Urban Heat Island Riviera
Aug. 20th, 2013 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
millionreasonsOn Saturday, we went to the Royal Academy to look at the The Summer Show. After viewing 1100 paintings (and photos and sculpture), I didn't want to see any artwork ever again. As it's impossible to pick your favourites, I concentrated on how the curators had hung the paintings: one had chosen to order pieces by colour like an idiosyncratic 6 year old - black and white on this wall, primary colours on that, another had controversially gone minimalist with only a couple of paintings per wall, and one room had bee arranged by theme: one wall showed industrial landscapes from Dungeness to Arizona to Azerbaijan.
We also went to the Richard Rogers exhibition round the back in Burlington Gardens, which featured ideas from members of the public on how to make London better:
Theere was also le Centre Pompidou fait du Lego.
Sunday, we went to the Hackney WICKed festival, boats, art, music, ice-cream. The Wick has been Disneyfied: retro-style art murals and blue plaques telling us about the industrial past ("When it rained, you could smell the soap from the Yardley factory!"), which provides a quirky backdrop for the hipsters' drinking and carousing. I don't want to go all Iain Sinclair on your collective ass, but sometimes I just prefer things as they were. Contrarily, my main objection to hipsters is their cultural appropriation of the past. They take things without the meanings attached to them. To hipsters, The Smiths means the same thing as Johnny Hates Jazz (one bar was actually playing Living In A Box by Living In A Box:- I look forward to the It Bites revival). I don't want/need to see or hear those things all over again.
We also went to the Richard Rogers exhibition round the back in Burlington Gardens, which featured ideas from members of the public on how to make London better:
Theere was also le Centre Pompidou fait du Lego.
Sunday, we went to the Hackney WICKed festival, boats, art, music, ice-cream. The Wick has been Disneyfied: retro-style art murals and blue plaques telling us about the industrial past ("When it rained, you could smell the soap from the Yardley factory!"), which provides a quirky backdrop for the hipsters' drinking and carousing. I don't want to go all Iain Sinclair on your collective ass, but sometimes I just prefer things as they were. Contrarily, my main objection to hipsters is their cultural appropriation of the past. They take things without the meanings attached to them. To hipsters, The Smiths means the same thing as Johnny Hates Jazz (one bar was actually playing Living In A Box by Living In A Box:- I look forward to the It Bites revival). I don't want/need to see or hear those things all over again.
