Helloooo, here comes the simulacrum... and the spurious
Starbucks pretends to be boho coffee-house
And in further news today: Fakes, forgeries and classification blunders to go on display in exhibition at the National Gallery.
Kathryn Hughes ponders on the desire to believe in groups and movements in a column on the Pre-Raph soap-opera Desperate Romantics:
The irony is that in real life a group is only identifiable from the outside. When you're inside it, you can't see it and, what's more, you really don't care. The Bloomsberries and the pre-Raphaelites may have gone in for a lot of self-mythologising, but they remained essentially a set of individuals, each with their own distinct tastes, beliefs and allegiances. When Rossetti woke up in the morning, he was Rossetti, singular. As the day wore on he might have experienced himself fleetingly as Lizzie Siddal's husband or Christina Rossetti's brother or William Morris's friend but, even as his head fell on the pillow at midnight, it's unlikely that the thought "I am a founding member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood" trotted through his head. It was only to jealous outsiders and fascinated posterity that he became fixed in aspic at the centre of a golden gang of clever, beautiful people, forever gathered in a shabby-chic studio somewhere off Chelsea.
It is to assuage these panicky feelings of anomic individualism that we continue to need stories about coherent cohorts.
And further on those desperate romantics, the TV critic, Sam Wollaston, considers it to be Carry On Up the Studio
And the culture section blog post Desperate Romantics, the BBC's new Victorian romp with the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, combines alpha-fop revelry with brazen historical liberty-taking. What did you make of the easel lovers? has garnered woefully few comments.
More on the spurious: Hadley Jackson is initiating a sporadic series dubbed "Phrases that should be banned from newspapers" (scroll down) -
1 Flamboyant", which some newspapers seem to think is French for "gay"....
2 "You"/"We", which, when employed by a columnist or reviewer, invariably means "me", unless the writer is possessed of psychic abilities and can predict how the reader feels or will react....
3 "?", aka the Daily Mail Question Mark, and most commonly seen in headlines in that "news" paper to ensure that gems such as "Can Grapefruit Put a Squeeze on Obesity?" aren't, strictly speaking, total cobblers.
Possibly the concept of cakes made with stealth vegetables for lower calorie counts belongs here?: I still think the best way not to be fat, if that's what you're after, is to get a hobby that doesn't involve cake. (Alice Beatitude is drifting around to the music in her head, doing the boggling cake-walk as she bakes a boggle cake.)
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