Category: London

Banksy as a TV Producer (Street Art 21)

Unfortunately I have no channel 4, but Curatedmag mentions Banksy will act as a TV producer for “The Antics Roadshow,” an hour-long special to air on UK’s channel 4 on August 13.

The show will chart “the history of behaving badly in public, from anarchists and activists to attention seeking eccentrics” and has been dubbed an “incomplete guide to total anarchy.” It will look at the stories behind some of the most audacious stunts of recent times and what motivates the perpetrators, from mindless boredom to heartfelt political beliefs.

Banksy: ‘Basically I just thought it was a good name for a TV programme and I’ve been working back from there’.

After the recent London Looting Riots I find it a bit ironic that Banksy will bring some reflection about the backgrounds of the (counter)culture leading to the riots.. Or would he?

Shocking Hotel Art: "Iraq War Memorial: Death of Prince Harry"

Trafalgar Hotel
Trafalgar Hotel

This weekend the London Trafalgar Hotel served as podium for Bridge Art Fair, a Chicago-based arts programming organization Bridge, NFP which organizes annual Bridge Art Fairs in Chicago, Miami and London.

As Part of The Bridge Art Fair Capla Kesting featured Iraq War Memorial: Death of Prince Harry.

Iraq War Memorial Prince Harry
Iraq War Memorial: Death of Prince Harry

by Daniel Edwards, well known for controversial sculptures, which include a nude, autopsied Paris Hilton, a graphic interpretation of Britney Spears giving birth and “Fidel Castro’s Deathbed Portrait”.

The Capla Kesting Press release explains it as follows:

LONDON, England – A war-mutilated Prince Harry is the symbolic fallen hero in a memorial honoring those willing but unable to serve in the Iraq conflict. Harry, brother to Britain’s future king, was poised to be the most celebrated soldier of the Coalition forces, but due to the “specific threats to kill or kidnap him,” he was kept home. However, Prince Harry will be remembered for his intended tour of duty in a memorial to be unveiled at the Trafalgar Hotel October 11th courtesy of Bridge Art Fair.

“Iraq War Memorial featuring the Death of Prince Harry, the Martyr of Maysan Province” draws inspiration from Harry’s willingness to sacrifice for his country, and the sympathy for his disappointment of an unfulfilled patriotic aspiration.

“This war memorial is dedicated to the brave at heart,” said spokesman David Kesting. “But the brave men and women Prince Harry inspired to enlist for combat following his announcement to serve six months in Iraq are not forgotten.”

The Memorial features Prince Harry laid out before the Union Jack with pennies placed over his eyes and head rested on the Bible. The statue suggests the tragic outcome of a confrontation in Iraq’s Maysan Province with the Iranian weapons smugglers for whom Harry’s tank regiment was scheduled to patrol. Prone with his unfired gun still holstered, Prince Harry is represented clutching a bloodied flag of Wales, and holding to his heart a cameo locket of his late mother, Princess Diana, while a desert vulture perches on his boot. Harry’s head is earless, denoting the explicit threats against the Prince from militia leaders saying they planned to send him back to his grandmother “without his ears.”

A bronze casting of Prince Harry’s “severed ears” also set for display at the Trafalgar Hotel will be offered on eBay.

Harry had stated he would leave the army if he was left in safety while his regiment was sent to a war zone. “Prince Harry’s spirit must have died the day they told him he couldn’t serve,” speculates New York artist Daniel Edwards. “That’s what this memorial is about.”

Like Paris’s Victor Noir Memorial, security for the Prince Harry Memorial will guard against vandalism from expected throngs of admirers believing luck in love and fertility may come by kissing the lips of the memorial to England’s reputed playboy “pinup prince.”

They even set up a website: Prince Harry memorial

There they claim the visitors comments were much more positive than the Press and the reactions on Internet:

The opening for the public was great. For all the negative press that we got and brandishing on the website NO ONE MADE A NEGATIVE COMMENT. Actually it was quite the opposite of what was said about it online. People responded very positively to the work. Remarking on the various details of the piece, like the locket, the holstered gun, the roses in his helmet and pound coins on his eyes. I think we had close to 500 visitors and no one had a negative thing to say. People really enjoyed the work and made numerous positive remarks commenting on their stance regarding the war, pubic service and the royal family.

The website features a picture of the London Towncrier who reportedly was responsible for announcing Harry’s birth:

Towncrier
The London Town Crier

I believe it is a great eye opener and reflection on present times.

What do you think?

Monet's Waterloo Bridge Temps Couvert fetches record

Monet's Waterloo Bridge Temps Couvert fetches record

Monet painted his Waterloo Bridge paintings during a stay in the London Savoy Hotel. This painting fetched a record at Christie’s of UK pnd 18 mio which is more than double the pre sale estimate.

From the Lot notes of Christie’s :

‘I adore London, it is a mass, an ensemble, and it is so simple. What I like most of all in London is the fog. How could English painters of the nineteenth century have painted its houses brick by brick? Those fellows painted bricks that they didn’t see, that they couldn’t see… I so love London! But I only like it in the winter… It is the fog that gives it its marvellous breadth. Its regular, massive blocks become grandiose in this mysterious cloak’ (Monet, quoted in J. House, ‘Visions of the Thames’, pp. 15-37, Monet’s London: Artists’ Reflections on the Thames 1859-1914, exh.cat., St. Petersburg, FL, 2005, p. 33).

When Monet arrived in London in 1899 for a family visit, he had not been to the British capital for some time. Checking into the relatively recently built Savoy Hotel, on the North bank of the Thames, he was amazed by the view, fascinated by the ever-shifting light effects on the river, and immediately embarked upon one of his most celebrated series of paintings, all showing essentially one of three motifs in London. These were the Houses of Parliament and, painted from his bedroom, Charing Cross Bridge and Waterloo Bridge. He focused more on the latter, as in Waterloo Bridge, temps couvert, perhaps enjoying the looping rhythm of the arches in comparison to the rigidity of the ever-right-angled Charing Cross Bridge. Another aspect that may have led to his preference of Waterloo Bridge as a theme was the fact that the sun, rising in the East, shone during the morning from behind it, providing an intriguing array of subtle light effects, a smog-bound chiaroscuro. It is a tribute to the visual power of Monet’s paintings of Waterloo Bridge that the majority are now in museum collections throughout the world, meaning that the appearance of Waterloo Bridge, temps couvert is a rarity, a factor that is emphasized by the sheer quality and beauty of this painting.

It was in order to see his son Michel, who was ostensibly in London to improve his English, that Monet arrived in 1899 with his wife Alice and his stepdaughter, Germaine Hosched̩. His immediate rapture on seeing the view from his room must have been to the chagrin of his family, for already during this stay he embarked upon the beginning of a campaign that would last half a decade. Canvas after canvas was used in order to capture the ever-changing view from his window, and the speed with which these view changed meant that he ended the first stay frustrated, and would returnРalone, and therefore presumably without the distractions of his familyРto the same hotel in 1900 and 1901.