After a week of practically no rain, yesterday was quietly drizzly, but still dry enough for a brisk walk round the block. I could hear the rain battering on the skylights when I went to bed and I reckon it carried on that way for most of the night.
It was still going this morning.
I considered getting on my bike to go to the market - it’s Wednesday again - but only for a moment or two. Then I put on my waterproof trousers, tucked them in my boots, put on my waterproof jacket, grabbed a hat and gloves and set off walking. It’s not a bad walk even in the rain and wind.
The river is full again.
The canal is overflowing.
The little streams have re-established themselves.
The puddly places on the Donkey Line are back and the waste ground approach to the Donkey Line is a quagmire once more. On my way home I was overtaken by a lone lady walker. When she reached the Delph end of the Donkey Line, I saw her hesitate and then turn round. It’s not all that unusual for people simply to walk the length of the bridle path and then turn back, but but she evidently felt the need to explain that she’d looked at the aforementioned quagmire and had decided to head back towards Uppermill, from whence she came. The dry spell hasn’t changed things much by the looks of things!
I read that President Biden is sending his dogs home to Delaware. He has rescue dogs, which is quite admirable, but they can sometimes be unpredictable. One of his has not adjusted well to life in the White House and has apparently taken to charging at the security men and there may even have been some biting. So off they have to go, back home to Delaware. They are known, apparently, as the First Dogs of the United States.
And dogs in the White House are traditional, it seems. Donald Trump didn’t have one. He is reported to have thought getting a dog would be “phoney”, and was the first US president in a century not to have a canine companion. There you go! I think the Downing Street thing is to have a cat at Number 10. Maybe the new POTUS will have to acquire a more amenable First Dog!
Somehow when I think about artists I imagine them quietly working away at drawing or painting or chipping away at stone to make a statue. Not always so! How about this:-
“Last week masked men set fire to a Banksy screenprint called Morons (White) at a secret location in Brooklyn, livestreaming the destruction via the Twitter account @BurntBanksy. The men worked for a company called Injective Protocol, which bought the print for $95,000 in order to destroy it and replace it with a unique digital facsimile. This is called crypto art and, if you want to know the extent to which it’s booming, well, the new work just went for $382,336, more than four times the original price.”
Wow! I’ve grown used to the odd video art of the likes of Bill Viola so I suppose this is a natural progression. However, it still seems odd to me. But it’s not the first time “artl has been destructive:-
“From Ai Weiwei smashing a 2,000-year-old vase to the Chapman brothers defacing Goya prints, artists are no strangers to creative destruction. But this is different. The burning of Morons (White) is thought to be the first time a physical artwork has been replaced by a unique digital asset. “We view this burning event as an expression of art itself,” Injective Protocol executive Mirza Uddin said. “We specifically chose a Banksy piece since he has previously shredded one of his own artworks at an auction.”
But who would pay a fortune for something intangible – a meme, a piece of video art or a digital rendering of a print – when you can just as easily see it free online? The answer is a lot of people, among them art collectors as well as speculators out to make a fast buck. Last month, the musician and artist Grimes made §6m in 20 minutes by selling, as one headline put it, “art that doesn’t exist” in a Twitter auction. Actually, the art does exist, just not in the boring old real world. WarNymph Collection Vol 1 consists of 10 works, mostly short video pieces Grimes made with her brother.
What a strange world we live in? People paying silly money for art that doesn’t tangibly exist! I shouldn’t be surprised. After all people make a living by doing no more than appear on social media, being influencers and the like, famous for being famous. It’s a good job some of us are boringly normal.
Finally for today, here’s Michael Rosen again:
“Dear Dominic
I've got away with it! I told them schools are opening but people will get infected and hardly a peep from the usual pessimists and naysayers. Public numbness is the new black and I'm riding high in the polls. Ever onwards.
Corona bona
Boris”
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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