RIP: Red lips are not so red

It is especially useful to take stock of all that is good in one's life on remembrance day, memorial day, decoration day, ANZAC day, call it what you will day. Just as it is important to commemorate the dead or slain, now or in the past, which is what we do, and will continue to do, though it properly aches when we do so. War is war today. Art is art. Take the battle represented in this blog, which is to say the fight to get an exhibition. It bows meekly, and must, in the face of human sacrifice, though it can for the artist sometimes feel like hell. There are not shells exploding as she walks - and she is the first to acknowledge this fact - and the real battle for the artist is not in trying to get an exhibition anyway. The real battle, the true battle, is in the work itself. The constant, daily straining to keep up with the rigours of the original idea. The deliberate, subsequent tending of the task at hand. No, art is not war, and the artist knows this fact, and it is not always true that a great war leaves a country with three armies - an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves. There can also be an army of artists. Yes, art can have a role in this recovery. It should be a kind of celebration of peace as well as any visual valediction. Besides, all sorts of battles are going on all the time, and each have their own ways of being remembered. One writer who wrote about war in his very first novel lost his battle against death only yesterday, but for him everything was a fight anyway. His second love was boxing and a kind of lyrical pugilism ran through just about everything he thought and did. (Oddly, he was both an anti-feminist and liberal, which is tough to digest.) His battles were largely masculine. As are war's. (Though I do remember on the edges of one recent splintered campaign on the continental mainland seeing women on the sidelines positively baying for blood.) War kills. Sometimes it must. Art breathes. It lives forever. Let us make great art while remembering the dead. But let us not forget why.

I Beg Your Pardon

I take a seat in an empty room full of chairs. A rude film crew stumble in, noisily setting up, the legs of the chairs scraping. They are laughing, speaking what I think is Persian or Farsi. One of the people organising the talk enters with her arms folded, defensively. 'Why didn't you give me a phone call telling me you were filming?' she says. The man in question deliberately ignores her. He nods, saying one or two niceties, but basically he is very busy hoping she does not tell him he cannot film, which is something he does by looking away and studiously engaging one of the men he is with. There is a Dylan song that comes to mind, in which he sings about how everything is broken. This morning the artist went off so positive and polished, only to have the person she was meeting stand her up. This was the important art world connection. The man who was going to put her in touch with a gallery. But the man she was to meet is busy, he has just become a father again, he is running one of the largest databases, he is hanging a show, he was about to fly off to Milan, he is ... bla-bla-blah. He had an appointment with the artist and did not make it. Of course, the artist forgives him. She is the last person in the world who ever wants to be a bother to someone. But that is not the point. Anyway, the rude guy in the room full of chairs waits for the woman to leave, which she eventually does, and he sighs with relief, even laughs. I feel like going up to him and pulling out the plugs to both his cameras and mikes, but I, too, am a guest. Anyway, I am at a talk and the room soon fills up. Appropriately, given my mood, the talk is on war. There are photographs of suffering on the wall - famous war images. Why is it that when reportage shows suffering you take it seriously but when so much of what passes itself off as art these days contains suffering, a large part of you simply does not buy it? (One female artist who makes millions for her art was worried about her cat in the national press the other day.) I look around the room. There is a man to my right. He didn't get back to me either. Someone a few rows behind was going to get back, too, get someone to get in touch with me. He didn't. What rank odour do we create that has us treated so? Or has there in fact been a total breakdown of manners and respect in our culture? (Everyone seems to care only about one thing and that is themselves.) Fear not. We shall not cease from exploration. At the end of the talk, given by a very senior soldier, someone told this very soldier that he had been filmed throughout for a TV programme and he hit the roof. He thought it was in-house. A couple of government image minders were called to the stage. They didn't really know what to say. There was chaos. It's not my job to watch people's backs. (I'd be good at it, though.) But someone ought to. They might want to deal with people's manners while they're at it, too.