The great poet and playwright Louis MacNeice composed during long, liquid lunches
Credit: Kurt Hutton
Last week Alex Mahon, CEO of Channel 4, told her staff to spend 90 minutes of the working day not working. “We will have an all-C4 lunch break daily at 12.30-2pm,” she wrote in a memo. This new policy was met with surprise. Didn’t the languorous lunch-break die out in the 1980s, along with lunchtime martinis? You can’t just stop for an hour and a half… can you?
In the age of the smartphone, too many people are expected to be constantly plugged-in, checking and responding to emails immediately. It’s a pressure that has only intensified in lockdown conditions: you can’t be credibly “out to lunch” when the very concept of “out” is illegal. Working from home means your home-life is, perforce, your work-life. This is a questionable state of affairs. Let’s raise a toast – or, at least, a hastily eaten toastie – to Mahon for taking a stance against it.
I came up a black staircase : how Dapper Dan went from fashion industry pariah to Gucci god Yomi Adegoke
It was a mentor on the gambling circuit in Harlem, New York, who gave Daniel Day the moniker that would make him famous. Day was just 13, but had revealed himself to be not only a better craps player than his guide, who was the original Dapper Dan, but also a better dresser. So it came to be that Day was christened “the new Dapper Dan”.
It wouldn’t be until decades later that Day would truly make his name. Dapper Dan’s Boutique, the legendary Harlem couturier he opened in 1982, kitted out local gamblers and gangsters, then later hip-hop stars and athletes such as Mike Tyson, Bobby Brown and Salt-N-Pepa. His custom pieces repurposed logos from the fashion houses that had overlooked black clientele. A pioneer in luxury streetwear, Day screenprinted the monograms of Gucci, Louis Vuitton, MCM and Fendi on to premium leathers to create silhouettes synonymou
FRED MILLER
I woke up this morning thinking about emojis, which is very disturbing because I hate emojis.
I was thinking about them because several members of my beloved family were taunting me – yes, taunting, and worse, in a pitying way – during an exchange of cellphone texts which I confessed I could not understand. Emojis were involved.
“Poor father, he’s so old and out of it,” was the general tone.
I was so disturbed that I had to go out and chainsaw down a tree to regain my normal sunny disposition. Then I got online to do a little research into emojis, to see whether I am justified in loathing them. (I wonder if there is an emoji yet for “loathe.”)
Plus, Damien Hirst puts his art on ice in Switzerland and technology is revolutionizing art authentication.
January 8, 2021
Supporters of US President Donald Trump sit inside the office of US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as the protest inside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, January 6, 2021. Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images.
Art Industry News is a daily digest of the most consequential developments coming out of the art world and art market. Here’s what you need to know on this Friday, January 8.
NEED-TO-READ
Artists React to the Riots in DC – Artists including Dread Scott, Glenn Ligon, and Marilyn Minter were among the many public figures condemning the pro-Trump rioters who stormed the US Capitol on Wednesday afternoon. Photographs from inside the august building showed chaos and destruction with nary an arrest in view, and many artists compared the surreal images to those at Black Lives Matter protests, where peaceful demonstrators were often maced, kettled,
Blurring the Lines
Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph, offers a comprehensive survey of a pioneering body of work. Born in Detroit but based in New York since the early 1970s, Ming Smith was the first female African-American photographer to have her work acquired by New Yorkâs Museum of Modern Art. She has mastered a blurry, impressionistic style emulating the mixture of spontaneity and detail in the jazz music she often evokes with her images.
Raised in Columbus, Ohio, Ming Smithâs childhood unfolded in a setting very different to the Manhattan and Brooklyn streets that she made her own (this book contains a striking image of Smith as a child, on her first visit to New York in 1959, looking out of a window with innocent fascination). Shortly after settling in the city she became, in 1973, the first woman member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of black photographers, which, as Yxta Maya Murray notes in one of several accompanying essays, âgathered at each other