30 Thursday May 26 2022 | the times
Comment
admired didn’t dare defend him for
fear of being bullied by this entitled
clique. Moreover, the self-righteous
girls had no thought that they could
destroy this man’s career and
reputation: “They’re kids, it was all
just a game to them. But you’d
expect the head to defend her own
staff.”
The teacher was suspended. By
coincidence that weekend the girls
were set a book to read: William
Golding’s Lord of the Flies.Press for paranoia
I
loathe moving money
around via online banking.
With a cheque it is up
to the recipient to
ensure cash goes into
the right account. Now
the responsibility for not
fat-fingeredly typing in a
wrong digit is all yours.
So when I had to transfer
a large sum into my
personal pension, I
checked, triple-checked,
read all the warnings
and even then received
a call from the fraud
prevention team.
I understand why
this is required:
because vulnerable folk
have been scammed out of
savings, but even so, it felt
so... intimate.“Is anything worrying you right
now?” I was asked. (Well,
monkeypox looks appalling... ) “This
person you’re paying, have you
known them for long, can you really
trust them?” Then, in the tone of
someone speaking to a very old, deaf
relative: “Now do you know what
happens if you send this sum to the
wrong person?” Yes, I
stuttered, I’ll probably
lose all my money.
With trembling hands
I pressed “make
transfer”. But even then
I received a call next
morning with an even
deeper set of questions,
until I wondered: how
well do I really know my
financial adviser? Is
someone secretly trying
to trick me? Who can
you trust in this wicked
world?Living history
I
knew nothing of
Japan’s annexation and
imperial rule of Korea,
how in the early 20th
century poor, rural
Korean migrants were
induced to toil in
Japanese factories, the
ruthless suppression
of those wanting
better conditions or theR
ecalling the sixth-former
bullied out of her school
for suggesting to a visiting
House of Lords speaker
that biological sex exists, a
friend recounted recent events at a
private girls’ school.
It was “dress-down Friday” and
pupils were allowed to wear their
own clothes. A class of 14-year-olds
arrived for their music lesson in
miniskirts and skimpy tops perhaps
more appropriate for the beach.
Watching them file in, the popular,
extrovert music teacher joked that
these girls had “more flesh on display
than a meat-market”. The girls were
outraged, accused him of “slut-
shaming” and “fat-shaming”,
recorded him on their phones,
tearfully complained to the
headmistress, then circulated a
petition to have him fired.
My friend notes that other girls
who were appalled by this campaign
against a teacher they liked and
Our cult of perfection has devalued beauty
The ugly truth is that originality in art and design has given way to a bland global uniformity
likes as efficiently among followers
in Europe as in America. And so
local eccentricities are shorn away
and the world converges on a narrow
set of idealised, endlessly repeatable
forms.
When the mayor of London, Sadiq
Khan, described the newly opened
Crossrail stations — those barren
monochrome concourses — as
modern “cathedrals” he was right,
but the thought is depressing, not
inspiring. When I was a child, the old
Tottenham Court Road station with
its escalators descending through
Eduardo Paolozzi’s mosaiced arches
seemed to me like a magic cavern. It
was unique to London. It only made
sense there. The new Tottenham
Court Road station, built for Crossrail,
would not seem out of place in China
or Singapore or America or anywhere
at all. Nobody could find it really
ugly or objectionable.
Our world is more tasteful than
ever, an effect the internet has
accelerated. The safest speech online
is completely inoffensive. So is the
most successful design. But art
thrives on local oddness, eccentricity
and even offence. When WH Auden
wrote that it was his “hope to be, like
some valley cheese, local, but prized
elsewhere” he spoke for all artists.
Beautiful things can be odd and
uneven. They spring from local
particularity and are not
pre-engineered for the appreciation
of a global audience.
Too late. We are surrounded by a
bland monotonous perfection that
has impoverished our idea of beauty.
And so I find myself standing
in front of a painting by Raphael
and yawning.empire from Jordan to Hadrian’s
Wall, so today identical towers of
steel and glass march across the
citadels of finance from New York to
London to Singapore.
In every one of these cities you can
go to bed in a chicly spartan hotel
room and rise to a morning flat white
in a tasteful café surrounded by
glossy-leaved pot plants. In every one
of these cities, advertisements present
you with ideal images of uncluttered,
tastefully upholstered lives that
might be lived anywhere at all.
Just as the great civic buildings of
Rome were the incarnation of Roman
power, so 21st-century minimalism
embodies the values of international
commerce. Because commerce
depends on advertising, modern
design values the direct, infantilising,
eye-catching language of adverts.
Hence the bum-shaped vases, bold
colours and unadorned book-covers.
Hence the London skyscrapers built in
big, babyish shapes — the Shard, the
Cheesegrater, the Walkie-Talkie, the
Gherkin — which aspire all too
desperately to “iconic” status. And as
the highest value of commerce is
efficiency and value for money, so
infantile minimalism is ostentatiously
suspicious of waste, eschewing
ornament for clean monotonous
lines. We must make do instead with
the bland but cost-effective
consolations of colour and form.
Most of all, infantile minimalism is
a style that must make sense
anywhere. Norman Foster’s profits
are healthiest when he can build his
silvery leviathans in any city in the
world. Apple’s iPhones must fit in as
easily in Tokyo as California. Every
Instagram breakfast must garnerU
nmoved and slightly bored
by the National Gallery’s
new exhibition of
paintings by Raphael, I
decide that I have
surfeited on perfection. Confronting
each harmonious arrangement of
babies, fabric and flawless Italian sky,
I find my eyes sliding hopefully
towards the gift shop. The problem,
obviously, is me, not Raphael.
To the people who first loved these
pictures in the 16th century each one
must have seemed a small zone of
perfect sublimity in a chaotic,
disfigured world. Today we are
accustomed to the perfect. Or a
particular, limited idea of the perfect.
To be alive (and connected to the
internet) in the 21st century is to have
seen more flawlessly beautiful people,
sunsets and breakfasts than any
human being who has previously lived.
Perfection has become commonplace.
Faces that would have once inspired
local wars are now restricted to
powering only moderately successful
careers on Instagram.
The twin hallmarks of the modern
cult of perfection are blandness and
repetition. Search for sunsets on
Instagram and you will discover
thousands of them — identical reds
and pinks burning away in neat rows
as if somewhere a central committee
issues directives governing the
colours and compositions appropriate
for photographs of the sky.
Though the internet has tended to
divide us politically, its aesthetic effect
is homogenising. “Instagram face”
describes the ubiquitous ideal of
modern beauty characterised by “high,
plump cheekbones, full lips and cat-
like eyes”. There are YouTube videos
that provide exhaustive instruction
in the use of face-tuning apps and
makeup to make you look less like
yourself and more like everybody else.
Blandness and repetition. Since the
invention of the iPhone we have
been subjected to the triumphant
progress of a kind of infantile
minimalism: bright colours; bold,
obvious shapes; simple, instantlylegible designs; a horror of ornament
or elaboration. This is an aesthetic
that offers the same uncomplicated
reassurance as the set of a children’s
TV show. I spot its symptoms
everywhere in London: vases in the
shape of breasts and buttocks, cafés
painted in pastel colours serving
bright Instagram-friendly food, the
simple blocky covers of (otherwise
excellent) novels by Naoise Dolan,
Meg Mason and Sally Rooney.
These aesthetic tendencies did not
begin with social media. In the late
20th century bland corporate
minimalism emerged as the imperial
style of global capitalism. As
Corinthian columns once supported
Roman buildings the breadth of theLocal eccentricities are
shorn away and the
world converges
enduring resentment of Korean-
heritage Japanese even today. I’d
never heard of the Great Kanto
Earthquake of 1923 or the resulting
ethnic massacre. Or that Korean
one-year-olds choose from a tray of
objects — red string for long life, a
book for intelligence — in a
ceremony believed to foretell their
fate. I’d no idea how to make kimchi.
But then I watched Pachinko
(Apple TV), and in this extraordinary
trilingual family drama, with a
budget rivalling The Crown, history
came vividly, movingly alive.Roll away the stone
T
hank you for your many witty
and knowledgeable comments
after I asked which is more
painful, childbirth or kidney stones.
Last week my husband finally had
his stone, which they couldn’t zap
with a laser the first time, removed
under general anaesthetic.
He woke to see a plastic pot
containing a grey object the size of a
large ant. It was granite-hard and I
thought could be set to make an
interesting ring but, alas, it
disappeared to the lab.
My husband then told me about
the tool with which the source of his
agony was extracted: “Apparently it
was a forceps delivery.”Janice Turner Notebook
Pupils cane
teacher for
a joke about
miniskirts
@victoriapeckhamNational Trust must
stop finger-wagging
Zewditu
Gebreyohanes
E
arlier this month I became
director of Restore Trust, an
organisation set up to
return the National Trust to
its founding values and
objectives. Readers will be familiar
with the problems afflicting this once
august national institution, including
the closure of some of its properties,
gimmicky displays in houses, the
dismissive treatment of long-serving
volunteers and the pursuit of
controversial, politicised agendas.
At the root of these problems lies a
lack of consultation with members,
volunteers, local communities and
conservation experts. Specialist
curators have gradually been phased
out to be replaced by curators who
lack not just the expertise to preserve
national heritage but also, it seems,
an interest in doing so. Curatorial
expertise has been replaced by a
soulless managerialism, in which
profit-making, and therefore brand-
selling, is the paramount concern.
Many of the Trust’s tenants tell us
they are not treated as partners in
the conservation effort but as a
lucrative source of revenue to be
exploited as much as possible.
The charitable objects of the Trust
state that its duty is “the preservation
for the benefit of the nation of lands
and tenements of beauty or historic
interest” and of “furniture, pictures
and chattels having national and
historic or artistic interest”. If the
charity wishes to add to this being
the nation’s historian, it needs to
perform the role carefully,
academically and without the bias or
finger-wagging seen in both its
Colonial Countryside project and its
interim report on the links between
slavery and Trust properties.
Many of those defending the Trust’s
trajectory invoke the words of its
founder, Octavia Hill — “for ever, for
everyone” — with the patronising and
false suggestion that “ethnic minority”
visitors are unable to enjoy what is
on offer without constant reminders
that slavery is morally reprehensible.
The Trust is and has long been open
to all, and beautiful houses, furniture,
artwork and gardens can be enjoyed
by everyone equally, irrespective of
ethnic background.
In a recent Times interview, the
Trust’s director, Hilary McGrady,
expressed astonishment at the
backlash to the slavery report,
pointing out that “Kew Gardens was
doing it at the same time”. That is true:
by the time the interim report was
published in mid-2020, Kew Gardens
had committed to an initiative to
“decolonise” its plant collections. Yet
what McGrady seems to forget is
that Kew was forced to scrap this
agenda after a Policy Exchange
paper I co-authored showed that its
activities went beyond its statutory
remit. The Trust should be held to
the same standards as Kew.Zewditu Gebreyohanes is the director of
Restore TrustJames
Marriott@j_amesmarriott