We persist in spelling Leigh Bowery as Leigh Bowrey. We don’t know why – it’ some sort of mental block. We apologise to the readers who have faithfully and repeatedly emailed us to point out this (and other) mistakes. We will endeavour to apply a much higher level of quality control from now on.
One reader, Ben Woodcock, told us that our constant misspellings are only one of two things he finds annoying about The Art Life.
“Secondly, Seb Smee is a nice bloke – he gave me a bottle of Calvados and a pasta machine for no reason – so I’m obliged to ask you to lay off the ad hominem stuff, even though you won’t, and you shouldn’t because it’s funny when it’s anyone else.”
Fair enough, but the problem with criticising writers is that it often comes across as a personal attack when we don’t really intend it that way. It’s true, we’ve called him a “bullshit artist of the highest order”, a “lightweight” and all that and we apologise – we get worked up and lose our collective head sometimes. We hear all the time too that Smee is a ‘nice bloke’ and that he’s completely dedicated to what he believes and we salute him for that. It’s just a pity that he’s such a pompous writer. His debut appearance in The Australian last Saturday as their regular art critic just added insult to the injury of that whole weekend and we will come back to his piece on the Melbourne Art Fair next week. In the meantime, we’ll take Ben’s words to heart and try to play the ball and not the man.
Another reader and constant poster in the Comments pop ups, The Corrector, wrote to us with the sad news of the death of one of the greats of 20th century thought. Although his work built on the great traditions of likeminded practitioners, it was his undeniably original and equivocal material that set him apart from his peers. Taking language as the very material on which he would build his rigorous process, he extended it into new areas of conceptual and cognitive understanding. We are of course talking about Rodney Dangerfield:
Trendy Man: Mr. Melon, your wife was just showing us her Klimt.
Rodney: You too, huh? She’s shown it to everybody.
Trendy Man: Well, she’s very proud of it.
Rodney: I’m proud of mine too. I don’t go waving it around at parties, though.
Trendy Man: It’s an exceptional painting.
Rodney: Oh, the painting.
It’s the way he told em. One of the funniest art jokes of all time and sourced from Back To School.
Actually, The Corrector was emailing us to advise us of the death of influential French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Death makes for strange travelling companions on their way to the next life, the last week seeing the departures of Dangerfield, Derrida, Janet Leigh and Christopher Reeve. What they would be saying to one another?
The problem facing obituary writers was the difficulty of summarising Derrida’s work in a way that was accurate but understandable for newspaper readers. Some, like the UK’s Guardian didn’t try, but the Americans had no such problem, as the Washington Post proved you could do it, and coin a whole new word in the process:
“Mr. Derrida (pronounced “deh-ree-DAH”) inspired and infuriated a generation of intellectuals and students with his argument that the meaning of a collection of words is not fixed and unchanging, an argument he most famously capsulized as ‘there is nothing outside the text.’”
We turn as we do in many things to the Wikipedia for a cogent summary of the man and his life’s work.
