REALITY CREEP

An actual tramp, Holborn, London, 2012. Product placement by Pret-A-Manger.

Gavin Turk, Bum, 1998. Image courtesy Inspector Google.

Life's sweet irony...how I love you. In the same week I attend the Marketing Strategy Summer School at eminent academic institution London School of Economics, (alumni: pants man JFK and tobacco connoisseur Monica Lewinsky), I receive the possible news that me and my media crew MAY be facing redundancy. Ironic in that my faithful employer, an internationally recognised media organisation with a short name and a long roll call of Liferesque employees contributed a very tidy sum toward my course fees. The lord giveth, it seems and the lord taketh away.

This got me thinking about Technology Creep. Its what we all suffer, whether we like it, acknowledge it or even realise it at all. Its that rush of anxiety you experience on the morning commute when you realise in a hungover stupor you've left your iphone charging at home next to the iron. But you're more panicked about the iphone. How will you tweet in real time that funny joke your hipster colleague told at lunch and pass it off as your own? What if an invite goes out on facebook and you can't be the first to Yes, I will Be Attending it? Technology Creep, sir.    

Certain humble colleagues of mine have been discussing this and related phenomenon for years now. How the odious onslaught of technology is changing the world at an impossibly rapid rate. An undeniable advantage on many levels. A different kettle of fish when your employer's entire business strategy is reconfigured internationally in a desperate 3-5 year plan to compete with the internet and emerging markets. Globalisation Creep, sir. Being a highly-skilled-migrant hailing from the New World with an LSF qualification no less, I should be ok in the cold, hard, new dawn of unemployment. But many of my British colleagues lacking the same advantages won't.   

Lifestyle Creep is a financial term defined as 'an improvement in the standard of living of people as their discretionary income rises either through an increase in income or a decrease in costs, to the extent that luxury goods turn into necessary goods'. Clearly a phenomenon thats been happening for decades in western economies. Except we're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy. The reality of the UK's 'squeezed middle' remains depressed wages, increasing costs, and in London at least, astronomical property prices. Poverty Creep sir. Most of us are getting poorer in real terms and the bandwagon pulled out from the kerb bound for the BRIC countries when we we all busy watching turgid bile like The X Factor.

Which brings me to our gentleman pictured at the top of this post, captured on my lunch break today from the LSF course, in Holborn - a central London area defined by its high concentration of straight world academic institutions of the legal, financial and business ilk. An incredible example of product placement created by some altruistic onlooker placing their Pret-A-Manger Brie & Bacon on Artesan (to give it its proper corporate title) artfully bottom right of the shot? This could be be the perfectly ironic anti-advertisement for the Olympics Lord Coe and Boris Johnson have been beavering away for years to conceal. What price in real terms for local people this vile spectacle (the Olympics, not the bum)? Are Pret-A-Manger one of the primary corporate sponsors? Is this even a genuine bum or a piece of performance art echoing Gavin Turk's life-size wax model 'Bum' exhibited at The South London Gallery in 1998 (pictured above)? Art...or arse? Or a genuine human being, down and out in (Paris and) London...glibly stepped over by busy worker bees distracted by their smart phones rushing back to the office in a vein attempt to avoid imminent redundancy? Reality Creep sir. Now where the f*** did I leave my iphone??? 

FRIEZE ART FAIR 2011

Really keen to crack on with TOMORROW'S fine reportage from the black lungs of Londinium TODAY but just a couple more art related ones I'm catching up on from last year...do forgive me. Rewinding back to October last year for the Frieze Art Fair in Regents Park, I think in its 9th year now and increasingly reeking of rank commercialism as each year passes. The fair is just that - a huge commercial enterprise enabling more than 500 international galleries to hawk their wares in overcrowded marquees crawling with hipsters, art students (at least those that can afford the admission price) and various London ace-faces hoping to get their sweet mugs featured, drunk, at the opening in the Standard Evening's magazine.

Being a nit-picking little so and so, I thought the calibre of the work on show was disappointing...and again proved the art rule I swear by that you need to syphon through 90% of utter tosh in contemporary art to discover the 10% that truly, and often for reasons only know to yourself, resonates. The work pictured above (all artists featured in this post unknown as I was sans notebook...apart from Gavin "The Man" Turk, bottom pic) did just that, its initial shock value giving way to a general low-level creepiness and fascination with a situation that the majority of people would normally never have the misfortune to experience. The work is probably taking centre stage right now in the Saatchi/Nigella dining room, affording privileged guests like Rebekah Brooks and Dave Cameron the opportunity to drink Baileys from a shoe and suck Nigella's creamy eggnog off the toes. Hooray!

Having a healthy sense of smut, a feminist bent, appreciation for glorious architectural monuments, a taste for appendages, an Eastern European fetish, a long and tawdry history with British indie music and a well documented love of my man Gavin Turk...may I now present a selection of my favourite pieces from the Frieze.



THE YBAs AT 50

Yes, The YBAs, those Publicity-Obsessed Marketing Geniuses...sorry, artists...have come of age and some guy called Jeremy Cooper has cashed in on a book all about them in this mid-career stage of their working lives. Having not read the book or listened at all to him (or the publisher's 'PR representative') gasbagging at the launch, I'm not sure whats in it (though I assume its some mildly interesting interviews)...but the party was refreshingly low-key and hipsterish at the Bethnal Green Working Mens' Club in East London.

Presumably Tracey Emin was too busy talking to the taxman about poetry (and entirely legal, Tory-sponsored tax avoidance loopholes) to attend such a humble event, with Damien Hirst no doubt locked in negotiations with one of Charles Taylor's henchmen regarding his next shipment of Liberia's finest commodity. However, the ever reliable, down to earth family man and shit hot post-ironic artiste Gavin Turk put in an appearance, spinning vinyl on the decks with what looked like one of his sons but more likely some Goldsmiths' Masters graduate art-world intern. I was hoping for a sighting of Sarah Lucas, but she must have been burrowed away in glorious hermitage, stuffing scrunched up copies of hoarded News of The Worlds into pairs of nude hosiery from Oxfam.

So there you have it...another post ostensibly about something, but in reality utterly superficial and pointless. Did someone mention YBAs?