CONVERSATION FIT FOR A QUEEN?

If you shuffle through the autumn leaves in St James’s Park and take a turn around the current exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, you will find much to feed the eye, and boggle the mind.
The Conversation Piece: Scenes from Fashionable Life is a journey through time. It opens windows on the various ways the rich found to waste their days, but is truly gripped by a more perplexing lifestyle question: how to be a monarch and resemble a human being.

The tour begins in 1632, with an embarrassing daub of Charles I and his queen. Their infant Charles II is about to tumble off a table, but his parents seem not to care. They have plonked their heir there, by crown, sceptre and an olive branch, to send a message. Namely, that the royal family is at peace with its subjects. Sadly, history proved otherwise.

35 paintings and two centuries later, the tour ends with another public family faking a private life. In one, doll-like Queen Victoria simpers at Albert, who has brought her corpses, fresh from a day’s shooting. Sir Edwin Landseer’s brush springs to life depicting their begging dogs, but the waxen couple see only each other. Meanwhile, their toddler daughter fondles a dead kingfisher. With such macabre propaganda, sold in prints, Victoria claimed her people’s hearts.

These two images seem consistent, but if this exhibition were a conversation, it would be a quarrel. (No raised voices, mind; this is Buckingham palace.) Two topics are in dispute. First, what is a ‘conversation piece’? Second, how can royalty, of all people, be trendy? And these questions are beside the real point of the show, a dazzling clutch of canvases by Johan Zoffany.

Where to start? With chipper Fleet Street optician, John Cuff, basking in golden light among the widgets of his trade? Or Queen Charlotte, wan wife of loopy George III, immobilised in her corset as two sons scamper in fancy dress. Tellingly, she touches neither, only her gigantic hound. I began wondering about our current monarch’s affections – corgis versus offspring.

The showstopper is 1777’s The Tribuna of the Uffizi, which celebrates of the Grand Tour. A hubbub of English aristocrats and homosexual collectors leer at naked Venus and Hercules in the octagonal room of the Uffizi gallery, jewel box of the Medicis’ art collection. Zoffany even smuggles in himself, flogging a Raphael to a duke. And the viewer knows not where to look. Each inch is pasted with perfect renderings, at postcard and stamp size, of Rubens, Titians, Holbeins.

This miraculous work has ironic shades. Sent to Italy by Queen Charlotte, Zoffany spent five years living it up in Italy, buying and selling art, while drawing a fat salary. If he hoped to compensate for the long absence with his virtuoso daring, he credited his patron with too much taste. Like most royals, Charlotte was concerned less with fashion than the image she projected. And she would not entertain such tourists, however grand – certainly not on the walls of her apartments. Thus Zoffany’s masterpiece ruined his career.

As a result, the royal collection has only seven works by Zoffany. Hence the broader scope of this exhibition, which tackles questions about the conversation piece, a style of painting that became fashionable in Britain in the 1730s, influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch family portraits (a mixed bunch are on display). Such works are concerned with conversation in its oldest sense, ’social interaction’. They show groups, at less than life-size, engaged in posh hobbies. So they are about wasting time elegantly – about being genteel, not regal.

Can you imagine a relaxing conversation with Queen Victoria? Exactly. But if this exhibition is not what it pretends, it is fun, and suggestive.

The history of the conversation piece echoes the history of conversation as an art, which was an idea born in conversazione, parties of wealthy Renaissance Italians. It evolved in seventeenth-century salons of aristocrats tired of Versailles. Then Dutch merchants aped French manners, then the conversation morphed again in England, with the boom in newspapers, coffee shops, and that mercurial beast, public opinion. If the art of conversation was a democratic force, the conversation piece celebrated the middle class, seizing power off those lumpen Hanoverian kings.

So instead of ‘conversation pieces’, this exhibition presents those Hanoverians, playing at gentlefolk, in vistas reminiscent of Hello! magazine. There are some fine Stubbs, merry-go-round horses, and panoramas of ladies tugging up stockings while high and low promenade along Pall Mall. But nothing more hilarious than puce George IV by his phaeton (the eighteenth-century Ferrari), of whom Thackeray sneered ‘he signalized his entrance into the world by a feat worthy of his future life. He invented a new shoebuckle.’

And say hello to the forgotten Prince of Wales, Frederick, at his cello. Had he survived, how cultured might the Windsors be? And on another wall, there is his secret society, ‘la table ronde’, of groupies in military garb, reading each other speeches. Do William and Harry declaim sonnets in Mahiki? I doubt it.

So go and look, and laugh.

 

As seen in The Lady magazine

THE WISDOM OF ADULTERY

Is sexual liberation over? You may think so, reading Jealousy, the sequel to The Sexual Life of Catherine M. In it, lusty Parisian academic Catherine Millet, who hung out with the whores in the Bois de Boulogne, reveals something controversial: a heart. When her man slept around, she went barmy.  

Hypocrisy is the most logical attitude to infidelity, as it fuses many issues, and beliefs about it formed in a world very different to our own.  It has a religious dimension.  As an infidel betrays God, so infidelity betrays the faith between two people.  The assumption is that loyalty in body, mind and spirit are interchangeable.  But arguably, people began disapproving of infidelity for a more practical reasons, to stop rows about property.  

Avid debauchee Alexandre ‘Three Musketeers’ Dumas lamented, ‘Why is what was called cuckoldry in the seventeenth century called adultery in the nineteenth?’  His answer was inheritance law.  Once, first-born sons got it all, then the law changed, giving every child a portion of the estate.  So husbands who once worried only about the paternity of their heir grew to fear every cuckoo in the nest.  And society grew fiercer about female infidelity, while in men a mistress remained a badge of success.   

Female sluts got it in the neck since Eve bit the apple.  Katie Price is slated for cavorting with her cage fighter.  But male sluts are less tolerated than before.  The court of public opinion is still out on randy Ashley Cole, while Cheryl is a latter-day saint for fighting for her love.  But for those whose private lives are private, now we have DNA-testing, good contraception, fidelity seems less relevant.  With the internet and the liar’s friend, the mobile phone, slipping the marital leash is ever easier.  Why can’t we act on passing fancies without breaching emotional loyalty? 

I understand infidelity’s fans.  Yet I believe monogamy, with the right person, is the least-worst path through life. Even empty sex threatens a relationship, as nobody can guarantee it will not come to mean more.  This belief is less old-fashioned than imagining that mind rules body, like 17th-century rationalist, René Descartes.  On the contrary, scientists have found neurochemicals released in sex, vasopressin and oxytocin, mean that where lust leads, territorial feelings often follow.  Love and sex, mind and body, are as interchangeable as ever.

IS IT ART?

IS IT ART?

My husband’s godson Theo (3) is a painter of genius. Thank-you notes come daubed in cubist rainbows, with titles (e.g. ‘Bacchus, drunk’) added by dad. We’d like to nurture Theo’s talent, but I’m worried we’ll ruin his fun. A recent study found children paint happily until told it is for a certificate, then instantly their enthusiasm plummets. Perhaps this is why traditionally we like artists starving in garrets. If they’re glum, we can believe their work is serious.

What is art? The question is slightly pointless. If something provokes you to ask it, and was designed to, it must be. Art’s job is to be contemplated, be it a busker’s performance, Marcel Duchamp’s upside-down urinal, or Piero Manzoni’s canned turds.

What people mean by this question is ‘Is it any good?’ It can be hard to tell, as I found at the ICA, working on perplexing events like the Naked Poetry Festival. The greatest talent, Steve McQueen, revealed to me how much an artist’s task is to convince us of his value. Wisely, he refused to supply publicity videos: no, his films were ‘installations’ (worth thousands). He understood that we rate art by its price. If Charles Saatchi coughs up £5,000 for a pipe, you know you’re not dreaming: it is Art.

Charles Darwin speculated that all futile delights – art, music, jokes – evolved from sexual competition. Whether or not ancient cave painters did it to impress lovers, you can be sure they wanted to depict their horses well. Once cash entered the equation, artists needed a new skill: to grab attention. Michelangelo was discovered after burying a sculpture and selling it to a cardinal as an antique. (The cardinal realised, laughed, and summoned him to Rome.) Art developed in social competition between artists and patrons, showing off. A patron sent one message – ‘My Madonna and Child has more gold leaf than yours’ – while the artist sent another, ‘Look at what I can do’.

Now ads, TV and colour are everywhere, visual competition is intense, and beauty, cheap. So art has a new task. It need not be gorgeous, but must do more than distract: it must seize imagination. Hence anti-social art has risen to the top. The Chapman Brothers are no Michelangelos, yet they are great. Because they make us ask, ‘Is it art?’

TRUE ROMANCE

This morning my husband left me.  Thank God.  We are in the Malvern hills.  He expected a holiday but I must write.  (Coincidentally, about couples screwing up leisure.)  The sun is in, mist yields myopic views, and two loved-up newlyweds are building a house ten yards away.  Deafened by the cement mixer, they shout – right now, about a boil on the man’s arse.  Meanwhile my husband is hiking in Wales.  His parting shot: ‘Work hard.’  Mine: ‘Shove off.’  

 

Our break isn’t going to plan, but may yet be salvaged.  Romance is a matter of taste, and while the newlyweds happily bray their sweet nothings, that isn’t how we do love.  Forget Dirty Dancing: give us Cary Grant cussing Katie Hepburn!   Our defining romantic story was a disastrous honeymoon, with the punchline that he forgot my birthday.  (‘What do you mean, present?  I just gave you a helleymoon!’)  Still, this holiday may beat it.  Provided he comes back.

 

Romance is always a story.  The word reeks of Mills and Boon, but the original romances were epics of knights, monsters, and unattainable married princesses (then, marriage was about anything but love).  Nowadays there is a set romantic script by which to tell love.  Or so vendors of satin hearts and teddy bears hope we believe.  Such tokens are the bastard spawn of ritual gifts traditionally exchanged between courting couples (their value conveyed the gravity of intentions).  But conventionality may undermine romance.

Rituals are far from empty gestures.  They have the power to imbue experience with not only greater significance but also pleasure.  Psychologists find that if you make tea in a certain way, then drink from your favourite cup, it truly tastes better.  Only to you, of course, but then you are the one who matters.  It tastes better because our brains form neural circuits, and anticipation increases the release of dopamine, the joy chemical.  

 

It is a mistake to accept the pro-forma romance script and expect your relationship to fill in the gaps.  Instead, form personal rituals.  Have a song that is yours; routinely set aside fifteen minutes a day to chat and do nothing; make the effort to tell each other tales about your off-beat bliss.  Do this and your love should resonate deeper and last longer.  You may become smug bastards, braying sweet nothings.  But happy smug bastards.  

ARE WE IN LOVE, OR VICTIMS OF CO-DEPENDENCE?

Did greedy doctors invent sex addiction to grab a piece of the divorce lawyers’ action?  I only ask because commitment anxiety is rising, and not just adultery is being diagnosed as a disease.   Fidelity, too, is suspect.  Are you married, cohabiting, eyes for no other?  Might you be – whisper it – co-dependent?

 

I am married and I am independent.  Or so I thought.  However, my spouse and I depend on each other.  So the increasingly common term ‘co-dependence’ worried me. It sounds vague.  But my dictionary says that a co-dependent couple features one who is an addict, and another who is addicted to their relationship with the addict.  So me and my husband are okay.  But then it struck me the definition is slippery.  What if the addict is addicted to the relationship?  And what if a co-dependency therapist had advised Victorian poet Robert Browning? Would he have eloped with ageing, invalid opium addict Elizabeth Barrett?  Would we have their great love story?

 

‘In a codependent society,’ warns therapist Robert Burney, ‘everyone has to have someone to look down on, in order to feel good about themselves.’  Sounds like human nature.  By this measure, love between any two imperfect or unequal individuals is unhealthy, and caring is suspect (caring could be ‘looking down’ in disguise).  Is there such a thing as a relationship without any power imbalance?  Isn’t one of the benefits of a relationship that you don’t have to be best at everything?

 

Burney is not the first to view love with a surgeon’s suspicion.  ‘My love is as a fever, longing still/For that which longer nurseth the disease.’  In this sonnet Shakespeare described a disorder called romance, which traditionally occurred outside dull marriage (which was for babies, money, and dynasties).  Only in the seventeenth century did married love come to be regarded the summit of human fulfilment.  In our crowded world, such a belief is less tenable.  

 

Twenty-first century romantics must commit to their job, friends, home, kids.  Even had we the time, it is harder to be confident about prioritising one relationship.  Fear of monotony, worry about monogamy, have increased our faith in other people’s right to talk us through our lives, and tell us how to live them.  But if we over-diagnose our emotions, our love stories may end before they’ve begun.

 

 

What is your quintessence?

Do you know who you are?  Yesterday I faced a metaphysical puzzle — of the nicest kind — whenI was  interviewed by my charming namesake Cathy Blythe for KFOR in Lincoln, Nebraska.  Resisting the temptation to ask the questions was difficult.  Was she talking to me?  Or I to me?  At least we had the e to separate us.

Metaphysical questions about words and names have been circling me for weeks, since the nice chaps at Wordia.com asked me to talk about the word quintessence.  They are devoted to celebrating language, from etymologies to personal definitions, in an on-line video archive.  This enterprise is the brainchild of Bebo co-founder, Michael Birch.  Since language is constantly evolving, and quarreled over, Wordia is a brilliant forum for capturing meaning on the wing, and pinning it to the fleeting sentiments with which we launch our words at one another.  If you have a favourite word and would like to tell the world about it, drop them a line.  

Here were my thoughts…

 

Quintessence is an odd word.  Everyone knows what essence means.  So that quint part tacked onto the start sounds unnecessary.  Ornamental.  Pretentious.  A little bit camp, a little bit snobby.  Indeed one definition of the word quintessence is as a superlative, as a term of praise.  If you are the ne plus ultra, the last word in fashion, you might be called the quintessence of fashion.  You have IT.  

 

So what is IT?  Another sense of the word quintessence is ‘definining characteristic’ — meaning, the essence of your essence.  But this is rather like saying ‘your most perfect perfection.’  It is a tautology.

However, originally quintessence meant something quite specific meaning.  It referred originally to the fifth element.  The first four were air, water, earth and fire; the mysterious quintessence was thought to be the substance of which the heavens and gods were composed.  Capture the quintessence and you would have the divine within your grasp.  Once upon a time, this elusive quantity was supposed to be latent in every substance.  So alchemists did not merely strive to turn lead into gold.  They sought also to extract the quintessence from base metals.  Hence it was also used as a verb – meaning, to distil or remove the essence from something.  

 

Although fond of this absurd word, I can’t hear it without picturing someone who wears overly complicated clothes, with lots of unnecessary frills and fringes.  The type of person who adds several extra vowels to words like Hellooo and Chic.  Because pretty as quintessence is, it sounds the essence of pretension.  Not to mention illogical, and far too long.  If it were up to me, I’d take the essential part and the quint could go hang.  

THE JOY OF BOREDOM

Could you bore someone to death? There’s no proof, although the entertainment provision in many care homes suggests this isn’t for want of trying. According to the poet Philip Larkin, ‘Life is first boredom, then fear.’ But far from a timeless feature of the human condition, boredom is fairly modern, and we haven’t always feared it.

In medieval times, after long days hacking fields, people weren’t bored, but fervently desired, as old graves do, ‘Rest in Peace’. The verb ‘to bore’ only sauntered into English around 1750, ‘boredom’ making its debut the following century, on the arm of languid Lady Dedlock in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. Leisure mass-produces boredom. Hence, while 52 per cent of Britons rated themselves ‘very happy’ in poor, hard-working 1957, only 36 per cent did by indulged, consumerist 2007.  It seems the richer we are, the harder we seek happiness, and the harder it is to find. Fear of boredom is part of the problem.

Admittedly, bores aren’t endearing. When cornered by one, the sensation of life ebbing away – and going on elsewhere, where people laugh and the sun still shines – is painful. Although it feels like a hostage situation, the underlying issue is lack of imagination. Malign bores sense no obligation to engage our interests. Benign bores don’t sense their interests aren’t universal. Too often, however, the fault is our own; we’re not extending imaginative hospitality, neither listening nor attempting to steer conversation somewhere less dull. Instead, like lazy consumers, we sit back, wait to be entertained, then call the other person boring.

Boredom has two causes: too much of something or too little. Similarly, there are two extremes of bore: amateur lecturers, and silent types. To make either interesting, you must make them take turns. In this sense, bores can help sharpen our wits. And boredom in general spurs imagination, because through it, we learn to amuse to ourselves. Anthropologist Ralph Linton argued, “Capacity for being bored, rather than man’s social or natural needs, lies at the root of cultural advance.”

Imagine if everybody was happy, all of the time. How dull would life be? Imagine if kids were never allowed to be bored, but the instant they whinged, plonked in front of TV – teaching them to sit back, and wait to be entertained. Can you imagine that?

STRIPPING OFF

Despite fierce Portuguese heat, I’m not writing this in my bikini. If it sees the light of this holiday, it will be for the briefest moments, between plunging into the pool and jumping out, into the coy embrace of a kaftan. You will gather I’m no fan of stripping off. This has many advantages. Friends police their pubic perimeters, ripping out innocent hairs in procedures that surely breach the Geneva convention. They call me inhibited. I consider them victims of a deceptive, bullying mindset.

Gok Wan became the patron saint of unnecessary nudity with a TV show that persuaded curdy women to parade their unfettered wares before a laughing crowd. Nobody seemed to doubt this event was empowering. But to equate nudity with liberation, and clothing with inhibition, is at best, lazy thinking. In the 1960s ugly men used similar arguments to persuade women to shag them.

Why should one’s pride be defined by what one is or isn’t wearing? Well, clothes are cultural artefacts: their stylishness lies as much in the beholder’s interpretation as the wearer’s intention. Equally, to strip is a social act. It doesn’t liberate you from other people’s opinions. Quite the reverse: challenging taboos requires spectators. Which is why stripping is really about power (it comes from a thirteenth-century word for plunder). Context dictates who is in charge. And when bellies, thongs and muffin tops come out to play, my privacy is being invaded too.

As computers dissolve the boundary between public and private, and Jordan becomes an icon to under-10 girls, self-display is increasingly de rigueur. What do we throw away with our inhibitions? To me, deprivatising our bodies cheapens the privileges of intimacy. The world-wide waste of time hosts a porno harem of multitudes. Booming plastic surgery on the fruits of Mars and Venus suggests people are both watching and concluding that their own, formerly private parts, are unfit to be seen. The aesthetics and ethics are intertwined because images change how we see ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d defend to the death your right to wear your birthday suit. In your home, garden, or on a designated beach. But I’d rather eat Brüno’s hot pants than wear mine for you.

I SWEAR TO YOU

When Boyz II Men sang “I swear”, romantic girls swooned.   But these plaintive words make me shudder, and not just when they’re crooned on X Factor.  Invariably “I swear to you” precedes an unwelcome admission.  The swearer isn’t arguing: oh no, the heirloom is broken, and yes, the plane tickets are in his briefcase.  At home.  But he swears he didn’t mean to.  And if I doubt his word, he is entitled to be angry with me.  Devious, isn’t it?

 

Emotional manipulation is just one of swearing’s powers.  Whatever you tell your mother, I bet you love letting rip, but don’t care to be sworn at.  What is troubling isn’t simply the limited vocabulary of whoever is cursing, which suggests that violence may ensue.  Swearing disturbs an antique thing called honour.

 

Once, swearing invoked magic.  The word derives from an Old English word for ‘answer’, because it was part of an exchange.  Devotees of Sulis, the goddess at Bath spa, would hurl curses, inscribed on pewter or lead, into Sulis’s spring, begging her to melt the eyes of the rotters who had stolen their boots.  Like the coins we toss into wishing wells, these were bribes, hoping for answers.  Equally, to plight your troth (pledge your truth) made you answerable for your promise.  If not, your good name would be lost.  

 

‘Son of a bitch’ still impugns somebody’s honour, not to mention his mum’s.  Unless he  answers back, with word or fist, he’s the loser.  Such vendetta logic makes an-eye-for-an-eye sense, but ends only when there’s no honour left to be redeemed, i.e. one side is dead.  That’s why an entire Corsican clan bought it over a disputed chestnut tree.  And that’s why civilisation favours virtues like forgiveness, which ask us to answer not to our honour but our conscience.

 

 Today shame and magic are as unfashionable as vows, and potty mouth is a term of endearment.  While gangs pursue honour, the rest of us bang on about self-esteem, and swear to nobody in particular, to vent out frustration.  We don’t fear, like our grandparents, that it will turn the air blue, let alone blacken our name, or bother the gods.  It’s a shame, because the magic of swearing was that people took their words seriously.

As seen in ES magazine

BUSINESS CONVERSATION TIPS

Gabe wanted to know more about some businessy conversation books.

Here are various suggestions, from Debra Fine’s Fine Art of Small Talk (very specific primer type read); then there is the superb business study, The Social Life of Information, by Duguid and Seely Brown; Linda Conway Correll’s Brainstorming Reinvented (exactly what it says it is); and at the more academic end, Cliff Figallo and Nancy Rhine’s Building the Knowledge Management Network: Best Practices, Tools and Techniques for Putting Conversation to Work.

A user-friendly guide (despite the off-putting title) is The Top Performer’s Guide to Conflict, by Tim Ursiny and Dave Bolz. And if you like negotiation, or would like to enjoy it more, Getting to Yes by William Ury is pretty illuminating.

Happy reading.