As an unbaptised agnostic raised with no religion, the closest I ever really come to a spiritual experience is when I’m standing in front of an artwork. Last week I went to Florence to do exactly that, drawn there not by Michelangelo’s David or Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, but by the works of Mark Rothko, that titan of US abstract expressionism whose work seems, on the surface at least, distinctly secular and un-Florentine. Yet seeing Renaissance art there had a profound impact on Rothko and his painting, as the exhibition Rothko in Florence makes strikingly explicit. Taking place at Palazzo Strozzi and two other satellite sites, it has been curated by his son, Christopher, and the author and independent curator Elena Geuna.
Is it embarrassing to admit that when confronted with the first large canvas I was drawn to I felt tearful? It was an emotion born of appreciation and astonishment but also – and this startled me – a feeling of gratitude. I felt profoundly lucky to be there, in front of this painting, not long after a time in my life where for various reasons I had been not been feeling all that fortunate at all. To have the chance to take in the paint on the monumental canvas, and absorb the ways the colours – purples, reds, oranges, yellows, blues – blend and in places seem to glow felt hugely significant to me personally. And then, as I continued to look – and as ever with Rothko – I stopped thinking about myself at all.
Column in Guardian written by a bird isn’t about the bird writing a column for The Guardian.
Or is it?
Any statement that starts ‘ As a (insert magic personal qualifier)..’ is very likely to be not worth reading. It claims special consideration. If your argument is good, you don’t need that. If it’s bad, it will not help.
I can get quite spiritual watching bits of really cleverly designed machinery working. I know I’m not alone otherwise tourbillon watches wouldn’t still be a thing.
Awe-inspiring beauty takes many forms – equations, proofs, machinery, bridges, buildings, as well as art, landscapes, animals, etc, etc.
With the advent of quartz watches, clever mechanical devices to improve spring balance accuracy are essentially redundant – same as valve gear on steam locos since diesel and electricity. They are both marvellous inventions and can be appreciated for the tech. But now tourbillon movements are Veblen goods and steam locos are tourist attractions.
I keep wondering when the luxury watch industry is going to crash.
Veblen goods are often about people at a certain time, and what was awesome when they were kids. It’s why Jaguar could sell Mondeos in drag to people. People who were kids in the 1960s thought Jags were cool always wanted a Jag. And got one, even though it was a Mondeo in drag. But you get to kids in the 1970s or 1980s, the Mercs and Porsches were the cool cars. Which is why Porsche are selling hideous SUVs. It’s to the people that always wanted a Porsche. But now have kids, so a 911 won’t do.
It’s why Jag aren’t coming back. Doesn’t matter if they go all golf club or metrosexual. No-one except people who lived then and remembered e-Types and Mk2s being cool cared about buying them. If you want a nice car, get a Lexus, because Jags are shit.
What’s the emotional driver of a £5000 Rolex instead of a £100 Swatch? Or, why is this a current Veblen good, and not something else? I don’t even bother with a watch. I have clocks everywhere, some synchronised to the time signal in Cumbria.
What’s the emotional driver of a £100 Swatch rather than a £5 Casio? Mechanical watches have been redundant for more than 50 years but Rolex still sells a million every year and there are new watchmakers launched every year at all price points. There is no reason for the market to crash.
Well, OK, I was thinking on the hoof. Replace £100 Swatch with £8 Casio?
I don’t get it. Instrument to tell the time. Maybe spend a bit more for nicer looks, but 500 times? Would you spend £8m on a nicer looking car than a Toyota?
I seem to recall an exchange where someone bumped into the Chairman of Rolex as he was having dinner. ‘How is the watch business’ the someone asked. ‘No idea’ came the reply ‘I ‘am in the jewellery business’
Sure. But jewelry is stupid now as well.
Women used to be given precious gems as a form of non-banking currency. Whores and mistresses couldn’t get bank accounts so bought jewels they could wear or hide easily. If they needed to they could trade them or pawn them.
Engagement rings were compensation if a man took your virginity but didn’t marry. You kept the ring
If you just want to wear a sparkly rock, no one can tell a fake from diamond.
Yes, that multiplier is too big to be reasonable. However in 2008 I bought a Citizen watch with solar cells that keep the internal super capacitor (I think) charged. It has two extra dials and a couple of LCD displays. Most of the functions I never use but it has one very useful function that changing timezone on the main hands is a couple of button presses. It has never stopped, it loses 30 seconds in 3 months consistently with an easy update. It cost me £150 then, it still works well and that is one of my best value things that I still regularly use.
I used to work with a watch repairer.* The other part of our jewelry business. He was always rather disparaging about high end watch movements. Particularly Rolex. He said there were only 5 (at the time) movement makers in Switzerland. So unless it’s got lots of subsidiary dials, they were much the same when opened up. Of course, for a clean & service, he charging according to the make. If you’re mug enough to buy a Patek Phillipe you pay the price.
I think cases are a different thing. They’re art/craftsmanship. There was a guy at the time making them out all the colours of gold – yellow, red, rose, white, black, green & purple – the metals soldered together, rolled, twisted,plenished, filed, folded, re-rolled … And the cases, bezels, backs etc carved out of the solid. It’s a Japanese technique where they value craftsmanship far higher than the materials things are made of. The effect’s somewhat similar to wood-grain in metal. Absolutely breathtaking.
*His forté was repairing C18th carriage clocks, fuseé movements, early chronometers etc. Often making the parts from metal stock. Did stuff for the V&A
Amen. I watch classic car auctions on TV – Mecum, Barrett-Jackson. People pay 7-figures for cars they couldn’t get in their youth. I think they are repairing their childhood.
And I wonder, when we Boomers are gone, who is going to even know what a Hemi ‘Cuda is? The value is certainly not in performance. My GT350R will beat the snot out of a Hemi ‘Cuda. 0-60: 3.9 sec vs 5.7 sec.
There’s a lot of “the stuff I couldn’t afford then”.
The big US one to me is Harley Davidson. Kids in the 1960s bought motorbikes, desired a Harley. By the 80s, kids were just getting cars. Bikes were off the radar. H-D have lost about 1/3rd of revenue in the past decade.
Funny. In my corner of SC in the mid ’60s, people wanted Triumphs or Nortons or BSAs. British bikes were the ultimate.
And what about Hispano-Suiza?!
Very good machine guns. But I’m not sure of their resale value.
There’s a spanish guy up just south of Burgos restores Yank metal from the 30s to the 50s. Sources them in S. America & the Caribbean. Dangerous place for me when I’m up that way. I know I’m going to leave with 50k’ s worth of something if I’m not careful. I had a close shave with a white convertible Buick straight 8 with rumble seat & side steps. Fortunately he’d already had a bid on it.
There’ll be enough beyond boomers who value them for one reason or another for a few or even more to be kept in good order. After all that era of auto design was when the technology really changed: big V8s, automatic transmission, monocoque construction.
Is monocoque British English for unibody construction? If so, yes, body-on-frame died. For cars. Persists with pickup trucks.
My neighbour is one of those chaps who changes cars every 3 years. At the moment he has a Range Rover.
It has a krooklok on it.
Even when I was rich, I never bought expensive cars. The missus and I had sporty ones for laughs, but they weren’t supercars. Now my knees have gone, I have to drive sensible cars.
The reasoning has become ever more starker as time goes on :
It is not so much the £100k for the motor, but the £5k a year for the insurance and the insurer’s insistance that I go down to bloody Halfords and buy a steering wheel lock.
Counterintuitively, regular, big selling cars are the best cars now.
Back in the 1960s, cars were made by humans. Rolls-Royce, Jaguar, Maserati hired better craftsmen than the likes of Ford and you paid more for it.
Once you got robots, the skill moved from craftsmen to the people managing the robots and processes. And like code, the cost sorting out your robots and process is quite static, however many you make. So, Toyota and Honda spend a lot of money on the figuring out how to make cars, what machines to use, and get it damn good and because Toyota make 10m cars, the cost of that is split across 10m, so it doesn’t cost much per car.
Luxury cars are more hand made because of the scale. And humans are just not as good at welding, painting, fitting as robots.
But people get set ideas of what stuff is good. The reputation of Mercedes is their reputation from the 1970s. And they’re still good. But, no better than a Toyota or Honda. LR/RR are garbage, amongst the worst cars you can buy. But I reckon people still think of old Defenders in the 1980s.
People of ‘a certain age’ probably more associate a Range Rover with John Steed and a champagne fridge in the back, with Purdey quaffing its contents.
His car before that was a BMW X5, which is another crime victim’s vehicle.
I think of Steed in a Blower Bentley.
There’s ‘certain age’ and ‘uncertain of my age’.
🙂
And both Emma Peel and Tara King in Lotuses.
Oooh, raaather.
I guess. But stuff changes.
Chilean wine was undrinkable piss in the 1970s. Then Pinochet privatised it all. And it’s about as good as anyone else’s now.
Once you got robots, the skill moved from craftsmen to the people managing the robots and processes.
Not for the quality of components and materials, though…
Gonna stick my head above the parapet here: people beat unfairly on Land Rover.
So many of the equipment failures on a LR/RR are stuff that other cars don’t have. Ever seen an air suspension failure on a Kia Rio? No, ‘cos they don’t have them. Crankshaft failures on the overlap between cylinders 5 & 6 of the V6 diesel, never happens in a Skoda Yeti because it came exclusively with an inline-4. The electric folding mirror mechanism will never fail on a Toyota Aygo, etc. etc.
A friend’s 2005 Discovery 3 has recently ticked over 200k miles.
One common problem with RRs was the electric parking brake seizing up. Most often this was due to disuse; the owner would just rely on the Park position on the gearbox and never use the brake. Then when it was time for the MOT the tester would engage the brake, there would be a horrible screeching sound and the owner would have an MOT failure and a £1200 repair bill.
Neighbor had a Rover. At some point, the oh-so-woke management decided that wiring insulation should be “sustainable,” so they went to soy based insulation.
Gray squirrels in SE US find soy insulation delicious. THOUSANDS of dollars damage, and weeks of outage. He has a Ford Bronco now. No prestige, but reliable transportation.
Same thing happening in the UK now with foxes.
If I was in the market I’d have another classic XJ6 or 8 series Jaguar.
Gamecock always liked the XJS.
So do I, but I’m not sure I could get out once I’d got in.
Ha ha ha. You should see me struggle in and out of my GT350R.
But it’s the same as with my BMW R 1200 R. When I get on, the knee angle is too acute. Within the first five seconds of my two hour ride, I don’t notice anymore.
Had two XJ8s (not at the same time, I’m not John Prescott). Unbelievably comfortable, but still really capable. The fastest car in heavy traffic because people will let you out. I’ve got an XK8-shaped itch at the moment.
Sorries. Jags have 6s or V12s. A Jaguar with a V8 is a Ford.
The £5000 Rolex exists at entry point to prove to Rolex you are serious enough to get a £10,000 Rolex, which is to prove you are serious…
There is quite a lot of this about. At least with weird brands like Rolex. If you just want a nice £5000 mechanical watch there are competitors out there. Notice Ferrari making that hideous electric car. I suspect the hideousness is the point – they don’t want to see an electric Ferrari ever driven on a road but they have to hit fleet carbon target shit, so if you want a real Ferrari you have to buy one of these first.
Also most Rolexes are bought with people who think they ought to be seen wearing a posh watch, because it’s the one with all the brand recognition. There’s a reason they look clunky and ugly, it’s a great big neon sign flashing “look at me! I have a Rolex!”
Never bit by the Rolex bug. EDC Casio Pathfinder. Wittnauer company watch for dress up.
However, a few years back, I got an alligator wallet. Expensive. Strikingly beautiful. When people see it, they think, “That boy’s got some money!”
I don’t have an inferiority complex.
I like my mechanical watch. Oddly it is the ubiquitous availability of accurate to the exact second time that makes the slightly inaccurate mechanical watch easy to live with. Mine gains a couple of seconds a day and can be reset just by pulling the crown out for a few seconds every so often. When it comes to luxury watches Longines seems to be the best value, if you can call it that, brand.
“It is art as meditation, as secular worship.”
Ah. So, the whole thing of Rothko is like picking the paint colour for a room? Like if you go to Ikea for room design ideas? How very bourgeois.
“Rothko monetised colour samples for interiors”…
Y’know… Not even half-bad as a critique….
and the emotional response comes from the nesting instinct, of redecorating the front room.
The Rothko cult is probably about money laundering. It’s certainly not only art.
It’s certainly not *about* art.
Rothko has no artistic value….Compare, for example, G. Bellini’s superb portrait of a Doge of Venice in the National Gallery. A glance shows there’s simply no comparison:…
Ah well yes, Theo.
Although I actually agree with you, we have to realis that thinking changed in the 19th Century on the purpose of painting.
It was no longer about faithful reproduction ( the Pre Raphaelites notwithstanding ) because photography did that. It was now the purpose of painting to represent the subject. Later on it becomes the goal to break the object down to it simplest compinent parts.
Hence someone like Rothko is the end station of that movement
That process threw away an awful lot of what made paintings interesting IMHO, so for me Rothko says nothing.
The techniques that some of the Old Masters developed are remarkable and modern stuff doesn’t really match up.
My niece, over the last few years, has become a very good botanical artist with several commissions under her belt. Some of those are amazingly beautiful and have a quality of representation that you don’t get with a photograph.
“Today everyone is a genius, but no-one can draw a hand.”
Marc Chagall (attrib)
Tracey Emin can draw; Rothko? Doubtful.
Some of that is right. Photography (and tubes of paint) leads to the impressionists, cubists.
What happens with art after that is caused by cinema. Cinema shifts from being filmed plays to an artform. You get Eisenstein doing montage, you get the German expressionists. And when Technicolor comes along in the late 1930s, it all comes together and cinema becomes the mass popular art. The best artists go and work for Walt Disney as animators, or become film directors or cinematographers.
The art establishment became the redundant buggy whip factory, and so the squatters moved in, and you got modern art like Rothko. How many people care about Rothko’s Cherry, Yellow, Orange, as opposed to Black Narcissus?
ART:
Forgeries now require forensic examination, as they’re so close to the original. At which point, as far as the human eye is concerned, it is the same thing. If you can have blokes banging out Monets or Caravaggios for £50K, why don’t people have them instead of spending £10m+ on them? Why don’t we have copies of all the paintings in the Louvre and the Uffizi in New York, and Americans can go see them instead of spending a fortune and a load of pollution?
The answer is, no-one cares that much about the art. You can observe this in art galleries. People are taking selfies with a work of art. It’s a brag. “Look, I’m in London”. Same with owning a Rothko. It says “I can burn money on this shit”.
The real modern art isn’t in galleries which is why nearly everything post-war is shit. We got printing and cinema, we get this art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE1lIdtDs2g. It’s not much different to Michaelangelo’s David which was basically saying “look how awesome Florence is” (paid for by the government of Florence), or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel which was “look how awesome Christianity is” (paid for my people running the churches who wanted more money for whores).
Fake or Fortune (IIRC) did a reproduction of an old master using a high-def scanner and 3D printer. You needed a magnifying glass to see any difference. I’d certainly pay £10k for a ‘perfect’ reproduction of my favourite painting to hang on my wall (View of Toledo by El Greco, in the Met).
CIA gayops
As in homosexual, or rubbish?
Rothko just isn’t fabulous enough for the gays. Jeff Koons is more likely to get men to go the gay way.
Rothko is for dreary Guardian readers, trying desperately to sound intellectual. I could spread a bit of marmite on toast and make a Rothko. Who wants to look at that. Really, who actually would rather look at any of this rather than spending 12 hours in a cinema for a Lord of the Rings marathon?
ART:
I mean the CIA deliberately funded and promoted “modern art”, to fuck with people.
Not true. …the CIA deliberately funded and promoted “modern art” to demonstrate the freedom of artists in the West compared to the enforced socialist realism of the USSR.
That said, funding degeneracy and cultural decline was not a bright idea…
to demonstrate the freedom of artists in the West compared to the enforced socialist realism of the USSR.
That’s what I said. To fuck with people.
Soviet realism was better art. Say what you will about Josef Stalin, he didn’t like ugly paintings and the USSR produced competent artists. At least it’s an ethos, dude.
Kids coming out of art school now, can they even draw a straight line?
Is it embarrassing to admit that when confronted with the first large canvas I was drawn to I felt tearful? It was an emotion born of appreciation and astonishment but also – and this startled me – a feeling of gratitude.
Stendahl Syndrome, appropriately in Florence.
There’s a woman at the gym . . . .
And the time of the month?
Really?
.
Did the cleaner find where he had been cleaning his brushes after painting the shed with creosote?
Or…
I’m a man of impeccable taste
Is there a Pollock hidden underneath?
I dunno. I happen to quite like Rothko, but that’s just because I happen to quite like Rothko. No other reason. I’ve no idea what he thought his pictures were supposed to be about, and actively avoid others’ “interpretations”. For me they’re a bit like looking at the sky, or shimmering water. They tend to disconnect the ego and let the mind wander. That’s what I think this bird is on about, in a rather over-egged way, when she’s not creating meaning and significance for herself that isn’t there in the pictures.
I was at the wildlife centre at Spurn Head a couple of weeks ago. There was a notice on the board advertising some talk by some bird, or something, about the symbolism of the Swallow.
I was extremely tempted to scrawl on it: “It’s not a symbol, love. It’s a Swallow. It doesn’t give a fuck about you. It belongs to itself.”
You sure she was taking about birds?
Well, just the one doesn’t make a summer, you know.
There’s an old country saying :
On hearing first cuckoo
And seeing first swallow
Hospipe ban sure to follow.
Cuckoo spit?
Nothing against Rothko, I respect the hustle.
But he couldn’t paint to save his life. The best modern artists imo were traditionally skilled draughtsmen and craftsmen who knew how to break the rules because they knew the rules of composition, colour etc.
Salvador Dali could create sublime art. Rothko’s early stuff looks like my great aunt’s amateur paintings. But he knew how to sell.
All true. Hockney, famously, could draw.
I’m mildly intrigued by ‘unbaptised agnostic.’
Does she have some odd belief about baptism?