A portrait of Peter Gabriel, painted 300 years before he was born?

I know it might sound like a lot of money, but if anybody has the odd three million quid to spare I quite fancy getting my hands on the newly-discovered Velazquez painting. Its a real bargain when you consider that there are only 98 known works by Velazquez and £3 million is a mere fraction of what was paid for Damien Hirst’s shark. Come on – I named my cat after Diego Velzquez, I obviously deserve it!

If nobody in the family manages a record-breaking lottery win before the auction I just hope the buyer lets the painting be displayed at the National Gallery or the Prado or somewhere else where the public can see it alongside some of his other paintings.

Apart from its rarity, it looks like a very good piece of work. Maybe not as striking as his portrait of Pope Innocent X and looking in need of a bit of a scrub, but still wonderful.

The subject is unknown, and suspected to be Philip IV’s master of the hunt, but I think we can all see that it is really a portrait of Peter Gabriel.

What is surprising is that nobody thought of doing this before: having looked at the site it all seems so obvious in hindsight – applying the fake tilt-shift effect to paintings.  In this case it is Van Gogh given the DOF makeover.

Actually, I reckon it was not the best choice of artist.  Van Gogh was already a bit impressionistic and I think it would be fun to see the effect applied to some of the more realistic paintings like Canaletto, Vermeer or de Hooch, although I suppose part of the charm is seeing the treatment given to something that was not photorealistic in the first place.

Very pretty though.

Or is it just one more thing for airport security to look out for?  Will they be confiscating Rubiks Cubes just in case?

Imagine the shoot-out in High Noon if both of them had one of these.  It would be like a particularly high-stakes round of the Krypton Factor.

(Some nice still photos at Gizmodo)

In this case it didn’t work.  I was distinctly underwhelmed by the book, although I’ll admit I am probably not the target audience for it anyway.

Having said that, the premise for the book is a little flaky.  It is very much an art book, well bound and beautifully printed on good quality, thick paper.  The short introduction/biography makes much of how Hardy started as a more general art student, became a  well-regarded tattoo artist and then moved into designs for clothing and ceramics and into painting.  The gist of it seemed to be that he is a ‘respectable artist’ because of that, justifying a serious book – and yet surely most people who are interested in him are interested because of the more counter-culural tattoo work.

I can appreciate that Hardy has more artistic talent in his lttle finger than I have in my whole body, but a lot of the designs in the book don’t really do much for me.  Personally I prefer the more geometric tattoo designs, but that is all subjective.  Unless you already know about Hardy and are a fan, a better book for anybody interested in tattoos would be one of the Taschen books.

It only took me about 15 minutes to digest the whole thing, so I spent a similarly short amount of time reviewing it:

For somebody like me who knew nothing about Ed Hardy, this book does not contain enough to fill me in on the subject: just seven pages of biography and lots of pictures.  I imagine that for those in the know it does not contain anywhere near enough pictures.

The book is packaged and presented like a fine art book, and much is made of Hardy’s diversification into areas like ceramics and paintings, but most of the illustrations are of body art.

As an outsider maybe I would have found it useful to have some context to the illustrations, like examples of the work that was supposed to have influenced Hardy so I could see how he took elements of traditional and contemporary Japanese tattoos and other pictures and what he added to it.

To be fair, this is probably aimed at a niche market which I am not part of. It didn’t make me want to rush out and get another tattoo.

It is really hard to judge from a description or even a photograph what sort of impact a large-scale work like this can have.   It sounds a bit meh: a big box made to look like a shipping container that you can walk into, but it is dark inside…  but then the plastic boxes were a lot better than I expected, and the Weather Project far outshone¹ any mere description.

The Turbine Hall is a massive space, awesome in its own right when it is empty, and large-scale works can gain an extra impact just from the sheer scale, combined with the setting, so I’ll reserve judgement until I can see it for myself.

One thing is for sure, I’m not likely to be able to enjoy the sort of access the TV crews and journalists were getting, where they could walk into the box alone: the Tate Modern is always packed, and deservedly so.  Us average punters will probably be walking into the box in the company of a party of 30 students, unless we can find some way of being there when the doors open and before the school buses start to roll up.

1. sorry about that

What a miserable, joyless old git he is though.  He is now a parody of himself.  Not only was he moaning about the One & Other project, but about the other temporary exhibits and the Sky Arts studio which he descibed as a shanty town.  When Clive Anderson mentioned how plinthers could be watched online Sewell replied using the phrase “modern faddy nonsense”.

I think he was actually describing computers and the internet as modern faddy nonsense and not the transient One & Other which shows a degree of out-of-touchness that is almost admirable.  He says he does not have a computer and I wonder how that can be true for anybody working for a newspaper.  I had a mental picture of him knocking out his crappy art criticism columns on an old sit-up-and-beg typewriter then figured he would probably regard them as terrible modern contrivances.  I suspect he delivers his columns handwritten with a quill pen.

It was terrific television though, with Clive Anderson only just pulling back from the temptation of openly taking the piss out of Sewell but quite happily provoking him into making ever more reactionary statements.  I don’t quite understand how any newspaper, even one that has decided it is too bad to charge for any more, can employ an art critic with so little interest in art outside very narrow confines.   I don’t think Brian Sewell approves of anything produced in the last hundred years except himself.

According to him the One & Other project is ‘fatuous and pointless’ as is the whole idea of having a revolving subject for the plinth, Antony Gormley and ‘just about everything’ in Tate Modern, while those people who have used their time to produce paintings or scultures on the plinth are just ‘daubers’.  It seemed like an unnecessary slight.  He also suggested that Liverpool should be towed out to sea and sunk.

It is such a good job he never had children.  Can you imagine a 4-year-old coming home with a finger painting, eagerly awaiting the praise to accompany the mounting of the painting on the fridge only to be met with a long and impassioned list of his shortcomings as an artist?

If I get called up as a last-minute reserve I think I may have to think up some sort of conceptual art tribute to Brian Sewell.

• Juggling
• Stilt walking
• Any other circus skills
• Singing
• Dancing
• Knitting
• Yoga
• Posing as a statue
• Tai Chi
• Playing guitar
• Playing violin
• Playing trumpet
• Playing any musical instrument

Also I was getting paranoid about doing anything that would require amplification as I had a mental picture of the sky opening and pouring down on expensive hired electronics.

I was left with only a couple of possibilities:  getting in touch with LMHR for some decent banners and reciting the poem The Hangman, leaving me with only 50 minutes to fill, going to the fancy dress shop in Horsham for a suitably eye-catching costume – perhaps even doublet and hose and reciting some killer Shakespeare solioquys.

Mind you, I did see a statement from the Met police that nudity per se was not a criminal offence so there was always that last resort….  I think we all had a lucky escape.

A bit of a mixed bag: he gave a short lecture about banking, read some poems, including ‘Twat’ by John Cooper Clarke, played some music, threw bundles of £20 notes down, danced, dressed up as a (extremely well-hung) Gormley Another Place statue and then as the Angel of the North.  All very entertaining.  Crawley council should encourage him to repeat the performance in the town centre.

The TV producers obviously loved Loren.  They kept showing her doing her thing.  They also showed the Monster Raving Loony a few times but unfortunately did not dwell on him: I thought he was hilarious, especially when he started filling in his expenses…  “Well.  Tube fare here.  That’s got to be five pounds.”

I had thought that dressing up as the Angel of the North would be a good idea, but I spotted several variations on that, so it has been done now.  In the unlikely event of me getting picked for October I won’t be able to do that.  Interesting that one bloke was going to just be a statue, because I had thought it would be interesting to see one of those professional statues up there – the people who stand on the South Bank painted white as a sort of low-energy busking.

I learned a few things tonight though.  For a start, various celebrities have applied to go on the plinth, taking their chances in the draw with everybody else.  Mike Figgis got picked, as we know, but Tim Marlow is still in the draw, as is Antony Gormley himself.   I wonder what he would do?  Wouldn’t it look like a real fix if he got picked?  I hope he does though.

I do like his attitude.  I know it sounds like a cop-out, given how much effort some people have put into the whole thing, but I do like the idea of just being rather than doing.  In fact, when I first heard of the whole thing I thought that was the point, although it has since evolved into a sort of talent show with some pressure on participants to put on a bit of a show even if that only involves dressing like one of the comedy entrants in the London Marathon.  It takes a certain amount of bravery now to go up there and just stand or sit there.

Or you could combine the two…  I recommend watching the stream of WooF from earlier today.  he did intend to put on a performance, went up on the plinth with his electric guitar, 30 watt amp and a portable generator.  Unfortunately the generator would not start and he spent most of the hour on the phone to somebody (technical support?) .  As somebody commented on the site, it was a Pinter-esque experience, but WooF is my hero of the today for the dignified way he coped and held his temper in the face of what must have been extreme frustration.

I have been looking at a few of the archives of plinthers and it occurs to me that the whole thing has the potential to be like a bite-sized Big Brother.  This is not a bad thing…  imagine being in Big Brother.  It goes on for months and months.  With the plinth you can have the opportunity to show off,  make a point, publicise a cause or whatever you want to do, but without having to give up your job to do it.

It can even be a political platform.  See this chap – spending an hour doing a grand job of promoting his political party.  Particularly good around the 20-minute mark where he bounces around the plinth on a spacehopper humming the Benny Hill tune.

Also… wouldn’t it be funny, ironic even, if a member of Fathers 4 Justice got selected?   They could dress up as Batman and stand on top of a London landmark for a whole hour with no hassle at all.  Might be a problem getting them to come down at the end though.

Just don’t let Andrew see this bloke.  I reckon this is what the Thriller dance would have been like if the square had not been chock full of steel bands.