A New Start

FT: State of the art

 

State of the art

By Peter Aspden

Published: February 18 2011 17:19 | Last updated: February 18 2011 17:19

A computer-generated image of the Zayed National Museum designed by Norman Foster

It is Grand Prix weekend in Abu Dhabi City and the gods of motorsport have smiled on one of Formula 1’s newest circuits. The thrilling last race of the season sees the drivers’ championship wide open. But, as is so often the way in modern sport, there is an air of anticlimax in the German driver Sebastian Vettel’s eventual victory, the race failing to live up to the preposterous hype around it. The unequivocal winner of the weekend is the striking and audacious Yas Marina circuit itself, hosting the Formula 1 circus for only the second year and once more impressing with its spectacular backdrop, gleaming facilities and immaculate organisation.

The Etihad Airways Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, to give it its full name, is one of a number of glitzy international events that have been brought to the United Arab Emirate capital to raise its global profile. Next door to the Yas Marina circuit is another crowd- and money-spinner: Ferrari World, a homage to the Italian racing car marque, the world’s largest indoor theme park and home of “Formula Rossa”, a new roller-coaster ride that slings you to a speed of 100kph in less than two seconds.

There is no more telling metaphor of this country’s intent than this dizzying and extravagant ride (its hydraulic winch system has been borrowed from jet-plane launch technology). Abu Dhabi is a country that is not so much embracing as hurtling towards the future. A place that loped to the stately rhythms of the desert and that depended on fishing and pearl-diving half a century ago has, since the discovery of oil in 1958, become a hothouse of economic planning and futuristic thinking. Today, it is the largest and wealthiest of the Emirates, a curious mix of beaches, skyscrapers and desert reflecting both its origins and future orientation.

Talk to some of its leading figures about their 20- and 30-year masterplans, projected growth figures, and forthcoming educational and scientific initiatives, and you feel something like the G-force of that 0-100kph race towards the first dip of Formula Rossa, and similar questions pop into your head: is it really possible to go this fast? And what happens if we go flying off? But it is precisely to secure its growing international reputation, as a society on the move, that Abu Dhabi has looked beyond the attractions of sport, leisure and shopping, and begun to address itself to something more sophisticated and more enduring: culture.

Look west across a scattering of islands from Yas Marina and you will see a larger, triangular land mass, a 27 sq km sanctuary just 500m off the coast of Abu Dhabi City. This is Saadiyat Island (“Island of Happiness”), a nondescript patch of land that is currently a mixture of building sites and unremarkable low-rise housing, but that in the next few years will oversee the single most important development in world culture.

A computer-generated image of Saadiyat Island, showing the new buildings

The western corner of Saadiyat Island has been designated as Abu Dhabi’s cultural district. That almost understated description belies the ambition behind the project. This is a cultural district like no other. Over the next five years, Saadiyat’s skyline will be transformed by a succession of hugely prestigious landmarks, piloted by some of the world’s leading architects: a Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Gehry; the Louvre Abu Dhabi designed by Jean Nouvel; a performing arts centre by Zaha Hadid; the Zayed National Museum designed by Norman Foster; and a Maritime Museum by the Japanese master Tadao Ando.

It will be the world’s largest single concentration of cultural institutions of this calibre. This is a country that is becoming used to making statements through superlatives and records. It is hoping to attract millions of visitors who will help support an economy that is, some would say, dangerously dependent on just one source, its oil revenue (pessimists predict a fall in the region’s oil production within 15 to 20 years).

The Saadiyat development, estimated at $27bn, will also include luxury resorts, golf and beach clubs, and a nature reserve. It wears its fashionable multi-use label with no little impunity, and is not proceeding without controversy: the issue of the abuse of migrant workers from south Asia was raised by a 2009 report by Human Rights Watch that put ironic quotation marks around the “Island of Happiness” project. The UAE government responded that the report had not acknowledged improving worker rights and conditions.

But Saadiyat is more than a tourist initiative. The implications of its successful development are potentially more profound than that. The cultural district project aims to redefine and reposition Abu Dhabi’s place in the world, and it will also force us to think in a new way about the Middle East. Can a region which has become a watchword, in western circles, for intransigent problems and violence once more become an energising cultural force?

. . .

Sheikh Sultan

I meet Sheikh Sultan bin Tahnoon al-Nahyan, chairman of Abu Dhabi’s Tourism Development & Investment Company (TDIC), in a VIP box overlooking the Yas Marina circuit, just a couple of hours before the start of the Grand Prix. There are engines revving up a storm on the circuit and it is hard to pick up Sheikh Sultan’s answers to my questions, delivered in softly spoken, fluent English (he holds an MA in economics from Tufts University in Boston).

Sheikh Sultan, a member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family, is the driving force behind the cultural initiatives in Saadiyat, for which he has received a cultural leadership award from the American Federation of Arts, as well as being appointed a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. The world is watching his experiment carefully. He sees his commitment to the arts as a vital, rather than marginal, force in shaping the future of Abu Dhabi. “Artists,” he says, “are often the first people in a society to anticipate future trends.”

He explains that the museums quarter in Saadiyat is only “part of a bigger story” that aims to make Abu Dhabi a cultural hub in the world. Each museum will have its own specific role: the Guggenheim will examine Arabian, Islamic and other Middle Eastern art in the context of the major developments of the past 100 years; the Louvre will be a world museum, borrowing prestigious pieces from its “parent” museum in Paris (which will receive a reported $1.3bn in return for its largesse, not to mention its name). The Zayed National Museum, named after Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, former ruler of Abu Dhabi and founding father of the Emirates, will tell the story of the UAE.

I put to Sheikh Sultan the most commonly expressed sceptical view of the Saadiyat project: how can a small albeit wealthy Islamic country, governed by dynastic succession, that prides itself on order and stability, become a genuine centre for artistic freedom and creativity? Art has a way of becoming a focus for dissent and destabilisation, I say. Culture can be a very awkward proposition.

He is unfazed. “This is the challenging aspect of art,” he replies. “It can change the way you think from time to time. We do not have a problem with that. We believe this challenge is a way to inspire innovation. This is proven.” He draws attention, in response to critics who anticipate censorship issues, to an exhibition of works by Picasso shown in Manarat Al Saadiyat, the island’s visitor and exhibition centre, which is already up and running. The works, borrowed from the Musée National Picasso in Paris, included some of that artist’s characteristically erotically charged creations.

The opening of the Manarat Al Saadiyat’s ‘RSTW’ show on Saadiyat Island last September

The centre recently showed works from the collection of the world’s top art dealer Larry Gagosian in a classy exhibition entitled “RSTW” after the featured artists Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol (that unattractive title shows that marketing is perhaps not yet Saadiyat’s strong point). I attended the show on a Friday morning, the Islamic day of rest, and it confirmed the worst suspicions of sceptics over the level of indigenous interest in western contemporary art: it was virtually empty.

Rita Aoun-Abdo is TDIC’s cultural director, and is sanguine when I raise the issue of the missing crowds. She emphasises that the country is, in terms of cultural consciousness, at the beginning of a steep learning curve. The first exhibitions held in Abu Dhabi City attracted about 75 people a day; the most recent edition of the Abu Dhabi art fair pulled in 17,000 viewers. “That is a lot,” she says. “We only started on this path five years ago. The growth in audience interest is amazing.”

Whereas western audiences are accustomed to using Sunday mornings as a time to catch up with culture, in Islamic societies, Friday mornings are for prayers. The establishment of a museum culture in Abu Dhabi “will question the very notion of what a museum is – a public space, a civic space?”. Expatriates too need to change their habits. “You very rarely see a CEO at a cultural event. They are in this country for commercial reasons, and congregate in business spaces. There needs to be a shift in the way all the people here live.”

Aoun-Abdo, a Lebanese who arrived in Abu Dhabi five years ago, also stresses the educational role of Saadiyat’s projects. “A cultural district not only provides a world-class destination. It goes beyond that. It is to foster a culture of art.” Even if that culture begins to engage with uncomfortable themes – the role of women in society, gay rights, democracy? Aoun-Abdo echoes Sheikh Sultan’s embracing of the forthcoming challenges, and issues one of her own: “The last thing Abu Dhabi wants is to build replicas of western institutions. What we have here is the creation of a new model, that is able to connect different civilisations.” The new museums also need to play their part in “sustaining the heritage of the local environment. If not, they will not be credible.”

Computer-generated image of the Louvre Abu Dhabi designed by Jean Nouvel

The Louvre Abu Dhabi has proved the most controversial of the Saadiyat projects, provoking vivid protests among dissenters in France who were dismayed to see the distinguished museum’s brand sold to the highest bidder. Aoun-Abdo says the criticism was based on “misinformation”, bridling when she hears references to Abu Dhabi’s “branch” of the Louvre. “That is totally wrong,” she says animatedly. “It is the Louvre Abu Dhabi. How can we have a branch of the Louvre, today in the 21st century?” Her vehemence reflects local sensitivities to what may look like a culturally colonial arrangement. Today, she adds, many of those vociferous critics have come round to Saadiyat. “They can see the richness of the project. But it is our responsibility to continue to explain it.” The loan of the “Louvre” name is for 30 years, and is renewable.

As for the notion of Abu Dhabi being able to contain the sharper provocations of contemporary art, she takes a broader view of the subject. “There are so many notions of art that are set in stone, and need to be reviewed.” In the west, she says, contemporary art is seen as the last point of a timeline that includes the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and modernism. The displays at Saadiyat will, to some extent, feel liberated from those art historical strictures. “They will ask fresh questions of museum aesthetics, of what the contemporary means – and of the notion of the Middle East itself.”

The efforts to use culture to help redefine Abu Dhabi’s identity are not unnoticed by the country’s fellow Emirate states. Qatar, famously victorious in its bid to stage the first-ever air-conditioned World Cup in 2022, is following a similar path to Abu Dhabi, with the building of its own National Museum designed by Jean Nouvel, I.M. Pei’s Museum of Islamic Art, and the newly opened “Mathaf”, the Arab Museum of Modern Art. There is naturally a spirit of competitiveness between the two Emirates, but it is relatively well-disguised, both countries preferring to concentrate on the complementary nature of their initiatives.

The Emirates were founded as a federation under the leadership of Sheikh Zayed in 1971, and it is the museum bearing his name on Saadiyat Island that is in many ways the most interesting project of them all. The Zayed National Museum’s spectacular fan-shaped design by Norman Foster, referencing the feathers of a falcon’s wing in homage to a favourite local pastime, was unveiled during the Queen’s visit to Abu Dhabi last November. Here is where the Emirati capital will display and explore its own identity through its history and traditions. There is more western support for this project, in the form of a consultancy role for the British Museum. Under its charismatic director Neil MacGregor, the BM has been developing bilateral links and organising loans with foreign museums.

Justin Morris of the British Museum with a model of the Zayed National Museum

Justin Morris, the BM’s head of strategic planning, said the link with the Zayed was strongly encouraged by the British government. “Although we are at arm’s length from the government, it has a significant role to play in developing such relationships – and it was very proactive in this case,” he tells me in his office in Bloomsbury. He says the last thing on either country’s mind was to establish a form of “outpost” in Abu Dhabi. “But we wanted to offer our services, they wanted an internationally credible museum.” He declines to disclose the fee for the museum’s services.

Morris says that the legacy of Sheikh Zayed is central to the museum that bears his name. “He is not particularly well-known internationally, but he was clearly an incredible man, full of real foresight and wisdom. That is why he is considered the father of the nation. He led and changed everything. And that is a big story to tell.”

Eschewing the cynicism that sees Saadiyat as an overblown vanity project, Morris emphasises the long view: “There is a rich and fascinating history here. In the third millennium BC, the [Persian] Gulf played a significant role in the trading process. Sheikh Zayed was keen to understand more about that long history and encouraged archaeologists to come to the UAE.”

When I ask him about the potentially subversive effects of opening what is still a fairly closed society to the unpredictable influence of cultural stimulus, he too underplays the tensions involved. “I think it is widely recognised that the museum is a device for developing civic society. And they have certainly talked to us about wanting to encourage debate and dialogue.”

. . .

Computer-generated image of the performing arts centre designed by Zaha Hadid

In response to the region’s growing interest in culture, both Sotheby’s and Christie’s have been active in selling art there. The most recent auction, held in Doha, was Sotheby’s “Hurouf: The Art of the Word” sale held in mid-December. It consisted entirely of work inspired by calligraphy, and raised $5.6m, above its high estimate. That is a trifling sum compared with the headline-grabbing auctions of western art, barely capable of buying the hind quarter of a Hirstian cow, but among the encouraging figures was the proportion of buyers – 32 per cent – who were new to the auction house.

Edward Gibbs, director of the Middle East department and worldwide head of Islamic art at Sotheby’s, says the works in the auction were the opposite of the shocking statements that accompany the wilder excesses of western contemporary art, tailored to local tastes and sensibilities. He says the increased emphasis on culture in the region has been “astonishing” to watch since the death of Sheikh Zayed in 2004. “The baton has passed to a younger generation, who have been educated abroad and are cosmopolitan, switched on, smart.

“There is a huge amount of talent in the Muslim world that is begging to be seen and heard and recognised. And Middle Eastern contemporary art has certainly found its feet in recent years.” He describes the clusters of Emirati women who have been active in leading the cultural charge as an “interesting group to watch. They have traditionally not been involved in business matters, but are [now] at the forefront of artistic patronage.” They include Sheikha Salama bint Hamdan al-Nahyan, wife of Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Mohammed, and Sheikha al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, daughter of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani.

Computer-generated image of the Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Gehry

Gibbs says that the Saadiyat development is something that goes beyond attracting more tourists, or even helping Abu Dhabi come to terms with its own history. He sees it as nothing less than a harbinger of an important geopolitical shift. When I express my doubts that culturally jaded westerners will be attracted by Saadiyat as a holiday destination, he replies: “But it is not for us. It is for people from the Middle East, and Indians, and Chinese, and Russians. They are not trying to attract American tourists. They are looking ahead, and the future is Asia, whether you like it or not. And the Asians will come in their millions.”

Gibbs talks of the ancient staging posts of the Silk Route, “the great cities like Palmyra and Nishapur, that died and collapsed back into the sand. Well these are the new staging posts – Abu Dhabi, Doha, Dubai. People love to sneer at it, but I think it’s fantastic.”

Morris also sees more profound motives behind Saadiyat than is commonly supposed. “They could easily have spent all the revenue generated by oil, and done little else. But I have been particularly impressed, not only by their long-term vision, but also their lateral thinking.” In asking questions of their own history and traditions, he says, and in studying them in a genuinely global and starry context, the rulers of Abu Dhabi may yet be preparing for a more demanding role. “You have to wonder about the extent to which they want to participate in the wider politics of the region. When you scratch beneath the surface, it is indicative of the direction they are taking.”

So Saadiyat Island could become the ultimate test, not only of a group of well-wishing art lovers who want to raise the profile of their native country, but of the power of culture itself, to change lives, to transform societies, and to foster peace and greater mutual understanding. The stakes are that high. Watch this fast-moving space.

Peter Aspden is the FT’s arts writer.

To comment on this article, please e-mail [email protected]

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011

ST: Lion king of dance

Life!

Home > Life! > Life News > Story

Jan 15, 2011

Lion king of dance

Despite few orders, Henry Ng still cannot bear to give up making lion dance costumes

By nicholas yong

 

When lion dance troupes in Singapore want quality, handmade lion dance costumes, they head for a nondescript five-room HDB flat in Ang Mo Kio.

There, in that flat-cum-workshop, Mr Henry Ng, 52, has been making such customised suits for 15 years. The father of three creates them from scratch with materials such as bamboo, high-fibre paper, cloth, and rabbit and sheep fur. Skeletal bamboo structures of lion heads are strewn among pliers and paints. Completed, stylised big cat heads sit around, wrapped in plastic.

You might say Mr Ng and his cloth lions are an endangered species. 'In the 1990s, I used to make more than 100 lions in a year. Sometimes, I could not meet the demand. Now, I usually make 30 to 40 lions a year,' he says in Mandarin.

This is mainly down to mass-produced, imported lion costumes from China, which cost a fraction of the $1,200 to $1,900 he charges for each lion. Foreign lions are easily purchased from suppliers in places such as Jurong and Tampines, or online.

The lion-maker notes: 'Many of the makers in China do not have experience in lion dance. They are made in factories and the more they make, the more money they get. So the quality is not as good.'

 

Lion dance costume maker Mr Henry Ng on the cheaper, mass-produced imported lion costumes from China -- ST PHOTO: LAU FOOK KONG

 

 

The availability of cheaper alternatives has taken its toll on craftsmen such as Mr Ng. When he first started, there were about 10 other full-time makers here. Now, he reckons he is the only one left.

Mr Ng, who began training in lion dance at the age of 13, taught himself how to make the costumes by dismantling damaged lions. It started as a hobby before he turned it into a profession in 1995.

Since then, he has made about 2,000 lions - many of which have been used in national and international competitions. It takes him five days or less to make a lion, with each lasting 15 years or more.

While he makes the lion heads himself, he outsources the sewing of the lion's body to a tailor, who puts it together based on Mr Ng's instructions.

Even so, he takes pride in his work. He makes his own glue to ensure that the different layers stick together and takes pains to meet customers' requests. He says, matter-of-factly: 'You have to give the customer what he wants. If he pays more than $1,000 for your lion and it falls apart after a few steps, he will run away.'

He is able to sustain his business through a mix of orders for lions made by him and cheaper lions made by his helper in China whom he personally trained. The family income is supplemented by his wife Nancy, 49, who works in an air cargo warehouse.

Regular customers include Mr Kenny Ng, 43, coach of Wei Jin Dragon And Lion Dance Association. He started patronising Mr Ng's business 15 years ago and now orders at least two lions a year.

'If I buy one lion from Henry, I can buy four from China,' says the coach. But, he adds: 'His lions are better, more durable and beautiful. He is a former lion dancer, so he knows what is required.'

One detail that does not escape the local craftsman is that lion dance is primarily about strength, so the costumes must be light enough to wield.

Lion dance instructor Nicholas Cheong, 37, notes that it is also easier to repair locally made lions since he can go straight to the maker.

The manager of 10-year-old Xin Cheng Events And Entertainment, a lion dance troupe, says: 'Singapore lions are much closer to our style and the quality will also be better in terms of the workmanship. Henry will customise what you want and the quality is there, that's why we go to him.'

Mr Ng's customers consist of mainly lion dance troupes who are taking part in competitions and businesses who want something special to represent them at corporate events. For example, beer brand ABC Extra Stout recently commissioned him to create a pair of Golden Prosperity Lions (above) as part of its celebrations for the upcoming Chinese New Year. With special features such as intricate golden embroidery and a golden cap with a fine silver layer, the lions took him two weeks to make and are valued at $15,000.

The lions will be making appearances at various food centres in the heartland during the festive period. He says tricky assignments such as the ABC lions are what keep him going: 'I prefer to take on more challenging jobs as they give me a sense of satisfaction. That's how I have been able to carry on till today.'

Asked how long he intends to continue in the business, he admits he considered changing jobs two years ago due to falling demand.

His children, the oldest of whom is still in secondary school, have little interest in his craft. 'My children are not interested in lion dance at all. When I am making the lions, they don't even come and watch,' he laments.

But the lion's den will not be going quiet anytime soon. 'So long as there is still demand, I will continue making lions,' he says. 'I can't bear to give it up.'

[email protected]

 

---

 

'Many of the makers in China do not have experience in lion dance. They are made in factories and the more they make, the more money they get. So the quality is not as good'

Lion dance costume maker Henry Ng on the cheaper, mass-produced lion costumes from China

FT: Panto wins the golden goose for UK theatre

 

Panto wins the golden goose for UK theatre

Published: December 9 2010 23:41 | Last updated: December 9 2010 23:41

 

By Emma Jacobs

 

Oh yes it is! Pamela Anderson in ‘Aladdin’, this year being staged in Liverpool

 

 

South London might be a bit chillier than Malibu but it appears to hold a certain allure for former stars of the 1990s television series Baywatch . David Hasselhoff, the 58-year-old who played lifeguard Mitch Buchannon, is appearing as Captain Hook in Peter Pan, this year’s pantomime at New Wimbledon Theatre.

Last year, the theatre drew Pamela Anderson, who wore a red swimsuit to play the Genie in Aladdin, a production that has moved this year to Liverpool’s Empire Theatre, taking Anderson with it.

Pantomimes – recastings of old children’s stories with puns, audience participation, singalongs and cross-dressing – are a long-standing staple of the British Christmas season. Appealing to everyone from grandparents to toddlers with a mix of over-the-top silliness, innuendo and topical references, they are also vitally lucrative for the country’s small and provincial theatres.

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Kevin Wood, chief executive of First Family Entertainment, the production company behind Wimbledon’s Peter Pan and Liverpool’s Aladdin, among 10 others, says: “Panto is massively important for regional theatres. It means they can put on events, like contemporary dance, that wouldn’t make money.” He declines to reveal how much he pays big stars, but says “it’s hundreds of thousands of pounds”.

Susie McKenna, who has staged an independent pantomime at the Hackney Empire in east London for 12 years, including this year’s Jack and the Beanstalk, says cuts in arts funding by the coalition government, make panto even more important: “We have to count every penny.” It is a point made in the show, when the “dame” laments the cuts by the “demolition government”. By the time the Olympics arrive in 2012, he sighs, it will be reduced to a few “pit bull races on Hackney Downs”.

Yet, unlike bigger productions, Ms McKenna says, Hackney needs to ensure tickets remain affordable to locals. Tickets go for as little as £1.50 ($2.36) and the most expensive is £24.50. This means that wages are kept low, as she quips: “People don’t work for us for the money.”

Nonetheless, Hackney is lucky that some of the actors who have appeared at the theatre for a long time have become famous, and so attract audiences from outside the locality.

Nick Thomas, chairman of Qdos Entertainment Group, which stages 22 pantomimes in Britain, says big production companies have greater buying power for top TV talent, such as John Barrowman, star of Torchwood, who has done panto for five years and has just signed on for another five.

On show

My Dad’s a Birdman, Young Vic, London

Cinderella, Birmingham Hippodrome, UK

Jack and the Beanstalk, Hackney Empire, London

Cinderella, Royal Opera House, London

Big companies are also more efficient because they exploit economies of scale. Family First Entertainment works on a five-year cycle – the Peter Pan production at Wimbledon this year will return to the theatre five years later. “It means we can spread overheads,” says Mr Wood, whose company receives sponsorship from Robinsons, the soft drinks maker. “Costumes, props and scripts will be recycled. The script is tweaked in terms of topical references, but Cinderella always goes to the ball.”

Is panto merely a refuge for washed-up celebrities? “Actors have to be good,” says Mr Thomas. “You need to get people buying tickets this year for next year. Cash flow is important for local theatres.”

Two days after Newcastle’s panto opened, he says, it had already taken “a quarter of a million pounds in tickets for 2011’s production”. He cites the effect of Dynasty star Joan Collins, who is making her debut at the age of 77: “She wouldn’t have been hired if she wasn’t right for the show.” And she earns her money: “She is doing everything but flying in on a wire.”

Mr Wood was thrilled when Shakespearean actor Sir Ian McKellen donned a floral dress in 2004 to play Widow Twanky at the Old Vic’s Aladdin in London. Rather than upstage provincial theatres, the upscale production increased Mr Wood’s bargaining power. “After McKellen, no actor could tell me panto was beneath them,” he says.

 

 

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

Sunflower Seeds - Tate - Ai Wei Wei

Sunflower Seeds - Tate - Ai Wei Wei

 

Download Sunflower Seeds_Porcelain_Tate_Ai Wei Wei

FT: How Annie got shot

How Annie got shot

By John Gapper

Published: October 22 2010 23:06 | Last updated: October 22 2010 23:06

Leibovitz with her portrait of Demi Moore

At work, Richard Petty runs a clinic around the corner from London’s Harley Street where he specialises in treating men with sexual and prostate conditions. For relaxation, he collects photographs of women.

Petty is not interested in any photos, only ones of recognisable figures with interesting careers or life stories. Among others, he owns portraits of the actresses Juliet Stevenson and Scarlett Johansson and the artist Tracey Emin. Another, taken in 1909 by Alexander Bassano, a famous society photographer, is of Maud Allan, an exotic dancer and purported mistress of Edward VII whose Salomé dance was declared obscene by the Lord Chamberlain. He started collecting 12 years ago, going to specialist galleries in London and finding photographs that captured his imagination.

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“It is not just a matter of fame. I like to know who the woman is and the story behind the image. The best possible image is a vintage print but if that is impossible to find then I get as near as I can. Each one has to be perfection,” he says.

In principle, therefore, he should be a potential customer for Annie Leibovitz, the notoriously perfectionist Vanity Fair photographer whose photos of Hollywood actors and actresses and other figures are among the best-known celebrity images. Her photos of a naked, pregnant Demi Moore and of an equally naked John Lennon hugging Yoko Ono, hours before his killing in 1980, defined their age.

After a 40-year career, starting as a photographer of rock bands on Rolling Stone in 1970, Leibovitz is a celebrity herself. In addition to her work at Vanity Fair, she is hired by companies such as American Express for advertising campaigns. The Queen sat for a Leibovitz portrait in 2007, and the head of BBC One later resigned after a documentary was edited to suggest, incorrectly, that the Queen had walked out of the shoot.

Yet Petty does not intend to acquire a Leibovitz. Not one of the 10 “master sets” of 157 of her prints that have been offered privately at an asking price of more than $3m per set; not even a single photo. “No,” he says firmly. “I nearly bought her portrait of the Queen but then I decided against it. She is obviously well-regarded but it is a distinctively American taste, her style of photography.”

It is only one collector’s view but it is a straw in a wind that has been blowing fiercely against Leibovitz, who is struggling to repair her finances, having built up multi-million-dollar debts amid a tangle of personal, professional and property troubles. The woes of one of the world’s highest-paid photographers have mesmerised the media and the art world.

Her troubles emerged publicly a year ago when she was sued by Art Capital, a New York firm that lent her $24m against collateral including her three houses in Greenwich Village and her photographic portfolio. The suit, which she described at the time as “harassment” and was subsequently settled, claimed the right to enter her homes to appraise assets that could be sold to repay the debt.

Leibovitz had been introduced to Art Capital by Ken Starr, a financial adviser whose clients included Hollywood celebrities such as Al Pacino, Sylvester Stallone and Martin Scorsese. Starr is now in jail and has pleaded guilty to diverting tens of millions of dollars from his clients’ accounts to his own. Last April, Leibovitz was bought out of the Art Capital arrangement by Colony Capital, a Californian private equity fund, giving her a breathing space.

. . .

The Leibovitz story, however, is more than a tale of a photographer who got absorbed into the high-spending world of the people she portrays. It is a reflection of something unexpected – that, despite all her celebrity and talent, Leibovitz lacks earning power as an artist.

If she could sell her prints in galleries or at auction for as much as former fashion and society photographers such as Herb Ritts, Bettina Rheims and Richard Avedon – let alone contemporary artists who work in photography, such as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Andreas Gursky and Gilbert & George – her financial worries would ease.

So far, she has not. The most that one of her photographs has fetched at public auction, according to Artnet, the online auction house, is £31,200. That was paid in 2005 for a signed print of a 1986 photograph of the (now dead) artist Keith Haring, naked and daubed with paint. Most of her prints auctioned this year have fetched in the single-figure thousands of dollars, and some in the hundreds.

It is plenty by most photographers’ standards but works by Sherman, Prince and Gursky have fetched more than $2m ($3m in the latter two cases). Meanwhile, a print of Avedon’s 1957 portrait of Marilyn Monroe sold for $457,000 at Sotheby’s in 2008, and a black and white print of a 1950 Vogue cover by Irving Penn sold for $481,000 at Christie’s the same year.

“To be honest, the market for her work has never been particularly strong,” says Josh Holdeman, director of photography for Christie’s in New York. “A lot of her photographs have been on the cover of magazines but there hasn’t been any deep collecting base for her work.”

Marisa Cardinale, an adviser hired by Leibovitz to sort out her portfolio and work with dealers and galleries to remedy that, says it reflects her lack of focus in the past. “There is a disparity between Annie’s importance as a photographer and the price fetched by her work in the art market. That was not where she focused her talent and intelligence, until now.”

Even Leibovitz’s doubters, of whom there are many in the gallery and auction world, do not dispute that she is a fine photographer – although some complain at her increased use of digital technology to smooth and manipulate photos. “I don’t think her problems relate to her photography at all. She is very good at what she does,” says Michael Hoppen, a London gallery owner.

The problem is that, as Jeffrey Boloten, a managing director of the ArtInsight consultancy in London, puts it: “You do have to play by the art market rules.” That means working closely with auction houses and galleries and doing what they tell you, from making small limited editions of your prints to signing and marketing them adeptly.

Leibovitz has failed this test, at least until she got into her current straits, and her credibility among the movers, shakers and brokers of the art world is low. “She had very little interest in the art world for most of her career,” says Edwynn Houk, a gallery owner in New York who used to represent her. “She suffered from not caring about it, not paying enough attention.”

Leibovitz, who would not be interviewed for this article, tacitly concedes the accusation. In a statement, she said: “I’ve always cared more about taking pictures than about the art market. But for some time now we have closely controlled the editioned prints and we are building a network of relationships with dealers and galleries.”

Her change of heart says something about the photography market itself – its sense of having had to struggle to be taken seriously, to be categorised as art in the same way as painting or sculpture. “That has been a concerted effort on everyone’s part, a dedicated campaign to transcend the photography market and enter the bigger one where more money is available,” says Boloten.

The unspoken fear is that, unless everyone pulls together, this three-decade effort could falter, an effort that has done more for the value of photography than any individual – even Annie Leibovitz.

. . .

‘Gloria Swanson, New York 1924’ by Edward Steichen, sold for $540,000 in 2007

When Edward Steichen, a painter and pioneer of artistic photography, was hired as chief photographer of Condé Nast magazines and started work on its flagship titles Vogue and Vanity Fair in 1922, he crossed a border. Burning all his canvases, he declared: “Art for art’s sake is dead, if it ever lived.”

At Vanity Fair, Steichen took some of the most memorable – and valuable – celebrity photos in history. His shadowy portraits of Noël Coward, George Gershwin and Gary Cooper are highly sought-after, and a silver gelatin print of his 1924 shot of the lace-covered face of Gloria Swanson, the silent film star, was auctioned for $540,000 by Phillips de Pury in New York in 2007.

His artistic reputation suffered from his defection to the world of commercial photography. “People thought it was unforgivable to work at a magazine, although I don’t think he cared,” says Anne Kennedy, co-founder of Art + Commerce, a New York agency that used to represent Leibovitz and has fashion photographers including Patrick Demarchelier and Steven Meisel on its books.

Steichen was eventually forgiven, though, and became director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947. The example he set, of moving between magazine and art photography, was later followed by others including Irving Penn, who worked for Vogue, and Diane Arbus, who worked for Harper’s Bazaar.

But that border remained hard to cross. Art + Commerce was founded in the early 1980s to get commissions for artistic photographers such as Robert Mapplethorpe so that they could support their creative work. “I’d been a dealer and I was regarded as a philistine because I was intrigued at the work that was being done commercially,” says Kennedy.

The division between specialist photography and contemporary art using photography still exists, with art photography fetching far higher prices. According to ArtTactic, the average price fetched by photographs in the big auction houses’ contemporary art evening sales last year was $259,300. The average for works in their specialist photography sales – less prestigious events held during the day instead of the evening – was $12,100. But the prestige gap has eroded, as more art museums have mounted photography exhibitions and collectors’ tastes have broadened. “Take Avedon,” says Holdeman. “Technically, he’s on the photography side but it would be unusual for a collector of his work not to own paintings and sculpture as well.”

The art world has accepted the work of some photojournalists including Luc Delahaye, who left Magnum, the legendary photo agency co-founded in 1947 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, to forge a career as an artist. Magnum itself sold 185,000 of its vintage press prints last year to MSD Capital, a fund founded by Michael Dell (of Dell Computers) in a deal valued at $100m.

The gap has also been bridged from the artistic side. Andy Warhol pioneered the use of commercial images such as Campbell’s Soup cans and celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe in his art. He has been followed by Richard Prince, whose print of a cowboy galloping across a landscape, which he re-photographed from a Marlboro advertising shoot, sold at Christie’s in 2005 for a then-record $1.25m.

Michael Wilson, a producer of the James Bond films, owns one of the largest private collections of photography in the world. He says that museums such as Tate, which for years excluded photography from contemporary art exhibits, have now validated it. “Art is basically what a bunch of collectors and curators say it is, there is no getting around that,” he says with a chuckle.

Celebrity images have dominated art for centuries, with painters from Hans Holbein to John Singer Sargent earning their bread and butter through commissions to paint portraits of nobles and high society figures. “Rembrandt was in many ways a celebrity painter but painters were released from that when photography came along,” says Hoppen.

Yet celebrity photography of the kind exemplified by Leibovitz has no automatic claim to be art. “The value of a photograph derives from the artist doing something interesting and exciting and different, not from the fame of its subject,” says Houk. “A photograph of a Hollywood star leaving a nightclub has a place in a magazine but it has no value as art.”

Leibovitz has one great advantage over the paparazzi – access to people who spend much of their lives trying to avoid being photographed. The Queen only gave her 25 minutes but Leibovitz usually demands two days, or at least half-days, of her subjects’ time, and spends hours on the tiniest details. Her subjects open up to her because she gets close and wears them down.

“Access is amazing – the amount of time you are given with someone. When people relax in front of you then all kinds of magic can happen,” says Hoppen. “If you have a day with Brad Pitt then potentially you can take a great photo, whereas if he walks past you in the street and you grab a picture with your phone, it is not going to happen.”

Leibovitz thus has the potential to do what Avedon and Penn did – to become as highly valued as an artist as a commercial photographer. The fact that she has not achieved it, so far at least, is because of something more vital than access, maybe even talent. It is something that has bedevilled the photography world from the technology’s earliest days. She lacks rarity value.

. . .

Prices in markets are set by supply and demand and the photography market is no exception. “If all of the stars were to align, you’d have an image that was a cultural product by a photographer who had entered the pantheon of art history and there would only be one print,” says Holdeman.

That hardly ever happens because photographs were made to multiply – the point of the technology is that a negative can be reproduced. “Rarity is essential and it is something that photography does not naturally have,” says Boloten. “You can print thousands of the things and a collector will ask: ‘Why am I paying a lot of money for a print when Picasso only painted one of each?’”

‘Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941’. There are hundreds of prints of Ansel Adams’ photograph, but a single vintage one fetched $518,500

There are at least 1,000 prints in existence of the bellwether photograph of the modern art market, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941” by Ansel Adams. Adams only got the chance to take a single haunting photograph of the moon rising over a graveyard, but he continued to make reproductions from the negative throughout his career, until his death in 1984. Dealers, auction houses and collectors have got around the lack of scarcity of “Moonrise” and other prints by ascribing far higher values to what are called “vintage prints” – those reproductions made at the time, or shortly after, the photograph was taken. Standard prints of “Moonrise” sell for about $50,000 while one vintage print, dated to the 1950s or 1960s, sold at Sotheby’s last June for $518,500.

Photographers who are alive present a bigger challenge in terms of scarcity. At 61, Leibovitz has plenty of her career left and she is known as a prodigiously hard worker, constantly adding to her portfolio. Prices for work of photographers such as Ritts and Mapplethorpe increased in the years following their deaths because that placed an unambiguous limit on supply.

Galleries have tried to solve this through editioning – limiting the number of reproductions of a negative to 10 or 15 high-quality signed prints, preferably made just after the photograph was taken. The dealers who represent photographers and have exclusive rights to sell their prints have become experts in curbing the market’s tendency towards over-supply.

“There were huge editions in the 1960s but the market has gone in a totally different direction,” says Alex Novak, a dealer in Pennsylvania. “The vast majority of prints are now made in very limited editions, and that has helped the contemporary market to remain fairly stable. It crashed and burned in past recessions because there were too many prints. ”

Calculating the optimal supply is a fine art in itself, since galleries want there to be enough liquidity for prints of any photo to change hands fairly frequently – which would be impossible if there were only one. Galleries often base their prices on the last recorded auction price and, especially in a rising market, want a recent reference point.

All of this planning over decades to raise the profile of photography and place limits on supply seems to be working. Photography accounts for a tiny proportion of the auction market – 2 per cent of sales in 2009, according to ArtTactic – but it has attracted growing investor interest. There are now several dedicated art funds, including the Tosca Photography Fund and the Art Photography Fund.

Not only did the total value of the contemporary photography market rise by 285 per cent between 1993 and 2008, according to Art Market Research, but it has been more resilient than contemporary art in the post-2008 downturn. “There has been a surprisingly strong comeback this year,” says Novak. “Photography has always been undervalued but it is less undervalued now.”

Yet Leibovitz, who changed galleries several times in recent years, including a spell at Phillips de Pury, has neglected these disciplines. “She is terribly nice but she is her own worst enemy,” says Zelda Cheatle, curator of the Tosca Photography Fund. “If there is a proper collectors’ print, it goes for a lot of money but no-one is sure if others that float around are the real thing or not.”

“We dropped her because it would take six months just to get a print signed,” says Hoppen. “I’ve got one of her prints of Steve Martin sitting here that I hope to get signed soon instead of waiting for months. You have to set aside half a day a month to sign if you are serious about it – that is paid time.”

Cardinale, who has worked with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and other photographers’ estates, denies that there is a problem with past editioning of Leibovitz’s work. “Disorder is not a problem. Her archive is very organised and it is an impressive body of work. It is quite exciting to be in a position to review it and to see the breadth of what she has accomplished.” But, she says, Leibovitz has to buckle down. “The active participation of the artist is of immeasurable importance in the development of a market. She is meeting dealers, discussing possible courses of action and becoming an engaged participant and that in itself is a big step. She is still an artist who loves to take pictures but this will be a priority in her life.”

Although most people in the art world express both admiration and affection for Leibovitz, there is an undercurrent of schadenfreude at the fact that a celebrity who defied the system has been brought low. “She is such a difficult person to work with and it’s always been her way or the highway,” says one photography specialist.

Peter MacGill, whose gallery Pace MacGill in New York represents Avedon, Penn and Robert Frank, says that her work deserves to stand alongside such names. “Annie is one of the important chroniclers of our time and if you execute that craft well, it has sustainable value in people’s hearts and minds and they want to collect it,” he says.

The fact that MacGill is on her side despite all her difficulties is a hopeful sign, for her troubles mirror those of the celebrities she photographs. Like a star who has mistreated and undervalued agents, directors and studios, she neglected the auction houses, dealers and collectors who worked for decades to turn photographs into works of art. Now that she needs them, will they rescue her?

John Gapper is the FT’s chief business commentator

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FT: A History of the World in 100 Objects

Because history is written by the victors – and in the case of the Huastec people only after their vanquishers, the Aztecs, were themselves vanquished by the Spanish conquistadores – MacGregor argues that written records can be less objective than the everyday objects that have survived

==

A History of the World in 100 Objects

Review by Andrew Roberts

Published: October 22 2010 23:04 | Last updated: October 22 2010 23:04

A History of the World in 100 Objects, by Neil MacGregor, Allen Lane RRP£30, 738 pages

Radio 4 listeners – and what intelligent, thoughtful Briton is not a Radio 4 listener? – have spent the past six months being charmed and intrigued by Neil MacGregor relating the history of the world by reference to 100 objects that can be found in the British Museum, of which he is director. Gloriously unfamiliar objects such as the north American otter pipe (200BC-AD100), the sphinx of Tarharqo (680BC), gold coins of Abd al-Malik (AD696) and Tang Tomb figurines (AD728) were brought alive and placed in their historical and cultural context in an amusing and often enticing way. And now here is the lavishly illustrated book of those radio scripts.

Mark Damazer, then head of Radio 4, challenged MacGregor and his museum colleagues to choose 100 objects “that had to range in date from the beginning of human history around 2m years ago and come right up to the present day. The objects had to cover the whole world, as far as possible equally. They would try to address as many aspects of human experience as proved practicable, and to tell us about whole societies, not just the rich and powerful within them.”

Yet far from being merely a sophisticated and intellectually stimulating parlour game, MacGregor’s acceptance of Damazer’s proposition had a deeper purpose, which was to try to justify museums in the digital media age. For listeners and readers will want to go to look at and be in the presence of the 100 objects themselves. This is therefore altogether more important than the jeu d’esprit that it might at first sight seem.

Because these pieces were written in order to be read over the airwaves, the style is authentic, personal and humorous, and almost tells us as much about the impishly witty MacGregor as it does about the objects.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry - Oct-22

‘Overhaul’ - Oct-22

Galileo: master of the universe - Oct-15

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s ‘Letters from London and Europe’ - Oct-15

Colman Andrews’ biography of Ferran Adrià - Oct-15

Colm Tóibín’s ‘The Empty Family’ - Oct-16

Of the gorgeously wrought but sexually explicit Warren cup (AD5) found near Jerusalem, with its depiction of a boy peeping around a door at two Greeks engaged in vigorous sodomy, MacGregor writes: “He is clearly a slave, although it is impossible to know whether he is simply indulging in voyeurism, or apprehensively responding to a call for ‘room service’.” Elsewhere of that cup, MacGregor wonders, “Perhaps everybody believes that the best sex happens somewhere else.”

A few of the objects are well known, such as Dürer’s woodcut of the rhinoceros, the statue of Ramses II, and the Sutton Hoo helmet, but the majority will only be known to British Museum cognoscenti, and it is the obscurer objects that have been presently drawing the crowds to Bloomsbury on the back of MacGregor’s radio broadcasts. We knew the museum had the Rosetta stone, lots of Egyptian mummies and the Elgin marbles, of course, but how many of us knew about such beautiful and fascinating objects as the Mexican ceremonial ballgame belt (AD100-500), the South Korean roof tile (AD700-800), the Zhou ritual vessel (1,050BC), the Hoxne pepper pot (AD300-400) or the tughra of Suleiman the Magnificent (AD1520)?

That mankind has always tried to express itself artistically is one of the lessons we take from MacGregor’s efforts, but also that the powerful have long tried to misappropriate art for political propaganda purposes, as well illustrated by a Turkish coin with the head of Alexander the Great (305BC), or the bronze statue of the emperor Augustus (27BC), which was found in the Sudan. “A thoughtful alien handling the banknotes of China and the United States today,” MacGregor writes, “might well assume that one was ruled by Mao and the other by George Washington.”

Another lesson is that events that we think epicentral to history might just not be in the estimation of our children or grandchildren; MacGregor delights in the fact that among his objects, “Canonical events – the making of the Roman Empire, the Mongol destruction of Baghdad, the European Renaissance, the Napoleonic wars, the bombing of Hiroshima – are not centre stage”.

If there is a bias evident in MacGregor’s choices, it is for the losers in history’s great struggles; he enjoys championing underdogs whose societies were eclipsed aeons ago, and thereby forces us to think of our own place in the history of global civilisation. “The Caribbean Taino, the Australian Aboriginals, the African people of Benin and the Incas,” he writes, “can speak to us now of their past achievements most powerfully through the objects they made,” and each of them is featured here.

Because history is written by the victors – and in the case of the Huastec people only after their vanquishers, the Aztecs, were themselves vanquished by the Spanish conquistadores – MacGregor argues that written records can be less objective than the everyday objects that have survived. Similarly, we might not know for certain what the Beijing jade “Bi” ring (1200BC) was actually for, but we know what the Qianlong emperor many centuries later thought it was for. (A bowl stand.)

The 100th and final object is a solar-powered lamp and mobile phone charger. So, after 1.8m years of human development since we fashioned the Tanzanian Olduvai stone chopping tool, during which time our species has wrought such things of beauty as the gold coins of Croesus (550BC), the Moselle Basse-Yutz flagons (450BC), the David porcelain vases of Yushan, China (AD1351), as well as gorgeous objects made from stone, feathers, jade, sandalwood and silver, we have finally come to such a pitch of excellence that our own modern civilisation can be defined by a solar-powered lamp and mobile phone charger.

MacGregor could not have skewered our pretensions better; we too often think ourselves superior to earlier inhabitants of the planet simply because of the chronological – and all too swiftly altered – accident that we are alive. Look at the photographs of the majestic centaur and Lapith on the Parthenon Sculpture (440BC) or the Augsburg mechanical galleon (1585), and then fast-forward through the centuries to our own green plastic solar-powered lamp and mobile phone charger.

Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair.

Andrew Roberts is author of ‘The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War’ (Penguin)

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FT: What inspires Clint Eastwood

What inspires Clint Eastwood

By Emanuel Levy

Published: October 22 2010 23:05 | Last updated: October 22 2010 23:05

Clint Eastwood and Matt Damon

Despite his advanced age (he turned 80 in May), Clint Eastwood is one of the most prolific, versatile and respected movie directors working in Hollywood today.

Over the past six years, he has made seven films, each different from the others in theme, narrative and visual style. Since 2004, he has directed Million Dollar Baby, which won the best picture and director Oscars, the back-to-back second world war movies Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, Gran Torino, his most commercial picture to date, Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie, and Invictus, about South African rugby, in which Nelson Mandela is played by Morgan Freeman.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Helen Mirren interview - Oct-15

Film releases: ‘The Social Network’ Oct 15 - Oct-13

Film releases: Oct 8 - Oct-06

Nollywood comes of age - Oct-01

Film releases: Oct 1 - Sep-29

How ‘Wall Street’ changed Wall Street - Sep-24

His latest is Hereafter, a meditation on fate and mortality, life and the afterlife. Released on Friday in the US, it shows that Eastwood continues to take risks with different kinds of texts. It explores the search of three characters for answers about what lies beyond death. “We don’t know what’s on the other side,” says Eastwood. “People have their beliefs about what’s there or what’s not there, but those are all hypotheticals. Nobody knows until you get there.” He holds that “most people want to believe that there’s something beyond, so in one way or another, we can relate to the story’s core emotions – love, loss, loneliness, connection.”

Hereafter follows the trend for storytelling based on multi-plot, multi-character structure, and the film sets in motion three separate but parallel stories. A tsunami tears through a beach town in Indonesia, dragging Marie, a French journalist (played by Belgian actress Cécile de France), to her underwater death. Meanwhile, in London’s harsh housing estates, an accident separates a pair of twins (Frankie and George McLaren). And in San Francisco, the psychically aware George (played by Matt Damon) disconnects from life to shut out the voices of the dead.

Hereafter marks a departure for the writer Peter Morgan, who is best known for his political dramas (the Oscar-nominated The Queen and Frost/Nixon). Morgan, who also serves as executive producer, wrote the script shortly after losing a friend in an accident.

“My friend died suddenly and violently, and it made no sense,” he says. “His spirit was still so alive around us. At his funeral, I kept thinking, ‘Where has he gone?’ ”

He adds: “As I was writing, I was unaware that I’d created three very lonely characters who were seeking completion. It was a very unusual screenplay for me. Normally, my scripts are researched and based on fact, but this one felt very instinctive, emotional and unplanned, and it was thrilling to write.”

After completing the script, Morgan discussed it with the producer Kathleen Kennedy. Kennedy gave it to Steven Spielberg, who upon reading said, “I know exactly who should direct this – Clint.”

Spielberg’s instinct was right. “The way it was laid out, it seemed to be something I had never seen before, and had such great dilemmas and dimensions,” says Eastwood. “I’ve talked to people who’ve had near-death experiences and there seems to be a similarity in their stories. Most people want to feel or to fantasise that there’s something after death, and most religions seem to believe that there is something after death.”

That said, Eastwood is quick to point out that for him, the emphasis is on the here and now. “I don’t think much about the hereafter, because I feel you’re given one opportunity to live in this world, and you have to take advantage of that and do the best you can. That’s the hand you’re dealt and you have to play it out. If you’re worrying too much about the end of it all, you can’t really live the present of it all.”

. . .

Eastwood cites a line from the character that Jay Mohr is playing (as Matt Damon’s brother): “A life that’s all about death is not a life worth living.” For him, it’s a profound line: “Even when you’re telling a tragedy, it’s through life that you’re telling the story.

“When you approach a scene in a movie, your intuition tells you to do it a certain way. I like to let stories unfold naturally by getting to know the particular characters. In this film, each of the main characters has something the other one needs, a starting point to get on with their lives. They’ve all just got to do the best they can while they’re here.”

More specifically, Eastwood liked Morgan’s story “because it was about a reticent hero, somebody whose life has not turned out the way he would have liked it to but eventually he becomes beneficial to all the characters.”

Although Hereafter portrays George as genuinely gifted, he is aware that the field of psychics and mediums is rife with phonies. “We try to show the legitimacy of what [George] does,” Eastwood notes, “as opposed to the charlatans out there. Whether there are some who are legitimate and others who are not is in the eye of the beholder, but the story does touch on people who take advantage of those wanting to make contact with the dead.”

In making any film, Eastwood says, the main thing is to cast correctly. “The casting mechanism is the most important because that’s what you start off with. I cast actors that I think are intelligent and agree with my vision. Most actors want to play roles they have not done before. You can instruct them a little along the way. Most actors are very co-operative with that, because they’re always looking for somebody to help them search out certain emotions.”

“I think Matt [Damon] is emerging as one of the most important actors we’ve had in a long time, when you look at the body of work and the array of roles he’s taken on,” Eastwood says. “What I like about Matt is that he’s an actor who is not actorish, and his performances reflect that. He is able to perform very subtly, you don’t get the feeling he’s performing.”

What keeps Eastwood going? “I just enjoy working,” he says, “I thrive on it. For me, a good script is usually the inspiration, and I’m always looking for new subject matters because every film is a new challenge for me.”

He elaborates: “I could have been satisfied to stick with the genres I have been doing for years but, the last decade, I’ve been doing a lot of films that were certainly different for me, experimenting with new issues and subjects.”

Eastwood has no intention of slowing down. He is already hard at work on his next project, a biopic of J Edgar Hoover: “Leonardo DiCaprio is eager to play Hoover, and so we’re going to do it together. We’re in pre-production now, and the shoot will begin in early 2011.”

‘Hereafter’ is in US cinemas and goes on release in Europe in January

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Time: A World Map Under Eastern Eyes

Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010

A World Map Under Eastern Eyes

By Michael Elliott

 

What does china really think of the U.S.? Spend some time in the Middle Kingdom, and you'll hear both protestations of admiration and plenty of disparaging comments about the West. Such attitudes have a long history. In 1602 the imperial Chinese court learned that the inhabitants of North America were "kindly and hospitable to strangers." On the other hand, they "kill one another all the year round, and spend their time in fighting and robbery. They feed exclusively on snakes, ants, spiders and other creeping things."

Those lines are written on a map of the world on display at the Library of Congress in Washington through April. The map is so rare — only six copies are known to exist — that to a fan of cartography, its exhibition is a bit like giving a devout Christian a chance to hold the Holy Grail. Prepared for the court of Emperor Wanli of the Ming dynasty by Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary in Beijing, the map places China at the center of the world, just where Chinese scholars thought (and think) appropriate. It was purchased last year by the James Ford Bell Trust from a Japanese collector and will move to permanent display at the University of Minnesota after its sojourn in Washington. (See 25 Asian experiences.)

Ricci, an Italian polymath, was perhaps the most talented of an extraordinary collection of Jesuits who went to China in the 16th and 17th centuries, taking Western learning with them. It was not a one-way exchange: Ming China was no slouch when it came to science and technology, and China's cartographic tradition was long and rich. Ricci's map is thought to be the first Chinese representation of the world as a sphere. But the map is at its most detailed in its depiction of China itself, an indication, as Professor Cordell Yee of St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., says, that Ricci was able to draw on Chinese gazetteers and atlases for his work.

Beyond China and its immediate environs, the map relies on the great European voyages of exploration of the previous 120 years. Unsurprisingly, those areas that had already been settled by Europeans are drawn in greatest detail: the coastline of Mexico, right up to Baja California, for example, is astonishingly accurate, while that of the Northeastern seaboard of North America is much less so. (See 25 more asian experiences.)

To those used to antique Western maps, Ricci's work — displayed here on six tall screens — is not especially beautiful. The map is densely covered not with gorgeous cartouches and drawings of unicorns, whales and horrible monsters of the land and sea but with text, including endorsements from Ricci's Chinese friends and passages naming territories ("Ka-na-ta," for example) and describing the habits of those who live there. That's how we can be sure that Ming China knew about hammocks. In parts of South America, Ricci wrote, "men sleep without beds or mattresses, but make nets of knotted cords. These they suspend from trees and recline in them." (The Library of Congress does not offer a translation of the text, but you can find a good one in the 1918 and '19 issues of the Geographical Journal.)

Seventeenth century Chinese, of course, would have grasped the aesthetics of the map quite differently from the way Occidentals do today. In China, "calligraphy is a visual art," says Yee. Combining European learning with Chinese artistic tradition, Ricci worked to make his map (and his mission) attractive to his Chinese hosts. Ricci, Yee says, "knew his stuff."

That he did. But the display of Ricci's great map is a chance to do more than just gawk at his achievement. There is a popular tendency in the West to see China's modern engagement with global society as something brand-new, the sundering of a hermetic seal by which China walled itself away from everyone else. This is quite false. China has been open to other cultures — and influenced them in its turn — for centuries. There's nothing preordained about how its modern rise will play out; much will depend on the skill with which China's interlocutors conduct themselves. That's one more reason to celebrate a legendary mapmaker and his work, even if he was rather rude about Americans' taste in lunch.

ST, CNNGo: Playground

The Straits Times www.straitstimes.com Life! Home > Life! > Life Arts > Story Oct 7, 2010 Concrete memories A photography show at an upcoming arts festival takes a nostalgic look at 1970s HDB playgrounds By magdalen ng More than 10 of Mr Khor Ean Ghee?s (centre) playgrounds from the 1970s will be featured in the School Of Hard Knocks photography exhibition, put together by photographers Antoinette Wong and Stanley Tan (above). The showcase can be viewed at the Esplanade Tunnel and JCDecaux bus-stop shelters in the city. -- PHOTOS: BENJAMIN NG, LITTLE DROM STORE View more photos   When Mr Khor Ean Ghee designed playgrounds for the Housing and Development Board (HDB) in the 1970s, he never thought that his work would become landmarks in the Singapore landscape. The 76-year-old tells Life! in an interview at one of the old dragon-inspired playgrounds in Toa Payoh Lorong 6: 'We wanted to create something that was distinctive. My boss said to me that all the buildings along Orchard Road were not designed locally. So at least, our playgrounds should be.' Those locally designed playgrounds have etched themselves so deeply into the memories of Singapore children that they have inspired a photography exhibition. The show titled School Of Hard Knocks is in tribute to the steel and concrete playthings and is part of the M1 Fringe Festival which is on from Jan 5 to 16. The annual arts event, organised by The Necessary Stage, has Art And Education as its theme and will feature 19 performances from 10 countries, including nine ticketed and nine non-ticketed programmes. Tickets went on sale yesterday. The School Of Hard Knocks exhibition, which can be seen at the Esplanade Tunnel as well as JCDecaux bus-stop shelters in the city, will be free. More than 10 of Mr Khor's playgrounds from the 1970s will be featured. The people behind the exhibition are photographers Antoinette Wong and Stanley Tan. The couple, who also own Little Drom Store, a shop selling vintage knick-knacks in Ann Siang Hill, are just two of the many children who fondly remember the mosaic playgrounds with structures which took the shape of animals such as dragons, rabbits, penguins and tortoises. 'The playground would be the meeting place for my friends and me every evening and I have so many memories there,' says Tan, 29, who grew up in Pasir Ris, where there was an elephant-shaped playground. The duo, who enjoy snapping pictures of old neighbourhoods, chose photographs for the exhibition from their collection of shots. 'In our explorations, we saw many things that are fast fading away and it's really enjoyable, even talking to owners of old bookshops which just sell mainly stationery,' says the 26-year-old Wong. Through their exhibition, they hope to capture this slice of Singapore history that is slowly disappearing as HDB changes the form and functions of playgrounds over the years. According to an HDB spokesman, playgrounds built in the 1970s and 1980s focused on functional play equipment. That changed in the 1990s, when the HDB wanted to encourage greater interaction among children and their families. Combinations of play equipment were selected to enable children of different ages to exercise through physical play. The focus is now on catering to the family. HDB installs play and exercise facilities for different age groups near one another, so as to meet the needs of different members in the family. These newer playgrounds are also safer, with rubber floors instead of the traditional sandpits, and are made of plastic as opposed to concrete. Wong notes: 'The playground is the place where we learnt through falling down. But these days, the playgrounds are so safe and parents are so protective. They say things such as, 'It's dangerous, don't do that'. 'When we were taking the pictures, we noticed no one plays at these old-school playgrounds anymore. I don't remember having to ask a kid to move so that I could take the pictures.' The Necessary Stage's company manager Melissa Lim, who is also the festival manager, says: 'Perhaps we can also look at how we educate our younger generation, how the nature of their play has changed and re-look our sense of caution and insurance today as they do impact on our learning.' The duo were commissioned by The Necessary Stage to put together the exhibition as their work fits the festival's theme. Ms Lim adds: 'I knew of Stanley and Antoinette's work from some time back and had always liked their ability to capture elements that were fast vanishing from our landscape, not only with a nostalgic gaze but also with a mission to inform and educate their viewers about these same elements.' For the photographers, the show is an opportunity to celebrate the character and charm of old playgrounds, compared to the newer ones. 'No matter where you go, it's the same old thing. We've lost a little of our identity, with the same safe playgrounds manufactured overseas, all over Singapore,' says Tan. Ironically, the man whose works they are celebrating has no sentimental feelings about the same objects. For Mr Khor, it is always about putting the children first: 'There were so many things to consider, such as whether it would be easy to maintain and whether children jumping on it would cause a lot of noise for the residents. But most importantly, I kept thinking about what the kids would like.' He is matter of fact about the new-generation playgrounds imported from overseas: 'In Singapore, we don't have the capability to build the kind of playground equipment we import. Overseas, they have done it for so long, it is tried and tested and safe. It is a good thing.' But Tan has the last word: 'Mr Khor doesn't know how much impact he has had on us.' [email protected] The M1 Fringe Festival 2011 will be on from Jan 5 to 16. For more details on the festival's programmes, go to www.singaporefringe.com. Tickets from Sistic (call 6348-5555 or go to www.sistic.com.sg)     Festival highlights ANOTHER ME: TRANSFORMATIONS FROM PAIN TO POWER By Achinto Bhadra Indian photographer Achinto Bhadra set out to document the experiences of women and children who were sexually exploited for commercial gains. Together with a counsellor, he guided girls and women, aged between eight and 25, through sessions in which they talked about their personal histories and reimagined themselves as mythical beings. They were given props and costumes with which to transform their appearance during a photography session and the resulting 126 portraits are shown in this exhibition. Where: Ion Art Gallery,Level 4, Ion Orchard When: Jan 5 to Jan 16, 10am to 10pm Admission: Free THE R.W. PROJECT By Le Collectif Quartre Ailes Swiss writer and avid walker Robert Walser's work, The Walk (1907), describes a poet's ambling and his observations of the minutiae of daily life. Le Collectif Quartre Ailes, a French theatre group which combines a variety of techniques such as animated images, shadow plays, songs and acrobatics, has adapted the vignettes for theatre. Where: Esplanade Theatre Studio When: Jan 5 and 6, 8pm Admission: $19 and $30 WHAT DID YOU LEARN TODAY By Sean Tobin and Natalie Hennedige This play co-written by Sean Tobin and Natalie Hennedige will star the husband-and-wife team of Lim Kay Siu and Neo Swee Lin. It will explore the role that education plays in everyday life. Where: Play Den, The Arts House When: Jan 13 to 15, 3pm Admission: $19 and $30 AROMASCAPE OF SINGAPORE By Maki Ueda Japanese artist Maki Ueda, who uses scents as her medium, will attempt to capture Singapore through its smells. The work will be created in collaboration with Singaporeans whom she will take on a tour around town to smell the city, from fragrant food stands to salty sea breeze to even garbage. She will capture their scent impressions for her show. Where: Glass Porch, Level 2, Singapore Art Museum When: Jan 5 to 16, 10am to 7pm daily except Fridays, 10am to 9pm

 

Playing with dragons -- Singapore's playgrounds of the past

Remember the days of sand, swings and slides? CNNGo hunts down the last few remaining playgrounds that haven't yet been usurped by plastic modern imports

By Justin Zhuang 30 March, 2010

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Fancy a bumboat ride? No need to go to the Singapore River, just come by Elias Mall in Pasir Ris. This playground is one of the designs that reflected local themes.

A generation of locally designed playgrounds were demolished after they were deemed unsafe for Singaporean children. Here are the last few still standing. Playing with a dragon? That’s no childhood fantasy, but what some Singaporean children growing up in the 1980s had as their playground. It was one of the many designed locally by the Housing and Development Board (HDB) for Singapore’s public housing estates. The design of these playgrounds were inspired by nursery rhymes and children’s games like 'Snakes and Ladders.' There were also those that resembled common objects like fruits, fire engines and clocks. As part of nation-building efforts, playgrounds also reflected Singapore culture -- some were shaped as Chinese bumboats, attap houses and trishaws. By the late 1980s, as more public housing estates were built, playgrounds also reflected the history and geography of a location. For instance, those in Pasir Ris, which were built on reclaimed land, took inspiration from the sea.  However, a decade of local playground design came to an abrupt end in 1993. Just months after the local papers ran an exposé about the public playgrounds' poor state and lack of safety standards, a five-year-old boy got his thumb severed off while playing on a faulty slide. The boy regained the full use of this thumb, but that marked the end of the play areas. Foreign safety experts were flown in to inspect our playgrounds and they were declared unsafe.  A massive upgrading exercise was carried out. The once concrete structures in sandboxes were replaced with plastic modular ones sitting on rubber mats. The HDB also stopped designing playgrounds and bought them from international suppliers instead. Not only did they meet international safety standards, these playgrounds were cheaper to maintain. Today, Singaporean children play in spaces designed like anywhere else around the world. As for these remaining old playgrounds, they will one day be erased in a city that never ceases to upgrade itself. Visit them before they disappear altogether.   The dragon design is so iconic of Singapore playgrounds that it was recently included in an issue of local stamps featuring playgrounds. This one is found along Toa Payoh Lorong 6.     This dove-shaped design debuted together with the dragon playground and this particular one is found in the estate of Dakota Crescent. Together, they marked the beginning of an era of locally designed playgrounds.     A clock-shaped playground design that is found near Bishan bus terminus. This is one of the many designs inspired by common objects.     Play amongst a pelican, rabbit and tortoise at this playground in Dover Vista Park

Read more: Playing with dragons -- Singapore's playgrounds of the past | CNNGo.com http://www.cnngo.com/singapore/play/singapores-playgrounds-yesterday-483500#ixzz11wtzqHBr

FT: Strip Tease - Graphic Novels

Graphic novels

By Tim Martin

Published: September 24 2010 23:17 | Last updated: September 24 2010 23:17

Artwork from ‘X’ed Out’ by Charles Burns

The Unwritten, Volume Two, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross, Titan RRP£9.99, 168 pages

Revolver, by Matt Kindt, Vertigo RRP$24.99, 192 pages

X’ed Out, by Charles Burns, Cape RRP£12.99, 56 pages

Air, Volumes One & Two, by G Willow Wilson and MK Perker, Titan RRP£9.99 per volume, 144 pages 128 pages

Christopher Nolan’s recent £125m blockbuster film Inception concludes with a 45-minute setpiece in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s team of brain-hopping idea thieves descends through nested dreams, in each of which time runs more slowly than in the previous layer.

Any graphic novel fans in the audience would have watched this complex sequence with nods of recognition. But perhaps with sighs of exasperation, too: the film’s showpiece effect – creating the illusion of relative time, of events happening simultaneously but being experienced at different paces – is difficult to achieve in the linear medium of cinema but easily suggested in comics and graphic novels. Inception is rigid with explanatory dialogue to help the viewer interpret the final hour: a kind of endless tutorial leading up to a deft but soulless showpiece.

When it comes to the medium of graphic novels, however, years of experimentation, combined with certain defining features of the form, have resulted in a complex medium that excels at portraying multiple time schemes and shifting conceptions of reality.

Reading a graphic novel is at once a complex and instinctive act. The reader is forced not only to parse several narrative streams – speech bubbles, the silent communication of figurative attitudes and scenic arrangement, repeated visual symbols, often a narrative commentary – but also construe them as a continuous sequence that represents the passage of time. It’s an act we perform without thinking about it, but is nevertheless a complicated piece of translation between the concrete and the abstract.

Four new comics bring radical slants on time, perception and the manipulation of reality to the consideration of some contemporary subjects, among them terrorism, political violence and the destructive nature of celebrity. G Willow Wilson’s Air is a whimsical tale of an acrophobic airline stewardess who develops the ability to mentally transform the world around her. The protagonist of Matt Kindt’s Revolver finds that each night’s sleep transports him between two dramatically different versions of his everyday life. Mike Carey’s The Unwritten spins a complex tale, poised between parody and profundity, about a discontented adult who finds that the universe of his father’s Harry-Potter-like novels has begun to bleed into the real world. And X’ed Out, by the legendarily disturbing writer-creator Charles Burns, brings a deadpan Lynchian approach to the narrative of a head-injured teenager in helpless freefall between dream, memory, reality and hallucination.

G Willow Wilson is a young American comics writer and author of The Butterfly Mosque, an autobiography describing her experiences as a convert to Islam. Air, however, keeps its distance from religion, instead whipping up a Mills and Boonish love story with philosophical notions of the hyperreal in a breathless narrative of airborne terrorism and industrial espionage.

Its protagonist, Blythe, discovers that there is more to the world than she imagined after a sequence of meetings with Zahn, a tall dark stranger who may be a terrorist, a mystic or an avatar of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. Soon she’s plunged into a world of dizzy reversals in which the only constant is the philosophical notion – cribbed from Borges and Baudrillard – that “the map is the territory”, and that by redrawing our impressions of the world we can remake it for ourselves.

Undeniably ambitious, Air belongs firmly to the tell-not-show school of writing. Character and motivation are almost absent as Wilson’s hapless heroine is dragged from pillar to post by an arbitrary narrative fuelled by fitful sub-Buffy quips. More seriously, for a comic that builds its whole narrative on leaping between realities and manipulating time, the layout and structure show a distinct lack of invention: much of the first part reads like a rather dismal storyboard.

Just as hope is flagging, however, Wilson pulls out of the dive, and Air becomes both stranger and more interesting in concept and execution. One extended chapter consists of a sequence of flashbacks in a plane plummeting towards the ground, as Blythe finds herself simultaneously inhabiting the memories of her lover. The level of trickery in this set-up parallels that of Inception but the medium allows Wilson to explore the concept with more freedom. Over several pages, images of a falling, entwined couple are interleaved with the panels. Dialogue from one character appears in the speech bubble of another. A serpent bisects a page of flashback, reaching down from another time scheme or level of reality to interrupt the dialogue.

Although many of the effects used in Air have been bettered elsewhere – in Grant Morrison’s anarcho-magical saga The Invisibles or Alan Moore’s formally daring Promethea, perhaps the arch-example of the comic of ideas – its limited successes serve as a reminder of the strengths of the comic form.

Matt Kindt’s graphic novel Revolver works around a single, but effective, manipulation of narrative time. Each morning its protagonist Sam finds himself waking up either in his everyday life, in which he edits party pictures for a newspaper and participates in empty consumerist fantasies with his girlfriend, or in an America mysteriously bombed flat by terrorist attacks, where he is forced to fight for his life.

Drawn by its author in a scrappy, offhand style that belies a deft grasp of form and scenic arrangement, Kindt’s comic still ultimately feels like less than the sum of its parts. The basic conundrum is attractively realised: are Sam’s days of gun-toting bravado fantasies of control, or is his dull alternate-day job an imaginative retreat from the rigours of destroyed America? For all that, the basic set-up, in which the audience is encouraged to wonder whether a troubled man is hallucinating or not, is becoming something of a familiar trope after Fight Club, The Machinist, Memento and others.

Where Revolver succeeds is not only in Kindt’s attentive ear for dialogue but in the quiet suggestiveness with which his arrangement of panels blurs our perspective on the action. He suggests the frantic, image-haunted mind of his protagonist by occasionally eliding the reader’s perspective with the character’s own, and by allowing small details – a scrap of torn comic in the street, a TV movie, some 9/11 footage – to briefly take hold of the narrative.

Mike Carey’s ongoing series The Unwritten has made a stir in the comics world since its launch last summer, and rightly so: its original and highly entertaining premise comes from one of the most reliably shrewd writers in the medium.

At heart a semi-comic adult fantasy about the nature of story itself, it follows Tommy Taylor, a 21st-century version of Christopher Robin Milne who has the ill luck to have been the hero of a string of eponymous children’s fantasies. Matters rapidly become complicated, however, as Tommy is framed for a sequence of bloody murders and finds the villains from his father’s books beginning to appear in the real world. Carey’s tale is a gloriously haphazard mix of literary references and conspiracy tropes, pulled along by some blockbuster plotting interspersed with gleeful satire on popular successes. “Queensbury”, the fictional publishers of Tommy Taylor, comes in for particular stick, but there’s some unrestrained mickey-taking of Winnie the Pooh, Philip Pullman and other classics too.

The conceit of a story taking form in the real world may not sound novel, but Carey’s irreverent, dextrous approach certainly is. Present-day narrative mixes with dramatised fragments of memory. Distinctions between time and place are collapsed. Bits of prose – from the fictitious Tommy Taylor books to Frankenstein and The Song of Roland – bring in colourful characters who take concrete form in the narrative.

Later instalments in the series promise even more deft manipulations of perspective and reality: the most recent issue of the comic, out this month, takes the form of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, with the story changing depending on which of two options the reader chooses at the end of each page. (Those interested by this premise should also investigate Jason Shiga’s 2009 Meanwhile, in which networks of squiggly lines branch off from each frame of the narrative, providing what its author claims are 3,856 permutations of the same story as well as a distinct feeling of dizziness.)

Last, and strangest, is Charles Burns’s X’ed Out, the first of a projected series of graphic novels by this idiosyncratic writer-illustrator. Burns is revered in comics circles for Black Hole, a surrealist saga 10 years in the making whose last issue appeared in 2005. In grotesque but compelling chiaroscuro, Burns’s pen-and-ink drawings told the story of a group of teens who contract a sexually transmitted disease that turns them into mutants and social outcasts. The author’s subsequent contention that the book was a metaphor for puberty and adolescence came nowhere near to explicating the work’s dark and haunting depths.

X’ed Out is designed in full colour but its seamless and troubling transitions between dream and waking, the real and the imagined, show that Burns has lost none of his touch. Its teen protagonist is confined to bed, gobbling pain pills after a mysterious head injury and afraid to leave the house.

Dreams in which he appears as a Tintin-like caricature, haunting a mysterious desert landscape full of grotesque beings, alternate with fractured instances of supposed lucidity. Images of rivers, veins and blood weave throughout the narrative, and the matte, surreal tinge to its progression through time and memory is heightened by the largely rigid nature of the panelling. Burns withholds many of the traditional devices used to shape a reader’s idea of time and causality in a comic, such as sound effects, motion blurs, panel comments and the like. The effect, as image marches on to image in a space of seemingly infinite stillness, is highly unsettling.

Comics are good at representing complicated sequences in time, and contemporary creators seem particularly interested in constructing stories that place this at the centre. We can posit reasons – abreaction from popular clichés of “comic-book” entertainment, generalised discontent with Hollywood five-act stories, or simple celebration of a medium so suited to non-straightforward entertainment. Whatever its origin, a complex interest in time extends throughout the medium, from the increasing prevalence of original takes on autobiography to the meticulously glum art-theoretical experiments of Chris Ware. Even the new Batman series, written by the veteran comics weirdo Grant Morrison, skips wildly across the epochs of human history as Morrison follows a Caped Crusader who has come adrift in time.

As the medium continues to evolve, this abiding formal interest in a largely unconscious process of perception may come to seem its most defining feature – and the one that stakes out a territory that only this form of art, at once self-evident and complex, can occupy.

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