Digby Warde-Aldam | The Spectator Columnists & Writers

Giving Turner Prize to Assemble is like giving Booker to Thomas Piketty

Within the first ten minutes of last night’s televised Turner Prize ceremony, someone had twice declared that the award was a ‘concept’. I must say, this was news to me: I’d always believed it was an award for contemporary art that existed to create a buzz around young artists who otherwise couldn’t get arrested. More often than not, one of the nominees is chosen to manufacture a bit of controversy – hardly the most noble objective, but it can make for a good half hour of telly. Kim Gordon forgetting what year we were in aside, what we got instead was in no sense good TV, but then that’s not really the point. This year’s point of contention was in fact Assemble, the 18-strong architectural collective nominated for their visionary urban regeneration project in a rundown area of Toxteth.

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If only they were a bit less cool: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons at the Guggenheim Bilbao

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If only they were a bit less cool: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons at the Guggenheim Bilbao

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time Guggenheim Bilbao, until 1 November Jeff Koons: Retrospective Guggenheim Bilbao, until 27 September Manhattan in the late 1970s early 1980s was, by all accounts, a pretty scary place. It was caked in graffiti, lawless, and in certain areas, almost emptied by the so-called ‘white flight’ to the suburbs. It was, in other words, a perfect stomping ground for artists and musicians. This is the romantic notion, anyway. It’s what someone will tell you when trying to justify Jean-Michel Basquiat’s posthumous superstar status and its accompanying price tag. His work is supposed to evoke not just the hip-hop heavy whirl of pre-Aids New York, but if you are to believe the (mostly white, middle-class) curators who burn the candle for him, he also captured the black American experience of the era.

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Chris Burden created some of the most exciting and utterly deranged art I’ve ever seen

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Chris Burden created some of the most exciting and utterly deranged art I’ve ever seen

I once went out with a girl who jabbed me in the ribs every time I mouthed the phrase ‘conceptual art’. It hurt, but I got her point. The C-word, you see, is a tricky one. All too often, it conjures up terrifying images of ‘explanatory’ texts that take 5,000 words to communicate precisely zilch. It implies student politics, gnomic utterances and an unhealthy dependence on the word ‘dialectic’. Too much critical dogma dictates that art must be oblique for its own sake, and utterly devoid of humour. But it wasn’t always thus. In the 60s and 70s, a lot of the best artists took Marcel Duchamp’s prickly sense of humour as the starting point for their work: think of Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit, Baldessari’s droll plays on language or almost anything by Ian Hamilton Finlay.

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Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, Royal Albert Hall, review: who goes to a Noel Gallagher gig?

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Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, Royal Albert Hall, review: who goes to a Noel Gallagher gig?

When people say Noel Gallagher is big-headed, they don’t know the half of it. He has what is known as a ‘classic rock-star build’ – that is, a tiny, fragile little body with a ludicrously big bonce on top, like one of those football figurines. I know this because I saw him once. He was standing outside the University of Westminster, looking cross as he jabbed a text message into his phone. It must be heavy, that head. From my seat in the Albert Hall, I watched as Noel stood hunched over his mic, like Quasimodo delivering a TED talk. It’s probably a bit off-key to mock a man for his freakishly massive skull, but there’s something approaching a relevant point here: fronting his own show, he looks downright awkward – odd for a man who’s been performing on huge stages for the best part of two decades.

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Hans Haacke’s Gift Horse, Fourth Plinth, review: cringe-worthy - but at least it’s not David Shrigley

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Hans Haacke’s Gift Horse, Fourth Plinth, review: cringe-worthy - but at least it’s not David Shrigley

There is good art, there is mediocre art and there is bad art. In the same ratio – about 3:65:32 – there is good political art, mediocre political art and bad political art. There is also a slender sub-genre of this last category, known as so-bad-it’s-good political art. And of this, I am a connoisseur. This week I encountered the best example of this I’d seen for quite some time. I’ll spare the numpty who painted it the blushes of a namecheck, but the picture was a faux-naïf (?) riff on the Last Supper, earnest as you like, in which Jesus and the disciples are throwing up their arms in Nazi salutes. I didn’t think to enquire as to the price, but the grin it’s kept on my face since has been priceless. Call me arch, but I love this stuff.

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Emir Kusturica interview: why Slavoj Žižek is a fraud

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Emir Kusturica interview: why Slavoj Žižek is a fraud

Last month I was invited on a press trip to Serbia. The whole thing sounded great; free accommodation, free food, free travel. I said yes, obviously. But there was a catch; it involved an interview with the film director Emir Kusturica. Now, the first thing you should know about Emir Kusturica is that he’s huge, a proper man-mountain. His hands look like they could do more damage than your average battle tank, and at 6'3", he must be at least a head taller than me. Not that I’m thinking this lucidly when finally the interview moment comes. Before I begin my questions, I’m more than a little scared that, at any moment, he might grab my throat and make himself two heads taller than me. Because the second thing you should know about Emil Kusturica is that he is, to put it mildly, a volatile character.

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A stunner of an exhibition at Paris’s flashiest new gallery

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A stunner of an exhibition at Paris’s flashiest new gallery

You can tell a lot about an art gallery from its attached eatery. The Tate has the grand but gratuitously naff Rex Whistler restaurant. The Serpentine its globular Zaha Hadid nouvelle cuisine joint. Then there’s the Mess Restaurant at the Saatchi Gallery’s newish space in the old Chelsea Barracks. To be charitable, the name is a bad but unfortunately appropriate pun. Anyway, I report from a children’s park in BCBG west Paris, where Louis Vuitton have just opened a new art gallery. Obviously, a luxury (and erstwhile collaborationist) megabrand were never going to settle for an ordinary white cube. Oh no. Instead they hired virtuoso architect Frank Gehry to build something that would piss off the local nimbys. And piss them off it did, but it still got built.

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An art award that actually rewards talent

Digby Warde-Aldam

An art award that actually rewards talent

Before I was asked to go out and cover it, I’d never heard of the Vincent Award for contemporary art. It’s a big deal in the Dutch art world, apparently, a sort of pan-European answer to the Turner Prize. It was set up by a charitable foundation with some deeply serious intent or other, and takes place around Holland every other year. The deal is that 50,000€ is awarded to – and I’m more or less directly quoting the literature here – a stimulating mid-career artist building a discussion platform. It is also, we are told, ‘Europe’s most prestigious art prize’. Are your bullshit detectors sounding off yet? Sure enough, mine were. ‘Prestigious’ is one of those adjectival free-for alls, isn’t it? And ‘Europe’s most prestigious’ might be the single most abused compound superlative in the English language.

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The Turner Prize shortlist is the worst in its history. Who should have won the award? Nobody

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The Turner Prize shortlist is the worst in its history. Who should have won the award? Nobody

What were you thinking? What? What? What? This is the question I'd ask the people who selected the artists for this year’s Turner Prize. The first time I visited, I thought I must have missed something – perhaps I just wasn’t in the right mood. Surely no arbiter in their right mind could’ve let such hectoring, cultural studies-sanctioned guff slip through the net? So I went again. And nope. I was right the first time – and then some. My first Turner Prize was in 1999, and hyperbolic though it sounds, what I saw there changed the way I thought about nearly everything. Yes, it was showy, sensationalist, in-yer-face. But it was pretty clear that the excitement it stirred up was far from empty. The artists that year were Steve McQueen (who won), Jane & Louise Wilson, Steven Pippin and, of course, Tracey Emin.

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Damon Albarn at the Royal Albert Hall: I’m sorry to say he killed it

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Damon Albarn at the Royal Albert Hall: I’m sorry to say he killed it

You can’t help but want to hate Damon Albarn. While he may not be the most irritating of the Britpop survivors, (as long as fellow Blur-ite Alex James is still droning on about cheese, there’s no competition) he’s a convincing candidate for second place. He spent the 90s as a pop idol, singing chirpy Small Faces rip-offs and gnomic industrial rock. There were some great songs, but most of it sounds dated, lost to a cutesy strain of that most meaningless catchall – quintessential Englishness. Then around the turn of the century he decided to become a sort of proto-hipster renaissance man, a Jonathan Miller figure for fortysomething men who think it’s OK to go to work on a skateboard. Over the last decade, he’s fronted cartoon hip-hop groups and banged out film soundtracks, experimental African electronica and po-mo operas.

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Our verdict on the North Korean embassy’s art exhibition: ‘I’ve seen worse’

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Our verdict on the North Korean embassy’s art exhibition: ‘I’ve seen worse’

What’s your favourite of Kim Jong Un’s photo opportunities? I like the pictures of the cuddly psychopath inspecting a lubricant factory. One of them has Kim rubbing his hands with glee as pipes squeeze lube into an oil drum. Classic stuff. As one who keeps a close eye on the Dear Leader’s state visits, I was a bit put out when the Dear Leader of the very, very Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea disappeared for six weeks. There were reports of regime change, gout and epic cheese binges. It was a relief, then, when business returned to usual. This week, Kim appeared in his most impressive propaganda shots to date, walking round an orphanage smoking a fag. The Mail’s coverage identified a Thick of It-style balls up in the official images.

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Are bowls of pasta Blairite?

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Are bowls of pasta Blairite?

If Thatcher was Britain’s Bonaparte, then Blair was most certainly our Louis-Philippe. It was during the reign of the latter that the bourgeoisie came to dominate the status quo in France, and they needed somewhere to gather. Not for them the salons of the aristocracy – instead, they invented the destination restaurant, imitations of which sprung up all over Paris to cater for the wannabes. Blair was undoubtedly our most haut-bourgeois leader. But what of his gastronomic legacy? Does it survive, or does it, like some ruined Empire man in a Balzac novel, limp around dressed in the tattered remains of its pomp? What, more to the point, is a Blairite restaurant? The answer is: ASK Italian. If you want to know what bourgeois speak is for ‘depressing’, let me tell you: it’s those clueless tourists you see sitting alone and miserable in branches of ASK.

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Frieze Week Diary: Will my marbles be the first to go, or my liver?

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Frieze Week Diary: Will my marbles be the first to go, or my liver?

This diary first appeared on Apollo Magazine's website. Monday, 13 October There was something weird in the London air, and it wasn't the rain. E-mails from PRs were hitting my inbox like the salvo from a battery of Gatling guns, and I'd already bumped into one art critic on the point of nervous collapse. ‘Just. Don’t,’ she shot at me when I asked her about all the launch parties I wasn’t invited to. So here we were: on the verge of Frieze, waiting for the ice to break. By the end of tomorrow, art dealers, PRs and journalists would be running screaming through the streets of central London, from Regent’s Park to the river. Gossip would become stronger currency than the Swiss franc. Complain all you want about Frieze and its satellite fairs – and believe me, I will – but we love it all really.

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Ukip’s logo is quite successful – in communicating a spirit of gung-ho crapness

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Ukip’s logo is quite successful – in communicating a spirit of gung-ho crapness

Now that the conference season is over, we can compare not just the party policies, but their logos too. Last week’s Tory conference taught us the patriotic adaptation of their tree — now draped in the Union Flag — doesn’t work any better than the original green-tree symbol. The old symbol demonstrated Conservative values as imagined by the Innocent smoothie design team. It said ‘Tradition’. It said ‘the Environment’. It said, ‘Look what I can do with my crayons, Mummy.’ Stephen Bayley, design expert and Spectator colleague, was one of the hapless advisers tasked with picking the old logo. ‘Not so great,’ he told me, ‘but you should have seen the alternatives.’ The Union Flag tree was in part the brainchild of Andy Coulson, who felt the British flag should be involved somehow.

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If the idea of disturbing kraut-punk sung by a troll appeals, you’ll love The Fall

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If the idea of disturbing kraut-punk sung by a troll appeals, you’ll love The Fall

I had a fair idea of what I was in for when I went to see The Fall at Brixton’s Electric last Friday. They’re a middle-aged band from Manchester, just like the Stone Roses, or the various incarnations of New Order. In journalese, this almost makes them ‘Heritage Rock’. I can’t remember when people started using this term, but it’s gone from the repertoire of niche music writing to being A Thing. You can’t go a week without some old beat combo or other announcing their re-formation, and in return they get a sort of protected status. Old rock music has become to the British what films about unfaithful middle-class couples are to the French. That is, culturally important but not very interesting. Consummately psychotic: Mark E.

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Artists’ houses

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Artists’ houses

I’m not sure what took me to Salvador Dalí’s house in Port Lligat, but it sure as hell wasn’t admiration. As a public figure, I hold him alone responsible for the look-at-me culture that gives contemporary art a bad name. And as a painter… don’t get me started. Sceptics slag off conceptual art as a load of navel-gazing nonsense, made by people with no interest in anything other than themselves. But to be fair to Dalí, he did at least have something to say. That is: ‘I’m mad, me!’ No, if I’m honest the only reason I’d slogged up the hill from the nearest town was nosiness. Artists’ houses that have been preserved as museums are always a thrill. They appeal to the busybody in me, but have the same high culture pull as a major art gallery.

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The Disappearance of Michel Houellebecq: French chin-stroking at its very best

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The Disappearance of Michel Houellebecq: French chin-stroking at its very best

Just when you thought Bernard-Henri Lévy had taken a chin-stroking national stereotype as far as it could possibly go, you open Le Monde‘s business pages and see this. Bernard Maris, one of France’s most respected financial correspondents, has written a 160-page book entitled Houellebecq Économiste. Maris’s book sets out its stall as an economic reading of the writer’s oeuvre, promising amongst other delights, a Malthusian interpretation of his 2005 novel The Possibility of an Island and an analysis of the division of labour in The Map and the Territory. Imagine Robert Peston writing a Hobbesian study of Irvine Welsh and you’re halfway there. I like Houellebecq’s novels. He’s either the Start-rite Céline or Rod Liddle gone feral, depending on where you’re coming from, but he’s very readable and never less than entertaining.

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Ever wondered what goes on in those green sheds you see around London?

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Ever wondered what goes on in those green sheds you see around London?

You know, those mysterious huts that allow entry only to cab drivers? I used to fancy they were cover for a network of underground bunkers where cackling taxi drivers plotted world domination and new ways to fuck up traffic at the Nag’s Head. One day, I vowed, the truth would be outed. This was how I ended up attending a mass sing-along at the cabbies’ hut in Russell Square. It was part of something called the ‘Cabbies’ Shelter Project’, organised by some very nice people who’d obviously been wondering the same thing. No subterranean tunnels were in evidence. Just a kitchenette, the all-pervasive stench of bacon fat and a cabbie called Mark Bird hammering out a knees-up on a keyboard. Joe le Taxi he wasn’t, let alone Travis Bickle.

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Paul McCartney telling me to vote No makes me want to vote Yes

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Paul McCartney telling me to vote No makes me want to vote Yes

‘Scotland, stay with us!’ David Bowie declared back in February. And what Bowie says (or doesn’t, quite – attentive readers will remember that he got Kate Moss to say it for him) others parrot. A few days ago, Sir Paul ‘Macca’ McCartney added his name to an open letter urging the people of Scotland to join the Bowie bandwagon. He was late to the party - the other signatories make up a bizarre (and almost entirely English) cross-section of the British entertainment establishment, from Simon Cowell to David Starkey to Cliff Richard. An impressive love-in, then. But it begs the question: will it actually swing any votes? As a young-ish Anglo-Scot living in London, I am completely unqualified to tell you. But if I’d stayed in Scotland and was just that little bit more stupid – enough, say, to care about what a bunch of ageing light entertainers think – the slebs and their open letters might be just the thing to make up my mind for me.

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I’d like to share my favourite violent pop video with you

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I’d like to share my favourite violent pop video with you

This week has seen the Prime Minister playing Mary Whitehouse again. On Monday he announced that, as of October, music videos on sites like YouTube and Vevo are to carry age classifications similar to those already in place for feature films. You can read the subtext on his ‘deeply concerned’ brow: 'if this is what it takes to get a majority…' In principle, it’s hard to object too much. CDs (if anyone still buys them) carry parental guidance stickers, and a lot of comic books have a ratings system. Video games and DVDs follow the same British film classification board traffic-light system as cinema releases. Unless you take particular issue with any of this, you can’t really do much but shrug. But then you clock how ineffectual the whole thing is.

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Roland Barthes was a fan of Sister Sledge - and I can see why

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Roland Barthes was a fan of Sister Sledge - and I can see why

Disco, the tackiest of music subcultures, is the nostalgia choice de nos jours. The sudden revival is a sort of pop gentrification. You want proof? They play Baccara’s 'Yes Sir, I Can Boogie' in Pret A Manger. Sister Sledge, too. Sledge were never the naffest of the movement’s megastars, but that’s not saying much. Roland Barthes was a fan, whatever that implies. 'How many people do you think are here as an ironic statement?' a friend asked as we stood in Camden’s Jazz Cafe waiting for the Sledge to take the stage. It was a good question. Who actually comes to a disco revival gig? And can such a thing exist outside of inverted commas? The first answer was: hipsters, Peter Stringfellow lookalikes and - wow - normal people.

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Has Morrissey finally recorded a decent album?

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Has Morrissey finally recorded a decent album?

Time was when the former Smiths singer surfaced only once every five years or so to do the Carry On Morrissey routine. But the more you ignore him, the closer he gets. Barely half a year after he colonised the books pages, he’s back. Is that a collective groan I hear? The release of a new Morrissey record really shouldn’t be a big deal. Since the mid-90s, his albums have worked to a formula that bolted sanctimonious, self-pitying lyrics to sub-Oasis guitar fluff. In his Autobiography, he repeatedly blames conspiratorial suits for keeping him from the top of the charts. This is sweet, but just not true. The problem, alas, was that the songs stunk. But hang about. I’ve just listened to World Peace is None of Your Business, his new one, for the third time in a row – and I’m about to play it for a fourth.

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Kanye West is a sanctimonious prat - which is exactly why he’s so great

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Kanye West is a sanctimonious prat - which is exactly why he’s so great

What’s the difference between Kanye West and the space cadets of Speakers’ Corner? Without having access to their bank statements, the biggest distinction between the two parties is that when Mr West (‘Yeezus’ to his friends) played a gig in London on Friday, he was standing on a state-of-the-art stage set rather than a stolen classroom chair. Otherwise, it’s pretty hard to make a distinction. You won’t find many differences in their public speech, that’s for sure. ‘I am Shakespeare in the flesh!’ he once declared, before dropping the false humility and admitting that he was in fact ‘God’s vessel.’ His set at the Wireless festival this weekend was no departure from past form; to the backing of the audience’s boos, he went off on one for 25-minutes, complaining about the fashion industry and indeed pretty much anything else you’d care to name.

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Crusties, trustafarians, Chris Martin and mud: the deadly predictability of Glastonbury

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Crusties, trustafarians, Chris Martin and mud: the deadly predictability of Glastonbury

Glastonbury weekend is upon us, and the bores are out in force. West London buzzes to the sound of hoorays buying drugs, and the army surplus stalls of Portobello Market are making a killing. Conversation in these parts has been reduced to a long in-joke. Ask what’s so funny and you’ll get the same response: ‘Yah, sorry darl – it’s a Glasto thing.’ The same is probably true in every posh postcode in Britain. I’ve never been to Glastonbury and probably never will – but God have I heard enough about it. ‘Veteran’ friends look at me as one would an idiot child, explaining the life-changing wonder that I’m missing. Frankly, the only thing duller than festival talk is drug talk, and since the one invariably follows the other, I’m yawning pretty hard at the moment.

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Happy birthday, spam! Do you mind if we don’t celebrate?

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Happy birthday, spam! Do you mind if we don’t celebrate?

The other day, I got an email advertising ‘miracle’ weight loss. You know the sort: English as defined by Boggle and no way on earth that anyone would ever buy the product in question. I opened it without thinking, and was redirected to a blank page. Within minutes, my Hotmail, Twitter and Wordpress accounts had gone haywire; I stared at my computer screen as the original message replicated itself and fired off to every single one of my contacts. My groan lasted about 20 minutes: why, I asked myself, would anyone bother doing this to me? It turned out I’d been hacked on a convenient anniversary. In April 1994, two American lawyers called Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel sent out the first ever commercial spam message.

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Michael Jackson’s back from the dead. Again.

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Michael Jackson’s back from the dead. Again.

Pop humpty-dumpty Michael Jackson has a new album out today. If that statement seems odd, you don’t know the half of it; five years after his death, Jackson is only on album number two. Compared to a trooper like Tupac – who still manages a couple of albums per year, despite having copped it in 1996 – his posthumous output is actually pretty sluggish. Record labels have always had a talent for cashing in on their dead charges. The zombie discs that result are generally made up of songs the 'artist' was too embarrassed to release when he recorded them. Michael Jackson's new one, Xscape goes one further. It’s a cut 'n' paste job of unused demos and vocal off-cuts remixed by some producers who were quite cool circa 2002.

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We watched Eurovision - so you didn’t have to

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We watched Eurovision - so you didn’t have to

I like Europe, even if this may not be the place to admit it, and I like this moment, when our brothers are forced to make fools of themselves in a language none bar the Irish can speak convincingly. Sauf les Français, obviously. ‘Ukraine will win. Europe has solidarity. You’ll see,' says my European flatmate. But after the first batch of votes, it becomes clear that either Ukraine’s entry wasn’t very good, or Putin actually takes the competition seriously. Having missed both Maria Yaremchuk’s Tick-Tock and the inner machinations of the Kremlin’s ministry of culture, my guess is one or both of those things. Many horrors were committed in the process of the panels’ announcements. Azerbaijan begging approval from mother Russia.

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Martin Amis may be a pompous arse, but he’s our pompous arse

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Martin Amis may be a pompous arse, but he’s our pompous arse

Was it Tibor Fischer’s hatchet job on Yellow Dog? Was it the fallout from the Islamophobia row? Was it getting his teeth fixed? Who knows, but at some point in the last decade or so, Martin Amis fell out of fashion - hard. It’s closer to croquet than football, I grant you, but slagging him off is now a national sport. Reading his books in public has become a bourgeois taboo. Flicking through one of his essay collections on the bus the other day, it didn’t take me long to figure out why my neighbour was eyeing me like I was a sex offender. The insults that get thrown his way, meanwhile, range from ‘not as good as his dad’ to the sort of stuff normally reserved for Holocaust deniers. But the most consistent slur is that he’s ‘out-of-touch’ – and for a literary novelist and self-appointed chronicler of British culture, that’s kryptonite.

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House music is great music - or can be

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House music is great music - or can be

When Chicago DJ Frankie Knuckles died last week, a novelty number by a Brylcreemed Aussie pop punk group had just reached number one. It displaced Duke Dumont & Jax Jones’s I Got U and ended a three week-run of house singles at the top of the charts. I suspect the following statement may piss off dance nerds, but it’s fair to say that Knuckles had as much claim as anyone to having ‘invented’ house music thirty odd years ago. Essentially, he took the kitsch out of disco and turned it into a synthesiser-heavy global brand. Was it worth the effort, though? Frankie Knuckles and the other Chicago house pioneers made some genuinely great music. For one thing, they understood that the point of a remix was to turn a song into something you might want to dance to (the threat of the photos cropping up on Instagram was just a sci-fi dream).