1:32pm
One of my commenters, Carroll Powell, makes a very good suggestion. It's all very well having a go at overrated artists, but it's a lot more use flagging up underrated ones.
His own suggestions:
[N]o-one writes better than William Trevor or John McGahern (now, alas, dead). Shameful that neither have won the Booker.
I'll return to this theme, but off the top of my head, I'd say that Carl Nielsen deserves to be ranked with symphonic greats, that for all the popoularity of some of Elgar's music, he is nonetheless woefully underrated, and that there has been no finer British conductor than Vernon Handley.
Suggestions, please (in any art form).
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1:25pm
I'm grateful to Peter Cuthbertson for pointing this out to me:
According to Google News, none of the 1,294 news stories on the Swedish movie director's death mention that he finally admitted in 1999 that he had been a Nazi-supporter all through WWII, when he was in his 20s, because he found Nazism to be "fun and youthful." Bergman's Nazi enthusiasm wasn't unknown back in Bergman's heyday: Richard Grenier, Commentary's film critic, wrote a hostile article about it in the 1980s, but, otherwise, Bergman seems to have gotten a free pass over it.
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9:53am
This clip of Channel Four News' Sue Turton having her bottom pinched has become infamous.
What amazes me is that the police's decision to try to find the culprit, and to see him punished, is being described as 'controversial'. The Mail reports that:
To the disgust of local taxpayers, police have mounted an investigation to trace the phantom tweaker and hand him an £80 fine for breaching public order.
Disgust? How about some disgust at what was an assault on Ms Turton? Who are these people who with one breath complain that we are a nation of yobs and with another moan about the police investigating and pursuing yobbery?
As Thames Valley police put it:
We are taking this seriously. We just think it was particularly stupid and obnoxious behaviour and the individual concerned needs some kind of sanction.
According to the man's wife:
Rufus does not go around pinching women's bottoms, but he does see the funny side in every situation. It seems a crazy use of police resources.
Except, of course, that he does go around pinching women's bottoms. He did just that, and was caught on camera.
Ms Turton appears to have
exactly the right attitude:
I've no desire to punish this man through the courts. But I did wonder if I accepted such behaviour without complaint what hope do women who are groped in public in this way have of any recourse? I personally found the matter quite humiliating and somewhat disrespectful to the plight of those I was reporting about. Some may say I'm being prudish. I've been in much more threatening situations throughout my reporting career, but they were in far-flung places. Male reporters would never be treated to a public goosing.
Quite right. If this idiot isn't guilty of, at the very least, anti-social behaviour - randomly groping a woman in the street - then who is?
(I've edited this post slightly to include some extra quotes.)
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9:26am
I have a piece in today's Times on Ingmar Bergman. Here's an extract:
Bergman is one of a large category of “important artists” whose defining quality is an almost total absence of public acclamation or popularity. Every art form has its equivalent – think James Joyce or Sir Harrison Birtwistle – but cinema is exceptional in its preponderance of such “important artists”. The latest is Lars von Trier, a maker of terminally dull films that are, nonetheless, lauded by cineastes (they have their own word, signifying that they’re a cut above bog-standard moviegoers).
It’s tempting to think that Bergman’s films were treated with such awe by critics because he was Swedish and the Swedes are, you know, deep. Like the Danish von Trier. So even if they’re yawnathons, they should be revered because they must mean something important.
But it’s not as simple as that. Even if Ingmar Bergman had been born plain old Terence Davies from Liverpool, cineastes would have been as likely to sing his praises. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you . . . Terence Davies, a Liverpudlian whose mind-numbingly dull accounts of his childhood in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) have led to him being revered as “one of the most original British film-makers of the late 20th century” (as the British Film Institute puts it).
It goes on that Davies’s uniqueness lies in the way he conveys “the fragmented nature of memory and the partial knowledge of his young protagonist. Instead of using a smooth narrative, we receive a succession of loosely connected episodes, with no dominant story line.” So nothing happens in no particular order. But it’s important art because it’s dark, worthy and dull.
Feel free to call me a philistine in the comments section, but sticks and stones and all that...
Perhaps it would more fun if you'd like to suggest other 'important artists' who are, in your view, overrated.
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