On Sunday we took a stroll into town for some new guitar strings. Bitter cold in Kensington Gardens and Sydney Street was doing a roaring trade in woolen Himalayan hats (the ones with the ear flaps) but on the way home we popped into Mo's (where you can get warm, great coffee and GF cake). It is located on Preston Circus, just opposite the Duke of York, which is an independent cinema and has the most fabulous pair of stripey tight clad legs kicking out of the roof. As I have said before, spontaneous art installations are a Brighton norm. These legs have been around a long time I just kept forgetting to photograph them. Of course to some they will raise the whole question of what is art. That's fine, art itself would struggle without the ongoing debate. But I guess its the idea and the material conversion of the idea that separates it from the ordinary, the pointing light moment, Walter Benjamin might have said, before parody and pastiche steal it for other purposes. Of course this idea could be copied and adapted, we and our neighbours could have a whole can can troupe kicking out of our respective roofs (now there is an idea - imagine seeing that as you look down the street) but it would only be a textual intervention on the original idea (I guess). Which brings me to the idea of 'fakes'. My old stomping ground (when I lived there) is the Dulwich Gallery and they have an exhibition loosely called spot the fakes. Fakes are fun. Fakes are cool is a conceptual art project in which a replica made in China is concealed among its “real” paintings. Can visitors spot the fake? The intervention, said the gallery’s director, “will provoke a new way of looking at our collection”. No it won't, all it will do is show there are some people who can replicate what the real artist conceived in a moment of creative genius. What they cannot and never will be able to show is the copy as an original piece of art of its time, originally conceived and crafted and engaged in dialogue with the age in which it was created. They would have been as well posting a bunch of iPhone pics. I will not be going to it. Oh, and of course, 'spot the fake' is just one of those snobby art critic games. Me, I want to turn up in a gallery with the provenance of the piece already established so I can see it and try to understand what its really all about - well maybe that's just me. Mind you there is a lot of pastiche in this song, still, its good to hear Lucinda Williams back in the studio, even if it is a wrong number:
