no hands

"Pre-Raphaelites is closing this weekend and advance tickets have now sold out. There are a limited number of tickets available for purchase in person in the gallery every day this week – we advise you to arrive early to avoid disappointment if you would like to purchase any of these tickets."

This is the message I found on Tate Britain's website this morning. I had toyed with the idea of seeing the Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde exhibition before it closes but was deterred by two equally unpleasant possibilities: being turned away because tickets were gone or having to cue and then body-check my way though overcrowded galleries after paying fourteen pounds for an exhibition that years earlier, thanks to my membership (which, in a bout of optimism about leaving London, I canceled at the end of 2011) would have been free.

One of the first exhibitions I saw thanks to said membership was, in late 2007, a John Everett Millais retrospective. Millais is a revered figure in British painting, on par with JMW Turner and second to none. Before the show at Tate Britain, I had not heard of him. I hadn't even noticed his statue, grand and bronze but not exactly prominent, out of the way on a bit of open space behind the museum.

Millais took my breath away. He was the most masterful painter of hands, and he manages to tell the stories in his paintings through the hands alone. One fine example, The Order of Release is available on the Tate website. Notice how every hand is essential for the narrative: holding the keys, handing over and receiving the eponymous order of release, tenderly touching after long separation, holding wife and sleeping kid, carrying a little welcome flower, hanging limply in sleep.

Once I had identified the first talking hands, I saw them in many more paintings and amused myself by mentally reducing them to the essentials, cropping to around the hands to distill each painting's essence. It was a masterclass in composition. It was also a masterclass in the anatomically correct drawing of hands, a skill that is in short supply these days, as a visit to the Saatchi makes abundantly clear.

The Saatchi Gallery is a vanity project of staggering proportions. Charles Saatchi, its owner, came to fortune with an advertisement agency co-run with his brother and then to fame with early art acquisitions that turned into gold. He launched Damian Hirst's career into utterly unjustified stratospheric heights and earned healthy millions in the process. In 2008, his gallery moved into a stunning space near Sloane Square that rivals any national gallery. Sadly, the architecture will forever outshine the art, which appears haphazard, randomly assembled, scattered about. Each show gives the impression that a few dozen failed art students had called their schoolmates-acting-as-agent to present them with their latest creations. "Look at this awesome piece", the inept artists proudly demand. "Where can I exhibit?" There's a lot of embarrassed scratching of heads, furtive suggestions to bin the lot and start all over and then the last resort: "We could always try the Saatchi." And so the new exhibition slowly takes shape.

Maybe I exaggerate, but probably not by much. I've been to all the shows at the Saatchi since 2008. The artistic quality of many pieces and the level of skill evident in them are rather poor. Hands are never painted well. Abstract works don't invite the same kind of targeted criticism, but bafflement is more often my spontaneous reaction than admiration. And yet, I return. If nothing else, what I am shown is unusual and unexpected, it makes me think (Can it really be that bad?), and usually there are a few good pieces among the rubbish.

At Tate Britain I know what I get. There are very few surprises. Maybe I should have gone to see the Pre-Raphaelites after all. But Millais was a founding member of this group. What's the point of going back to a thing you know? If art ain't new, it's just old hats.

lighting the fire

This morning, listening to Radio 4, I was reminded of the second big event of the Olympics. This morning, at precisely twelve minutes past eight, all church bells in the country would be rung and everyone was asked to join in, be it with bicycle bells, neighbors' door bells or car horns.

The ringing of the bells had been the idea of Martin Creed, a Scottish artist who first rose to fame with the Turner Prize-winning (and, in my opinion, -discrediting) installation The lights going on and off, in which he periodically filled an empty room with light or, in other words, turned the lights on and off automatically. Since then, he has built a career and reputation on turning things on and off, for example by having runners sprint down the length of Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries in intervals. If you wonder what the point is, you should listen to Creed describe it. The inarticulateness of the artists is in perfect harmony with the vacuousness of his works. He has nothing to say and doesn't know how to say it. On the other hand, he knows how to turn things on and off, a skill perfectly suited to the ringing of bells, and his involvement promised a majestic sonic experience, London awash in music.

The first big event of the Olympics was supposed to be majestic and uplifting as well. Boris Johnson, the clown-mayor of London, saw in it "the contagion of joy". When the Olympic flame passed in front of my flat yesterday, families and resident business owners, shoppers and visitors, lined the street in anticipation, yearning for that vibe. A solitary chain of Olympic pennants in primary colors and pink fluttered above as the excitement built below. What happened then be best described as the kid sister of the Tour de France: copious security with flashing lights, a paucity of floats advertising sponsors and a runner that passed by in a flash. Instead of magic, I saw self-importance pushed to ridiculous levels. The only positive aspect was the thorough cleaning of the street before the torch relay. All the detritus of poverty had been swept away by an army of temporary council workers.

Tonight, the flame will reach the Olympic stadium and, culminating a quaint and bucolic opening ceremony, the cauldron will be lit. Tomorrow, the games will properly begin. But even though we're constantly being badgered into patriotism and enthusiasm, doubtful voices remain. The most recent bad news is the heat – never mind that rain would have really screwed with the show. Pollution levels have rising so much in London that athletes are not expected to be able to perform at their peak. I could feel the pain as I weaved across the Gloucester Road crossing, cutting through the hot exhaust of buses that should run on hydrogen and cars that shouldn't be in the city at all. The heat has now subsided and the next days are forecast to be properly English, cooler and wet. May the rain wash the dirt from the air.

Beside the weather (which one can't control anyway), the biggest headache of the organizers was transport. How would a system that runs at capacity most of the time cope with a million extra journeys? Early signs indicate that the worries were misplaced. Far from being afflicted with the contagion of joy, many people, residents and city breakers alike, have chosen to stay away from London during the Olympics. Colleagues of mine who commute to work have reported eerily quite trains. Hotels are far from fully booked. The bug has yet to catch on.

This morning, I was doing my best to catch the bug. I wanted to feel the bells around me. But it was still too early. Had I left home when the anchor reminded the nation of what was to come, I would have been locked away in the white noise of the lab when Big Ben set off three minutes of clatter. So I slowed my breakfast down to a crawl. Bread was buttered assiduously and jam spread most meticulously, with millimeter accuracy until I left at five to eight. Somewhere between Earl's Court and the Olympic lane at Cromwell Road, the minute hand hit the twelve, but I couldn't tell. There was no sound. I had my ears open and was receptive to even the faintest toll. But there was nothing. In the middle of London, the Olympics were going entirely unnoticed.

outside the park

The Serpentine Gallery is a small art space in Kensington Gardens that is run with an expert mind and the vision for making a splash. The exhibitions change frequently, are to the point and cost nothing to see. But it is the annual architectural commission that makes this place special. Every year, a practice is invited to design and install a pavilion next to the gallery that will provide space for visitors to relax, have a tea and contemplate the connections between art and architecture.

The commission has been run since 2000. At the beginning, only architects that hadn't worked in Britain before could be selected. This stipulation seems to have been relaxed this year, when Ai Weiwei and Herzog & de Meuron were asked to perform. Ai Weiwei has indeed not built anything in Britain, but he's an artist rather than an architect, despite his involvement with the Olympic Stadium in Beijing. Herzog & de Meuron, of course, created Tate Modern and are currently overseeing its expansion. Could it be that appointing this partnership served to send a reminder to the Chinese government of Ai Weiwei's standing in the art world?

Political considerations apart, I had reasons to be apprehensive about this year's pavilion. It was an excavated structure, an artificial cave, not exactly the first thing you'd associate with park and summer. As I approached the pavilion, I only saw its roof, a flat circular disk just about a meter off the ground that rain had turned into a reflection pool. The space below was dark. Rough shapes were all I could make out. I descended a few steps and exited the park. It felt a bit like stepping into a neglected pedestrian tunnel underneath a large railway station, solitary bulbs on the ceiling given a dim, rather localized light. Dullness and drabness engulfed me.

All around was nothing but concrete, the coarse mix of cement and rough pebbles that I remember from my childhood when city centers built or spiffed up in the 60s and 70s were clad and decorated with it. There is nothing pretty about the material. It looks like something unsuccessfully designed to look like granite, a cheap substitute, decoration intended to appear noble and elegant but with the opposite effect. Dreadful.

It was raining. Underneath the disk, a few dozen visitors were huddled in a grim underworld, mere silhouettes against the dark background. Quick first glances confirmed my suspicions about the design, but as I looked more closely, my perception changed. People appeared joyfully out of synch with the dreariness of their immediate surroundings, chatting, picnicking, having coffee from the stall just outside, or reading the newspaper the Serpentine hands out for free thanks to its media sponsor. Kids were bouncing about, screeching with bliss. On concrete, I wondered?

I had read that archaeology was a theme of the pavilion. Remnants of the previous eleven structures were apparently incorporated into the design. Foot-high walls crisscrossed the ground like foundations. The pillars and wall segments, twelve in total, that held the roof also referenced past pavilions. There was no repetition and no symmetry. Little stools stood here and there, solid, massive and wider at the top than at the bottom. Made from concrete, they were accidents waiting to happen, tipping over and crushing visitors' toes.

The previous big Ai Weiwei presence in town, the hundred million porcelain sunflower seeds on the floor of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, had to be fenced off despite the intentions of the artist because the walking and playing of the gallery visitors on them during the first two days had produced enough dust to give everyone potter's rot. Where was Health & Safety? The pavilion had been open for more than a month.

I sat down on a stool, and suddenly it all made sense. The stool was made from cork, as was the entire pavilion. Cork covered all surfaces, and the mock foundation walls were cork as well. The cork looked like bargain-basement concrete, but was slightly springy and a pleasure to sit on. And while it continued to rain outside, the cozy cove was dry and warm.

With the help of the weather, Ai Weiwei and Herzog & de Meuron have created an absolute masterpiece, spot on. In the heat of a real summer, it would be unbearably oppressive, but during the current wash-out, record-rainy already and predicted to get worse, the Serpentine Pavilion might just be the best place to be outside in London.

recent walks

A huge weight fell off my shoulder. I walked out of the featureless office building and into a summer afternoon in Paris. I had just finished the oral part of the interview for a job that had taken me to Paris once before already. The process, with its frightening formality and insistence on the French language, had been drawn out. It had kept my brain engaged for months and my level of preoccupation slightly but steadily elevated. Now it was over. I could saunter off into the sunshine.

Except there was not much sun – the highrise across the street was brightly lit but the black sky framing it spoke of impending rain – and I was in no state to saunter. A walnut-sized blister had grown over the last few days on the ball of my right foot, between the second and the third toe, making walking almost impossible. I had hobbled to the station in the morning, and hobbling was all I was going to do.

The day would be much different from Sunday when I had developed the blister in the first place. Flucha had been in town and, as has become tradition over the months, we were out to make the most of the time we had together. We had started by going to Dulwich to spot evidence of Stik who had left street art based on pieces in the local picture gallery in a few places across town. When we had found them, we were halfway along a walk suggested in that most magnificent of local guides, Walking Village London. We did the second half as well and finished it off with cake and coffee at the Dulwich Picture Gallery café.

That was the first half of the day. After the walk, we took train and tube to North Greenwich where a couple of new attractions have opened to the public. The first is a walk/climb across a Himalayan bridge stretched over the spiky tarp of the Millennium Dome. Spending 22 quid requires a reservation but you'll get training with the biners and the rope and nearly an hour to bounce around on the blue elastic and have your hair tousled by the wind. Fun for city dwellers that have never seen rock.

The second attraction had been my reason for coming. A handful of swish helical towers have recently been stuck into the mud of the Thames. Cables were then strung across them and gondolas attached. In the spirit of a ski lift but without snow, they now ferry passengers from one largely abandoned side of the river to the other. Despite the cable car's integration into the public transport system, complete with a short line on the iconic map its own color (1) and the possibility of taking the ride with a simple touch of one's Oyster, this is clearly built for tourists. The special fare of £3.60 attests to that, as does the fact that no Londoner would think of traveling between North Greenwich and the Royal Victoria Dock.

It's a tourist trap in other words. In yet other words, it's awesome. The ride is breathtaking, though much too fast, and the view fantastic. Unlike the the London Eye with its I've-seen-it-on-TV vistas, the cable car lets you see the Thames barrier, the shiny towers of the Docklands, docks in various states of dereliction, the Olympic stadium and observation tower, and the river in a part that is rarely seen by tourists. If you come to London, you must take the Emirates Air Line, as it is officially called.

Our walk continued on the other side where regeneration has turned wharves into housing and a devastated wasteland into a huge conference center. Highlights for me where the dozen decommissioned cargo cranes lining the dock and the bridge crossing it. The bridge doesn't look like much, just two vertical towers and a straight span, all right angles, boring. But it was built with the possibility of a future upgrade to a transporter bridge, which deserves high praise for quirkiness. Plus, from on top, directly in the flight path, one can wonderfully experience the power of the aircraft taking off from City Airport, less than a mile away. Shame it's not a busier airport.

By the time we were on our way home, we had four hurting feet and one blister on its way. When it grew bigger, over the next few days, I took measures, the trip to Paris in mind: I consulted a dictionary. "Ampoule" I would say in response to the possible question of why I was walking so funny. But when I was asked into the meeting room to stand in front of the jury no one cared. The interview was all business.

Going through the questions of the past five years that were posted on the organization's web site, I had identified what looked like a consensus and duly prepared for that. In my practice talks, I clocked in at four minutes. Not too bad for a five-minute presentation, I thought. I always speak slower and with more stuffing than when I practice. Nevertheless, I prepared a riposte in case a member of the jury didn't like my brevity: I'm not a man of baroque decoration, I would have said, but I needn't have worried. Just three quarters through, I was rudely stopped and told my time was up.

Thirty minutes of questions followed. Some I could answer; with others I felt a bit lost. It's hard to make sense with a vocabulary of 150 and grammar that goes down the drain when nervousness runs high. But it went all right overall. I was stumped only once when one jury member asked about ticks. I know they can be a vector for Lyme disease but couldn't really see how this was relevant for the job or even how it fit into the question the guy had asked. When he rephrased his question, I realized he wasn't talking about "les tiques" (the ticks) but rather "l'éthique" (the ethics). It's pronounced the same but made much more sense. Shortly after that the interview was over, and I was out in the street hobbling towards the rain.

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(1) Or rather the color of Emirates, the sponsor.

winding down

Out on the terrace is not exactly the most obvious place to hang out with the calendar going inexorably towards December, but it's still unseasonably warm. It's been dry for weeks and the gales that wreaked havoc on the islands off the coast of Scotland last night haven't done much to disturb the peace here. There was some wind this morning but now it's calm. Best of all, the sun is out, though it's hanging quite low in the sky.

The view is stunning, as always. St. Paul's is imposing, rising imperturbably above the increasingly messy protest camp at its feet. It's a spectacular sight from any direction and cause of severe planning restrictions. The number of high-rises that slowly spread outwards from the City is surprising given the views protected by ordinances. On certain lines-of-sight, nothing can be built that might obstruct the mighty cathedral.

Ten miles up the Thames in Richmond Park is a little hill, a knoll, to employ a word that gave me good points in a game of Scrabble the other day, called King Henry VIII's Mound, with a telescope. Point the telescope at the plain in front of you, the obvious view overlooking the river, and you see the plain in front of you. Point it back towards London at a narrow clearing in the trees and you're bound to gape. Out of nowhere, St. Paul's jumps at you, hovering above the city like a mirage, with nothing in the way, rising above the horizon formed by the low wall encircling the mound. This view is part of the soul of London and the telescope free for all.

Nothing can be built between King Henry VIII's Mound and St. Paul's, in front of the cathedral or up to a dome and a half to either side. No one would imagine building something between me and St. Paul's at the moment either. The terrace I'm at is on the fifth floor of Tate Modern, facing the river and the cathedral behind. Leave Tate and walk a few minutes towards Southwark station and you will wonder how permission was ever granted to build the enormous power station that now houses the gallery, but out on the terrace, all you see are the river, the riverfront on the other side and the footbridge that takes you there.

The bridge was built in the run-up to the millennium festivities and like the Millennium Dome – the other highly visible infrastructure project at the time – it came dangerously close to being a complete failure. The bridge opened in June 2000 and earned the moniker Wobbly Bridge during the first two days when those crossing, mostly as part of a walk in support of Save the Children, experienced a noticeable sway. Some felt unwell.

Too late, engineers realized that the minimal lateral vibrations that were part of the design would cause people on the bridge to walk in step, amplifying the motion to intolerable levels. Two days after it opened with great pomp, the bridge was closed for refitting. It didn't open for another two years. Even so, that was much better than the Millennium Dome's immediate fate.

After running a mildly successful exhibition during 2000, the Millennium Dome stood empty for years. It was leased to a developer who initially couldn't figure out what to do with a gigantic events center in the void of North Greenwich. It was off most people's maps and sat there, a spiky white elephant of public spending gone horribly wrong. Somehow it was turned around, and now it's the world's busiest music venue, with frequent knock-out shows. Led Zeppelin's ephemeral reunion in 2009 could have sold a million tickets. Prince played 21 nights in 2007. Michael Jackson was scheduled to play 50 (but that proved too daunting a prospect).

I've never been to The O₂, as the Millennium Dome is called these days, but, to bring this post back to where it belongs, I've been on the terrace at Tate Modern many times. It's the best part of the member's room, a café only accessible to those shelling out for an annual membership to Tate. I've been a member pretty much since I moved here. While Tate Modern and Tate Britain are free to visit, the temporary exhibitions cost dearly, but members always go free. When Salvator Dalí came around in summer 2007, I bought a membership and never looked back.

It was a good deal. After four visits, I had recouped my investment, and there are at least eight shows a year in the two London spaces. Sometimes I would go see an exhibition twice. Overall I got so much out of my membership that I was a bit embarrassed at times. I was not so much supporting the museum as taking advantage of it. Here are my favorite exhibitions over the last four years (Tate's online archive helping me remember):

Salvator Dalí ("The difference between me and a surrealist is that I'm a surrealist") got it all started. I didn't expect much of Francis Alÿs but was bowled over by his poetry in everyday actions. Pop Life was a gaudy riot. Rothko's enormous canvases seemed to change color as I watched them. Cildo Mereiles's installations turned the exhibition into an adventure.

Up the river at Tate Britain, the Turner Prize retrospective was fantastic: Anish Kapoor's infinity, moving video art, and the split cow, all you ever need to see of Damian Hirst. From John Everett Millais I learned that there's no end to the meaning a few masterfully painted hands can convey. Richard Long's memories of walks undertaken were huge and subtle at the same time.

My time in London is coming to an end. Whether it's weeks or months, departure is near, and I'm slowing winding down my presence. When my membership came up for renewal this month, I declined. And so it came to pass that this weekend is the last I can spend in the member's room. Earlier, I had a tea and a little salad, but now, with the sun setting but the view still splendid, it's time to say farewell.

Weiwei day

Every winter, Tate Modern hands control over its Turbine Hall, London's largest enclosed exhibition space at a bit more than 100,000 cubic meters, to a single artist. That person is invited to do with the space/fill it as he or she sees fit. Not much is off-limit, not even structural damage to the building itself, as Doris Salcedo demonstrated.

The eleventh Turbine Hall commission was announced last fall. It fell to Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist that I was not only unfamiliar with but had in fact never heard of before. That doesn't mean much. Last year's black box of perceived infinity was by an artist I didn’t know, and it was brilliant.

I'm not sure this year's commission deserved the same praise. The far quarter of the Turbine Hall's floor space was covered ankle-deep in one hundred million porcelain replicas of sunflower seeds, seemingly identical but in fact all unique because they were painted by hand in small workshops. The material accompanying the installation talked loftily about the analogies to the artist's homeland: the millions in blue identikit Mao suits, with identical hair and, to Western eyes, faces are all individuals.

I didn't think much of the curator's philosophizing, and I didn't think much of the installation. Had I visited during the opening weekend, my verdict might have been different. People were allowed onto the bed of sunflower seeds and invited to touch the art and play with it and to hang out and chill, as if it were the gravelly seaside at Brighton. Then fine dust was noticed, produced by the continuous grinding of pebble against pebble under people's feet, and Health and Safety cordoned off the area. Visitors were restricted to contemplate a deserted beach, too far away to discern differences among the seeds or even recognize them as such.

After my visit, I still didn't know much about Ai Weiwei. He is Chinese and a successful public figure with a large audience in the West. Surely he must be a poodle or a parrot of the regime. The authorities wouldn't allow otherwise... I should have known better. A year ago, the New Yorker profiled Ai Weiwei in a thoughtful and rather prescient piece ("he could end up in jail"). Who is this guy?

Throughout his artistic career, Ai Weiwei has been fighting the system from within, challenging state control of the arts and tirelessly demanding political democracy. He's conflated his life and his activism into one big piece of art, with his blog (shut down by the authorities but recently published in English translation) and nearly continuous Twitter posts relating every minute of his existence.

Using whatever measure of transparency exists in China, he exposed the corruption and hypocrisy of the system, most notably the failings surrounding the Sichuan earthquake. In a country of one-party rule, he became a one-man opposition party that relentlessly tested and pushed the limits of civic possibility. To put it succinctly, he was a major pain in the ass of the Chinese so-called Communist Party.

On 3 April, the Party struck back. Ai Weiwei was detained without charges and hasn't been seen since. Nor has there been any information on his whereabouts or the reasons for his disappearance. In all likelihood, he's waterboarding in some detention center in the far corner of China to pay for his impertinence and self-confident individuality.

There have been protests, from governments and NGOs, but the art world has been curiously slow to react. I read an article the other day that put the inaction down to envy at his popularity, but I can't believe that. As such, I'm glad that a few signs of hope have appeared in London this weekend and I decided to see them one by one.

I started out at Lisson Gallery near Edgware Road, two exhibition spaces filled with sculpture and video that still can't convince me of Ai Weiwei's artistic merit (detached from his political existence). One of the outside walls was plastered with posters quoting Ai Weiwei. They go a long way to explaining why Ai Weiwei is behind bars (or worse). One says, "Liberty is about our rights to question everything". Indeed.

Visitors were encouraged to sign a petition calling for the artist's release and to take copies of the posters home with them. The opportunity to have your picture taken, in front of the gallery and with a "Free Ai Weiwei" sign in your hand, was apparently restricted to the opening night of the exhibition, for which I was one day late.

From Edgware Road I went to Trafalgar Square and walked down the Strand. On the right side is Somerset House. Its courtyard was adorned with twelve enormous Ai Weiwei bronzes, recreations of zodiac sculptures that once been part of a fountain at an imperial retreat in Beijing. Given that the courtyard at Somerset House is one big fountain itself, the heads were a good match. But there was no Free-Ai-Weiwei activism.

My last stop of the day was Tate Modern. The sunflower seeds had all been packed up in the enormous bags they had come in, ready to be – what? Sent back to China and dumped on Tienanmen Square? Made to disappear in the North Sea? Auctioned off at Sotheby's? Nobody knows.

In response to Ai Weiwei's arrest, huge letters have been affixed to the outside of the former power station, calling for his release. With all I've read and learned, and in ignorance of the official charges, I'm happy to join the chorus: Release Ai Weiwei!

brainwash

Last summer, the full force of super-charged Banksy hype hit upon Britain. As a sprayer, Banksy had gained notoriety for his foolhardy stunts and inventive grafs, but his fame hadn't spread beyond a small minority. But when, out of nowhere, Bristol's City Museum let Banksy desecrate its hallowed halls with spray cans, cardboard stencils and disrespect for the orthodoxy, the crowds streamed in, and his name was in everyone's mouth. The exhibition set the region ablaze, and people happily spent four hours or more in a line to see what it was that everyone was talking about. It was a scream.

I loved the show, and I love Banksy's graffiti for their creativity, irony and fun, but also the skilled and daring execution. When I heard that a Banksy film featured at Sundance, I was all excited. It's been a while since I lived next door to the festival, but I knew I'd catch the film in a theater sooner or later. About a month ago, an official poster advertising it went up in the tunnel connecting the Science Museum and South Kensington Station. March 5th, it said.

Before that was the Berlin Film Festival, which also ran Exit Through the Gift Shop, as the film is called, but did one better than Sundance: It promised a speech by the intangible sprayer-turned-filmmaker. The art world was abuzz. Would his scrupulously guarded anonymity be lifted? No, the speech was prerecorded, the frames filled with a black silhouette jabbering with an electronically altered voice. Never mind – the critics like the film.

The trailer doesn't do the film justice, and neither does this little synopsis: A Frenchman living in Los Angeles who runs a vintage clothing store and captures every moments of his life on video runs into a bunch of street artists. He starts filming them and gets sucked into their world. First, he just documents what's happening around him, but soon enough he's out there with them as assistant and side-kick.

By chance, he meets Banksy whose confidence he gains by skill, perseverance and sheer madness. Banksy pushes him to edit his endless reels of tape into a film but doesn't like the result. He decides to make the film himself and, to get the persistent Frenchman off his back, encourages him to try art instead. The madman becomes Mr. Brainwash, fills a vacant TV studio in LA with his pieces and becomes an art world sensation overnight. Banksy is pissed, as are the other sprayers he used to film.

The film, in other words, is a documentary, and it's exceedingly well done. The magic of street art and the mystique of Banksy permeate the film but are never revealed. The narration is spot on, and the comments made by the protagonists are hilarious. Towards the end, Banksy points out that everything is just one big joke, but he can't decide who or what it is on. To me, the biggest appeal of the film lay in its total irreverence towards everyone and everything, Banksy very much included.

I left the theater bouncing with laughter and thoroughly engrossed in the world of Banksy, and then I did something strange. I took the tube back home. Normally I walk; the cinema is just around the corner. But the cinema just around the corner didn't show Exit Through the Gift Shop, nor did the majority of London's theaters. I had to trek down to Wimbledon to catch a showing, really bizarre after the hype of last summer.

On the train home, the film was still in my rioting in my head, and with distance I started wondering. Was this thing real or was it just a big sham? Was Banksy himself manning the projector, laughing himself to the floor with every new scene that the audience took at face value?

Thierry Guetta, the mad Frenchman, was traumatized as a child when he missed the moment of his mom's death. He sprouted a camera and started filming constantly, vowing never to lose a moment again. This may be good material for a psychology text book but perhaps just a bit too much for reality. Then I realized that the rising art star chooses Mr. Brainwash as nom d'artiste. It can't really be any more obvious, can it? The thick French accent and even thicker muttonchops, patiently slow-cooked for maximum impact, are just a disguise. Mr. Brainwash is Banksy, if not physically than at least metaphorically. Mr. Brainwash was created for the purpose of making the film, and the big exhibition in LA probably financed it. And the man without a name keeps laughing at whoever takes him seriously.

schooled

I had alluded to it already in an earlier post. On Tuesday I went to another concert of the Berliner Staatskapelle under Daniel Barenboim. Again, the two names on the program were Beethoven and Schoenberg. And while the concert series was generally referred to as The Piano Concertos – all five of Beethoven's were on the bill – last night Schoenberg played the first violin, and did so in a rather curious way.

First we listened to Beethoven, though. His Third Piano Concerto is an easy crowd pleaser, full of pleasant rhythms, with lyric melodies in the slow movement and catchy tunes in the fast ones, and bedazzling with lightning fast finger dances across the range of the keyboard. Like the first concert I went to, this was as much as feast for the eyes as it was for the ears. Seeing Barenboim live is a treat.

However, there's something a little wrong when you go to a classical music concert for the visuals. Barenboim is a showman, and he enjoys the challenge of playing and conducting simultaneously as an opportunity for showing off. There were occasion when I thought that the quick and very visible flick of a hand, in a brief lull between his playing, was excessive. It probably didn't help the orchestra, but it shoved it into the face of the audience that Barenboim can do it, removing a hand from the keys in the middle of a piano solo. This little gripe notwithstanding, it was quite a show.

Barenboim could have left it at that, and no one would have complained. Some overexcited members of the audience jumped to their feet almost before the last bar of the roaring finale had passed. By the second curtain call, the entire Royal Festival Hall was standing, something I've never seen before. This was before the interval, and the principal piece of the night was still to come.

Schoenberg's Variations were next, preceded by an illustrated talk, as the program promised. I had no idea what to expect and was mildly shocked when Barenboim turned to face the audience and took to the mike. All entertainer, he set out to explain the intricacies of the music that was to come. I thought that was quite a brave, even bold move. Most had probably come for Barenboim and the Beethoven. Many had heard of Schoenberg, but not necessarily in favorable terms. Difficult, complex, modern, different – attributes like these have kept me from listening to his music before, and judging by the audience's reaction to some of Barenboim's comments ("Some of you might not be totally familiar with Schoenberg" – relieved laughter in the knowledge that there wouldn't be a quiz afterwards), I was in good company.

For the next half hour or so, Barenboim pontificated on the Variations, explaining how the theme is transmogrified almost beyond recognition, and yet recurs in each of them. Barenboim would isolate certain instruments ("Von Takt 164, bitte nur die Harfen und die Mandoline.") and contrast them with the theme, again and again. What would to an uneducated ear be mostly noise slowly turned into something that made a little bit of sense. It was like a masterclass in music appreciation, and Barenboim was a great teacher, entertaining and enlightening.

Once school was over, the Variations were played in their entirety, and I'm sure that everyone listened extra hard to find the subtle trumpet or evasive double-basses that had been highlighted earlier. In fact, so engrossed were people in the music that they didn't realize it was over until Barenboim shouted "That's it!" over his shoulder. Then the auditorium erupted in the same wild ovation that had characterized the Piano Concerto, and Barenboim was visibly pleased. The great Schoenberg appreciation drive had been a triumph.

But was it? Would the audience go home with Schoenberg in their heads, whistling the theme on the train and knocking the beat involuntarily? Barenboim seemed to doubt that and recalled a part from Milan Kundera's Ignorance intended to explain what was to come. Schoenberg once claimed defiantly that people in the streets would whistle the tunes of his pieces just like they do Strauss's. "Maybe not in my lifetime, but surely fifty years from now", he's supposed to have said. Kundera derided Schoenberg for overestimating himself. Barenboim thought Schoenberg had overestimated the future. Either way, the conclusion seemed that it is not time for Schoenberg yet. To make this point, (which couldn't possibly have been his point, after all this expounding and explicating) he turned his back to the audience, ripped his baton high, and when he brought it down, the orchestra exploded in a tumultuous rendering of Strauss's Unter Donner und Blitz polka, music that didn't need a single word of explanation. Ten minutes later, as the audience filed for the exits, the mood was elevated and there were grins on all faces. It was a special night.

Berlin to London

It's the last weekend of January. A twelfth of the new year is already over. How fast it happened – yet again. Must have something to do with aging. Who doesn't still remember the days of childhood when birthdays were ages apart, months wouldn't end, and the summer holidays didn't come around forever? Now everything happens at the same time and coalesces into a big blur retrospectively.

What have I done in January? I already don't know anymore. This blog is of not much help – there are only five posts so far this year, and they don't say much. At least they are a reminder of my resolution not to put so much verbal prolixity online anymore. Another resolution was to train hard for the marathon. This one I've kept to a similar extent, going out frequently but not so much as to freeze rigid in the snow and ice that still abound. I'm slowly getting into shape.

Right now, I'm sitting in my living room looking out. The sun's shining strongly and it promises to be a brilliant (though very cold) weekend. My new Nikes are bouncing up and down with excitement, trying to break free from their containment in the lowest shelf of my shoe cabinet, but before I take them out for a run, I'd like to commit last night to memory.

I was a the Royal Festival Hall for the kick-off of a four-concert mini-residence of the Berliner Staatskapelle. Over the course of a week, the famous orchestra is giving four performances, playing all five of Beethoven's Piano Concertos. The quality of the orchestra and the clear musical focus would be enough to sell out the hall, more or less. But why were all tickets months in advance?

What made this series so special and the tickets the hottest in town was the fact that Daniel Barenboim doubled as conductor and soloist. Barenboim is the Bono of classical music, the biggest name on the stage, a visionary in many ways but primarily an artist: one of the best conductors and one of the most renowned pianists in the world.

About a year ago, I had witnessed this second part of his artistic persona when attending two concerts of Beethoven's piano sonatas, also at the Royal Festival Hall. The music was sublime, but the experiences contained so much more. Seeing him play quiet parts with his left hand while his right grabbed the towel hanging over the side of the piano and then dried his forehead was special. Feeling the power of the maestro, how he held an audience of nearly three thousand motionless in rapt attention was magical. There was just a little piano on the big stage in the far distance, and a little man working the keys. Sometimes caressing, sometimes pounding, magic was created.

I expected magic last night, and I was not disappointed. When the orchestra took their places, something odd became obvious: Instead of the rostrum, all musicians faced a piano positioned centrally at the front of the stage. A few minutes later, Barenboim entered, walked over to the piano and just stood there. With a wave of his hands, the music started. He was conducting.

But at some point, the first solo part started. Barenboim sat down and played, but kept conducting, either with his eyes and head, or with his hands. Most incredible were the times, sometimes mere bursts, when only one of his hands had notes to play. The other would immediately jump into the air and give directions to the musicians. It was a visual feast, even from my cheap seat in one of the last rows.

Unfortunately I'm no expert and can't say whether it was also an acoustic feast, commensurate with the hype. All I can say is that the music was wonderful and that I enjoyed it tremendously, as did the rest of the audience, judging by the applause after the concert. Barenboim himself was quite visibly delighted during the curtain call. Chest swollen with self-admiration, he strutted back onto the stage like a proud peacock to receive his ovation.

I'm looking forward to giving him another, on Tuesday after the concluding concert of the series, but before I can enjoy that, I have to suffer a little. It is three degrees outside, but my trainers are getting anxious. They want to be taken running, and I should do so before the sun vanishes and nothing is left to distract from the miserable cold.

art confusion

"Art is the re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical values-judgments." This sentence jumped at me before I had even reached the first chapter of the latest addition to my collection of sadly unread books. It starts the introduction to Atlas Shrugged and was said by the author Ayn Rand to preclude any literary interpretation of or search for meaning in her fictional works.

The introduction proceeds to quote at length from Rand's notebooks, giving away the punchlines and, as the creator of the introduction warns, spoiling the book for those who haven't read it. To me, that does not seem a sensible way of composing an introduction. Or is Atlas Shrugged restricted to devoted followers that know the book by heart already? In that case, it seems pointless to me to issue yet another edition.

Enough of such contradictions already. Chance had it that the first sentence, reproduced above, was the book's way of telling me, Read me not! Do your homework first. One thing after another. And the book is right, of course. Something has been churning in my head that needs to be ladled out and presented in a satisfying way before I can ask my brain to cook up something else.

Yesterday, I went to Tate Modern to see a major exhibition that had just opened. Pop Life is a retrospective on Pop Art, starting with Andy Warhol in the late 60s and then meandering in unpredictable ways to the present, and to Japan.

The exhibition is quite amazing. I wasn't so sure of that when I left it Sunday night, but now I can see the point and the power. In ten brilliantly different rooms, one very different from the next, artists were presented as they were or liked to see themselves. There was quite a bit of the Tate's signature pretentious rubbish in the introductory panels, but overall the pieces were mostly free to speak to the audience. Controversy about art and commerce, about selling out and buying in, was left to the viewer to resolve.

One room was designed to look like Keith Haring's Pop Shop in SoHo. His cartoon figures were painted on walls, floor and ceiling as if it were one gigantic canvas, music was blasting from concealed speakers, and from a hole in the wall one could buy t-shirts and buttons. Inside a paying exhibition in London's preeminent modern art museum, to make that clear.

Another room was dedicated to the show that was the short-lived marriage between Jeff Koons (of balloon animal and animal balloon fame) and Cicciolina (of adult movie and Italian parliament fame). Like two others, this room was restricted to the above-18-year-olds. Koons and Cicciolina were shown/showed themselves copulating enthusiastically. The action was captured from all angles and in a cheerful Barbiesque plasticness that belied the medical attention to detail.

It was in that room that the idea for the current post took hold. You have to wonder – and I certainly did, not for the first time, by the way – what is art. Never mind the very first sentence of this post, to me this question is not at all answered. Not that it matters. I'm inclined to say that the more interesting question is, Who makes art.

It is not the creator because then we'd all be artists because everyone re-creates reality according to some values or judgments, to beat that first statement one last time. I write, you sing under the shower, he prunes hedges, she repaints the living room. None of this is generally considered art, and the reason for this is that no authority has elevated it to the status of art.

My favorite example is the story of the Brazilian tropicalist who was so upset with the arts establishment that he submitted the skin of a pig as his entry for the annual Salon. He reasoned that what he had done was clearly not art, but the system was so rotten and false that it would accept his submission thereby exposing its own degeneration most powerfully.

Surprise, surprise: His 'sculpture' was rejected on the grounds that it wasn't art. If the story ended here, no one would remember it. But in 2005, I saw a Tropicalism exhibition in the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art in which the pigskin featured prominently. It had become art – contrary to the express intention of the creator/artist.

Another vantage point of who makes art was presented in another room at the Tate. It was a video of two people having sex, for one slow-moving hour. How is this art? Well, the artist in question asked her agent if he could find her a collector willing to pay for a video of her having sex with that collector. A collector was found, the video shot and five copies produced. These are now considered art.

But does prostitution become art just because a self-proclaimed arts collector pays for it? You really have to wonder. And I do, I still do. I haven't come to a conclusion but have a least let my thoughts go freely and get out of my head. Though no questions are answered, I can now, with the respects that is due, approach the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged.