Time’s running out for Cork Street, one of the world’s pre-eminent venues for the fine arts. Take a moment and append your name to the e-petition and let’s do whatever it takes to save something unique in the art world.

SAVE CORK STREET

What was strongly hinted by friend and colleague Elliot Lee is now official- art galleries along vaunted Cork Street have been told by the new property owner that their leases will not be extended beyond June of next year. Although it is reported that the effected dealers, including that most venerable of modern art venues Mayor Gallery, will be offered some sort of compensation, whatever the offer it will only  amount to a token compared to the damage done. In a fickle business like the art and antiques trade, anything that interrupts trading is for all intents and purposes a death knell.

As with so much of the West End, as with Madison Avenue in New York, dealers are displaced by mass market retailers, mostly clothing, nearly all of whom are outlets of chains publically owned whose volume of business and stronger capital structure enables them to pay far, far greater rent than galleries, nearly all of which are privately owned and single outlet.

One has to ask the question how many Fendi stores are needed in the world? Mind you, I’m not trying to deprive Karl Lagerfeld with a way to make a living, but the original location in Rome seemed, as it had for the first 75 years of its existence, adequate to serve the beau monde. The proliferation of international couture functioning as it does now to push out locally distinctive business, ultimately yields to shopping venues that might be seen anywhere. Why visit Rome to shop the Via Condotti when one can go to the local mall? Givenchy at Wal-Mart? The mind reels.

I hate to consider the prospect of London, in the current case, moving toward losing its identity as arguably the world’s leading art market city. What provides more for the ferment of the cutting edge than leading private galleries whose ownership maintains the vision and courage to mount exhibitions that might otherwise remain unseen? Where would post impressionism be if not for the groundbreaking exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1914? City planners, certainly in London, realize that any number of specific urban characteristics- and that prominently includes art galleries- contribute to the benefit of the commonweal by their presence, consequently yielding development of conservation areas as a safe haven- but in the short term, who can stand up to the financial onslaught of mass market retailers?

A further irony here, more apparent perhaps in the US but moving inexorably toward Europe, the advent of internet shopping has thinned the bricks and mortar presence of all manner of storefront, even luxury retailers. Witness the vacancies along vaunted thoroughfares like our own Post Street in San Francisco, a victim to the inexorable phenomenon of the virtual displacing the actual. Though vacancies now ostensibly making leaseholds more affordable, the predations of the last several years have now rendered galleries to fill in the gaps the status of ‘former’ and nothing but a memory.

Not so long ago, a spate of emails came through from a dealer friend, bitterly decrying how a mass market furniture retailer had done him wrong by knocking off a piece in his inventory- a vintage industrial type hanging lamp. Deeply angry as he should have been that he, working hard as he does to try and find unique items to offer through his galleries, to then be victimized by a company whose sole intention was to mine his taste and effort- without compensating him for it.

As it happens, about the same time we received an internet inquiry from a lady in England on a set of 12 dining chairs, Louis XVI in style, but made by Maison Jansen and originally installed in a Jansen-designed villa in Mexico City. Although she complimented us on the chairs, the punter remarked that she had seen similar chairs offered through an online sales platform for less. My fingers nimbly sprang into action, and I found the same chairs, or should I more accurately say, the very roughly similar chairs, with the online descriptive text giving the vaguest of vague hints as to a relationship with the Paris decorating firm.

On the same day, a huge catalog arrived from the ere mentioned mass market retailer, showing yet another example of similar chairs, newly made, for a fraction the price of even the cheaper Louis VXI style chairs offered through the online source. I made a point of going to the retailers’ local showroom to examine their offerings, to get a sense of what might make the cheapest even cheaper, and so much more so. And it was cheaper in every sense- mediocre timber, not much detail, and fairly poor quality craftsmanship, and pretty basic upholstery. A knockoff of an earlier style, but certainly not a copy, and by the by, it was one of masses of similar pieces, all sharing the same sort of period inspiration- but sharing the same dearth of period quality.

It occurred to me, though, much as I would like to decry the hawking of inferior goods, this was price point merchandise, and it was young-ish folk who were inside looking to buy. I always tell my own clients to hold on to your money until you can purchase something of good quality, but the fact is, that money is sometimes rather slow in coming, and sitting on camp stools or folding chairs gets pretty old after a few months. Yes, these pieces I’ve heard so often described as ‘early marriage’, giving a chronology to their period of acquisition, will doubtless be the garage sale items of the not so distant future, but the fact of the matter is, what was on offer at the retailer had a period appearance, albeit a poorly executed one, and consequently gave me some degree of hope. People buy what they like, at a price they can afford, and if it is something of a period design, eventually, if the gods of an improving economy remain sufficiently propitious, the looks like but not really the same will be replaced, in the fullness of time, with the genuine article. Hope does spring eternal.

But for the moment, I have to content myself with the realization that knockoffs of period items are now and have for generations been firmly entrenched. And, at the end of the day, what did Maison Jansen do very much of the time but restate, even to the point of literal reproduction, those items of an earlier day. Doubtless 18^th century ebeniste Georges Jacob would have been no happier than his modern colleagues to see his pieces knocked off- even a century on and even by a house as vaunted as Maison Jansen.

An article in a travel magazine discussed the prevalence of billionaires amongst a local university’s recent graduates, related, it seems to its proximity to Silicon Valley. That these billionaires all had some sort of computer science background in common as well should be no surprise even to those of my readers, some of whom are some distance removed from the local area who possibly may still use quill and ink.

It’s also no great surprise that so many of these newly minted grandees should end up so wealthy. Wealthy on paper, at any rate, as doubtless most of them have assets- net of BMWs and Lamborghinis and Porsches, of course- mostly composed of restricted issues of stock or other business equity,  the result of some IPO or takeover or investment from the myriad venture capital firms that proliferate in the greater Bay Area. The plain fact is, despite the economic doldrums, we exist in an environment capital rich for certain, read ‘tech’, industries.

When thinking about the less tangible but ever so present products of technology- search engines, social networking sites, and any other manner of ostensibly free online services- the question is begged about what it is they have in common. The answer is- everything, at least in so far as success in this virtual world is measured. They are all reliant upon online advertising for their revenue stream, which advertising amounts to precious little- witness the numbers of heavily capitalized companies that either are marginally profitable or have yet to become so. For ourselves, our foray into internet advertising lasted only a couple of months and netted us nothing but a bill from the search engine. With all that, enough businesses large and small have the occasional flutter that, presumably, there exists at least one plus new advertising punter for each one that drops out.

There also seems to be a notion abroad that, lacking profit, site activity itself has some not quantifiable but nevertheless tangible value, with each site hit yielding some kind of personal information that may provide some valuable marketing information in the future. Seems reasonable, I suppose, but, looking at my daily junk folder, whatever personal information has been gleaned about me results almost entirely in ads for Viagra and knock-off wrist watches. If the sources of any of those emails reads this- for the record, my extremities both above and below the waist are well kitted out, thank you very much.

Still and all, something good must be happening, because the local unemployment rate is about the lowest in the nation, and local real estate economy is ticking along nicely. And I guess luxury car sales must be pretty good. But the economic strength that most would admit is largely a local phenomenon shouldn’t occlude the fact that for a very limited number of fortunate individuals, they happened to be in the right place at the right time, doing the right job.

Watching Alan Bennett’s television play ‘A Question of Attribution’, one is unfortunately reminded that the legacy of Anthony Blunt is almost entirely of the traitorous fourth man in the Cambridge spy ring whose politically motivated exposure in 1979 was, it seems, solely to provide the Thatcher government with a whipping boy.  That his exposure also greatly embarrassed the crown, working as he had been as surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, and knighted in the process, Thatcher’s short term goal of providing transparency in government further distanced her from the queen, with whom she had at the best of times a chilly relationship.

Occluded in all this, though, is the extraordinary art historian that Blunt was. If one doesn’t know anything else, one should know that Blunt was almost entirely responsible for a rescue and consequent recognition of the baroque as an important epoch, and elevating Poussin and Borromini to canonical status within the period.

Moreover, before and during his tenancy as director of the Courtauld Institute, he moved the discipline from a crudely fashioned empiricism into the contextual analysis that forms the backbone of not only modern art historical consideration, but virtually all aspects of study involving material culture. With all that, he was serious about scholarship, and had no time for what is politely termed ‘appreciationism.’ A painting may say something to a body, but that aesthetic interchange, unless one is looking just to decorate the walls, is largely irrelevant. One can’t possibly know entirely how a picture was perceived within its contemporaneous context, but it is that context, albeit only partly apprehended, that is crucial to achieving the all important site of meaning.

Why it was that Blunt decided to spy for the Soviets is impossible to say. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time’, that time being the era of economic and political ferment of the mid 1930’s, seems the oft given but inadequate response to what remains still an open question. In her excellent recent biography of Blunt, Miranda Carter tries to give some indication of Blunt’s Marxist leanings, concluding something pervasive in Blunt’s point of view that also influenced his critical analysis of paintings. However, Blunt’s own identification of a particular painting as either aristocratic, bourgeois, or proletarian, while indicative of class division, is hardly conclusive of class struggle.

My own career in art history post dates that of Blunt, but fortunately, it has overlapped and been influenced by very many who knew and were taught by him. The opinions are, unanimously, positive nearly hagiographic ones, and mercifully apolitical, of a scholar whose scholarship was rigorous and impeccable, whose lectures and seminars were a joy to attend, and whose attention to students was sincere and conscientious.

At last- a new blog entry from Michael.

Something I am pleased now to be well enough to resume is taking the San Francisco Municipal Railway. The walk to and from the Muni station at the bottom of our hill is salubrious for the body, and that taking public transportation is moreover the right thing to do should put everyone in a positive frame of mind. With all that, the proliferation of handheld devices and coffee bars has made the interior of the cars these days a welter of elbows. Possibly I’m a bit perspicacious, as the presence of protuberances so near and at torso level makes me wince- the result, perhaps, of having my chest nearly caved in in a car crash a couple of months ago.

Trying to set my own I hope temporary phobia aside, doubtless others, including those offending, are bothered by their near neighbors’ behavior, browsing aimlessly on their handheld devices, and sucking through the takeaway cover, blithely ignoring the signs posted prohibiting eating and drinking on the train. All of this is of course made the worse with the crowded presence of backpacks and folios, all of a size one would require to scale Everest without a Sherpa guide.

Mind you, I don’t travel a vast distance on Muni- just five stops from Church Street to Montgomery Street- but for myself, I don’t feel the need to tinker with my iphone or risk the lurching of the train causing me to pour an inadvertent mouthful of boiling coffee down my gullet. I rather enjoy the people watching, and, absent anything worth looking at, just a few moments to be lost in my own thoughts. My own suggestion to Muni would be to play a continuous loop of japa meditation. It would certainly do everyone plenty of good, and the change from elbows akimbo to upturned palms would be, for me at least, a welcome one.