How To Walk In High Heels: The Girl's Guide To Everything (17 page)

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Authors: Camilla Morton

BOOK: How To Walk In High Heels: The Girl's Guide To Everything
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Gary Hume
Graduating with Damien Hirst, he came to attention with his minimal abstract work known as ‘door’ paintings. He went on to incorporate portraits of celebrity figures such as Tony Blackburn, Kate Moss and Patsy Kensit as well as collaborating on a print for fashion designer Stella McCartney.
Gilbert and George
Gilbert born 1943, Dolomites, Italy. George born 1942, Devon, England. In 1967 they met while studying at St Martins, London. In blurring the boundary between art and life they aim to make ‘art for everyone’. They often use taboo subjects, which have included drunkenness, expletives, human bondage and human excrement. Not for the faint-hearted.
Gavin Turk
Best known for his POP sculpture, which was a waxwork of himself as Sid Vicious, a modern take on Warhol’s
Elvis
.
Nan Goldin
She is recognised as one of the leading working art photographers. Her images are raw, frank and intimate. When she contracted HIV she decided to use her camera to document the lives and loves of those who she came into contact with, including transsexuals and prostitutes. In 2001 the Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris, was the first stage of a major touring survey of her work.
Sam Taylor-Wood
Specialises in photographic and film work that is distinguished by ironic and subversive use of media. Began in 1995 with series of photos entitled
Five Revolutionary Seconds
, panoramic audio photographs that rotated 360 degrees. Her self-portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, alongside the infamous
Beckham Sleeping
picture of the soccer star, and her husband is Jay Joplin, curator of White Cube.
Sarah Lucas
Another outspoken lass whose controversial art and opinions have helped her achieve notoriety as a bad girl of British art, along with her friend Tracey Emin. Lucas plays on stereotypes, and blurs the boundaries between vision and truth, in confrontational and often shocking work. If it’s an unmentionable subject, she will do an installation of it.
Andreas Gursky
Best known for his large colour photographs, which are crammed with too much information. He likes using subject matter such as the International Stock Exchanges, supermarkets, rubbish dumps and apartment blocks. Had major exhibition at the Pompidou in Paris, yet would look equally good in the
National Geographic
or
Time
magazines.
The Turner Prize
This is the most prestigious award in the UK art world. Madonna even turned up to present it one year. It is given to ‘British artists under the age of fifty for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work over the last twelve months’. The show of the shortlisted artists is exhibited at Tate Britain. Since the prize was established in 1984, winners have included Howard Hodgkin, Gilbert and George, Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili who made dung art, and Grayson Perry the ceramic potter and transvestite who collected his award in a dress. For further information, biographies and details of past winners go to www.tate.org.uk.
Galleries to go to
Really to appreciate art and understand it you have to experience it first-hand, go to exhibitions and visit new and national galleries. Don’t let anyone tell you what you like, go and try it for yourself. Modern art is like sushi. Once you’ve tried it, if you get the taste for it, you want to have it again. And then once you realise you weren’t poisoned you get braver, maybe even try sashimi; and in this way your taste advances, as well as expands.
When in London visit the Serpentine, Hayward, Whitechapel and Saatchi Galleries as well as the National and National Portrait Galleries, plus John Soane’s Gallery and the Courtauld. Great Weekend Pilgrimages include the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham and Charleston House, near Brighton, which was decorated by Duncan and Vanessa Bell and home to the Bloomsbury set. Explore the country discovering art.
As well as finding the art stimulating you’ll discover most galleries have good snacking and people-watching opportunities; the Hayward Gallery even organises singles evenings. Try Tate Britain for a fabulous Sunday roast, and Tate Modern for exceptional chocolate brownies. If you become a member at the Tate or the Royal Academy you have a special café, as well as private views. The Chisendale and the Lisson Galleries attract a grown-up, stylish crowd, while intellectuals tend to congregate at the ICA.
Art fairs travel the world, but Freize and the Affordable Art Fair in London are unmissable social and people-spotting events, while the National Gallery shop is an ideal place for Christmas shopping. The Photographers’ Gallery is great for prints as well as carrot cake. Combine a 99 ice cream with a trip to the Tate in St Ives. Student degree shows are always worth a look – you might find the next big thing. If you fancy becoming a collector the postcard sale at the Royal College of Art, with unsigned postcards contributed by David Hockney, Mario Testino, Hussein Chalayan and Phoebe Philo amongst other lesser known people, is a good place to start. They all cost the same amount but you don’t find out whose yours is by until you’ve bought it.
Find out about big exhibitions and what is coming up so you know what themes are ‘in’. This can be done painlessly by visiting www.arthappens.org. To stay ahead get the
Art Newspaper
. Their annual guide to what’s on for the year ahead, across the globe, will help you plan the entire year.
Best galleries in Britain
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery:
www.birmingham.gov.uk/bmag
Brighton Museum and Art Gallery:
www.virtualmuseum.info
Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland:
www.natgalscot.ac.uk
Gateshead, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art:
www.balticmill.com
Glasgow, Centre for Contemporary Arts:
www.cca-glasgow.com
Liverpool, Tate Liverpool:
www.tate.org.uk/liverpool
Manchester Art Gallery:
www.manchestergalleries.org
Much Hadham, Henry Moore Foundation:
www.henry-moore-fdn.co.uk
Newcastle, Laing Art Gallery:
www.twmuseums.org.uk/laing
Wakefield, Yorkshire Sculpture Park:
www.ysp.co.uk
Best galleries in London
Barbican Art Gallery:
www.barbican.org.uk
Crafts Council Gallery:
www.craftscouncil.org.uk
Design Museum:
www.designmuseum.org.uk
National Gallery:
www.nationalgallery.org.uk
National Portrait Gallery:
www.npg.org.uk
Photographers’ Gallery:
www.photonet.org.uk
Royal Academy of Arts:
www.royalacademy.org.uk
Saatchi Gallery:
www.saatchigallery.org.uk
Serpentine Gallery:
www.serpentinegallery.org
Sir John Soane’s Gallery:
www.soane.org
Tate Britain:
www.tate.org.uk
Tate Modern:
www.tate.org.uk
Victoria and Albert Museum:
www.vam.ac.uk
Whitechapel Art Gallery:
www.whitechapel.org
Best galleries around the globe
The Frick, New York, America
The Guggenheims, New York, America and Venice, Italy
Louisiana, Copenhagen, Denmark
The Picasso Museum, Paris, France
Pompidou, Paris, France
How to appreciate art, and where to start,
by Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer
Lady Bracknell to Ernest: ‘Young people either know everything or nothing. Which do you know?’
At the age of seventeen I knew nothing. Yet I thirsted for knowledge and I wanted to understand the world I live in. I have always thought it extremely important to form my opinions from facts and to have some responsibility for my actions. There is such a thing as cause and effect. Look before you leap.
Don’t waste your time with conceptual or abstract art: there is nothing to see in it except what you invent.
One of the things that art teaches us is that others have thought differently, and there are other ways to understand the world. Knowledge is relevant, and once we acquire the taste for it nothing will stop our curiosity.
I send my fashion students in Berlin to the art galleries. I tell them: imagine which painting you would save if the room was on fire. Eventually they will choose a different one because of their developing judgment.
Look at seventeenth-century Dutch painting; in the history of art there is nothing more strikingly original. Each painter specialised in a different subject, concentrated into a size convenient for the households of prosperous Dutch burghers.
Go to the National Gallery, in London; there is a still life you must see by Willem Kalf. I think he always has a half-peeled lemon in the foreground. The design is of a disordered table with a great red lobster and a drinking horn with an elaborate silver mount. These decorative vessels were often completely invented by the painter.
Genre scenes of social life, particularly tavern scenes, were another speciality. You can do no better than look at Adriaen Brouwer. Gerhard ter Borch shares with Vermeer the subject matter of a woman in a private room, sometimes playing music or drinking with one or two men. One of my favourites, in the Louvre, in Paris, is of a large man, a cavalier, offering money to a woman. I like his expression, a combination of desire and appreciation, as he waits for her response. The Wallace Collection, in London, also has a fine ter Borch of a woman reading a letter. However, my favourite Dutch painting in the Wallace Collection is A Winter Scene, by Aert van der Neer, who specialised in capturing moonlit scenes.
Salomon van Ruysdael and Jan van Goyen were particularly prolific painters of seascapes and landscapes, but the greatest landscape painter of them all was Jacob van Ruïsdael. His skies are unequalled, and you feel you could inhabit the view, follow the stream, be the young woman cutting through the undergrowth of the wood.
There are many more Dutch painters of these perfect works. For example there is Hercules Seghers, an engraver and painter of the first landscapes (but his works are few). These small landscapes are so concentrated that looking at them I feel as if somebody gave me a piece of time to hold.
Dutch realism is a mark of the genius of which human beings are sometimes capable. When looking at these works it is important to note how crucial drawing is. To paint outdoors requires enormous practice and a rapid skill, for everything changes – light, shadows.
We are so lucky in England to have the Wallace Collection, which houses the eighteenth-century French art, which survived the Revolution. It was collected by Lord Hertford along with furniture, porcelain, clocks, snuff boxes.
I also love the nineteenth-century French landscape painter, Corot. He was enormously prolific, thanks to an inheritance which gave him the autonomy to paint even though this was counter to his father’s wishes. Corot is associated with the Barbizan School, and other members Daubigny, Rousseau and Boudin are all well represented in the National Gallery.
Watteau was a prodigious talent. His paintings, known as Fêtes Galantes, revealed theatrical scenes which captured the imagination of the century. Watteau’s genius was in the way his paintings were ‘drawn’. People say he draws colour. What was so new is the sketchiness of his paintings.
He is followed by Boucher and Fragonard, Boucher’s pupil, who both paint in this sketchy way. There is a lightness and air grounded in the most rigorous anatomical objectivity. Boucher invented an unending stream of compositions out of his head – nude and clothed, without the use of a model. Fragonard (after all that practice) said he could paint with his arsehole.
Finally, you get out what you put in. In cultivating your taste, by comparing, building your judgment, you are acquiring objectivity: this is knowledge.
How to Have Good Manners
Eric: We went out for a special meal one night. It was very posh. Just to impress the wife, I ordered the whole meal in French. Even the waiter was surprised.
Ernie: Really?
Eric: Yes – it was a Chinese restaurant.
Morecambe and Wise
How to stifle a yawn at the dinner table
It’s not
necessarily
that someone is boring, though they may well be, but sometimes you simply have to yawn.
A staged yawn is a very good way to signal ‘time to go’, ‘bed time’, or ‘I’m done’, ‘out of here’ . . .
When you feel a genuine unwanted one coming on, purse your lips together and almost smile into it. This stops your mouth from flipping open and no one will be any the wiser.
Another option is to throw caution to the wind and yawn, covering your mouth with your right wrist or hand.
Other yawn-covering items include fans, gloves, menus and large floral table arrangements. Dropping a spoon or spare cutlery on floor at said moment is another handy tip.
How to blow your nose gracefully
Practically impossible. You can’t.
So, if you need to blow your nose, excuse yourself and leave the room.
Always carry tissues with you to avoid the shame and discomfort of having to blow your nose on a bus ticket or having to ask someone for a tissue. Most unglamorous.
If you must put tissues up your sleeve, fold them; you don’t want to ruin the line of the top.
If you have a streaming cold, it’s very simple: don’t go out. STAY IN.
How to complain with class
There are some people who are never satisfied and who kick off at every opportunity. Then there are those who are as silent as a stealth-bomber but when they blow – wow – they really lose their rag.
Always try to be the latter. If you cry wolf too often people won’t listen to you when there’s a real emergency.

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