June 09, 2004
Venus
Contrary to
this blinkered nonsense on Snarkout, the Transit of Venus was met with widespread excitement and saturation media coverage here, and, directly or indirectly, seen by millions. And quite right too. Improbably clear skies and summer heat provided perfect viewing conditions in the UK.
Despite good intentions and plenty of advance warning, I managed to be unprepared for watching the event. Pinhole projection proved hopelessly inadequate to the task and Ian thoughtlessly left our binoculars in Wales last week. Live coverage on the BBC website didn't cut it either. In the end I risked the direct view through a rather Heath Robinson arrangement of five pairs of dark sunglasses and a silvered window. This would, I'm sure, give ophthalmologists the world over conniptions, but fuck it. I was extremely happy with the short-term results: a dimmed solar disc visibly blemished by the planet's tiny silhouette in a gratifying inverse of last year's Martian approach. Let's just hope there aren't any long-term results to speak of.
After that I met up with my father and a friend to visit the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, an annual orgy of indulgence by the old guard of British art that I usually have the sense to steer clear of; followed by lunch.
The exhibition was even more soul-destroyingly dreadful than I expected, room after room after room of unmitigated rubbish. There were a few OK pieces -- the Richard Long room was relatively inoffensive, as was the one hung by Anish Kapoor -- but the overwhelming impression was of a moribund art establishment that has completely lost its way, that has co-opted and devoured everything vibrant and worthwhile in art over the last century or more and come up with nothing whatsoever to give back. The six pictures by co-curator David Hockney, for example, may be the most useless pieces he has produced in his entire career, the sort of thing that devalues great paintings like Two Deckchairs, Calvi by association.
There are even two watercolours by Prince fucking Charles, for crying out loud!
It would be hard, in such hallowed company, to pick out a single "worst of show" piece, but the late Terry Frost's terminal "magnum opus" has to be a contender. Even in a collection of so much egregious shite, it stood out as having been included solely from some sheepishly sentimental notion of post-mortem obligation. Awful awful awful awful awful.
When the Momart warehouse burned down the other week, there was a lot of sneery dismissal of the work that was lost. I can just imagine the hand-wringing that would accompany the fiery destruction of this tide of crap (which, btw, includes feeble stuff by Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Michael Craig-Martin and the like), but the nation and the world would be better off without almost all of it. If one had to judge solely on the basis of the Summer Exhibition -- which, thankfully, one doesn't -- the only reasonable conclusion to reach would be that Art is Dead.
Posted by matt at June 9, 2004 11:19 PM
When getting to work, there were dozens of people from the Wellcome Institute staring at the sun through sheets of overdeveloped autoradiography paper (we're swimming in it), so I was able to get a glimpse then, which was good in itself. Later on, someone else whipped out some binocs and paper which gave an even clearer image... not easy to appreciate in any classic sense, but it was throroughly satisfying :)
You say "blinkered nonsense", I say "rhetorical effect". Let's call the whole thing off. I'm glad your sunglasses-upon-sunglasses setup worked, though; it would have been a shame to miss it.
It would.
I guess I was struck by the US-centric dismissiveness of that post because it seemed out of character. Or something.
I read the "blinkered nonsense" as a piece "it's not happening here so we need to justify not getting excited about it". After all, US events are usually timed to conincide with East Coast prime time TV slots.
The astronomical point is valid, though - the transit didn't tell us anything we didn't already know - but I still think it was cool and I am disppointed to not have been able to see it.
I read the "blinkered nonsense" as a piece "it's not happening here so we need to justify not getting excited about it".
Nah, I just don't think the American public cares much about astrological events any more. Given that just a couple of weeks ago I wrote at length about the Imperial Graves Commission, I don't think that's a valid conclusion.
I guess I was struck by the US-centric dismissiveness of that post because it seemed out of character. Or something.
Well, see, here's the thing -- I live in the US, so I'm most interested in the differences in attitude, then and now, in the US. That much public attention paid in the 19th century struck me as entirely distinct from the collective (American) yawn, and discontinuities in history are one of the things I really like to write about. Ain't no John Philips Sousa marches (or the modern equivalent) being written today, nor are people queuing up by the hundreds on the streets of Cleveland. If I lived in England and could gauge the reaction in the popular press and general public there, I might have written about that instead. And I still might have written blinkered nonsense; my post immediately previous to the Venus transit one was sneerily dismissive of the threat that rural towns face from armor-plated bulldozers piloted by crazed tinkerers, f'rinstance.
Shrug. It was a cool thing, even if most of America ignored it. I'm glad you got to see it.
Well, you may be right about the general disinterest of the American public (although it's _astronomical_ phenomena, of course), but I still think there would have been more coverage of the event if it had been visible in more of the country.
I know my wife and I would have been focussing binoculars and everything, but we're in Oregon so it was too far west to see the transit. And it was raining, of course.
Well, you may be right about the general disinterest of the American public (although it's _astronomical_ phenomena, of course)...
Oh, man. Boy. Umm.
I guess if it had been an astrological event, people might have paid attention. "Hey, the Moon is in the Seventh House! It looks like Kobe's going to be found guilty!"
