The Blackberry Walk

I hope to be the first person to write about these two figures together. After laying siege to Jerusalem, Titus, the son of Vespasian, brought home the grand riches of the temple. Nothing left of the temple stands except for a single wall - now known as the Wailing Wall - which Titus permitted to leave standing. The loot, and some enslaved Jews, were to be paraded in the first triumph Rome had seen for many years, and the Flavian dynasty's position was now secure. What was Vespasian to do with the loot? Coming from a stock of gentlemen farmers, and being a military man, he had little time for splendour and excess. He was, for an emperor, ascetic in nature. He inherited Rome, after three short-lived emperors within a year, from Nero, a man whose name is synonymous with excess. As a man of great power and appetite, Nero lived a life of luxury and decadence unparalleled. One such building was the Domus Aurea, translated to the 'Gold House', which was the palace of Nero, his pride and joy. Vespasian, being a man who found such opulence shameful, stripped much of the palace complex of its riches, and put to use the excessive palace grounds. Before Nero's death, the Gold House was filled with treasures taken from around the world, but Vespasian again wasn't interested. Instead, Vespasian built what can only be understood at a museum. Known as the Temple of Peace, this proto-museum housed the great treasures of the empire, and the loot Titus took from the Temple of Jerusalem. And what's more the public could go and see it. The public of course wasn't everyone in Rome, of course - slaves weren't part of the public, because they weren't citizens - but any Roman citizen could go and see the great bejewelled loot the Romans had won over the years. In a sense, this was also an art gallery. It was a place where beautiful things - perhaps even thought provoking things - could be displayed and contemplated by the public. Two-thousand years later, Tracy Emin is a British world-famous artist. As a poster-child for the much hated 'modern art' her pieces have been sold for incredible sums, and are pride of place in galleries like the Tate Modern. Many use the phrase 'modern art', but it's a very fuzzy phrase. Modernist art, like the works of Wyndam Lewis, are most likely not what's being rallied against. Then many will refactor their argument to post-modern art - but there are some good post-modern art pieces also like 'The Bigger Splash', which again aren't quite what's being rallied against. What offends so many about Tracy Emin's work is that it's nothing. One of her most famous works, titled 'My Bed' is just a very messy bed with litter strewn across the side. Thought provoking perhaps, but there is no beauty in it. Outside of an art gallery, it is just a messy bed. But if you took the emerald encrusted crown of the Pharaohs outside of the Temple of Peace, it would still be a thing of wonder and marvel. The Russian film director Tarkovsky has made some very eerie works. He uses long panning shots, washed out colours, and most famously let's the camera stare at a scene for an uncomfortable amount of time. It let's you think about a scene, truly think about a scene or an image, and let the wonder seep into you. You make this effect at home. I have made this effect at home. We have a cabinet in my house where we place an item of the month. We place the item on a small stand, under a small LED spotlight, and you can look at it and think about it every now and then. For instance, we had a lock which had to be cut open with bolt-cutters, and the lock sat on in the display cabinet for a month. One doesn't think about ordinary objects for very long in everyday life unless you properly sit and spend time with it. Many claim they don't feel connected to great works of art in the same way they do to movies; but for a film you spend two hours watching, whereas most don't give a painting more than five minutes. Appreciation of beauty requires time. Appreciation of objects requires time. Hideaki Anno uses the lift scene in Eva to give you time to contemplates Rei and Asuka's relationship. Mamoru Oshii, a devotee of Tarkovsky, send people to sleep in Angel's Egg because he's trying to give you time with the images he paints. And likewise Emin is doing the same, albeit with something intentionally ugly. Angel's Egg is art, however, but the broken lock in my cabinet is not. Art is artifice, the creation of something to serve a purpose. The way we use the word art today is usually to regard a film or a painting used to inspire beauty in our hearts. Vespasian would have perhaps had different ideas. He most likely would not have approved of Roman citizen viewing the Temple of Peace in the same way many British citizens today view the British Museum: that is, as a place where a vicious empire has stolen unjustly the world's treasure.¹ Nay, Vespasian was projecting his power to the citizens and wanted to display these works as a charitable good for the people. The modern interpretation of the museum feels like an inversion of the original. Before the Renaissance, the artist merely made the work, and wasn't someone to be exalted. After the Renaissance, however, the artist became part of the work, with the cults of personality of Da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo making the people more famous than their works. This trend continues to the point where the psychoanalysts saw art as but a method by which to understand the artist. And then we come to the bed again. What makes her bed more important than mine? Besides, my bed's cleaner! What does my bed say about me? Very much most likely. If I poked around a stranger's house Come Dine With Me-style, and had a look at their bedroom, I could learn an awful lot about them, never having met them. Tracy Emin's bed says a lot about her, or about womanhood - but does it? It's fundamentally constructed, it's designed to be like someone's bed. This is the level at which it can be considered art. It is an intentional work. It isn't an actual bed, but is an artifice, a creation attempting to communicate something. Beyond it's immediate message, it has a meta-message of iconoclasm against beauty itself: a most horrific thing indeed. There is an implicit insult to all talent and skilled art attempting at beauty. In so far as beautiful Edwardian prose of the men of letters has sunk to the lower hieroglyphs of emojis, perhaps too has art sank from the brush of Rembrandt to Tracy Emin's bed. What should be taken away then from this rambling article? Vespasian had art to show, but Emin does not. The artist, unless you're interested in tracing art history, isn't what's important, and shouldn't be idolised. And that anything in your house can be thought provoking if long as you display it - and even if you don't display it. The world is only dull and ugly so long as you aren't willing to give it your time. 1. Perhaps the reason so many Brits think we have stolen the world's riches is because the ownership and conquest no longer feels justified. We are no longer the world hegemon, nor a serious independent geopolitcal player, so why do we have loot that would demonstrate otherwise? I reckon there's a subconscious embarrassment in many Brits that our nation no longer has the power the British Museum projects.