Image: City Abstract #15

A Busy Morning, So Far

This morning I watched a so-so game of rugby in which Ireland beat Scotland. Because I wasn’t transfixed by the game on the screen, I managed to finish doing the taxes for the Everloving and me.  This is definitely the earliest I have ever got them done.

I have to say that one of the benefits of being old and poor (along with bus passes, free drugs, and grocery deliveries) is the lack of paperwork.  None of those complicated deduction and benefit schedules for us, oh no: just the basic form to fill out and enjoyment of the “zero balance payable” before licking the stamp and sending it off.

Now I can sit back and watch Wales rugby destroy Italy without a care in the world. Except … I am delaying having to deal with the major damage to our patio caused by the gale-force winds last night.  I have some confidence that Wales will put me in a mood sufficient to face that freezing ordeal.

Jeff Koons and Banality

Image: Leon Neal/Getty Images

Over the years, I have written several times about my dislike of Jeff Koons‘ work and my dismay at the vast amounts of money people are willing to pay for his kitschy pieces.  I have not been alobe in this contempt, and his latest exhibition in England has brought forth yet another expert opinion that Koons now shows:

“few signs of the promise Koons showed before he embraced Banality … The first room in the exhibition takes us from 1985 to 2013 in four easy steps, providing a precis of his ascension into decline …

“Koons’s art is too expensive to fail, I have heard it said. It will survive as a paradigm of folly and excessiveness, less to be looked at, more to be gawped at.”

Koons’s art pieces are too expensive to fail, but only because we are saving the faces of those idiots with too much money and too little taste who poured millions into his catalogue.  What I dislike most is the fact that important public galleries keep flaunting this stuff and taking up space that would be better used to display genuine artists.