in Tunisia and Tahrir Square in Cairo wonder what happened to the promise of the modern liberal society that was supposed to be about to be born out of the pages of Facebook accompanied by the jingles of mobile phones. Where have all the clean-shaven, jeans-wearing, cappuccino-imbibing young things gone? And where did all these bushy beards and extra-thick hijabs, absent from the early stages of the "revolution", come from?
To find an answer let us start with the certainties of the situation. First, it is too early to speak of an Arab revolution. Revolutions are baptised as such only after they have happened. What we have in the countries affected by the Arab Spring so far is the promise of a revolution. For the first time in decades almost all Arab societies are in a state of flux. Everywhere, the regimes in place have run out of the energy and imagination needed to keep themselves in power. Arab governing elites are no longer able to respond to the hopes, fears and aspirations of their peoples.
The emergence of modern Arab states in the Middle East and North Africa dates back to the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, and then the decolonisation movement that followed the Second. Initially, the Arab elites toyed with the idea of reviving the Islamic caliphate, a dream that haunted ambitious leaders from King Fouad of Egypt to King Abdul-Aziz of Saudi Arabia. However, the reality of the emerging Arab states was something else. These were states created around an army, even when, as was the case in Saudi Arabia and Transjordan, it consisted of a tribal band of irregulars. At the start, almost all the newly created states were monarchies under different names. In Yemen the monarch was called the imam, in Egypt he was the king and in Morocco the sultan.
Writing in his blog for The Daily Mail, Historian and friend of the NCF Michael Burleigh gives his thoughts on the recent Abu Qatada affair:
Every jihadi terrorist group or individual requires religious sanction for their atrocities. They are, after all, Islamists, even though of a specially noxious kind. The Jordanian-Palestinian Abu Qatada was different. He provided global religious sanction for all manner of jihadis.
He came to Britain with his wife and three children in 1993 on a forged United Arab Emirates passport, after being expelled from both Jordan (where he plotted bombings) and Kuwait, where he supported the invasion of his hosts by Saddam Hussein. All three facts should have resulted in him being turned away at the airport, but no, we granted him refugee status. I wonder whether the officials responsible for that decision have been sacked? I doubt it.
Although Mr Qatada claims to despise western values, and wants the separation of believers and infidels, he was quite happy for his brood to be subsidised by British tax payers. This enabled him to set up a one-man spiritual advice centre for Islamist warriors, based in the Four Feathers Social Club in Baker Street, and to preach from the Finsbury Park mosque.
During this period, Qatada licensed the murder of women, children and old people by the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, which in the 1990s slaughtered 130,000 people in that country. Even Bin Laden thought this group had run amok. Qatada then supported the group's next incarnation as the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, which turned out to be even more murderous. For what it is worth, a host of eminent Muslim theologians condemned practices which Qatada said were legitimate.
As the BBC's adaption of Sebastian Faulks's novel Birdsong proves to be a ratings success, The Daily Telegraph's Serena Davies says the BBC has made an elegiac and lyrical film, with which the next generation can associate the war:
You could argue that the BBC’s adaptation of Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong (BBC One) has had nearly 20 years of hype. The book came out in 1993; readers adored it. A film version was promised; it never happened. Faulks himself has long since distanced himself from the project. Last night, the Beeb’s lush, languorous two-part treatment finally hoved into view. And in many ways, it was a triumph.
Eddie Redmayne played Stephen Wraysford, the introverted hero who walks the trenches of the worst war that ever happened as if he were already dead, with total absorption. He gave the part both an aloof melancholy and the sense that his insides had been ripped out. He also gave it drop dead beauty.
Indeed, Redmayne is too beautiful, in one way, for this muddy, bloody tale of collapsing tunnels and exploded skulls. But in another way, his beauty helped. Director Philip Martin’s whole vision of the First World War – in which half the scenes of the opener took place – was aestheticised. His tableaux of the battlefield, with their blasted trees, looked like Paul Nash’s paintings. When Wraysford’s near-expired body was rescued at the end of the episode it looked like a scene from the Deposition of Christ. No accident, I’m sure: the British officer, like Jesus, would be brought back from the dead.
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Submitted by valentinerossetti on Mon, 2012-01-23 02:15.
