Filler 38

If you're wondering what on Earth possessed me to embark on the voyage of cranky didacticism evidenced by the last couple of posts, well, you're not the only one. There have been a great many half-baked blogging strands in the history of WT, but Derivatives 101 is, in many ways, the least explicable yet.

Perhaps it is indicative of a general impatience with my working environment, buttressed as it is by the jargonistic and obfuscatory bollocks of contemporary finance. Perhaps it is a reaction to quitting teaching in other, unrelated, domains that leads me to try to explain the vapidities of derivatives trading to an a priori uninterested audience; specifically, to get across what utter self-aggrandizing shite it all is without denying the intellectual fascination of its internal workings. (Not, of course, that there's any particular likelihood of success in communicating those things.)

The upshot being, I suppose, that it's nothing more than another writerly finger exercise in the end.

Life in general is, of course, no more bound up with the ludicrousies of work than at any other time. This week, for example, has seen the usual array of disappointments, fulfilments, and non-events.

Eg, I finally managed to take in the Rachel Whiteread Unilever exhibit in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, which was mildly diverting but ultimately unexceptional, especially in comparison to her award-winning and (in my almost-never-humble opinion) transcendentally brilliant House more than a decade ago (in the denunciation of which Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty -- aka the KLF -- lost whatever fleeting respect I might have retained for them before witnessing their overriding artistic bankruptcy at first hand at Myelin; said bankruptcy being as nothing compared to that of Mark "Zodiac Mindwarp" Manning, possibly the most odious person I've ever had the misfortune to meet; but I digress).

A possibly more relevant contention is that Embankment compares unfavourably with its immediate predecessors The Weather Project and, in particular, Marsyas. Filling the Turbine Hall with art is quite a challenge, and Whiteread acquits herself okay -- but "okay" isn't really good enough in this context. There's a terrible feeling, wandering around the artfully stacked white plastic boxes, of a thing done half-heartedly; of a missed opportunity; of the failure to live up to potential. It feels like, in the light of the enormous effort already expended, it would have been so easy for this humdrum piece to be so much more.

Meanwhile, Brokeback Mountain proved an altogether satisfactory follow-up to Whiteread's sugarcube warehouse installation, tender and tear-jerking without being nearly as depressing as various people had led me to expect. And while this may be a distraction from the film's point, Jake Gyllenhaal really is un-fucking-believably beautiful. Almost enough to compete with the landscapes of Wyoming.

But not quite.
Posted by matt at January 21, 2006 11:23 PM