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November 2008
Art & Books
Culture
diary
Art
Edinburgh Art Fair
Edinburgh, Scotland, Corn Exchange
21-23 November
Fine, modern and contemporary paintings, sculptures, ceramics and glassware are available at Scotland’s largest art fair. With prices ranging from €100 to €60,000, this fair has something for novices and experienced collectors alike.
Winter Fine Art & Antiques Fair
London, England, Olympia
10-16 November
One of Europe’s most prestigious antique fairs has leading international dealers with pieces to suit even the most eclectic tastes, including art deco, Asian art, clocks, mirrors and maps.
Picasso and Masters
Paris, France, Grand Palais
8 October 2008 — 2 February 2009
This exhibition brings together the National Picasso Museum, the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay to recreate the artistic pantheon of Picasso and reveal his inspiration.
Rembrandt
Madrid, Spain, Museo Nacional Del Prado
15 October 2008 — 6 January 2009
Forty works loaned from across Europe of one of the great European painters, Rembrandt. These will be displayed alongside paintings by Titian and Rubens that were his principal sources of inspiration.
museum
Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970
London, England, V&A Museum
Until 11 January 2009
The first exhibition to examine contemporary design, architecture, film and popular culture on both side of the Iron Curtain during the cold-war era. There are over 300 exhibits from a Sputnik to a film by Stanley Kubrick.
architecture
Architecture Now
London, England, V&A RIBA Architecture Gallery
Until 1 December
This exhibition showcases some innovative designs that aim to achieve sustainability and will question how you see a standard school, house or office. Discover some examples that could become commonplace in the future.
music
Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow)
Milan, Italy, La Scala –
throughout November
The operetta par excellence, Franz Lehár’s masterpiece is given a fresh spin in this original version, but will retain the instrumental colour that makes it so loved.
books
Planet Google: How One Company is Transforming Our Lives
By Randall E Stross €20 ISBN 9781843549802
Two amazing facts: even in Black September, as financial systems were collapsing, Google’s stock stayed relatively healthy; moreover, while most tech stocks were looking pretty ropey, Google’s new projects —the iPhone —challenging Android and floating offshore computer servers — were still exciting the market.
But, as Stross notes, the thing that truly sets Google apart from any other company in the corporate world, is the sheer scope of its ambitions. Even when the company was operating from a rented garage close to the Stanford University campus — where its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, studied computer science — its mission statement was to “organise the world’s information”.
This appropriately well-organised book zips through Google’s technical achievements, from indexing web pages and storing information on its own servers, to digitising content, and launching the Gmail email service. It also explains how the powerful combination of Google’s nerd-territory algorithms and monetising vision helped it disarm Yahoo and then encroach on Microsoft territory. Indeed, its remote “cloud” servers may be the only threat to Microsoft’s omnipotence in the workplace.
Stross also highlights Google’s early blindspot when it came to recognising the potential of social content on the internet, as evidenced by its subsequent $1.65bn acquisition of YouTube. This transaction also illustrates Google’s huge reservoir of resources. Though the video hosting site has yet to turn a profit, and faces huge lawsuits from content companies such as Viacom, Google can afford to weather the troubles to tap into YouTube’s vast audience.
Inevitably, as Google has grown, it has alienated people — many of them quick to quote the company’s “Don’t Do Evil” philosophy in relation to its censored search engine for China and the photographing of the planet, street by street, by Google Earth. Others criticise Google’s collation of statistics of our personal lives
However, this book does not dwell on the potential invasion of privacy that the company’s vision might both entail and enable. And it is certainly not, as its publisher bills, “a revelatory expose” of Google nor does it explore the profound implications of that strategy for the business world, and for culture at large.
Any of this would have given welcome colour to a book about what may turn out to be the most important company of the 21st century.
In the end though, the book is a little like the search engine itself: very thorough but ultimately dull. BF
Crowd Surfing
By Martin Thomas and David Brain
A&C Black €25 ISBN 9781408105955
Oxfam recently invited the public to write the slogans for its latest poster campaign. Perhaps they’ve been reading this overview of the much written-about phenomena of the empowered consumer. There are plenty of familiar case studies — Barack Obama, Innocent smoothies, Dove cosmetics — and the revolutionary potential of Web 2.0 is duly eulogised. However, the sober, almost academic tone lacks the entertaining fervour of the likes of Wikinomics, despite the writers having worked for many of the companies held up as examples. LC
The Ape in the Corner Office
By Richard Conniff
Marshall Cavendish
€18 ISBN 9781904879985
“Nature built us to be nice,” but aggression, instead of being destructive, is shown to be “a well-integrated part of social life…It occurs in the best relationships.” Applying chimpanzee research to office politics could have resulted in a daft book full of sloppy allusion, instead, Conniff updates numerous misperceptions about how we interact. While affirming the ‘tear through Tokyo like Godzilla’ routine of the red-blooded CEO, he shows that there is a better way without leaving out the Godzilla. Profoundly funny but still profound, a rare feat. RL
Hot, Flat and Crowded
By Thomas L Friedman
Allen Lane
€30 ISBN 9781846141294
This book is a vividly green sequel to The World is Flat, Friedman’s previous hit. Far from concocting the book in a study, Friedman has energetically mined a vast battalion of minds from Capitol Hill policy advisers to visionary academics. Now the planet is hot and crowded — and very patriotically American, too. Chapter eight, Green is the New Red, White and Blue, could have served as a sub-title. As for chapter 14: Outgreening al-Qaeda, it seems to scream: “Forget Gore’s dull sermons, even Red Necks have to take up the green cause now.” RL
The Secrets of CEOs
By Steve Tappin and Andrew Cave
Nicholas Brealey Publishing
€15 ISBN 9781857885132
There’s a delicious irony about this third-quarter-2008, nearly-out-of-date book, where, on page 102, Andy Hornby, the ill-fated CEO of the recently taken-over-by-Lloyds TSB Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) notes: “I’m not a sailor but one of the things that everybody has said to me is that capital markets are like the tide. You have got to catch the tide. Once it has gone out, you are left high and dry.” Spot on Andy! Aside from the guffaws, this is a valuable compendium of anecdote and insight even if little of the advice constitutes a secret. RL
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