Arcadian anarchy at the National Gallery

What's a national art gallery for? Is its function simply to stage exhibitions that attract big crowds - or does it have a responsibility to introduce the public to lesser-known works of art, even if it means fewer people coming through the door?

Apparently they haven't exactly been queuing around the block at the National Gallery recently. Now the gallery is about to take a chance with an exhibition devoted, as the Guardian puts it, 'to an art movement of which even the organisers admit few have ever heard: the late 19th-century Italian divisionists.'

The gallery's director Nicholas Penny mounts a vigorous defence of his strategy:

I don't like to make a simple distinction between blockbusters and academic shows. But mostblockbusters are actually showing people what they already know. I think that a major gallery should be prepared to introduce people to something they know nothing about.

I agree, especially as I think many people will find the work of the divisionists, who combined anarchist and socialist politics with arcadian imagery, something of a revelation. I wrote here about seeing a similar exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York last summer, and particularly about the work of Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. It's a fair bet that some of da Volpedo's work will feature in the forthcoming exhibition at the National Gallery. If so, it'll be well worth going. In the meantime, here are three examples of da Volpedo's work to whet the appetite:



And for a YouTube selection of his paintings, click here.

Men in big hats for Obama

On second thoughts, perhaps every campaign can tolerate a little bit of kitsch. Let's hope this does the trick in Texas:




(Via)

Tory leader speaks out against communalism

I need to take a deep breath before writing this but (gulp) David Cameron has actually said something sensible. Speaking at a debate hosted by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Tory leader said the following:

For too long we've caved in to more extreme elements by hiding under the cloak of cultural sensitivity. For too long we've given in to the loudest voices from each community, without listening to what the majority want. And for too long, we've come to ignore differences - even if they fly in the face of human rights, notions of equality and child protection - with a hapless shrug of the shoulders, saying, 'It's their culture isn't it? Let them do what they want'.

And in a reference to the recent row involving the Archbishop of Canterbury he added:

The reality is that the introduction of sharia law for Muslims is actually the logical endpoint of the now discredited doctrine of state multiculturalism, seeing people merely as followers of certain religions rather than individuals in their own right within a common community.

Even the most sceptical listener would be hard put to interpret this as the usual coded Conservative race-speak: and in fact, the Commission's chair, Trevor Phillips, recently praised Cameron for attempting to 'deracialise the issue of immigration'.

I still believe that Cameron's conversion from Hooray-Henry Thatcherite to centrist liberal is skin-deep, and it would be easy to dismiss this intervention as tactical - just words. But to quote Barack Obama (quoting Deval Patrick): Don't tell me words don't matter. In public discussion of issues of 'race', the fact that the Tories have moved from nativist rhetoric to a discourse of equality and rights should be warmly welcomed. And it would be good to hear politicians of the left making the same kind of criticisms of communalism and segregation, and speaking up in similar terms for universal human rights.

Can the excitement of the US election be reproduced in Britain?

"Can we change the metropolitan borough of Wirral? Yes, we can!"

Jonathan Freedland imagines transplanting the American model of party primaries - 'currently catalysing such drama Stateside' - to Britain, with selection processes for local parliamentary candidates thrown wide open:

I can see the appeal of the primary idea. Indeed, I would be delighted to see it extended to the job that matters most: party leader. Imagine how much more solid a mandate Gordon Brown would rest on now if he had had to win the votes of declared Labour voters in successive contests, first in wintry, rural Lincolnshire, then in tiny Rutland before a Super Thursday of contests in sunny Cornwall, delegate-rich London and pivotal Yorkshire.

But Freedland is wary of British politicians 'cherry-picking' the attractive bits of the American system without broader reform:

In the US case, if primaries work, they work not in isolation but because they are embedded in a radically different approach to political parties, and even to democracy and sovereignty. We can't scrape off the tasty icing of primaries unless we're prepared to import the entire democratic cake.

This would include a clear separation of powers, which Freedland believes would 'entail a political earthquake':

Either we would have a directly elected PM, admitting the presidential nature of our current system and letting the Commons act as a check on Downing Street. Or we could fully elect the second chamber, at a time other than the general election, and ensure it acts like a separate legislature, holding the executive to account.

Freedland's argument - with which I find myself in broad agreement - echoes what he wrote last year about government plans for a 'national day' to celebrate 'Britishness'. He suggested then that, in countries such as France and the US, festivities of this kind tend to commemorate political upheavals that have created a sense of shared national identity. As he put it:

We can't just skip that awkward bit and jump straight to the barbecue and bunting. No, first we have to have a political change of our own. That doesn't mean bringing out the guillotine. It could be the bloodless drafting, at long last, of our own written constitution. If such a document established a British republic, so much the better.

For an example of the potential of the US primary elections - and an electrifying candidate - to galvanise popular feeling, take a look at this video. According to The Field:

Texas Republicans have worked overtime to make it harder for key Democratic voting groups to vote and be represented fairly. The redistricting games they’ve played are infamous. And for the Prairie View A&M University precincts, they put the early-polling place more than seven miles from the school.

So what did the students in this video do? They shut down the highway as they marched seven miles to cast their votes on the first day of early voting.

Male sexuality in the dock

Levi Bellfield was convicted yesterday of murdering two female students he stalked at bus stops in London. He was also found guilty of the attempted murder of a third woman and is suspected of carrying out 20 other attacks on women. The conviction comes 3 days after Mark Dixie was found guilty of the vicious, sexually-motivated murder of Sally Anne Bowman, and 4 days after Steve Wright was told he will spend the rest of his life in prison for the killing of five women in Suffolk.

Last week the Guardian carried an obituary of the American historian and chronicler of gay life Allan Berube. In 1993 Berube gave evidence to the Senate hearings into the US military's policy of barring gay men and lesbians. He argued that the problem that should be investigated was not homosexual behaviour, but heterosexual masculinity.

It's easy to dismiss this as po-mo rad-fem posturing. But after the depressing news of the past week, you begin to wonder...

He's got the mo

Obama-phobics look away now. I know, I'm a sucker for this kind of thing, but what the heck. Once again via Andrew Sullivan, here are two more musical tributes to Barack. The first, 'Si, Se Puede Cambiar', is a Spanish riff on Obama's catchphrase. Its anti-war rhetoric won't appeal to everyone:



And here are the seven-year-old Rockabelles with 'We Got The Mo':

Simplification no substitute for analysis when criticising religion

As regular readers of this blog will know, despite my youthful flirtation with Catholicism and continuing love-hate relationship with religion, I hold no particular brief for the institutional Catholic Church. But reading Gareth McLean’s remarks in his Guardian TV preview on Friday, I began to wonder if James MacMillan had a point when he wrote (in an article I mentioned here) of ‘the gross oversimplification and caricature that serves as an understanding of religion, particularly Catholic Christianity, in so much that passes for criticism and analysis’.

Previewing a programme about Latin America, McLean wrote that in that part of the world the Church ‘did what it does: sided with the powerful - inevitably right-wing, often murderous - and oppressed the oppressed’. Thus the complex history of Catholicism in the Americas is reduced to a soundbite, and the witness of Archbishop Oscar Romero, Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, Sister Dorothy Stang and many others who stood up for human rights and as a result were murdered by the ‘powerful’, is suppressed. McLean then blames the 'institutionalised misogyny' of the Church for the continuing ban on abortion in Nicaragua. Now, while few will claim that the Church has a shining record on women’s rights - and wherever you stand on the abortion issue - can the Church’s position really be attributed to misogyny rather than a stubborn, if misguided, belief in the sanctity of life from the moment of conception?

OK, so it was only a TV preview and I have no particular wish to defend the Catholic Church, whether in Latin America or elsewhere. But McLean's casual, one-sided outburst was remarkable in a newspaper that has adopted a notably softly-softly stance towards religion in recent times. Of course, that indulgence has been extended mainly to Islam. Can you imagine a Guardian columnist getting away with similar sideswipes, without the usual caveats and cultural-relativist explanations, at Islam: ‘Islam does what it always does, oppresses the oppressed’ or 'the institutionalised misogyny of Islam’?

McLean’s comments are a reminder of the old adage that anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the Left. Of course, that was in the days before anti-Semitism became the anti-Semitism of the Left.