Art & Books: January 2007

ART

LONDON, ENGLAND Elegant Variation: The Architecture of H.T. Cadbury-Brown RA Royal Academy, until 21 January, 2007 www.royalacademy.org.uk One of the great architects of the past century, H.T. (Jim) Cadbury-Brown, widely explored Modernist forms, combining charm and accessibility with integrity and originality. Includes original drawings, models and photographs. ______________________________

PARIS, FRANCE Around 1900: An Art Nouveau Ensemble. The Rispal Donation Musée d'Orsay, until 28 January, 2007 www.musee-orsay.fr Antonin Rispal, who played a major role in rediscovering French Art Nouveau, died in 2003, donating 250 pieces to the museum including exquisite works by Carlo Bugatti, Emile Gallé and Louis Majorelle. ______________________________

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND John M. Armleder: Amor Vacui, Horror Vacui Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, until 21 January, 2007 www.mamco.ch Contemporary Swiss artist John M. Armleder's vast multimedia cycle Mille et Trois Plateaux spreads over more than 30 galleries in the museum. ______________________________

BARCELONA , SPAIN Palazuelo: Working Process Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), until 18 February, 2007 www.macba.es A rare retrospective of Pablo Palazuelo, a key figure of modern Spanish art, who conceived art as 'a road to find a way out of human problems'. Originally an architect, Palazuelo's abstract work explores geometry as the origin of all life, the most 'inventive and endless thing we all know'. ______________________________

BOOKS Marketbusters Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. Macmillan Harvard Business School Press, €20 ISBN 15911391237 In a time of slowing growth and intense, growing competition, how should companies stand out, improve their market position and keep their shareholders happy? The authors of this intriguing book suggest 40 strategic moves to enable companies to focus on the quality of their product, keep a constant check that it is better than competitors and stay on the lookout for new market niches. As the authors point out, with companies facing so many distractions, the importance of sticking to basics cannot be overstressed. JK Freakonomics Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner Penguin Books, €13 ISBN 0141019018 Many economists clutch at recognisable scenarios to explain economic principles. Instead, this entertaining and humorous book uses pure economics to explain some recognisable scenarios. Such as: why so many drug dealers live with their mothers and why estate agents always manage to sell their own properties for higher prices. Freakonomics, as many delighted readers have already discovered, is no economics textbook. But it does use sound statistics to give an amusing insight into how societies really work. The new expanded version should empirically prove that the book's success is no freak. RL Moment of Truth Andreas Bauer, Bjorn Bloching, Hai Howaldt and Alan Mitchell Palgrave Macmillan, €35 ISBN 1403998965 With this number of writers, you would think it remarkable that this book manages to say anything coherent at all; however, it actually says quite a lot. Most are senior employees at Roland Berger, one of the world's leading strategy consultants, and illustrate their rather cerebral concepts of brand management with colourful graphs and tables. In a nutshell: for a brand to succeed, the focus from the outset must be not product attributes or even customer need, but instead strategically targeted customer values. Challenging but worthwhile. JK The Sheikh of Baghdad Adnan Alkaissy with Ross Bernstein Triumph Books, €16.95 ISBN 9781572437302 The Sheikh of Baghdad was published in 2004, no European issue is planned, and it is categorised as Sports/Wrestling. Not perhaps a natural choice of book for these pages. But the review copy hit CNBC European Business's desk the same day that Saddam Hussein was condemned to death, and its subject matter does more to elucidate the nature of that dictatorship than piles of serious political analysis. Besides which, it's sheer good fun. The book's subtitle, Tales of Celebrity and Terror from Pro Wrestling's General Adnan, refers to wrestler Adnan Alkaissy's Saddam-like persona in the ring shortly after the outbreak of the first Gulf War in 1990. Alkaissy, or General Adnan as he was known, would appear in the ring as the Iraqi dictator. His wrestling partner was equally bizarre: Bob Remus played Sergeant Slaughter, an over-the-top US Army drill sergeant, who is so appalled at the US 'invasion' of Kuwait that he has defected to the Iraqi side. This two-up villain act was guaranteed to stir up angry patriotism among mostly blue-collar audiences. Indeed it worked so well that Alkaissy received a warning from the State Department that his life might be at risk from a nutter, and he had to adopt disguises outside the ring. The other reason the role worked so well was that Alkaissy was a native Iraqi and hammed the role up by screaming Arabic at random moments. In fact he was actually a sheikh by birth. That's really the juncture at which the whole book takes off, and raises innumerable reflections on life imitating art imitating life. This is particularly so when the reader learns how Alkaissy went to school with Hussain in the 50s in Iraq, then learned wrestling in the States and later brought it to Iraq under the auspices of the Ba'ath party in 1969. Fighting George Gordienko before a crowd of 200,000 at the al-Shaab stadium led Gordienko to fear for his life as Alkaissy's predictable victory was celebrated with thousands for rifle shots fired randomly into the sky by wild fans. While US fans would later confuse the Alkaissy's Saddam role with reality, so Hussain and the Ba'ath party thought the wrestling was real instead of fake. Not all the tales ring true but the constant and unforced irony of the subject matter is unmistakable. As enthralling as autobiography gets and in spite of its cheesy, ghost-written tone. You don't even have to be a Pro Wrestling fan. RL Heat George Monbiot Allen Lane, €26 ISBN 0713999233 Stop reading this now. No, really. The world is going to end sometime really, really soon. Unless, that is, as George Monbiot spells it out in the bestselling Heat, every single government immediately casts aside all self-interest and synchronises a total overhaul of their country's housing, power, trade and transport policies to reverse global warming. No one can accuse Monbiot of being just another global merchant of doom – although he is doing rather nicely out of the products churned out from his fear factory: books, syndicated newspaper columns, websites etc. No, he positively bombards the reader with elegant and concise solutions as to how we can achieve a 90% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. Not only does Monbiot seemingly have all the facts at his fingertips – as befits someone described by the book jacket as 'one of the world's most influential radical thinkers' – he knows exactly how much every scheme and mechanism is going to cost. Forget a green tax on commercial flights, by the way; Monbiot says that none of us should be allowed to fly anywhere ever again. In fact, we should be prevented from even driving or leaving our homes, unless it is to plant a tree. Oh, and he would also like to see a directly elected world parliament to enforce this utopia, never mind the fact that some countries, such as the planet's largest potential pollutor, China, are strangers to electing even national leaders. Make no mistake, Heat is a powerful book in which the author has clearly invested much passion and rigorous research. Some of his suggestions, such as walking more, are obviously practical – although, many suburban areas of the US have no footpaths. Nevertheless, its potency is severely undermined in the same way that many similar polemical works are: Monbiot loftily assumes that none of the readers' lifestyle choices are really necessary and that none of their more immediate concerns or aspirations are even worth considering. In short, Heat may actually accelerate the planet's demise. Some of the climate change scenarios the book envisages are so grim and Monbiot's solutions are so jaw-droppingly idealistic, the reader can only conclude that he might as well buy that Ferrari tomorrow, take as many exotic holidays as he can (while we still have any planes in the skies at all) and, hell, tuck into a giant panda, while he's at it. Cos pretty soon we're all gonna fry, anyway. BF