The £100 Million Question

The recent news that the National Gallery has to come up with £50million to keep the Titian masterpiece Diana and Actaeon in this country has caused widespread debate (read about it here).

The basic deal is this: £50m will buy you the first Titian painting and a second (Diana and Callisto) will be offered for the same price in four years time. Once both of these paintings are secure, the rest of the Bridgewater collection will be secured on a long-term loan to the galleries also, which is a significant extra to the deal.

When you consider some of the substantial sums that are traded in the art world, £50m for each of the paintings isn’t actually too bad. I have no issue with paying that much money; in market terms it is a bargain. Furthermore, £10m has been pledged by National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), which is a wonderful donation.

However, there is bound to be a shortfall and eventually help will likely be asked for from the government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Given the current economic constraints on the country as a whole, should we be more cautious in spending such an amount of money on a painting?

The only problem that I have is not with paying the money, but from where the money is coming from – if it comes from the Government, it has to be as part of its budget and not a special magic fund. We have borrowed enough money as a country to suggest that we shouldn’t be pulling £50m out of a magic hat.

Another factor that irks me somewhat is the continual argument in favour of the painting: that it is part of our heritage. Various artists assisting in the campaign have described how inspired they were as children or students by being able to see the painting at its long term home in Edinburgh.

To me, this painting is not our heritage. It is a masterpiece from a great Italian renaissance painter which we have been lucky to have been able to display in galleries in Britain. To claim it as part of our heritage just because a wealthy British aristocrat bought it so many years ago seems a little misguided to me. Think of all the artists in different countries of the world who might have been inspired by it but haven’t had the opportunity.

People can buy great works of art, but they never own them. These Titian paintings belong to the people who spend hours looking at them. In recent times, this has been a British audience but if Lord Sutherland were to sell the paintings privately, it is likely they would go abroad and a whole new set of people would be able to spend time staring at them.

Despite this, from a selfish point of view, I hope that Britain keeps these masterpieces on our shores, providing the money is generated sensibly. But it is important to remember that we have no divine right to them.

The Truly Great Gatsby

The boom of the 1920s has long interested me, since I first learned of the period in my early teens. Perhaps more than any other time in the 21st Century, the 1920s helped to shape the world we live in today.

I recently finished reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 masterpiece "The Great Gatsby" which is an interesting portrayal of this period which he coined as The Jazz Age. It was a period of decadence, of popular entertainment through the first wave of cinema and of economic prosperity, particularly in America. It was the land of opportunity.

The 1920s is almost a historical allegory for the current economic downturn that we are facing. Everyday families played the stock market as if it was a game (and one that for the majority of the century, was easy to win) before it all ended dreadfully with the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Consider the parallels with the housing market of the early 2000s and its sharp recent collapse and you can make an easy case for the parallel.

"The Great Gatsby" is more than merely a reflection of the boom of the 1920s however. I'm not going to go into the story in any great deal (you can read about it here) but I am going to describe the things that I think make it so special and far before its time.

The story of Gatsby is told through the eyes of a young man, Nick Carraway, and what I like about this is that the story is told almost completely without judgement on the central characters. This is quite unusual for a first person narrative in itself and made more so by the moral decisions that pins the plot together. The characters are so self-absorbed that they don't realise the importance of their wrong choices but at no point are we made to choose sides. By the end, Nick has made his own mind up and his allegiance is to Gatsby but the crucial thing is that the reader is afforded the option to make their own decision.

The ending is also stunning and yet at the same time, probably the reason why the book was unpopular on its release. Given the boom that the audience of 1924 were experiencing, it is perhaps only natural that they would reject the bleak and unhappy ending. At the same time, this is probably the part that helped an audience rediscover it as Fitzgerald's masterpiece after his death. Not only did it brilliantly surmise his riffs on the sanctity of marriage, of the falseness and loneliness of society and the way that things are not always as they seem but it has also inspired influential artists since. The mental image of Gatsby being shot dead in his swimming pool was almost certainly the inspiration for the Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard - an iconic image that helped to redefine Hollywood in the fifties.

And finally, what drew me into the story was the entertainment of Fitzgerald's writing. It had pace, elegance and wit, yet at the same time was garnished with beautiful descriptions that in most other circumstances would slow down the novel. It was almost like it had been glossed with the modern sheen; that it was not of its time. If the same novel came out today, people would not question its writing style as being old-fashioned.

What's more at under 200 pages, it delivers an astonishing number of themes and motifs, proving that brevity is not something to be scorned. In today's publishing market, research suggests that people don't like to buy short books and more than likely, The Great Gatsby would be treated as a novella if it was written today. Not only would render it unlikely to ever receive the audience it deserves, it would also be a massive disservice to the work as a Novel in its own right.

This would be a sad indictment on modern culture. Given the parallels with the twenties, the world needs works of art like The Great Gatsby to remember that with every boom there must come a bust.

Fun and Games

I recently watched Funny Games US, the shot-for-shot remake of the original Michael Haneke film from 1997. What makes this unique is that it was the same director who made this virtual replica, albeit in English language with Hollywood actors like Naomi Watts and Tim Roth.

Haneke has suggested that the reason for making this film is that he saw the target audience as the American society that has notably been consuming "torture-porn" style movies like Hostel and Saw. With his earlier version being in foreign language, he argued that in order to get the film out to this audience, he had to remake it in English.

Unfortunately, this wasn't a success. Mainly due to its limited distribution across America, the wider audience that the remake was aiming at was simply not penetrated. If anything, the film was watched mainly by people who had already seen the original version or who had enjoyed Haneke's recent successes with Hidden (Cache) or the Piano Teacher.

The teen audience that attends multiplex showings of Hostel-like films were not there and the stats back this up - Funny Games US opened to 274 screens in the USA and took a total of $1.2million dollars in the month it played. To put this into context, Hostel Part II took seven times that amount on its opening weekend in 2007 ($8.2million) and grossed fourteen times the amount ($17.5million) in total.

The figure that most stands out is that it cost $15million to make and as such, even taking into account DVD sales, makes for a low level of profit overall. All things considered, surely it would have made more sense to just re-release the original film in the USA and spend a bit of money on marketing it?

While it is an interesting concept to remake his own film for such a reason, Haneke fundamentally failed. What's more, the actual films themselves are so identical that they is nothing to differentiate them. It is neither better nor worse than the original; they are identical in shots and dialogue and the performance from the cast is just as strong, especially from Naomi Watts. What's more - and this is perhaps testament to Haneke's skills as a director - the same repulsion and horror are impinged upon you and it maintains the same psychological bite as the original.

Based upon this, the conundrum that I keep contemplating is this: Which version would I recommend to a friend to watch over the other?

My gut reaction is that if I watched the two of them side by side, and independent of thought, that I would prefer the remake. Most of this is probably due to the familiarity of it - not in just the language but also the fact that the cast is known and with it comes a certain extra intimacy and connection. For example, I have watched a large number of Naomi Watts films purely on the basis of her participation and it is this warmth and familiarity that draws me to the remake.

There is an obvious cultural distaste for remakes, especially those of foreign language films into English language. This is invariably due to the inferior quality but there is often a more snobbish element at play. Why watch the remake when you can watch the original? Ultimately, I think Haneke's response would be that it doesn't matter which version you watch, as long as you watch it.

With Funny Games US, I think I can comfortably say that it is a great film, like the original. The logic behind making it however does not quite befit the same genius.

Long Gone

It is now nearly three weeks since the break up of Sheffield indie band The Long Blondes after their guitarist suffered a stroke in the summer. It was sad news at the time and their absence on the modern music scene will continue to leave a gap in the market.

They were always a slightly off-kilter band, full of seemingly different personalities. To watch them live was a strange experience as the charismatic singer Kate Jackson captured the attention of the audience, whilst the rest of the band - in particular Emma and Reenie - looked deeply uncomfortable.

What I loved about the band was the way their lyrics was full of pop-culture references, drenched in glamorous asides from years gone by. They name-checked, amongst others, Edie Sedgwick, Scott Walker, Billy Wilder films and Erin O'Connor whilst at the same time reflecting the difficulties of youth. They were exciting and, perhaps most importantly - and this is often overlooked or scoffed at in modern music - a lot of fun.

Their first album was critically well received on the most part but didn't sell particularly brilliantly. Someone To Drive You Home was full of well-paced, youthful sounding indie pop songs: it smashed you over the head before putting its arms round you and inviting you to the local disco.

Their second album Couples was a different affair, almost a specific attempt to sound grown-up in response to their earlier releases. It fused lyrics of mid-20s displacement with a more openly pop sound that made use of electronica as well as their normal guitar sound. There was a critical backlash as well as a confused reaction from fans expecting the second installment of Someone To Drive You Home and it reached only number 48 in the album charts.

It may not have sold many CDs but there was undoubtedly a massive record company push behind them; faith they never repaid in monetary terms. They had an unbelievable opportunity but somehow the mainstream couldn't seem to take to them, no matter how much hype surrounded them.

Because of this, it was perhaps an inevitable split - even if Dorian Cox's stroke was a quite shocking final chapter of the story. It is a sad reflection of the UK music industry that if you don't shift units, you will probably end up losing your record deal and it is unlikely that the band would have been given the opportunity to release another record.

Part of me is sad that the Long Blondes are no more. In time, I can't help but feel that their second album - for all the bad words said about it - will stand up as a much greater work than their first. Whether the band will end up as a cult forgotten act like many that have gone before is debatable, that they'll always be hovering around my CD player is not.