The spring crocuses are opening their spiky purple heads to show bright saffron stamens. I wander through the garden believing that spring may be finally on the way, enthuses the Countess du Ruel. Snow drops blanket the riverbanks and church yards, and soon the daffodils will greet us with cheerful yellow smiles.
Last night I went to an arts event at the Barbican Centre in London. I always forget just how overwhelming the Barbican complex is. When you enter this crumbling vision of the future, you leave contemporary London behind. The Centre imposes its logic on you, and you feel like you've always been aboard it, a vast Gormenghast of a spaceship, rumbling through space for hundreds of years on a mission that its cocooned inhabitants have long forgotten.
The future of publishing is in doubt. Since Apple's iPad launch just over a week ago, an already heated debate has got hotter. The iPad is essentially a magazine-sized iPhone on which you can read news and books (and play games, and send emails, and watch films…) on a rich colour screen. As a reading device, it's still not up there with that old master of reading technology, the book, but it's a powerful force for change.
I know where I stand in the debate about Jeff Koons' talent, sniffs the Countess du Ruel. I'm firmly in the "he's a con man" camp. I've never seen a worse example of phoney, gimmicky art than Koon's first large scale exhibition, the Popeye Series, at the Serpentine, which is running now until mid-September.
For 53 times now the art world has met in Venice (every other year for one week in June), writes the Countess du Ruel.The Venice Biennale is without rival as the greatest contemporary art event in the world. No place can touch it as a venue with gondolas, canals, pizzas, and palazzos swinging into action to provide spectacular backdrops for a glitzy event.
At last something good has come out of the credit crunch, cheers Mrs. M. I'm delighted to hear that over-priced, valueless art, which was part and parcel of the greed culture, is on its' way out...Going, Going, Gone! That at least is something to cheer about.
The spring crocuses are opening their spiky purple heads to show bright saffron stamens. I wander through the garden believing that spring may be finally on the way, enthuses the Countess du Ruel. Snow drops blanket the riverbanks and church yards, and soon the daffodils will greet us with cheerful yellow smiles.
