Avert your eyes, boys and girls, it's MORE ART!

The two other pieces of art that I wrote about here were ones that I like. Here's one that I don't. In fact, it exemplifies everything that I don't understand or appreciate about modern art. Please bear in mind that this isn't exactly the right colour, so I may not be doing the 'work' justice. IKB 79, at least, is in [the] Tate Modern.



I know what you must be thinking: how on earth did he do it? Well, here's what he started with. But don't run off with the idea that painting a big blue square is just a matter of having paint. Many amateurs forget that canvas is also useful, or at least something to paint on. Oh, and, of course, a certain amount of talent, I suppose.

The Weather

There's an old joke that the English talk about the weather too much. Someone once said that wit is humour with a grain of truth. The joke I led with is entirely true, but not humorous. Does that make it witty?

Anyway, the point is that it is undoubtedly, instantly verifiably, true. The astonishing thing is that the weather in this country is flamboyantly uniform. A balmy summer day might reach 77F, while a cold winter will see people shivering at 45F. Why people should spend so much time discussing weather that is so very nearly unchanging is a mystery to me. Many, many people have asked why over many, many years, and I've never really been entirely convinced by any of the explanations I've heard.

There are psychological explanations. People might claim, for example, that the English are generally self-deprecating and so love to talk happily about their weather, which is clearly awful by almost any standards. But the English penchant for self-deprecation seems to have decreased markedly even during my lifetime without manifesting a corresponding decline in discussions of the weather. Furthermore, the Scots, for example, have never exhibited this very English degree of morbid humility, and yet they seem to talk about the weather at least as much.

There are practical explanations too. For example, one might suppose that the average Englishmen uses public transport more than people in many other countries, so he is more affected by tiny changes in the weather. But in the many countries that use public transport more, this obsession with the weather is not shared.

The fact that such an enduring and ubiquitous phenomenon has avoided explanation seems bizarre to me. Of course, it often happens to physical phenomena, but this is a sociological phenomenon, and thus one on which almost anyone ought to be able to comment.

Perhaps there are some things that Man was simply not meant to understand. By the way, good comedians never lead with their best material.

Money, money, money

I was listening to the radio this morning. (Radio Four's breakfast show, in case you're interested.) A chap on it was talking about the cost of the war in Iraq. (You are, no doubt, wondering if he was referring to the war of 1535, or that of 1632. As it happens, he was talking about the most recent one. It's still ongoing, as a matter of fact.)

Ah, the human cost, you sigh, and add a sage nod for gravitas. Yes, the deaths of servicemen and the suffering and daily violence ...

But, as it happened, he was initially talking about only the financial cost. Of course, it is a matter for debate whether expenditure on this scale can ever have purely economic effects. And ineluctably, such a debate would rapidly lead to a discussion of whether 'purely economic effects' of such a magnitude exist. If they do, what would they mean?

For example, is national expenditure that requires a one per cent tax rise deemed to have only economic costs, and no others? Of course not. Although these knock-on consequences might take years, it is arguable that they would include lower economic growth and less prosperity. So that, if one were a person who might, hypothetically, lose one's job as a consequence of this, the ultimate results would be so vast that they would no longer be viewed as 'purely economic'.

And, of course, this is but another way of coming to the point that the radio-chappie was sort-of making. Money, in sufficiently large quantities, can solve almost any problem. And certainly, money, in the quantities in which it has been spent on the war in Iraq, should be able to accomplish almost any societal problem which may lie within the scope of government action.

These arguments crop up all over the place. (In the following examples, the figures I'll use come from reputable-looking websites, mostly the NY Times and the UN. They may still be wring, but hopefully not by, say, a factor of ten! Also, by one billion, I'll mean 10^9, since the British usage seems to have been abandoned even by the British.)

It would cost about $3 billion dollars to provide AIDS-medicine to everyone in Africa. (I assume that this means: everyone who needs it. But no matter.)

The most common figure that one hears for the cost of the war is $3000 billion dollars. If we assume that this is direct expenditure, and doesn't count secondary costs, then it means the amount needed for African AIDS medicines is being spent every couple of days. Supplying clean drinking water to everyone on the planet would cost about $5 billion, so it's similar to the AIDS figure. Either way, in theory, a one-week ceasefire would save enough money to pay for both.

Often, when huge figures are thrown around in newspapers, the papers will come up with some image to communicate how much money is being discussed. Things like: "If this money were converted into ten pound notes and placed in a pile, it would reach the moon", or "if that money were placed in fifty pound notes and crammed into suitcases, we would have to use twenty million suitcases". (The last one sounds ridiculous, but I've actually seen something very much like it.)

Recently, H.M. Government were 'forced' to buy a bank at a cost of, probably, about 200 billion pounds. The papers, sensibly for once, converted this into a figure of 4 thousand pounds per taxpayer. This was an improvement, but it actually stirred people because they felt that four thousand pounds was their personal loss. It still failed to communicate the size of the original figure clearly.

Here's the rub. Money is power, and nothing is so much like power as money is. It's even scalable: Very little money is very little power, and a gigantic amount of money is a gigantic amount of power. To an average person, one million cars might not be one million times as useful as one car (what does that even mean?); but a million dollars are a million times as useful as one dollar.

Of course, this is pretty much circular; and since it's unclear what any of the previous ideas mean to me, I won't elaborate.

The only way to measure the value of money is to think of what the power that it represents can achieve. We do this all the time: we have consumer price indices to track the changing value of our money, we have currency exchange rates, based, in the final analysis, on the relative purchasing power of the currencies.

But the most enormous amounts of money discussed in the world today are spent by governments. And government spending is constrained by political will. Is there anyone who really believes that five stealth bombers are worth as much as the universal provision of drinking water? (Especially since the value of stealth bombers is not scalable: ten of them are not twice as good as five.)

And yet this situation is explained by the fact that political will can be mustered for certain expenditures, and not for others.

I'm going to tail off here. I have more to say, but so, I feel, should anyone sensible.

More Art

A while ago, I put a picture that I really like. I didn't say why, although the comment was meant to be a hint. I have very juvenile tastes in many things; such as food (I like chocolate), drinks (I like full bodied red wines, regardless of any other subtleties), and humour. Therefore, I will freely admit that many might consider my taste in sculpture to be juvenile too.

Nevertheless, I am posting here a picture of the statue of Achilles from Hyde Park. It has all of th qualities that I admire: it is awe-inspiringly large, breath-takingly heroic, and green. I have posted the biggest picture that I could. Oh, and it commemorates one of the most impressive men in history. Enjoy!

All change, please!

It's been a quite unacceptably long time since my last post. In case you do read this, thank you for your loyalty.

My topic today is going to be change. It seems that there simply isn't enough to go around, or at least, not enough to please some people.

In the USA, Mr Obama's message of 'Change you can believe in' and 'a hope of change' (or is it 'a change of hope', which would be no less platitudinous) seems to have gripped the popular imagination to an astonishing degree. In the UK, both of the main political parties are anxious to declare themselves the party of Change.

In both countries, this message has become incredibly popular. I really want to understand why. You see, my main opinion has always been that it is only necessary to change things which have failed, or are going to fail. I acknowledge that I am, even by my own reckoning, a hidebound and reactionary conservative, but I will try to approach this discussion without prejudice.

Let's get the standard arguments out of the way first. To begin with, it really does seem true that most people respond better to positive or optimistic messages than to negative and pessimistic ones. This is the real reason why negative campaigning is not as popular as a cynic would expect. Certainly, conventional wisdom (CW) seems to credit much of the extraordinary appeal of Mr Obama to the positivity of his message.

'Hold fast to that which is good' says Thessalonians, chapter something, verse whatever. (Not being a Christian, I am free to quote only those bits of the Bible with which I agree. Doubtless there's a verse that says the opposite, but it's up to you to find it.) The Romans even went so far as to define 'pietas' as one of their cardinal virtues. Roughly translated, it means a respect for tradition and conservatism. And their empire lasted at least seven hundred years. (Not counting the sad, drawn-out demise of the Empire in the East.) So why is an argument for Change now perceived as positive? What is to be Changed? Why is this not at least as important as a promise to effect Change?

You see, the general tone of public discourse in American politics is, in fact, significantly more optimistic and patriotic than that of this country (reflecting ... but perhaps that's a digression too far). British politicians seem allowed to spend a lot of time grumbling about how awful the country is rapidly becoming (although it never seems to happen entirely), but American politicians aren't. It simply appears to be too negative to resonate with voters.

So if the British Weltanschauung really, truly, was that the country is in rapid decline and needed saving, I might accept Change as a message of Hope. However, even in the case of the British, I don't quite believe the gloomy act. And Americans, to use a very crude stereotype, seem mostly to be much more positive about the world than the British. I'd go so far as to say that in almost any regard, the USA is better off than almost any other country. So a message of vague, unspecified Change seems not too far from starting a speech with 'we are fortunate to live in the greatest country in the world, so please support me in my mission to Change it'.

Basically, I'm saying that, of course, no country is perfect. But advocating unspecified change seems to suggest that the country is, on balance, a bad place. Is that really the message of Hope?