Digital cloud plan for city skies

"Digital cloud plan for city skies" read a heading in my BBC Live News Update. Wow, my heart started beating faster, finally London gets an overall free WiFi coverage, the so-called "Cloud". That would be so cool, in the country where broadband cable is still a luxury and download speeds are usually limited by the capacity of Victorian copper wires.

Alas, the article turned out to be about building "120m-tall mesh towers and a series of interconnected plastic bubbles that can be used to display images and data" Doh. Like the utterly useless "white elephant" of Millenium Dome was not enough. Perhaps this will be the last belch of the lame-duck Labour Government, still delirious after the boom years of the financial bubble. And who will be stuck with the bill? The taxpayer.

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.

Kakophilia In Modern Art

There is method in beauty. It can be mathematically verified. There is only one Golden Section, a.k.a. the Divine Proportion. The closer to it you get, the more beautiful comes out your artefact. The problem is that the area right around has been overexplored in the course of the humankind's history. The possibilities are by large exhausted, it is next to impossible to come up with something new.

That is unless you step away from the Golden Section to fill in the missing parts of the art paradigm that were left void for one good reason: they are ugly, unappealing to the human eye and aesthetic sense. But what of it as long as you can claim to be original! Australian art historian Arthur Danto coined a new word for this kind of conscious shunning the universally accepted beauty standard: kallophobia – the fear of beautiful.

Modern artists calculatedly venture away the Divine Proportion because it's easier to get noticed. At some point of time there was a point to it: a pure scientific desire to make up the whole paradigm of possible art forms, shapes and sounds. Once it was the manifesto of rebels breaking away from the ossified academic art: there was honesty and a message in impressionism, cubism and futurism. Fast forward to post-modernity: desperate ego-bloating, marketing trickery, shameless bluffery.

The situation is not aided by the explosive expansion of art market where aesthetically challenged but loaded buyers see nothing but a great investment opportunity in often mediocre and quite often ugly pieces of art. Bankers and brokers, whose ballyhooed MBA courses sure never included art history modules, buy out whole exhibitions of drab, spam and scum even before they open. Hedge fund dealers adorn their fancy living rooms with God-awful doodles in the hope of windfalls at the next Sotheby’s auction. Wherever you go, city officials out of fear to come across square waste taxpayers’ money to commission abhorrent monstrosities for public spaces. Year after year aspiring artists are trained in art academies to objectify the worst demons and dirtiest garbage from their subconscious into “art” and spurt it out on unsuspecting audiences.

This phenomenon is so widespread that it deserves a fancy name, a word that best describes its true essence: kakophilia, the Greek for "love for shit". This inflatable faeces "masterpiece" epitomizes the trend. There is no end in siight: for every Damien Hirst there seems to be a Russian billionaire.

Roman Abramovich - The Official Presiding Deity Of Conspicuous Consumerism

How do you know a natural born gentleman of means from a freshstart trying to pass for one? The latter gives too much tips.

New Russians feel that if something costs an awful amount of money, it simply must be good. Probably that's why clothes of comparable quality cost in Moscow 2-3 times as much as in Western Europe. Russians are considered best customers in Amsterdam's shopping malls, which locals consider too ridiculously overpriced to go to. Life is not a cabaret, it is a mall so Russians in Europe shop till they drop - as if the stingy hand of Communism were still having a grip on Russia's consumer supply.

Russia's presumedly richest man Roman Abramovich paid Amy Winehouse a hefty 1 million GBP (that's around 2 millions US bucks) to sing one hour at the launch of his girlfriend's art gallery in Moscow. That may come across as a sign of ultimate coolness in Moscow but Mrs. Wino must have been laughing in her sleeves not believing her luck: the Russian gig brought in about 10 times as much as a much longer regular performance elsewhere.

This guy looks like he can't believe his luck: Ivorian footballer Didier Drogba was plucked out of relative obscurity and handed 24 million pounds by Mr. Abramovich to join his favourite hobby horse: Chelsea F.C. - just one million short of Beckham's transfer fee to Real Madrid one year earlier. The kick of playing a fairytale prince who can turn people's fortunes upside down at his whim must be priceless.

Unrestrained in means and oblivious of real world prices, in football New Russians are pushing the prices up, just like in London's luxury realty market where they are responsible for 90% of purchases, pressing out the Japanese and Arabs.

In the country where 34 people own 75% of entire wealth, it is a never-ending ball for those 34 and their families. Brought up in relative austerity under Communists, they managed to grab hold of formally everybody's - technically nobody's - assets in what is probably the biggest swindling operation in history when world's second largest economy was privatized for next to peanuts. But it is also the same country where men officially are not expected to live to retirement (average life span is 56 years) and whose population is dwindling by 800 thousand a year from harsh labour and living conditions, unhealthy lifestyles, rampant alcoholism, drug abuse and diseases. But what of it, when you can sit back in your 9.5-million-pound London apartment and enjoy an 80-million pound painting that belongs to you and looks like shit.

Russian Argh (Review)

"Pretentious and meaningless" - that would be my two-word summary of this triumph of Russian Post-Modernism.

In more words: one hundred minutes of incoherent mono- and dialogues (at times, the actors repeat the same lines 3 or 4 times in a row), acting worth wooden marionettes, never-ending close-ups of famous paintings, shamefully clumsy or downright pointless allegories and a total absence of any plot line or script purpose except a tedious reiteration of the director's poorly hidden resentment for anything related to Soviet history.

It does achieve its 3 sole objectives though:

1) proving possible shooting a full movie in a single take;
2) proudly parading 2,000 extras in lavish period costumes;
3) showing off the best bits of the Hermitage's art collection.

Cleverly contrived to fool Western critics with Russian exoticism, it was released to a great acclaim - Rotten Tomatoes shows a staggering 88% approval rate. My guess is that the reviewers, half-expecting something really perversely artsy weird from a Russian director, must have fallen for the typical Post-Modern pretence at implying some far-fetched elitist message. Too ashamed that they didn't get it, they hasted to praise the flick and find sense in the nonsensical drivel that the actors spew, so that they, the critics, could come across progressive and elitist too.

Another factor that may also have played the role is the Americans' weakness for all things related to European royalty, which they invariably find quaint and endearing.

The film would be really best used as an MTV-style visual background for a pot-pourri of popular classical music. Having to watch it with the sound on would come in handy as a Guantanamo interrogation technique.

World's Ugliest Cars In Amsterdam!

I have spotted both official world's ugliest cars in Amsterdam. As far as I know they are not even sold in the Netherlands, so their owners must have gone to some lengths to procure them. Both times I didn't have my camera, so I'll post pics gleaned from the net.

The obviously LSD-inspired Pontiac Aztec was designed by a committee of design gurus at GM. In 2007, two years after the Pontiac Aztek went out of production, the 25 vehicles that were sold were brand new from the dealership. Little wonder, innit?















Described by Top Gear Magazine as a car "that looks like it got bottled in a pub brawl and stitched back together by a blind man", the Ssangyong Rodius was designed by the former director of the London School of Design. I figure they must have fired him as unfit for the position and the Rodius was his revenge on the world.

Can Modern Architecture Be Beautiful?

My last favourite architectural style is Art Deco which is essentially Art Nouveau traumatised by the experiences of WWI and massive industrialisation. Anything that came after that - institutionalised post-modern monstrosities commonly jumbled together under the monnicker of "International style" is the result of further traumatisation of the mass conscious by the horrors of WWII. Post-war architecture essentially represents caving in to the demands of speedy mass construction - obviously, you cannot make high-rise apartment blocks churned out by the thousand have the aesthetics of stately mansions of the horse and buggy days, or can you?

I'm romantic when it comes to architecture: I like beautiful buildings. Living in this day and age, it is hard to avoid being eclectic altogether, so it is sure no pain if a house recalls architectural influences from the past.

In my travels, two places earned my whole-hearted admiration for the aesthetical quality of modern time civil engineering: Morocco, particularly Marrakesh and Ouarzazate, and China. Both draw hugely on their cultural heritage, ending up having modern structures seamlessly blending with the historical parts. Both have employed their tradition-inspired modern styles on a large scale: in the whole city of Ouarzazate I saw no single building that falls out of the pattern.

Central planning must have done good to China: there are whole new development areas where modernity blends beautifully with tradition. The monochrome Ming palette greatly appeals to modern minimalist trends and Ming forms and shapes are easy to rendered with enforced concrete blocks.

A good example of the opposite is my dear Amsterdam. We have so many examples of fresh architectural graduates' eager ego-tripping in this city that now my sight simply ignores and skips those monstrosities.

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.