Rembrandt in the Cellar

There is a notion that is trotted out, reliably, by commentators, possibly not informed commentators, possibly self appointed commentators, but commentators none the less, every time a famous or at least expensive painting is sold, that the painting will never be seen again by ordinary folk.  That it will, instead, spend the rest of its existence in a vault, or in the Secret Basement Gallery of the wealthy purchaser.

Art is an investment, and it is often bought by banks and other financial institutions in the hope that the value of the piece will appreciate and it can be flogged on.  In the meantime, banks do what banks do, and store their wealth in a vault.  Probably a nice vault, but a vault nonetheless.  This causes consternation among those who espouse the view that famous art should reside in a public gallery, preferably near them, where it can bore schoolkids and never be seen by those ignorant sods who have the poor taste to live some distance away.

Special resentment is reserved if the buyer is suspected to be an individual.  In such a case, commentators choose to ignore the evidence of the countless little plaques placed discreetly beside works of art on temporary or permanent display that read ‘On load from’ and instead intimate that the artwork will now reside in the Secret basement Gallery of the wealthy buyer, possibly illuminated by a single spotlight, while the new owner squats in a leather armchair facing the art with a glass of brandy in one hand and his cock in the other as he feverishly goes to town on himself like a lusty gibbon, drooling over a classical nude.  Or a Pollock, there’s no knowing with these perverts.

Rich people, it would appear, love an underground room, be it wine cellar, art gallery, panic room, murder room or simply a well appointed sex dungeon.

The message of the commentators though is that art should be for the masses and should not be hidden away in dimly lit rooms.

This despite the fact that the masses prioritise other stuff above art.  Do huge crowds go to their local art gallery every Saturday?  No.  Do they go to watch the footie?  Yes.  Even if this means travelling long distances, which is more than most people would do to get a glimpse of a painting, even of sunflowers.

Art began in dimly lit rooms.  Banksy’s ancestors painted the walls of a cave, not with Neolithic Farrow and Ball but with pictures intended to bring luck to the Woolly Mammoth hunt.  And there is good reason why some art is exhibited in dimly lit rooms.  This is not because the owner is a Bond villain.  Well, not always.  It’s because some images, such as watercolours, fade over time with prolonged exposure to strong light.  Watercolours, it would appear, are intended to be viewed in a Victorian drawing room, either by gaslight or by daylight filtered through windows tinted with the smoke of industry on the outside and the smoke of enthusiastic pipe smokers on the inside.  The best way to preserve a watercolour painting is to cover it in tissue paper, put it in a cardboard folder, and put it in a draw.  Then close the draw.

This provides problems exhibiting the piece.

As a result, delicate drawings are usually exhibited in artfully lit galleries for short periods.  This is done to preserve the piece and so prevent the embarrassment of having to hand back to the lender of the artwork a blank piece of paper on which once resided a delicate watercolour, probably of a canal.

The National Gallery in London takes measures to avoid just such an embarrassment by placing their Rembrandt exhibition in the basement, of the annex.  It was not quite a case of descending a rickety staircase with a torch, there is after all a brightly lit gift shop.  And the exhibits themselves are magnificent, if you like unsmiling folk in ruffs, which I do.  Also on display are delicate sketches of landscapes, mostly canals and cottages, occasional tree, which look as vulnerable to sunlight as vampires.  A good thing then that they are secure in this art bunker.

Man Cave

Back in The Good Old Days when the only qualification required to become an eminent natural philosopher was the possession of a beard so huge, established and respectable that it had its own mistress, Britain’s museums were stuffed with stuff.

Often, stuffed stuff.

The glorious age of Victorian Empire era expansion allowed the British to roam the world, identify interesting bits of it, and then either chip them free for relocation to Islington or shoot them, skin them and then put them in a glass case, in Islington.

This then was the golden age of museums.  Truly, wonder houses, the most wonderous thing about them being that a Briton could see the creatures of the African Interior without risking the twin perils of the age normally associated with seeing a lion; catching something vile and perishing in a sweaty heap of linen in a hammock or, being eaten.

These museums were curated by Men.  Men with beards, men who may have been the most learned of their age, but did not know the word ‘cluttered’, men who, when faced with the problem of housing another thousand startled looking exhibits of creatures newly discovered/slaughtered, would simply add another wing the size of a cathedral to their museum.

Men love stuff.  Men love to collect.

Women do not.  The exception is when certain women do the menopause.  They then start to notice the ads in the back of TV Quick offering them the opportunity to purchase a thimble collection that will be the envy of their friends.  Particularly acute cases collect cats.

Men collect.  They start as schoolboys collecting footie cards, comics, stamps, coins, anything that can be collected.  And they never shake the habit.

Men collect so much stuff that an astonishing 80% of them invest in specialised off-site storage, commonly known as a shed.

A shed owned by a woman will contain: a lawnmower, half a bag of compost, curtains that she has put up at the windows.

A shed owned by a man will contain at least: two lawnmowers (one working, one awaiting repair or resurrection), a dozen tins of paint, each with an inch of paint in the bottom that is now so hard it could survive re-entry, a failed attempt at home brew, a successful attempt at home brew, porn, a Playstation 1, more porn, a collection of ‘Commando’ comics that the missus thinks you threw out two years ago and which she would be more upset about than the porn you still have, a stuffed animal.

This condition has led directly to the creation of the Man Cave.

If you spend any time at the sort of edge-of-town industrial areas that feature DIY superstores, areas of waste ground with weeds pushing through broken concrete, and invariably somebody with a caravan who is selling ‘hamburgers’ and ‘hot dogs’, then you might have noticed self storage units.

Such places are actually mundane.  They are mostly used by businesses storing stock and, depressingly, food banks (surely we all hope for the day when the only food banks in operation are those that supply blokes with forbidden treats that The Wives will not permit them, leading to the glorious prospect of a self storage unity filled floor to ceiling with boxes of Curlywurly) and not, I suspect to the disappointment of those who enjoyed ‘Silence of the Lambs’ a little too much, used as trophy rooms by serial killers.

They are though, apparently, used as Man Caves.  When a woman likes a bloke enough to commit to a long term relationship with him, so that they move in together and she can Fix Him, a chap is often confronted with the bewildering notion that his collection of 120 mint in box Transformers are not welcome, and there’s this thing called eBay.  Or Oxfam.  Or the tip.

Up and down the country, there are men who spend a couple of hours a week just…sitting, in their ‘comfortable’ armchair, amid their collections of replicas (never ‘toys’ or ‘tat’) or vinyl or books or VHS or Betamax or footie game programmes and just…being.

Somebody with a beard should build a monumental self-storage facility, so that we can all enjoy the Museum of Bloke. 

Flavour of the month

What better way can there be to indulge a vice than by legitimising it. This is why magazines like 'Decanter' exist, so that journalists with black teeth and no points left on their driving license can share their thoughts about booze with the sort of people who use their ability to tell the difference between chardonay and merlot to justify the making of that distinction at half eleven in the morning on a week day on a regular basis.

And why not go one better than getting a magazine about your hobby delivered once a month and actually get your hobby delivered once a month. There are, for instance, schemes you can join where once a month you get a crate of the 'wines of the world' delivered. I've never seen the point in getting a crate of booze chosen by somebody else, as there's always the lurking suspicion that it just happens to be whatever was going cheap at the cash and carry that month. Worse still, one would live in horror of opening the crate to discover that this month has been designated 'wines of Latvia', 'a taste of Croydon' or something similarly ghastly. This is often delivered with tasting notes and these are important because without those you are just a bloke that has booze, and random booze at that, delivered once a month.

The same might be said of book clubs. Once a month you are reading something that has been chosen by somebody else and instead of a tasting note you are expected to give your opinion while in a group of people all trying desperately to sound as though they read it all the way through, understood it and are not in fact relying upon the Wikipedia entry, the film adaption or, if you really want to live dangerously, the soundtrack to the film adaption and nothing else.

The '...of the month club' is endlessly adaptable. At the dull end of the market is the 'mobile phone bill of the month', then you go through stuff that you consume, like food and drink (the fruit of the month club is an especially interesting proposition. I love the idea of some sort of fruit arriving in the post, possibly packed in straw, and not having bloody clue what it is, how to eat it or even how to pronounce it). And of course at the slightly sinister end of the market for the sort of people who buy 'true crime' magazines, you could be posted a random, blood stained object and have to work out for yourself what horror you've just become implicated in.

The one thing that the format of a monthly delivery of something chosen by somebody else has going for it is novelty. Given half a chance, I'd probably eat the same seven meals every night of the week year in, year out. If you think seven sounds pretty good, bear in mind that I'm counting at least one dish twice, because pie and chips is different to chips and pie, right? So why not have pie clubs, where once a month you get a pie of a flavour not of your choosing delivered. For instance, I always go for chicken and mushroom, always, and why not? But am I denying myself a more fulfilling experience?

Is there anything so really wrong in eating the same seven meals since I was twenty anyway? Especially when you consider that what I am actually seeking to do is perfect the recipes for those meals. The latest challenge is pasta sauce and it's now reached the point where I am adding so many extras to the recipe that, technically, I'm not sure that it can be classed as a sauce any more.

I'm also staring to wonder if the ability to experiment with cooking breaks down along gender lines. Blokes are far more likely to deviate from the recipe simply because they can comfortably think things like 'humn, no tomatoes in the house, and I can't be arsed to walk to the shops, I'll use bacon instead'. Women have a different view of diet, considering that different daily fillings in a baked potato constitutes variety.

Judging a magazine by it's cover

While magazines in the past were generally content to contain nothing more than articles with pictures to illustrate the words, or pictures with words to explain the images (or, in certain glossy cases, lots of pictures, very few words and what words there were preporting to be from readers who had had quite exciting erotic experiences that they felt they had to share with other readers, when the reality was that the apex of an erotic experience for a reader of such material was actually a crafty hand shandy parked up in a in a lay-by between sales meetings while perusing it), magazines today come with all sorts of free stuff attached to the front of them, CDs and DVDs being the most common cover mounts because they are handily flat, while stuff like golf balls and fresh veg you don't see so much of.

Kids' comics have, of course, long been exponents of enticing new readers with a free gift. Now the norm, it used to be the exception and seeing a cheap bit of tat selotaped to the front cover of a comic sent a thrill of excitement and must-have pester power through a young lad keen to start tooting on their 'space distress siren' or, as it might more properly be called, crap plastic whistle.

Comics came with 'space spinners' (plastic hoop), 'club wallets' (cardboard envelope) and other novelties that made the magazine popular with kids and, thirty years on, drives comic collectors to fits of sorrowful rage as they come across another first issue with a mutilated cover where the toy had been ripped off, or to effervesce with joy if they come across one that has not.

Also available as cover mounts, sweets (or, more normally, a sweet, but hey, a sweet is a sweet, right?) or 'space dust' which I'm not sure is a sweet or some sort of junior amphetamine. What was odd was that these toys and sweets were never available to readers in Northern Ireland. Obviously it was considered that it would be unwise to fuel sectarian violence with sugary treats.

Of course, cover mounts were not confined to kids publications. I seem to recall that every single edition of the 'Peoples' Friend' ever published came with a free rain hood. This was genius, women who have a tartan shopping trolly in one hand and the magazine in the other are unable to hold an umbrella as they wait for the bus in the rain, reading hospital romances.

These days the chief exponents of the cover mount are the collectible or the hobby part works. The collectible part works promise you 'strange smells of the world' and have a different jar for you to sniff the contents of every week, or something.

The hobby part works used to be straightforward, you got a magazine that told you about Nelson and the navy and, free with part one, the bowsprit of the 'Victory'. By the time you had worked your way to the rudder you probably had a stack of magazines about eight foot high, a greater understanding of life in the navy in the Neoplionic era than any man alive and a nagging sensation that you missed issue 176 and, with it, a starboard gun port. Could be worse, the magazine could fold before you collect the issue with the glue for assembling the damn thing.

The thing to do is to cut your losses after issue three, go to a model shop, buy a replica kit, glue and paints and then leave the whole thing unmade on a shelf for a few decades. It's the same result as collecting the part work without all the schlepping down to the newsagent, where the danger is that you will be enticed by one of the more edgy, modern, cooler part works, like 'learn to bake' with a different cake tin free with every issue, or 'the family surgeon' with each edition covering some common operation in detail and containing a piece of surgical kit. Just remember to collect the issue with the batteries before you try attempt anything likely to require the defribulator. And remember, Botox is not a toy.