A few, banal little clouds

Belatedly I have discovered that the Guardian's excellent art critic Adrian Searle has been doing a series of podcasts in which he talks about art works. Here he is describing John Davies' photo of the Trafford Centre, in which you will hear a human voice studying an art work and seeing what amateurs like ourselves usually miss.

Thought for the day

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed figleaves together, and made themselves aprons. Genesis 3:7

The ever-changing bunny

My personal disillusion with much contemporary video and installation art is how boring, obvious and didactic it is. Advertising has always borrowed its clothes from the art world. In Britain, because of our woefully under-funded film industry, many directors have begun their careers in television and cinema advertising. I find the following clip charming, amusing and inventive, but it does lack the precise and salty bite of art.



(via Norm)

Donna e mobile

How our faces changed.


(with thanks to George Szirtes, whom I pinched it from)

The boundaries between art and dress

I'm very busy today, so will leave you with this piece from the Telegraph earlier year

In 1935 the 22-year-old Meret Oppenheim was studying art in Paris when her Jewish father (a friend of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, whose ideas led the young art student into surrealism) was forced to leave Nazi Germany and could no longer support his daughter financially. Needing to earn her own living, she decided to collaborate with the fashion world and made a fur bracelet for Schiaparelli, whose belief that haute couture should make the everyday extraordinary meant she was the ideal partner for a surrealist. For Schiaparelli all fashion was a metamorphosis - a dress could become a painting and a shoe could become a hat. When Oppenheim showed the bracelet to Picasso in a café, he remarked that anything could be covered in fur. Oppenheim agreed, pointing to a cup and saucer on the table, and went on to design the fur teacup and spoon that is one of surrealism's most famous works.

Items in the news

The great Hilary Alexander in the Telegraph reports that the Ossie Clark label is going to be relaunched, headed by Avsh Alom Gur, who has previously worked with Donna Karan and Chloe, at the next London Fashion Week. That's Clark, to the left, and his then wife , Celia Birtwell, in a double portrait by David Hockney which hangs in the Tate Gallery in London.

Last week Gap was exposed for using child labour. Seven days on and it's planning a new Sweatshop-free label

Yesterday, Gap's senior vice president, Stanley Raggio, flew from San Francisco to New Delhi to meet the anti-sweatshop charity the Global March Against Child Labour, to hammer out proposals to tackle child labour.

According to Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer from the charity, the US conglomerate set out a series of ambitious proposals including a move that would see it relabelling its garments to allow the consumer to directly track online exactly where they are made.

The system would closely mirror the highly successful RugMark programme which has largely eradicated child labour in India's carpet industry.

The Observer also has a piece on COS, which is an H&M owned label only available in Europe. When I was in Berlin a year ago, I noticed it really seemed to have take off there and the Regent Street store in London is always busy. I haven't bought anything quite yet, but the colours and minimalist shapes are very good. As Polly Vernon says here, it's excellent for affordable staples.

And a review of the third volume of John Richardson's biography of Picasso:

Picasso with an immaculately svelte wife on his arm was an indefatigable socialite, always present on the sidelines of the innumerable mock battles staged by Parisians in this era of brawl and counter-brawl, pillow fights at fancy-dress balls, turbulent first nights, openings disrupted by Dadaist punch-ups and Surrealist reprisals. Politics passed Picasso by. So did the bleak realities of social and financial disintegration in postwar France. Even the final throes of the 1914-18 war seem to have impinged on him chiefly as a tiresome inconvenience that cut off supplies, detained friends at the front, and interfered with Diaghilev's ballet bookings ('German and Austrian troops had broken through the Italian lines, so Rome was out; the third battle of Ypres was going badly, so Paris was out...').