Art in the banksy?

Bansky rat, Hoxton; sadly now gone

Banksy was on the charge in New York last month, with the aim of creating a new art work every day – although it didn’t start well, with the first one painted over within 24 hours.

But it provoked the usual sort of outbursts from some on news websites, calling for that city’s “finest” to arrest and deport Banksy (if they could find him) and then have him scrub any of his works off walls in the UK.

Goodness: how tedious some people can be.

You might not like street art, but it’s not the same as daubing ‘I woz ere’ on the local bus shelter. And neither are we talking about people stenciling something on the outside of St Paul’s.

In some areas, it brightens up rather drab and tatty surroundings. And it has the added economic advantage of being an increasing draw for visitors who want both to look and photograph.

Not that the objectors are just daft individuals trying to out conservative each other on a website.

ROA rabbit, Hackney Road

Two years ago, Hackney council decided that it would tell the owners of a building on Hackney Road to get rid of a piece of artwork from the side.

This was a rabbit by Belgian street artist ROA, who creates almost Düreresque pieces, and it was done with permission. He’s done a rat further down what is, in essence, a not very picturesque street, so such works help to give the area a welcome lift.

I actually emailed the council telling them to sort their priorities out – I like to think that that effort was influential, because the rabbit is still there, lighting up a street that is otherwise pretty dire on the eye.

In an interesting contrast to this particularly democratic art form, I’ve noticed in the last day or so that my Facebook timeline now getting spammed by Saatchi, which wants me to “invest in art”.

It amounts to them having decided what artists to promote, telling you that there’s a chance that these artists’ work might sell for lots of cash sometime in the future and wouldn’t that be a good investment?

Peeblitz; Blair – war criminal. Now painted over

It’s possibly a fairly good career move for the artists concerned, but it’s also difficult to budge the feeling that the prime motive of Saatchi isn’t one of promoting good art or actually convincing people to enjoy art more.

This is far more about Saatchi making money.

Of course, in the past, artists were at the mercy of patrons.

The 19th can 20th centuries saw the growth in importance of galleries and agents, and also of individual collectors who wielded influence – for instance, Leo and Gertrude Stein in Paris in the early 20th century.

But if we then return to street art, we can see that people can enjoy it and share it (it’s easy enough to buy Banksy prints for instance, or to print up your own photos), without some vast outlay.

Art sometimes seems to suffer from an idea of stuffiness and, of course, cost.

It’s worth noting that many of the UK’s major galleries are generally free, except for specific and temporary exhibitions.

This applies at such national institutions as the National Gallery and the Tate Modern, both in London, but also at plenty of regional galleries too.

But appreciating street art is not incompatible with admiring Rembrandt or van Gogh – and it could be argued that, as fine art has appeared to become more abstracted and, therefore, more difficult to read, the likes of Bansky fill a vacuum of artistic expression in a modern way.

Christ; crown of thorns. Brighton beach, artist unknown

Banksy isn’t alone in using street art to make political points – and street art as a whole hardly invented political and satirical art: think Hoggarth for starters (several of his works are on display in the National Gallery), but that probably upsets some of the naysayers, since the politics generally displayed in street art are hardly conservative or pastoral in nature – see the picture of Peeblitz’s Tony Blair stencil, taken on Hackney Road in 2007 and sadly painted over fairly soon after.

Although there are moments when those who are conservative about street art in general change their tune if it suits them.

My parents, for instance, thought that the Peeblitz/Blair piece was wonderful – and there was a companion piece featuring his fellow war-monger, George W Bush.

The inventiveness and quality of some street art is excellent. And to pretend otherwise is frankly churlish.

Mind, the entire New York outing included a stall set up in Central park selling original Bansky canvases for under £40.

Now that, Saatchis, is an investment. And so too are my Barry Blends – except that I have bought them for no other reason than pleasure and to lift my life on a daily basis.

And I would suggest that Banksy has far more in common, in terms of a philosophy of art as for everyone, with the likes of Matisse, who very much believed in art being for everyone, than do the Saatchis.

And that, my friends, is art.

Farewell Steve Prescott – a real hero

When anyone dies at 39, the first thought is that it so young; far too young.

But for Steve Prescott, who passed away in the early hours of yesterday morning, it was almost a miracle of longevity.

Steve had played Rugby League as a fullback for St Helens, Hull FC and Wakefield, winning trophies at Saints, playing for Lancashire in the Origin games, and England, Ireland and GB at international level.

I didn’t personally get to meet him, but I saw him play – not least in that momentous 1996 Challenge Cup Final victory against Bradford, when he scored two tries for Saints, and I have a very fond memory of standing behind the sticks at the old, undeveloped Stoop, on a freezing night, as he bantered with the crowd while the action was at the other end of the field.

But his career was ended by injury in 2004, after a broken knee cap the year before.

As if that were not enough of a blow, in September 2006, he was diagnosed with a rare form of stomach cancer and given just weeks to live.

But instead of feeling sorry for himself or hiding away, he took on a series of challenges to raise money and awareness – challenges that would have tested the healthiest person, never mind someone facing what he was.

He set up a foundation, which has raised more than half a million pounds so far, and personally ran marathons and walked many more miles, up and down hill and dale.

In April 2012, along with former GB captain Paul Sculthorpe, he ran the Paris Marathon – and then cycled from the French capital to the coast, rowed the English Channel in atrocious conditions and then ran the London Marathon a day later, finishing in four hours and 23 minutes.

In doing so, Steve inspired many others to get involved as well as to donate.

And in 2010, he was made an MBE for services to the sport he loved and to charity.

When he passed away on Saturday, he hadn’t so much ‘succumbed’ to cancer, as spent seven years giving it a bloody nose.

He was able to see his two daughters grow, and left them a remarkable legacy.

And his fight will outlast his physical body – from the medical knowledge gained from his own fight, to the benefits for medical care and science that his fundraising achieved.

With that in mind, it was entirely apt on Saturday that the crowds at both the England v Fiji and the Ireland v Australia World Cup games applauded.

Words like ‘heroic’ and ‘legend’ are overused, but not in this case.

We should, then, celebrate the quite extraordinary achievements of Steve Prescott, and take inspiration from his attitude toward life – and death.

• The Steve Prescott Foundation

Marketing at its brightest – the charity edition

It's charidee!

I have a brand new idea for a really ace marketing campaign. How about: ‘buy our product – or the poor black child in Africa gets it’?

You like it? No?

Well it’s already happening, in essence, because it’s the subliminal message that could be taken from a number of advertising campaigns by a number of companies, which attempt to persuade you to buy their products by promising to make a small donation to charity for every unit sold.

At present in the UK, we have Kelloggs promoting itself by promising that if you promote the company, they’ll ensure that a child somewhere in the UK will get a breakfast.

@KelloggsUK has been tweeting: “RT to #GiveAChildABreakfast. Breakfast clubs are fun and help kids get their breakfast so they can focus in class”.

Now to be fair, I tweeted back at them, rather snidely suggesting that that breakfast would be sugar-laden and salt-packed breakfast cereals. They responded, saying that they give money to school breakfast clubs, with no conditions on how it is spent.

However, the core issue remains: it’s an act of marketing disguised as charity.

Only this lunchtime in a corner shop, I noticed boxes of Whiskas cat food proclaiming that if you buy those, it’ll help to “protect the tiger”.

Pampers Nappies seem to regularly advertise by saying that if you buy their nappies they’ll donate something or other – for instance, one tetanus jab to UNICEF for each packet front returned to them.

And right now, Innocent Drinks is selling bottles of their smoothies with miniature hats on top that have been knitted and sent in by members of the public, and from the sales of which the company will donate to Age UK to keep old people from freezing to death this winter.

You can see below the Twitter conversation I had with them about this yesterday.

This is a company, remember, that is 90% owned by Coca-Cola, which itself hardly has a sparkling record, facing longstanding criticisms on a range of issues from its environmental record to the abduction and murder of trade unionists at its bottling plants in Guatemala and Colombia.

So what happens if you don’t buy the product that promises to make a donation?

Remember the social media meme: ‘If God sees you masturbating, a kitten will die’? That’s a joke about blackmail.

These are rather less jokey.

What it certainly does is to philosophically change the nature of charity.

If charitable giving is about increasing sales/profits or being able to get a tax break, it alters the essential nature of the act.

If you doubt me on the tax-break point, ask yourself how you'd feel if you discovered that someone had claimed tax back on the cost of a poppy for this season of remembrance.

And if that is not the exploitation of those in need for the sake of profit, then what is it?

If nothing else, there’s a corporate cynicism here that is not in keeping with what one would hope charity would mean.

It’s even got a name – ‘cause marketing’, and in the US at least, there’s a web page from the New York State Office of the Attorney General about it, advising both companies and customers on the issue.

According to Wikipedia, “Cause-related marketing is a powerful marketing tool that business and nonprofit organizations are increasingly leveraging. According to the Cone Millennial Cause Study in 2006, 89% of Americans (aged 13 to 25) would switch from one brand to another brand of a comparable product (and price) if the latter brand was associated with “good cause” ... Earlier studies by Cone indicate an upward trend in the number of Americans who associate their own buying habits with cause marketing as well as an expectation that those companies to be “good corporate citizens”.”

So it works to increase sales.

It works in a different way too.

The American Heart Foundation gives out a stamp of approval via its food certification programme, which permits the use of its ‘heart check’ logo on products that meet its low-fat, low-cholesterol standards, such as Cheerios, the breakfast cereal.

We have something similar in the UK, where the British Heart Foundation has links with Flora, a brand that is owned by Unilever, which is also involved in the UK government’s public health policy-making process.

Innocent Drinks get antsy

But let’s hop back to those Cheerios for a moment. Ingredients – “Whole Cereal Grains (77.8%) (Whole Grain Oats, Whole Grain Wheat, Whole Grain Barley, Whole Grain Rice, Whole Grain Maize), Sugar, Partially Inverted Brown Sugar Syrup, Wheat Starch, Salt, Tripotassium Phosphate, Colours: Carotene, Annatto And Caramel, Antioxidant: Tocopherols, Vitamins And Minerals: Vitamin C, Niacin, Pantothenic Acid, Vitamin B6, Riboflavin (B2), Thiamin (B1), Folic Acid (Folacin), Vitamin B12, Calcium Carbonate And Iron, To produce 100g Of This Product 77.8g Of Whole Grain Was Included In This Recipe”.

Yay! Low fat! Yay! Actually, 3.2g of fat per 45g serving, of which 1.5g saturates. However, the same serving also includes 28.7g of carbohydrate, 12.4g of which sugars.

Now take a look at Flora Original Spread (they’ve stopped calling it margarine after that became box office poison), which is part of a brand that is sometimes marketed as linked to the British Heart Foundation.

Ingredients: “Vegetable Oils (Seed Oils 85%), Water, Salt (1.4%), Buttermilk, Emulsifier: Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids, Preservative: Potassium Sorbate, Citric Acid, Vitamin E, Vitamin B6, Flavouring, Colour: Beta-Carotene, Folic Acid, Vitamins A, D and B12.”

Now, what do you think the ingredients list looks like on a pack of unsalted butter?

You won’t easily find any such list – because there’s only one ingredient in unsalted butter, and that’s cream.

Then ask yourself why butter doesn’t need added “flavouring” and why Flora Original ‘Spread’ does. And why it needs colour added too. Could it be because you wouldn’t want to spread it on anything if these things were not added? And if it would taste dire of or nothing, and if it looked awful without added colour, why would anyone think it a ‘natural’ and healthy food to consume and why would anyone buy and consume – it?

Of course, conventional advice is that fat is bad for you – so buy those foods that call themselves low-fat, even if they’re stuffed with sugars to compensate for the lack of taste and ‘mouth feel’ that occurs when fat is stripped out.

This orthodoxy is, however, being challenged.

Dr Aseem Malhotra, an interventional cardiology specialist registrar at Croydon University Hospital, London, recently made the headlines after penning a shocking (to many) article in the British Medical Journal, which said, briefly, that saturated fat is not the problem – and may actually be good for your health. And that the real problems are caused by sugars.

To emphasise: that’s a non-technical summary, so please do read the original article, which you can access here.

Dr Malhotra is not the first to point this out, but he has enough of a profile to ensure that the story was picked up widely.

The British Heart Foundation continues to reject such conclusions, but its relationship with Flora/Unilever means that, at best, it has a conflict of interest. The same is the case in the States with the American Heart Foundation.

And this is at a time when there is an increasingly loud voice saying that sugars – many of them hidden – are the major dietary health problem in the West, and that this is what needs to be tackled.

As has been said by others, the attitude of Big Food to this is reminiscent of the behavior of tobacco companies – and its difficult to see cause marketing as not being an entirely deliberate and calculated tactic in creating an image of corporate responsibility and moral behavior that enables to multinational companies to continue behaving just as they please, while customers, trying to do the right thing, make choices based on that cynical marketing.

As Jim Royle might so eloquently put it:  ‘Charity my arse’ .

• You can follow @DrAseemMalhotra on Twitter for more information on diet.

Something for the weekend – or midweek

A classic veal blanquette (not mine)

Veal is making a long overdue comeback, now that people realise that it’s not all raised in crates and that, if you use dairy, then it is an inevitable byproduct of farming that would otherwise be wasted – and the calf have no life at all.

So it’s the perfect opportunity to explore ways of cooking this delicate but tasty meat – and in ways other than as a wiener schnitzel.

Perfectly fitted for such a culinary experiment is the veal blanquette, a classic French ‘white stew’, where neither the meat nor the butter that it is sealed in are browned.

“Because this is a classic ‘white stew’ there is a prejudice to serving it with any items that would add color (ie carrots or peas),” claims Wikipedia.

Which is somewhat erroneous, given the recipes that exist by some exceptional chefs who presumably know.

In French Country Cooking, for instance, those culinary slouches, the Roux brothers, include quite a lot of vegetables. As does Joël Robuchon in The Complete Robuchon. And so too does Bruno Loubet, in the recently-published Mange Tout.

For Loubet in particular, there are carrots and lots of celery, together with the green part of a leek or two, plus chervil.

So even if you say that the traditional onion and button mushrooms are entirely in keeping with the whiteness, there’s still colour to be seen, and to be seen rather clearly.

It was Bruno’s book that inspired me to finally try a blanquette and indeed, this is not a fine dining restaurant dish for him, but something that his grandmother used to cook, while for the Rouxs, it’s packed with memories of their grandmother.

Not that it won’t have been served in some rarified culinary environs: Escoffier, somewhat predictably, provides more than a single recipe, while a look at Larousse Gastronomique reveals that there are several other blanquettes, including lamb and monkfish.

I used Bruno’s recipe to guide me, but I’m not going to detail that here, beyond saying that he uses lots of celery, because his grandmother did, and that if you can’t find chervil, flat-leaf parsley makes an entirely acceptable substitute.

I’ll say it now – if you’re looking to buy a cookbook for Christmas, I really do recommend Bruno’s book.

The monkfish version is much quicker, but as I’m not a believer in undercooking vegetables, this really means that you need to do it in two parts.

So, for my version of a monkfish blanquette …

Heat some butter gently in a pan, and add chopped carrot, onion, garlic and celery, and let it all cook gently until the vegetables are softened, but without colouring.

Sprinkle a little plain flour over and stir to cook for about a minute, before starting to add chicken, fish or vegetable stock, little by little, until the sauce has stopped thickening quickly.

Pop a lid on and leave to gently cook for about 20 minutes or so, until the carrot is starting to get tender.

In the meantime, heat some more butter in another pan and seal your monkfish, which has been cut into pieces, but remembering not to colour.

When the carrot is starting to get tender, add the fish and some button mushrooms, pop the lid back on and give it around 12-15 minutes.

Check the fish is cooked. Check the seasoning and adjust if you need to.

Take it off the heat and stir in some really thick cream. Pop it back on the heat and allow everything to warm through thoroughly, before giving a squeeze of fresh lemon juice to just add a little edge.

Serve with plain or basmati rice to keep the white theme going – and to mop up the juices – and a garnish of chopped parsley if it takes your fancy.

And there you have it – a very simple blanquette that could also be done with any meaty piece of white fish, and which makes a hearty and healthy midweek dinner.

Irresistible Brecht with a message for now

Henry Goodman as Artuto Ui

It’s not often that you find agit-prop in the heart of London’s West End but, for a brief season only, the Duchess is playing host to Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.

It’s a classic mistake of many British productions down the decades to treat Brecht with a kind of awed reverence, but there’s no such mistake in this transfer from The Chichester Festival Theatre.

Although he began work on it while in exile in Finland in 1941, Ui was not preformed until 1958, two years after the playwright’s death.

Brecht himself called it a “history farce”, and it's not difficult to see why.

Using a background of Jazz Age Chicago, it tells the story of how the eponymous Ui, a no-mark of a gangster.

But Ui has ambition and, seeing an opportunity, sets out to use the regional cauliflower trade to rise to power on the back of a protection racket and violence.

This might be a parable of the rise of Hitler, but it’s broad comedy, owing more here to Mel Brooks than to anything serious.

And then, as the second act concludes, the play – and production – provides one massive, gut-constricting punch that tells the audience, quite clearly: ‘don’t think this is just history you’ve been laughing at’.

Or, as the final words state of Hitler: “the bitch that bore him is in heat again”.

William Gaunt and Henry Goodman

In a world where nationalist and far-right parties are on the rise, and where bankers and big business profiteer on a scale and with an arrogance never quite seen before, and all with the active aid of ideologically-approving governments and media that plays divide-and-rule by demonising the poorest in society, or unhampered by other governments that are too scared or confused to do anything more than tinker at the edges occasionally and hope for a good headline, Brecht’s warning from history is as apt as ever.

The Uis/Hitlers of this world can be resisted and must be resisted is his message.

This is a fun production with a very good cast. It gets clunky in the second act, briefly, after the murder of Dullfoot, but picks up instantly.

It can help to know some history to spot the sketches of assorted historical figures and events: Dogsborough is Hindenburg, Roma is Röhm, Giri is Göring, Givola is Göbbels and the warehouse fire is the Reichstag fire of 1933.

The translation is not the newest, but is George Tabori’s, with slight changes by Alistair Beaton – incidentally, it’s fun playing spot-the-Shakespeare-reference/quote – and director Jonathan Church has done away with Brecht’s surtitles that made the Nazi-era references explicit, primarily to make it easier to see this as being a warning for the future and not just about the past.

Michael Feast and Henry Goodman

Of the cast, particular mentions go to William Gaunt, Joe McGann and Michael Feast, who are excellent as Dogsborough, Giri and Roma respectively.

Henry Goodman in the title role is on superb form. It’s a masterclass in physical comedy, while the transformation from the silly man you ignore to the tyrant who wields power over you remains subtle.

The scene where an ageing classical actor teaches him to walk, stand and speak is an absolute hoot.

As mentioned at the start, it’s not often you get a play like this in the West End, and it illustrates that Brecht is both damned good fun, and every bit as relevant as he ever was.

It’s on for a few more weeks, so there’s still some time to catch it on a very short run.

• At the Duchess Theatre until 7 December.

A sensible decision – and an outbreak of stupidity

Caster Semenya: living proof of gender/sex complexity

In one of today’s rather more positive items of news, it appears that Germany is to allow babies to be registered as of ‘indeterminate sex’ where it is not possible to immediately see whether the infant is male or female.

It’s a move that will, hopefully, help to avoid situations where parents are forced to make a decision on gender, with the result that doctors may then perform drastic and irreversible surgery that may not actually tally with what the individual feels as they grow up.

You could be forgiven for thinking that it would be difficult to view this as anything other than a sensible and sensitive decision.

The very recent case of South African athlete Caster Semenya should illustrate how the matter of sex is not always a matter of absolutes – and Semenya is far from unique.

And the life and early death of David Reimer (and his brother) is another example of the tragic consequences of an obsessive need to categorise gender/sex too early (and of male circumcision).

So what could possibly be controversial about the news of this decision in Germany?

Well, when the BBC allowed comments after publishing the story earlier today, it unleashed a remarkable mount of ignorance and downright bile.

“This says everything you need to know about Europe and its God despising politicians. We need to get out of the EU IMMEDIATELY,” screamed one poster.

“This will just confuse the children even more. Look to the Lord God our Savior and let Him decide.
Man should not be making these sorts of decisions, the rapture will come soon to punish those acting in the name of the Lord God Our Father,” said another.

“Next we'll have legal marriage between three people under the banner ‘we deserve it it’s our right’ – what a joke. Are we going to have have to fit everywhere with 3 sets of toilets: ‘Male’, ‘Female’, ‘Not quite sure’ – life is tough, get on with it,” read another.

Then there was this little classic: “God created WOMEN from the rib of MAN. God did NOT create another gender. THIS IS BLASPHEMY.”

And this simplistic summing up: “Ridiculous – they either have a Y chromosome or not – end of story. The sooner people stop thinking that gender is a matter of choice the better.”

Then this fantastic piece of expert medical advice: “A boy is medically different from a girl, just ask the doctors to put their glasses on! It’s only in extraordinary circumstances that we should meddle.”

And this piece of paranoid lunacy: “And so depravity rules eh.....Haarp anyone? Something in the water. SIck society, the end is nigh.”

This one starts with a good old laugh at those Jerries: “Well their language works like that so masculine, feminine and neuter probably seems more natural to them,” before going into loony terrain: “Meanwhile back in the real world outside of the halls of the BBC and Westminster, a third gender is creepy and unnatural. why do we have to keep putting up with this nonsense in Western society?”

I have quite deliberately not edited a single one of these: they are exactly as published.

To be clear, there were also many, many comments that reflect compassion and, if not a scientific understanding, then a readiness to accept that the issue exists and that this is a sensible and sensitive way to deal with it.

But boy, oh boy, there are also a remarkably large number of these negative comments. Well, not simply “negative”, but stark staring bonkers.

Even within their apparent own belief systems, some fail to exert internal logic.

For instance, if you believe in a god that is – as the Christian god is traditionally believed to be – omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent, then it was that god that created those babies whose sex/gender is not clear at birth.

Are some people really trying to pretend that no babies are ever born with, say, genitalia that is not limited to one sex, and are thus saying that this story is based on a lie to start with?

The EU comment is simply the sort of raving bonkersness that probably comes of care in the community.

Not that such people limited themselves to simply posting such crap.

For instance, you have to wonder at the mentality of whoever it was who, within seconds of this calm and sensible comment being posted, marked it down:

“Generally speaking, unless there is impaired functionality (as with cleft palate or “hare lip”,congenital cardiac defects &c.) “correcting” inter-sex features immediately upon birth might be -- in some cases -- more traumatic than beneficial.It will require a lifetime of medication with hormones.May be better to provide effective counselling to parents & focus on psychoemotional &social aspects1st.”

What? In marking it down you suggest that you think (I use the word loosely) that instant surgery is absolutely the best option, regardless of any later problems that it creates if it turns out the physical characteristics that you’ve chosen for the child do not meet the emotional ones that they subsequently possess?

I mean – come on: really?

This isn’t about ‘creating’ a third sex – it’s about a country finding a way to help ensure that children who are born with indeterminate sex are not rushed into situations that could be negative for them in later life.

These children exist – the condition exists.

What’s to get so hot and bothered about?

A century ago, Magnus Hirschfeld – the world’s first sexologist – was campaigning to increase understanding, decriminalisation and greater tolerance of homosexuality and homosexuals.

We’ve come a long, long way in the time since – at least in some parts of the world. As Stephen Fry’s recent look at homophobia showed very clearly, there’s still a very long way to go in some places in particular, but you do look at these sort of comments – and there are plenty of them – and you wonder at the continuing intolerance, deliberate misunderstanding and just downright stupidity that seems to exist among sizable amounts of the population.

Is it really too optimistic to hope that, at some time, we could actually have entire populations that are educated to a point where they don’t come out with such drivel?

Or will we need to develop a fourth way of categorising people for those who are simply stupid beyond help?