| “Art Has Dreadful Manners. It's There to Make Us See the World in a Different Way" |
Critical Christmas Cracker |
| Things That Caught the Attention , Culture & Media in 2025 , December 22, 2025 |
Every day brings its own swirl of information. In the giddying swirl small things abound. Some inform, some entertain, some illuminate. These are a few things that were just a bit different in 2025. JANUARY “Highlights in the History of Concrete” wins the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year. The prize dates to the Frankfurt Book Fair of 1978. A literary designer, Bruce Robertson, started to scour the aisles looking for unusual titles. Previous titles include “The Large Sieve and Its Applications”, “Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers”, “The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History and Its Role in the World Today”. * * * * FEBRUARY Jon Gower reviews “Your Lowly Hedgehog Knows” by Gareth Howell-Jones. As James Baldwin once put it, ‘You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.’ “Garden designer, bookseller and author Howell-Jones teaches us how to better read the world, suggesting that all we need to do sometimes is simply stop and look. ‘We can walk through the world each day as if it were a film we’ve never seen, uncertain what might happen next, alert to each new scene and mood in this gigantic drama. It may be the only live screening in the universe; it’d be a crime to miss it.’ * * * * MARCH The press relishes a story of £9952 awarded for “Decolonising the Welsh Cake.” “Decolonising usually means finding and challenging how imperialism worked. The Arts Council of Wales - a Welsh Government sponsored body - was unable to explain what links the cake has to empire.” Mims Davies, shadow secretary of state for Wales: “This is another total waste of money. We should all be proudly celebrating and supporting Welsh heritage, not having the taxpayer fund, along with lottery players, an organisation that is shelling out thousands of pounds to fund these bonkers leftie ideological attempts to tear it down.” She said the funding was a “direct result” of dictats [sic] from the Welsh Labour government.” * * * * APRIL Reading the critic Clement Greenberg. In 1949 Jackson Pollock earned $3100, a large canvas was $4000, a small $300. * * * * MAY Simon Schama's “the Power of Art” is repeated on BBC4. “Art has dreadful manners. It's there to make us see the world in a different way.” * * * * JUNE Augustine Sedgewick has a book “Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power”, 320 pages that start in Babylon and Athens. The author asks his own son what a father should be. “Funny and good at hugging.” * * * * JULY Aldous Huxley writes about Ben Jonson: “at all times a caricature is disquieting; and it is very good for most of us to be made uncomfortable.” Disapproval of authors goes a way back. The weekly Westminster Gazette of 5th August 1922 declares Dante “an irredentist and imperialist.” * * * * AUGUST Some words are innately satisfactory. “Scroyles” has a dictionary definition. “Pugles”, a Pembrokeshire word, does not. * * * * SEPTEMBER Amartya Sen has some good words in “The Idea of Justice”. “The need to transcend the limitations of our positional perspectives is important in moral and political philosophy, and in jurisprudence. "Liberation from positional sequestering may not always be easy, but it is a challenge that ethical, political and legal thinking has to take on board. Trying to go beyond positional confinement is also central to epistemology.” * * * * OCTOBER A tale of art and customs duties. In the USA works of art were not subject to custom duties. In 1927 officials refused to believe that a Brancusi sculpture, “Bird in Space” a tall, thin piece of polished bronze, was art. A 40% tariff, that for manufactured metal objects, was imposed on the sale price. Marcel Duchamp had accompanied the sculpture from Europe. Edward Steichen, who was to take possession after exhibition, and Brâncuși were indignant. Appraiser F. J. H. Kracke confirmed the initial classification of items and said that they were subject to duty. Whether or not the sculpture was art was contested and led to a prolonged court case. * * * * NOVEMBER I receive a message fom the 33rd biggest company in the world. Its valuation is £250 billion and their opening line reads “Hi, first-name.” * * * * DECEMBER The Wallenberg dynasty in Sweden has a motto. “Esse, no videri.” “To be, not to be seen” is a good one. Joyce Carol Oates takes a view on trends in novel-writing "wan little husks of autofiction with space between paragraphs to make the book seem longer.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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