Run, Tracey, Run!

Tracey Emin, the artist that shot prominence after her drunk appearance on Channel 4 in 1997, said she would quit the UK for France because of the proposed tax hike on high earners.

Emin is behind such profoundly meaningful and innovative pieces as My Bed (an unmade bed decorated with body secretions, used condoms and dirty underwear) and Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (a tent appliquéd with the names of all people the artist has been in bed with).

Emin hopes that French government will be more of receptive of her creative talents and we hope they will teach her to make her bed in France.

Maya Plisetskya in Carmen Suite

She is almost inhumanely prefect: with just the right does of vulgarity that Carmen should have and yet so exquisite and passionate.

Victoria & Albert Museum - the giant cupboard of the British Empire

Victoria & Albert Museum - this is where the revolution in industrial design started. Artefacts and materials from all over the world were gathered here so that young Englishmen (and later English women) could see and learn world's best in shape, colour and composition.

But for me the V&A is more like the giant cupboard of the British Empire. Extremely ornate on the outside and inside it so overabundant, it tires me out quickly.

Rich Man's Frug Through The Years

Dance was my passion and, for some time, serious involvement since the age of 7 when we had ballroom dancing classes at my school up to the time when a lower back injury made me quit my jazz dance and modern ballet pursuits. I can really appreciate when a dance is conceived and executed good; great choreography can well me up.

Rich Man's Frug - a superb production by inimitable Bob Fosse has inspired a series of spin-offs and take-offs throughoutthe yeears. Some are quite spectacular but most are just not up to snuff.

Get Me Bodied by Beyoncé (click the link as the video is protected from embedding)

In Get Me Bodied Beyoncé finished the cricle by bringing the dance that heavily borrowed from Afro-American dance tradition back to the 'hood she pulled it with some class and distinction.

That, unfortunately, cannot be said about Freemasons' who seem to have been on a very tight budget to make this video for When You Touch Me so they had to hire a dancing act from their local drag show. Even clever editing and camera work do not hide the fact that it is probably the performers' sophomore project in a provincial dance academy. Where Beyoncé (or her video producers) put a new twist on the original routine, injecting it with some cool soul vibe, Freemasons only managed an unflattering take-off. Bob Fosse would not have been proud of this.

Emma Bunton apparently had a bigger budget for her video, must be the money she saved on the rather lacklustre song. At any rate, Baby Spice did some justice to her inspiration, the one and only Rich Man's Frug.

African Slave Beads & The Folly Of Art Nouveau

Last Saturday and Sunday was a Museum Weekend in Amsterdam. You can visit most museums free, some for a reduced fee and many historical monuments that normally are off-limits for visitors - office buildings or private houses - are open to all and sundry.

This year I went to the Allard Parson Museum (Egyptican, Greek, Roman, Etruscan etc. antiquities) and the Hermitage Amsterdam (our local branch of St. Petersburg's grand). Both are typically Amsterdam "klein maar fijn" - small but nice, although the Hermitage is slated to expand greatly in the near future.

The Allard Parson houses amongst other things an extensive collection of beads. Yawn? I thought so too. It turns out however that it was a vast and highly profitable industry until as late as shortly after WWII. You know why?

Also known as African money, trade or slave beads were produced so cheaply and in such huge quantities that they were used as ballast in slave/trade ships for the outbound trip. However, you could buy a human slave for a 3-inch string of white beads that, say, in Venice, a major bead-manufacturing centre, would cost 2 pennies to produce. Get where the catch is? Africans were duped to trade their land, men, gold, ivory and other valuable assets for next no nothing - and that lasted centuries and centuries.

They did eventually wise up, but so did the White folks - now they deal in finance, mostly currency futures accounting for 90% of the world international trade. Africa's share is the meagre 2% that however makes up the bulk of real commodity traded worldwide, including 70% of the world's strategic minerals. Any comment would be superfluous.

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The only exhibition now held by the Hermitage Amsterdam is of Art Nouveau (known in Russia as stil' modern) artefacts. In the late 19th century, the French freshly defeated by the Prussians were seeking allies for revenge and they saw a good candidate in the "gendarme of Europe". The strategic courtship included lavish gifts in the then cutting-edge and highly fashionable Art Nouveau made by the French Republic to the Russian Imperial Family.

While I always liked this style in architecture since my childhood fascination with Riga, it was the first time that I was confronted with such an extensive array of Art Nouveau objects and for the first time my eyes opened to the roots of modern kitsch.

Dutch art historian Henk Zantkuijl once very aptly remarked that the generally accepted idea of good taste in art was lost in the West some time in the 1870s. The overflow of information brought about by massive archaeological and ethnographic discoveries of the era including the influx of Chinoiserie and Japonaiserie, developments in technology and the sky-rocketed demand for mass production industrial design - all that in the aftermath of the Crisis of Representation - led to a broad confusion as to what is tasteful and what is not.

Art Nouveau is the style born in such a situation, a bridge between Neo-Classicism that fed on the (sometimes misinterpreted) Greek and Roman aesthetic ideas and Modernism, that just broke with any previous tradition (also with mixed results). In a sense, Art Nouveau was the odd fruit of a growing process, a growing pain even, an essential period for reflection, absorption and adaptation. It was a great time and art movement, however, even if not without some bizarre by-products. Quite a slew of those are now on show in the Hermitage Amsterdam.

Who Needs (Post-)Modern Art?

At the risk of sounding an old-fashioned bore, I have to say that in my eyes nearly any piece of graphic arts (sculpture, painting, etc.) created after WWII represents an unsavoury mix of ego-bloating, blatant marketing and an exhausted artistic paradigm.

My idea about art is that it should contain either Beauty or Meaning. When there are both, we are dealing with Great Art. When there's neither - most likely it is a modern piece.

When photography became technologically established and wide-spread enough to serve to represent reality, graphic arts went through the Crisis of Representation. You did not need a painter to represent reality on a canvas any more - so art went down the slippery road of filling the missing parts of the aesthetic paradigm. Everything has been tried just for the sake of trying - including exhibiting air-tight containers with faeces in major museums like the MoMA, the Tate Gallery and the Centre Pompidou.

It proved abortive, if addictive: now you don't have to bother coming up with anything beautiful or meaningful as long as you give your pieces convoluted or mysteriously sounding names, best with no relation whatsoever to the subject. With the general rise of living standards, practically anyone, gifted or not, can go to an art school and now that modern art market is well established and is worth billions, worldwide art has become a market commodity. The only way to judge an artist is their market success which can always be expressed monetarily, and as we all know from the examples of Coca Cola and Microsoft's Windows anything we marketed can become a worldwide hit. Like the old saying goes, 'Millions and millions of flies like shit.' But modern art is the kind of shit that can give you an aura of lofty sophistication and trendiness. Propelled by the eternal human attributes of greed and vanity, modern art market is an indestructible profit-generating monster.