Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes

A Guardian article today on the forthcoming Ballet Russes exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum that doesn’t mention Tamara Karsavina!

Tamara Karsavina was the grace of the three graces (Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, Olga Spessivtzeva) during the time of Diaghilev. Serge Lifar will tell you. He will also argue that Karsavina's name is inseparable from Diaghilev's (in his book, The Three Graces). I think I will faint if the Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909-1929 exhibition doesn’t include a reference to her.

English National Opera

John Berry, English National Opera's artistic director, has accused critics of "murdering" new risk-taking productions, according to today's Daily Telegraph.

He is also reported as saying that London is more conservative than Berlin.

Does he know that in Vienna, where opera houses are filled every night, you can pay as little as 3 euro for standing viewing? To stand in the pit at The Globe or the Donmar Warehouse you would have to pay a lot more.

Perhaps the fact that we are in a recession and that you can pay as much as £78 to sit in the balcony four tiers up at the English National Opera is closer to an answer as to why people aren't flocking to performances.

Gun At Damien Hirst's Head

Eugenio Merino is just the man I have been looking for. The Spanish artist has created a sculpture of the British artist, Damien Hirst, pointing a gun at his head. Not that I want Hirst to commit suicide, of course. (In my earlier days as a student at Oxford I wrote an article for The Owl Journal against the tawdry glorification of suicide in literature as a cynical stunt to pull: http://theowljournal.com/reader/?page=11&edition=7) But the point of his sculpture called "4 the Love of Go(I)d” is not death as an end in itself; it is about the worth of art. Merino’s point is that Hirst’s attempts to increase the value of his art could only be enhanced by his own death.

Yesterday, Merino was quoted in The Guardian:
"I thought that, given that he thinks so much about money, his next work could be that he shot himself. Like that the value of his work would increase dramatically," Merino told The Guardian. "Obviously, though, he would not be around to enjoy it. It is a joke but it is also paradoxical that if he did kill himself his work would be worth even more. That is a metaphor for the current state of the art world."

Parallels can also be drawn with the current state of celebrity. I predict that Jade Goody will become the muse of many a writer following her death (and I hope that she doesn’t die!). Do you remember when she was reviled? Now, because of the health tragedy that has befallen her, the media has become involved in a sort of expiation of the way in which it created the Goody phenomenon.

On 17 November 2008, I wrote a post in this blog saying that Hirst’s next work of art should be focused on its financial value: http://workofmyownfiction.blogspot.com/2008/11/price-of-art.html

I suggested that he place his next work of art in the middle of Leicester Square, next to all the portrait artists who sit out in the wind and rain every day, and tell everyone that the work is not for sale. This should be his response to Merino. Unless, of course, he can think of a better idea of his own.

Award-Winning Tragedies

(Note: If you have not seen The Reader or Revolutionary Road, or read the books, and you don't want to know what happens, then don't read on!)

Kate Winslet won two Golden Globes for her performance in The Reader and Revolutionary Road and is now up for the Baftas and the Oscars.

She is excellent in both and they are good films.

However, it is hard to escape the fact that the two characters she plays kill themselves off at the end.

Does one have to die in a tragedy?

I think not.

If our heros, heroines, villains and tortured souls all killed themselves off - directly or indirectly - what would that mean for the rest of us?