May 2, 2008
Luke Leitch



The elite of the London art world will convene in Lambeth tonight to examine graffiti in a dank railway tunnel.

It is not a location that has been listed among London’s main cultural attractions. In fact, it compares unfavourably with other dank tunnels in the capital.

From tomorrow, however, when the tunnel opens to the public, the graffiti are expected to attract thousands, because they represent the largest exhibition by Banksy, a determinedly anonymous British graffiti artist. He has gathered 40 of the chief proponents of the form to transform the tunnel into a showcase.

Banksy himself has contributed depictions of a self-harming hoody, the Buddha wearing a neck-brace, a council worker spraying over some ancient cave paintings and a sculpture of a tree sprouting CCTV cameras.

The Dutch artist Hugo Kaagman has attempted to capture Boris Johnson. The Norwegian artist Dolk has painted the Pope in the style of an iconic image of Marilyn Monroe, smiling coquettishly as he tries to push down his windblown robes.

The exhibition is entitled the Cans Festival. Last night the tunnel was thick with fumes as the artists worked to finish their paintings in time for a private viewing this evening. They had come from all over the world. The Argentinian artist Frederico, half of the graffiti collective Run Don’t Walk, said of Banksy’s invitation to participate: “It happened really fast. They just told us our flights. It’s great to meet people from all over the world to paint. This isn’t some branded event, it isn’t in a gallery, it’s unique.”

The London-born artist Leon arrived from Los Angeles. “It’s traditional for graffiti artists to paint together,” he said, “but it’s never happened in Britain on this scale.”

Banksy said: “I’ve always felt anyone with a paint can should have as much say in how our cities look as architects and ad men. So getting to cover an entire street with graffiti is a dream come true, or as some people might call it — a complete and utter nightmare.”

The Times undertook not to disclose the precise location before 10.30am today, when it will be revealed at www.thecansfestival.com, the exhibition website. It will be open to the public for the Bank Holiday weekend.

As well as looking at art, visitors will be invited to make it: anyone who brings a stencil will be allowed to add their own design. Banksy said: “Graffiti doesn’t always spoil buildings. In fact, it’s the only way to improve a lot of them. In the space of a few hours with a couple of hundred cans of paint I’m hoping we can transform a dark, forgotten filth pit into an oasis of beautiful art — in a dark, forgotten filth pit.”

None of the works is for sale, nor is the tunnel, which has been rented from its owner, Eurostar, and which will revert to public use after the show.

Last night Jo Brooks, Banksy’s spokeswoman, said that Eurostar had agreed to leave the work in place for up to six months. “They were very happy with what they saw,” she said.

The early visitors included Kevin Spacey, the actor and artistic director of the Old Vic.

It is the first exhibition staged in Britain by Banksy since Crude Oils in 2005, when he filled a shop in Westbourne Grove, London, with 164 live rats and vandalised pastiches of works including Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and Jack Vettriano’s Singing Butler.

At a Sotheby’s charity auction in New York in January, a Banksy image sprayed on top of a Damien Hirst spot painting fetched £950,000, a record for the artist.

Guerrilla art

— Adam Neate hung his canvases on nails on London streets, leaving them to be discovered

— Jeff “Doze” Green began tagging New York subway trains as a student in the 1970s. His work now hangs in galleries in the US, Europe and Japan

— The self-styled French “guerrilla artist” Space Invader secretly created mosaics of the arcade game figures on the city streets of six continents over ten years. There are 75 in London alone

Source: Times archives




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April 30, 2008
Rosemary Bennett, Social Affairs Correspondent


The alarm clock rings at 4am in Martha Hunter's North London flat, as it has every morning for 13 years. The single mother gets up, dresses and heads into Central London to start her cleaning job at 6am. Mrs Hunter, 38, and her daughters, Karen, 14, and four-year-old Julianna, have been living in “temporary accommodation” for three years — a tiny flat in Haringey where the girls have to share bunk beds. The cooker doesn't work properly and the shower is broken. “I hate it. I have been fighting, fighting with the council to get a better place,” says Mrs Hunter.

This is the day-to-day reality of life for hundreds of thousands of Londoners struggling to make a living in one of the world's richest cities. As Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson trade blows over transport, property prices and the environment, entire communities feel unable to connect with the campaign issues.

While the billions of pounds spent to help families out of poverty have been a success in the rest of Britain, lifting almost 600,000 above the breadline, London has been left behind. There are 650,000 children still in poverty, 41 per cent of all the capital's children and down by just one per cent since 1998. The numbers in poverty have not fallen at all since 2000.

Carey Oppenheim, who chairs the London Child Poverty Commission, said the great raft of government initiatives that have helped to reduce poverty elsewhere by “making work pay” have had barely any impact at all in London. The national minimum wage of £5.52 an hour is simply not enough to live on in the capital. “The incentives to work in London are far weaker than anywhere else,” she says. “In London the costs of housing and child care, on top of the hassle factor of getting into Central London where the jobs are and home again in time to pick up from school or nursery, mean it is just not worth it for many people to get a job,” she adds.

Jane Wills, Professor of Human Geography at Queen Mary, London University , says London's low-waged have been hit badly by the rapid spread of “contracting out”, the cost-saving scheme pioneered by the Tories in the 1980s and embraced by Labour, which has prevented wages from rising as the economy boomed. “Sub-contracting in cleaning, catering and security and so on is being used by hospitals, local government and across the private sector. That means there is in-built pressure on keeping wages low across the service industry. These companies have to tender every four or five years so there is no room to push up wages even if they wanted to.”

Mrs Hunter is among the more fortunate cleaners in the capital. She works for the London School of Economics, which pays contracted-out staff the “living wage” of £7.20 an hour. Esasa Erhunse is not so lucky. She has cleaned rooms at one of the best-known hotels in London for 13 years. She has not had a pay rise since 2003. “We were paid £6 an hour when a new company took over our contracts. They said we were being paid too much and would be kept on this rate until the minimum wage catches up,” she says. She lives with her daughter, now 18, in a tower block in the Old Kent Road and has struggled to make ends meet as the cost of living has escalated while her wages stayed the same.

"These have been very bad years. It has been very stressful because the electricity bills have gone up, our rent has gone up but my money has stayed the same so we have to make it back somewhere else,” she says. “People say I should get a new job but I am 50 and I think it is safer to stay where they know me. I cannot remember when I last bought new clothes. If we get the chance to go without a meal, we do it.”

In the East End it is unemployment rather than low wages that is the problem. Tower Hamlets, the borough that borders the City of London, has the highest unemployment rate in the country at 14 per cent.

Farage Mahmood, 22, has been out of work for a year. He speaks good English and has “a few GCSEs”. But since leaving school he has had only two short stints in work. Now that he wants to get a job he can't find one.

He lives in a three-bedroom council flat in Shadwell with his parents, four brothers and three sisters. One brother and two sisters have jobs and support the household. “My parents don't speak English so we don't really talk much. My brother is rich. He helps me out. He's a bus driver. But I want to get on now and get a place of my own. But there are just not that many jobs around and the ones I want have gone by the time I ring.”

Chris Henry, a play leader with Coram , the children's charity, says: “People want to work but the cost of childcare stops them. It doesn't get much better when the children are older because there is chronic shortage of after-school provision round here. People do the sums and work out that they are better off on benefits.”



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From The Times
April 30, 2008
Ben Hoyle, Arts Reporter　



There will be naked dancing girls, bungee ropes, a four-storey tower wreathed in fireworks and the theme from the Old Spice adverts amplified so that 18,000 people can hear it.

Puritannical music lovers should probably run for the hills: the stadium classical music gig is coming to Britain. O2 , the concert venue in the former Millennium Dome, announced yesterday that it will stage a monumental production of Carmina Burana next January.

It plans to follow Carl Orff’s frenetic and instantly recognisable work with productions of Carmen, Aida and The Nutcracker. A musical adaptation of Ben-Hur has also been mooted.

In the ten months since it opened, O2 has won a stack of industry awards and hosted the Led Zeppelin reunion concert, the Rolling Stones, world championship boxing and Strictly Come Dancing. However, presenting classical music as mass entertainment on this scale represents a significant new gamble.

The promoters, Harvey Goldsmith and Raymond Gubbay, have had mixed commercial fortunes presenting operas in Earl’s Court, Wembley Arena and the Royal Albert Hall over the past two decades. But not since 1926 and the end of the triennial Han-del Festivals at the Crystal Palace, six miles away across South London, has such a large indoor venue in Britain hosted classical music.

That event peaked in 1883 when a choir of 4,000 and an orchestra of 500 performed Messiah to an audience of 87,000.

This production of Carmina Burana has already played to 150,000 on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro and more than a million people in 13 years of worldwide touring. It has not visited Britain before.

Franz Abraham, the German impresario behind the production, described his Carmina Burana as “the antiboring classical spectacle”.

Musical theatre as imagined by Cecil B. de Mille seems to be the general idea, with 250 performers – including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Brighton Festival Chorus and Youth Choir, as well as dancers, actors, and singers – involved in the British staging.

A huge, moving central tower provides a backdrop to the sort of overblown spectacle that Orff originally envisaged for his music. There will be fireworks, giant puppets, cannon, vast light projections, masks the size of a man, bungee aerial sequences and “erotic scenes with naked girls imitating an orgy”, Mr Abraham said.

“Carmina Burana is about drinking, food and sex, next to the spiritual aspect of course.”

The work has its origins in a collection of often bawdy 13th-century poems discovered in a Bavarian monastery in 1847 by Johann Andreas Schmeller, a musicologist. They reflected the monks’ preoccupations with earthly pleasures and the overbearing burden of fate.

Schmeller turned the poems into songs that in turn became the basis for Orff’s epic orchestral and choral work, perhaps the most celebrated artistic achievement to come out of Nazi Germany. The whole composition lasts about an hour in performance although it is best known for the O For-tunachorus in the opening and closing movements, which was for many years the soundtrack to adverts for Old Spice aftershave.

Walter Haupt, a student and friend of Orff, created the production coming to the O2 and will conduct it.

“This is not only the most monumental version of Carmina Burana,” Mr Abrahams said. “It is the most authentic version. Orff’s widow came to the premiere and had tears in her eyes.

She said that this is what he dreamed for his masterpiece.”

The music industry is now intrigued as to whether there are enough classical music fans to fill the O2 .

James Inverne, editor of Grama-phonemagazine, said that the concerts could grow the audience for classical music if they were done with flair and sensitivity. “There are a lot of people who will go to something because it’s out of the ordinary and if it’s good there’s nothing to say they won’t then seek out the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican for more.”

But another industry insider with experience of arena concerts said: “They are never going to get 18,000 people for one performance. I’d put money on it. There just isn’t the audience.”

Tickets go on sale this Friday at 9am from www.theo2.co.uk



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April 29, 2008
Richard Morrison


The once scandalous home of the avant-garde is now an irrelevant backwater that can barely run its own birthday party


Somehow it seems symptomatic of the inconsequential backwater that the ICA has become. More than a year after the relevant date has passed, an exhibition called Nought to Sixty, the major component of its 60th birthday celebrations, is only now about to open.

It was early in 1947 that the Institute of Contemporary Arts was set up, by a group of Modernists who wanted a “new consciousness” of the arts to evolve in exhausted postwar Britain. In June that year the ICA's prime founder, an anarchist poet called Herbert Read, wrote a letter to The Times appealing for funds. That produced a scathing riposte from the 91-year-old George Bernard Shaw. If we wanted to improve the wellbeing of British people, he thundered, the money would be better spent on hygiene, not the arts.

Shaw had a point, with London still full of bomb craters and primitive Victorian housing. And there are those who would argue that the ICA has done little in the 61 years since to prove him wrong.

I wouldn't quite go along with that. It's probably impossible for anyone under 50 to imagine how stuffy the mainstream arts scene in Britain was, even in the 1960s. The counterculture, the beatnik movement, hippies, sex, drugs and rock'n'roll - these were things that happened elsewhere. They had virtually no impact on theatres, concert halls or art galleries. The ICA in those days was a unique melting pot for the avant-gardes of different fields, from Peter Blake's Pop Art to John Cage's aleatoric music.

It was also a thorn in the complacent backside of the Establishment. Shows such as the 1965 happening Oh What A Lovely Whore, which invited the audience to smash up a piano, or the 1957 exhibition Paintings by Chimpanzees (which was exactly that), or Mary Kelly's notorious 1976 display of dirty nappies (to bring home the reality of motherhood), or Einstürzende Neubauten's never-to-be-forgotten 1984 Concerto for Voice and Machinery, which demolished the ICA's stage with a piledriver - all these shook preconceptions about art. One show was shut down amid threats of indecency charges. That was the 1976 exhibition on prostitution, featuring the half-clad charms of a porn model called Cosey Fanni Tutti.

Those were the days! The ICA was always a shambling, incoherent place - but at least in its heady early decades it could was occasionally capable of shocking Tunbridge Wells with a lively piece of gross moral turpitude.

But all that was more than 25 years ago. Since then? Well, there have been odd attempts to recapture the spirit of daring anarchy. Looking back over my reviews in the 1980s and 1990s, I see I wrote about a series of workshops on transvestitism with “New York's foremost cross-dressing impresario”, about a display of catfood balanced on melons, and about “the first international festival of naked poets”. None of which has left the slightest trace on my memory. That was how much impact they made on me, and on the public at large.

Little wonder, then, that the ICA has gone off the radar in the past 20 years. Apart from one incident, that is. Six years ago its chairman, a businessman called Ivan Massow, was forced to resign when he made the observation that most conceptual art was “pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat”. How ironic. The ICA was in the headlines, for the first time in years, because its boss had attacked the very thing that it was supposed to be promoting.

In one way, however, Massow's words were unsurprising, since the ICA had spectacularly failed to jump on the Young British Artists bandwagon that galvanised the London art scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Charles Saatchi and Tate Modern were allowed to set the agendas, garner the headlines and draw the big crowds. Another irony: for the first time in history, Britain was the centre of an avant-garde art movement - yet the very institution set up to champion the avant-garde was nowhere to be seen.

What has the ICA been doing instead, while millions flocked to Nicholas Serota's great brick culture castle by the Thames? Well, it's been offering what its music programmer calls “hot, drink-fuelled nights of music, butt-shaking and smiles”. Admittedly, these club nights have boosted its attendance figures. But should you need a £1.36 million annual subsidy from the Arts Council to do that? London heaves with clubs offering butt-shaking to suit every taste.

The ICA has also made a point of championing the “digital arts” - a subculture of a subculture that already seems as dated as a prawn cocktail. And it is reliving its past. The Concerto for Voice and Machinery was revived recently - though with a fake floor so that the building wouldn't suffer any real damage. How symbolic! The ICA is “not about storming the barricades any more”, says Ekow Eshun, the former style journalist who was appointed its boss three years ago. So what is it about?

Perhaps it is about identifying the artists who are going to be big in the 2020s, rather than those - such as Hirst and Emin - who peaked in the early 1990s. If so, Nought to Sixty looks promising. It presents 60 solo projects by young British and Irish artists. Each show lasts just one week. And the line-up for May looks suitably weird and wacky.

Nina Canell and Robin Watkins, for instance, will be showing a film of a man digging a hole in a bog. Read into that what you will. And there's an exhibition by Alastair MacKinven, a young artist last seen glueing his hand to the floor of the Camden Arts Centre to test how long it would take the attendants to notice. According to the ICA's programme, this prank “plays with notions of institutional critique”.

Perhaps these youthful japes will be enough to revive its wild, iconoclastic spirit. But stuck in its posh home on The Mall, just beneath the Athenaeum Club and the Institute of Directors, the ICA seems marooned both geographically and symbolically. In London today contemporary arts flourish. Even pillars of the cultural establishment, such as the Royal Opera House and National Theatre, offer cutting-edge new work. If the ICA were to become more like the National Theatre of Scotland, to become not a physical venue but a commissioning body, it might still survive with its point intact. Yet in its current form it is almost the last place you would look for brilliant new work.

People who work in institutes are, by definition, insitutionalised. And that's the last thing the avant-garde should be. When the Edinburgh Festival reached its 50th birthday, the great George Steiner declared that the best way of celebrating the anniversary would be for it to abolish itself - before what was spontaneous and exhilarating became routine.

I am tempted to offer the ICA the same advice. If the ICA blew itself up tomorrow, what an anarchic statement that would be! Except that I don't think many people would even notice that it had gone.

Nought to Sixty, May 5 to November 2, www.ica.org.uk/noughttosixty

Shock or shlock? Milestones at the ICA

Peter Blake: Objects, 1960

One of the British artist's first solo shows, this exhibition is credited with launching Pop Art to the wider public. In the early 1960s the ICA mounted exhibitions by several of Britain's top artists, including Howard Hodgkin, David Hockney and Richard Smith.

The Clash, 1976

One of the band's earliest gigs, it inaugurated punk. The NME reported that a woman at the front of the crowd bit her boyfriend's earlobe off in front of an astonished Joe Strummer, and tried to slash her own wrists with a broken bottle before being bundled away by security.

Prostitution, 1976

Threatened with indecency charges, the ICA was forced to take down the syringes, chains, used tampons and pornographic images, as well as the star exhibit, a semi-naked woman.

Concerto for Voice and Machinery, 1984

The German band Einstürzende Neubauten, wearing heavy-duty goggles to protect themselves (no such help for the audience), noisily destroyed the ICA stage, among other things, with a road drill.

Manga! Manga! Manga!, 1992

This film season, one of the first showings of anime in the UK, introduced Japanese animation to London, and showed the first overseas releases of many classics of the genre. It still carries a huge following at the ICA's Comica festival.

NANCY DURRANT




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April 26, 2008
Ben Hoyle, Arts Reporter


Britain needs to show more gratitude to wealthy philanthropists who give money to the arts, leaders of major cultural institutions said yesterday.

Mark Jones, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum and chairman of the National Museum Directors’ Conference (NMDC), said that Britain’s cultural heritage depended on a fundamental shift towards a culture of private giving.

Potential donors were said to be held back by offputting tax laws, by ignorance of how to get involved and by an often “curmudgeonly” and suspicious attitude towards people who give to the arts. Rather than celebrating the gift, he said, people often think: “What’s in it for them?”

The Government should reward prominent philanthropists with more honours and less tax, he argued. “We are less generous to donors than the Irish system, the French system or the Americans.” Mr Jones was speaking at the start of a campaign to encourage greater giving, backed by a report that lays bare the poor state of charitable contributions. The campaign is led by the NMDC, the Museums, Libraries and Archive Council and Arts Council England.

According to the report, Private Giving for the Public Good, there are 68 billionaires in Britain, and 100 new millionaires are created every day, yet charitable giving has fallen 25 per cent since 1992 as a proportion of gross domestic product.

Of the £9.5 billion donated last year, only a tiny fraction went to the arts.

Nearly 70 per cent of money given to culture goes to London and the South East.

Philanthropy UK, which advises aspiring donors, believes that the wealthiest 10 per cent of the population could double their giving. At present the poorest 10 per cent of the population give about 3 per cent of their income while the richest 10 per cent give barely 1 per cent.

The consequences for the arts, where public spending is throttling back after a decade of investment and the cost of acquiring art for public collections is rising rapidly, are potentially dire.

Private contributions have increased – subsidised performing arts groups now receive on average 36 per cent of their funding from the public purse as opposed to 51 per cent in 1980 – but more is needed, Mr Jones said.

“All the people in our sector realise we’re going to have to try harder than ever to attract private donations if we are going to compete effectively on the international stage. Government support has been very good but we can’t expect a great deal more of taxpayers’ money in the current economic climate.”

The report highlights the leading role played by private donors in creating the fabric of modern British cultural life. Philanthropy was integral to the founding of the British Museum, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, English National Opera and the Royal Ballet. Mr Jones said: “It would be good to recognise that we need to treat donors well. And there are some straightforward and practical things that government could do.”

He suggested handing out more honours to reward donors, expanding the Gift Aid scheme and treating donations as gifts for tax purposes even if they come with associated benefits such as invitations to private views.

The campaign’s top target is a change to the tax rules surrounding a donation of art to the nation.

“At the moment it is more efficient to give cash or shares than a work of art. If I have a Jeff Koons worth £10 million and I want to give it to the Tate, I get no tax relief. If I sell it and give the £10 million to the Tate I get tax relief at 40 per cent, so it only costs me £6 million.”

Mr Jones also said that he wanted to see the tax benefits associated with gifts of art to the nation made after death extended.

The acceptance-in-lieu scheme, which enables taxpayers to transfer works of art and heritage objects into public ownership and set their value against inheritance tax, has brought more than £250 million of works into the public domain in the past ten years. However, it excludes the most attractive donors: living ones.

“The gift of that first work of art is often the beginning of a lifetime’s engagement,” Mr Jones said.

“This is not about banging people over the head. Giving is a secret, misunderstood pleasure. If you want to be rich and happy, you need to give.”

Digging deep

— More than 1,500 people helped the refurbishment of the Royal Festival Hall, above, by paying at least £300 to name a seat

— The wealthiest 10 per cent of the population give less than 1 per cent of their income to charity

— The poorest 10 per cent of the population give around 3 per cent Individuals gave £9.5 billion to charity in 2006-07

— Global art prices have doubled in the past ten years

— Heritage Lottery Fund awardsfor acquiring works of art have fallen from £25 million to under £5 million in the same period

— In February the “extraordinarily generous” art dealer Anthony d’Offay sold his £125 million art collection to the nation for £26.5 million

Source: National Museum Directors’ Conference





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Schubert Piano Sonata in C minor, D.958
Kurtág Antiphon in F sharp major
Bach The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080: Contrapunctus I
Kurtág Tumble-Bunny
Kurtág Portrait 3
Kurtág Dirge 2
Kurtág Hommage à Christian Wolff (Half-Asleep)
Bach French Suite no.5 in G major, BWV 816: Sarabande
Kurtág Spiel mit dem Unendlichen
Schumann Symphonic Etudes, Op.13

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光子さんの初ソロリサイタルです。
神がかったコンチェルトから約１年、とても楽しみにしていました。
背中を左斜め前方に眺める位置だったけれど、音響は抜群。


シューベルトのc-mollソナタは目を開かされる演奏でした。新鮮というのか。きっちりした感があって、重厚感も適度。音がすごく詰まった響きで、四角い感じがしました。１楽章は、シューベルト的というか、ドイツ的な音だった気が…。２楽章はペダルが本当に細かくて、でも、とてもやわらかかったです。

前半後半は、ハンガリー作曲家の現代作品とバッハ作品を組み合わせて、面白かったです。Fisが保持音となっているAntiphony in Fisから、そのままバッハのContrapunctus 1へ。躍動が激しいTumble-bunnyとDirge 2。どこか宇宙的で浮いているような音楽のHommage a Christian Wolffから切れることなくバッハのイギリス組曲第５番サラバンド。バッハって本当は物凄く自由な音楽なのかなと思いました。〆のPlay with Infinityは、本当に面白い曲。何が面白いか。鍵盤88鍵を一番上から順に下ってくるある意味普遍的な旋律とそれを取り巻くようにそこここに浮かぶ音の固まりたち。88鍵という限られたものから広がる「infinity」。そしてそれで遊ぶ私たち。また聴きたいです。

後半のシューマンの交響的練習曲は、初版（？）によるオリジナル版（Posth. variationが含まれていない版）でした。これを一番楽しみにしていたのですが、ごめんなさい、途中で飽きちゃいました。プロの人の演奏会を聴きにいって、こういう感じを受けるのは初めてでした（聴いてて心配になる瞬間が一番怖かったです。）


でも、でも、やっぱりアンコールのモーツァルト（ソナタ K330 C Durの２楽章）はさすが。
聖域です。拝みたくなりました。
アンコール２曲目のシューベルトの即興曲(D899 No.3）もハラショー。
１番最初のシューベルトは別人でした。



光子さんといえば、近年ベートヴェンに力をいれていらっしゃいますが、最近発表になったCDがBBC Music Award 2008の大賞に選ばれました。収録曲は、Piano Sonata No. 28 in A, Op. 101; No. 29 in B flat, Op. 106 (Hammerklavier)です。販売元はPhilip社。



The Independent Review *****


The Times Review ***

英国の現代アートを代表するデミアン・ハーストの有名な「牛の輪切りのホルマリン漬け」が税関?で英国産牛肉への輸入規制（輸入不可）に引っかかり、危うく森美術館で開催される展示会『英国美術の現在史：ターナー賞の歩み展』に出品ができなくなるところだったそうです。というか、食べないだろう。これ、どうみても、食用牛肉じゃないだろう。だって、朽ち果てていくのを展示する「アート作品」です。大体、税関通告書見ればわかるでしょうに…。よっぽど検査官は驚いたろうなと思います。でも、ホームでひたすら爆笑でございました。

で、この朽ち果てていく美しさを求められるウシくんたちは他の現代作品とともに，六本木の森美術館で７月13日まで展示されます。

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Damien Hirst's cow art in a pickle


Telegraph
By Johanna Leggatt
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 09/04/2008


Damien Hirst's controversial artwork of a cow preserved in formaldehyde has caused a headache for staff at a Tokyo museum


A pickled cow by British artist Damien Hirst ran into trouble on its way to a Tokyo museum because of Japan's strict import ban on British beef.



A vistor inspects Damien Hirst's Mother and Child, Divided
A Tate Modern staff member inspects Hirst's Mother and Child, Divided when it was first installed


Hirst's Mother and Child, Divided, consisting of a cow and a calf each sliced in half, is part of a retrospective of Britain's controversial Turner Prize at The Mori Arts Museum.

Due to Japan's ban on British beef after the mad cow disease outbreak, the museums' representatives had to convince customs officials that the cow was indeed art, and not dinner.

"I think my staff explained that it's not for eating," Fumio Nanjo, Director of the Mori Art Museum, said.

However, once the cow had cleared customs, the problems didn't end there. The orginal cow and calf - which won the 1995 Turner prize - had started to rot, so the museum has had to replace them with a new and improved version that is usually displayed at the Astrup Fearnly Museum in Oslo.
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"The original cow was decaying very fast. This is the second version," Nanjo said.

Furthermore, for their trip to Japan, the carcasses had to be taken out of their original formaldehyde solution, and will be re-pickled for the Tokyo exhibition.

Fearing that formaldehyde fumes could poison staff as the liquid is poured into the cow's glass case, the museum has pledged to install a ventilation system.

This will involve major construction work, including drilling a new shaft through the ceiling.

It isn't the first time Hirst's penchant for picked animals have caused a stir.

In 2006, Hirst had to replace his pickled shark, titled "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living", with a new one after the original had begun to rot.

Nanjo however, seemed unperturbed by the bureaucratic hic-cups. "This is a major work for the show. So we cannot give up," he said.


History in the Making: A Retrospective of the Turner Prize, at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo's Roppongi neighbourhood, will run from April 25 to July 13.




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As classical music is piped into 40 Tube stations to reduce antisocial behaviour, Jessica Duchen asks if we really want rush hour symphonies

Independent
Wednesday, 26 March 2008



Trundling through the packed ticket hall at Vauxhall Tube station, I and several hundred other travellers recently found our ears filled with the strains of Mahler – to be precise, the slow movement of his Symphony No 1, a spoof funeral march based on "Frère Jacques". Whoever chose to pipe this through the station loudspeakers at 8.30 on a Monday morning must have a slightly twisted sense of humour.

Classical music has been part of Vauxhall station's way of life for some time now, but now it has been announced that Transport for London's scheme to reduce crime and antisocial behaviour by piping such music through stations has been so effective that it has been extended to 40 locations across the network, with more likely to follow.

The notion originally came from Canada – in Montreal, in the mid-1990s, an experiment was carried out to see whether classical music could clear away crowds of yobs who didn't happen to like it. The idea was first tested here outside supermarkets troubled by assembled hoodies, and on the Metro system in Tyne and Wear in 1997. Signs were that it did the trick, and Elm Park on the District Line became the first Tube station to try it in 2003 – a place where there was such a gang problem that train drivers were afraid to stop there. Within 18 months, robberies were cut by 33 per cent, assaults on staff by 25 per cent, and vandalism by 37 per cent as the voice of Pavarotti made troublemakers scarper.

Amadeus on the underground - Mozart's Sonata K448
これは特に有名ですね。
『のだめカンタービレ』で千秋とのだめの演奏バージョンでどうぞ。笑

Theories vary as to why it works. One is that it doesn't fit with antisocial youths' perception of cool; another that teenagers can hear high-frequency overtones that adults can't detect, which upset them (though music students of a similar age are evidently immune). As for the rest of us, when TfL did a survey of 700 commuters, "they overwhelmingly agreed that hearing classical music made them feel happy, less stressed and relaxed". It's also part of the current conviction amid the powers that be that people need protection not from crime – which may have been reduced by the scheme but certainly hasn't been wiped out – but from the fear of it. Play them a little Beethoven and they may feel braver.

The Tube's 40-hour playlist, chosen by a subcontractor named Broadchart, consists of music mainly from the 18th and 19th centuries, some well known, some obscure, all of it tonal and tuneful. Most people seem to like it (disproving the common fallacy that classical music isn't popular). No doubt there's a piece to suit every situation: you could enjoy Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony when delayed due to overrunning engineering works; prepare for the marathon of walking up a broken escalator via Strauss's Alpine Symphony; or be comforted by any number of wintery pieces – Vivaldi's from The Four Seasons, Prokofiev's "Winter Fairy" from Cinderella, or Tchaikovsky's "Snowflake Waltz" from The Nutcracker, say – when faced with frozen points.

Of course, there have been groans, and justifiable ones, over the notion of reducing the great artistry of composers such as Handel, Brahms and Rachmaninov to mere ambient mood-music. On the one hand, it beats hearing the tinny thump-thump of other peoples' iPods, or their half of a mobile-phone conversation. But on the other, if the scheme is too successful, it might be extended to the point where everyone will encounter Bach and Beethoven almost every time they step out of their front doors – and if excessive repetition inures us to the sentiments of Schumann or the power of Puccini, how will they ever stir us again? They're supposed to move our souls, not our feet.

Whether or not familiarity does breed contempt, music can't help but alter mood, and that recognition is nothing new – rather, the use of music as public crime deterrent represents the rediscovery of an ancient wisdom and its appliance to a 21st-century situation. The Greeks, for example, recognised very well the degree to which music could affect human passions. "Music is a moral law," wrote Plato, around 300BC. "It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything."

In fact, in most eras of history – with the remarkable exception of the 20th century – the inherent properties of the vibrations set up by different musical intervals to inspire calm and stability or chaos and aggression have been acknowledged.

Thus, if calm and stability are alien to you, you probably won't be able to stand Mozart; and your average commuter will probably run a mile if assailed by gangsta rap or Stockhausen en route to the office. Not that hoodies are particularly likely to take to Stockhausen either.



Music to travel by

Mind the Gap: Haydn, "Surprise" Symphony
Change here: Steve Reich, Different Trains
Track repairs: Beethoven, "Hammerklavier" Sonata
Signal failure: Schumann, Blumenstück
Leaves on the line: Arnold Bax, November Woods
The wrong kind of snow: Liszt, Transcendental Study No 12, "Chasse-neige" ("Snow Plough")
Lines suspended: Palestrina, Missa Papae Marcelli
Seasonal breakdown: Mendelssohn, A Midsummer Night's Dream
Heading for a champagne party? Mozart, The Magic Flute
Braving Harrods sale? Eric Coates, the "Knightsbridge" march from the London Suite
Using the Heathrow Express? John Adams, Short Ride in a Fast Machine

The Times
April 8, 2008
Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent



David Hockney called on Britain’s most celebrated artists yesterday to donate works to the Tate, as it emerged that fewer than half had fulfilled a promise to do so.

Speaking while he unveiled a spectacular painting that he is giving to the Tate, Hockney said that it was the duty of artists to give something back to an institution whose support had ensured that they did not struggle in their early careers.

Bigger Trees near Warter, which is to be shown at Tate Britain, is an enormous depiction of a grove of sycamore and beech trees in East Yorkshire, painted outdoors and capturing the way light dances in the branches.

At 15ft by 40ft (4.5m by 12m), with 50 separate canvases, it is his largest work. If it had come on to the open market, collectors would have been excited into parting with millions.

In 2004 the Tate announced that 23 artists, all household names, had agreed to donate at least one work.

It said yesterday that only nine of them - including Damien Hirst and Antony Gormley – had kept their promise so far. Some of the nation’s most successful artists – notably Lucian Freud, Richard Hamilton and Gilbert & George – have yet to deliver. Hamilton said yesterday: “Nick [Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate] has talked about it. He hasn’t pursued it. He will come back when the time is right.” Gilbert & George could not be contacted yesterday.

Hockney said he had not forgotten that the Tate saw his potential as long ago as 1963 – a year after he graduated from the Royal College of Art – and bought a painting by him.

The artist, 70, said: “The Tate asked me two years ago about giving things. I thought, ‘If I’m going to give something to the Tate I want to give them something really good. It’s going to be here for a while. I don’t want to give things I’m not too proud of’.”

Hockney, who is planning a couple of further donations, said: “I thought this was a good painting because it’s of England. It seems like a good thing to do. I feel loyal to the Tate. More artists should donate. They should think about it. You can’t quite trust collectors who say they’ll give to the Tate and often don’t.”

With its meagre funds – an annual acquisition budget of only £1.5 million – the Tate could never have afforded to buy such a work. Hockney acknowledged as much by saying that prices for contemporary art had “gone a bit mad”.

Two years ago Sotheby’s sold his The Splash for £2.92 million. Thirty years earlier it had changed hands for just £25,000.

The Tate played down any frustration with artists who had yet to donate, saying that it was continuing its discussions with them.

Sir Nicholas dismissed the suggestion that the gallery was disappointed, pointing out that artists would give when the right work was available: “To do this over five or ten years is no problem.”

He paid tribute to Hockney’s generosity, saying: “It is an astonishing gift. Notwithstanding its size, this painting could have been sold to many buyers around the world. Simply to give with no tax benefit to himself is a remarkable gesture.”

Bigger Trees will be shown at Tate Britain next year. Hockney has also presented Tate with two digital photographic copies in the same size, suggesting that they could be hung on adjacent walls to suggest a cloister.




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The Times
April 3, 2008



LOS ANGELES A sorcerer in a hoody conjures a spray can in a mural, above, on a man-made riverbank in Los Angeles.

It is part of 10,000sq ft (930sq m) of graffiti art that the county wants removed after politicians complained that parts of it were obscene and attracted gang-related tags.

The project was approved by the city and last September Alex Poli, a graffiti specialist and gallery owner, organised a day for hundreds of muralists to work on the vast canvas as families brought their children to watch. Images such as an angel cradling a man, a besuited pig smoking marijuana and scantily clad women went up but Los Angeles County said that some were inappropriate and that Mr Poli had not kept his promise to keep the riverbank free of gang tags.

Last October the county told Friends of the Los Angeles River, which arranged permission for the murals, that it had 90 days to paint them over or pay $70,000 (£35,000) for their removal. Mr Moli is seeking legal help to fight off the county.

“It would be beautiful if the river went back to its natural state and was actually a river and a park,” said Mr Poli, “but right now we have concrete walls, so the next best thing is to beautify it with art.” (AP)