Oh Dear, I Don't Fancy Yours Much

Exhibition review: Beauty, Victoria Albert Museum.

“Beauty is a way of editing the world”, writes Stephen Bayley in the introduction to this exhibition at the V+A. Yes, but who would want to edit the world?

I’ve always had a soft spot for Stephen Bayley ever since he suggested that Nicholas Serota had no right being the director of The Tate because he drove a Volvo. It was camp nonsense, but it was funny camp nonsense. This exhibition, however, suggests that Bayley may not have had his tongue anywhere near his cheek when he said it.

Ostensibly, ‘Beauty’ is not really an exhibition at all. It’s actually a trail through the V+A’s permanent collection curated by Bayley. You pick up a catalogue at the front desk and follow the pink arrows around the V+A to objects that he has picked out as representing ideals of beauty. Following this trail to the letter, and ignoring everything else on the way, results in an excitingly random crash course in art history. The most obvious enjoyment of the show, however, is to challenge Bayley’s choice of objects and, thus, get to the nub of his own agenda. Such an approach pricks some holes in his wafer-thin notion of beauty and the usefulness of such a term to start with. For, surely, it is ultimately taste - not beauty - that is being celebrated here and, in particular, Bayley’s own hyper-urbane, ‘darling-one-simply-must-have-the-right-corkscrew’ kind of taste.

So off, and skipping some items, we go. Item 1 is Canova’s Sleeping Nymph which, Bayley informs us, has a ‘cold beauty’ that is ‘intensely erotic’. Which is another way of saying that Steven Bayley himself finds cold beauty intensely erotic. Personally, I find Sarah HYoarding from Girl’s Aloud intensely erotic but I’m not sure it constitutes a manifesto. Moving on, we get to admire a genuinely magnificent Chinese Imperial throne and a Samurai sword but ignore a splendid Fisherman’s Celebration Robe, enjoy a Japanese tea ceremony set, take in Michelangelo’s David, by-pass Metalwork in the Netherlands entirely, stop off to admire Donatello and arrive, oddly, at a photo of Brigitte Bardot by David Bailey. The suggestion that a sword, a tea set and Brigitte Bardot all contain some illusive yet transferable quality is unnerving to say the least.

Moving on, we find, unsurprisingly, that Bayley has little time for Victorian Silverware and thus misses out a truly magnificent eight-armed silver plated fruit bowl dispenser and picks some elegant glassware instead. After this, there are a couple of Arts and Crafts items and we are off into ‘The Modern Era’. Swatch watches, leather trousers and Katherine Hamnett’s ‘Stay Alive in ‘85’ t-shirt don’t make the grade but Olivetti’s typewriter somewhat boringly does. I completely missed Dieter Ram’s Braun radio, so I chose the Inter 6 Transistor Folding Portable Radio – which folds into a ‘space bracelet’ which, you have to admit, is pretty cool – instead.

There are no items picked from Marquetry 1650-1700 and we zip through South Asia without a bye or leave. In the Elizabethan paintings section, Bayley highlights a picture entitled Young Man in Roses, which sounds a bit like how he must have felt when they asked him to curate this show. Finally, we end up in the vast room containing Raphael’s cartoons.

Along the way we learn little about beauty but quite a lot about the contents of Stephen Bayley’s head. Many of his selections confirm a pretty orthodox idea of both beauty and value, but the desire to mark out and hold things up as worthy is the compelling psychosis underpinning the show. In his notes, Bayley provides us with some pretty nebulous background as to what beauty might be. “Beauty is much easier to detect than to define”, he says. “Philosopher’s” have apparently “pondered” it. Well, that’s a help. When people are on thin ice they normally reach for the description ‘timeless’ and Bayley grabs for it here. Generally, it’s probably safe to assume that anything dismissed as superficial isn’t, and anything that claims eternal value is hiding its own insecurities. The concept of beauty here then is, perhaps ultimately, more about a fear of ugliness, or of bad taste, than it is a value in its own right.

The Super Streamlined Shiny New Retro-Futuristic Past Is Here, Now.

Film Review: The Incredibles.

In cartoons like The Jetsons and The Flintstones, the 1960’s nuclear family is transported to space or stone age conditions, suggesting that wherever we are in time - whether being chased by a woolly mammoth or teleporting across space - several constants can be relied upon; wives will nag, brothers and sisters will fight and husbands will miserably slope off to work in faceless office jobs. Similarly, In The Incredibles a thoroughly ‘normal’ family of superheroes find themselves facing a life of suburban drudgery after being forced into early retirement by an ungrateful world.

The suburbia in which The Incredibles end up though is a kind of souped-up parody of late 60’s modernism. Spaciously laid out grids of groovy bungalows - Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian house meets John Lautner – spread out for miles in an orderly, conformist utopia. The imagery in the film evokes the techno-modernism of the late ‘60’s but bathed in a nostalgic glow made possible by today’s super advanced computer modelling: everything here seems to shimmer in a retro-haze of rendered perfection. 1960’s suburbia is given a shiny newness it never had at the time whilst its modernity is simultaneously parodied as a period piece. So, cars are super-shapely Stingrays or even-more-outrageous-than-usual Oldsmobiles, the city is a vertigo inducing composite of Metropolis and Batman’s Gotham and the villain lives in the ultimate You Only Live Twice era Bond set.

The film both acknowledges and revels in the irony of re-creating such retro-modernism as silvery mono-rails swooping into hollowed out volcanoes or chrome staircases cantilevered at improbable angles – the groovy futurism of Ken Adam’s Bond sets surpassed visually and rendered by a technology still in its infancy when they were made. Like a beautifully rendered picture of an Amstrad computer, it’s technology looking admiringly at itself in the mirror.

It’s in this relationship between computer technology and the imagery it employs that the film may have something interesting to say about contemporary architecture. In The Incredibles, the latest computer modelling software is used to parody the design dreams of the past. In architecture, the same technology is used to create visions of the future. Nothing is new in The Incredibles, only the technology employed to make it possible. The computers used to make this film burn their way through improbable mathematical calculations in order to make Mr Incredible’s sagging paunch bounce up and down or render the dated Trimphone in his office. The computer render in architecture is (still) seen as a transparent, visionary tool, without its own values or representational codes. There is a functionalist strain of argument in architecture that says computer technology leads inevitably to certain kinds of forms: as if using the computer will lead automatically to a vision of the future. Pixar’s use exposes the fatuousness of this argument, using computers to model, with extraordinary verisimilitude, the chromium shine on a Corvette wing mirror, or the sun as it filters through the jungle mist. Not only that, but that they also achieve infinitely more subtle modulations of tone, atmosphere and, ultimately, value.