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I like this debate because there are so many aspects to it.  Why do we pay tax?  Why can't we choose what our tax is spent on?  Are non-profit organisations possibly providing better value for money than the state can?

Having been brought up in the Netherlands, but having lived in the UK now for some 20 years, I am acutely aware of the difference in national attitudes towards taxation.  The two nations have in common a protestant history that places a high value on contributing to society, and doing something good with one's money.  But the medieval origins of taxation are quite different.  In the simplest terms, the English were asked to fork out money to pay for their monarchs' foreign wars, and the Dutch were asked to pay up to build dikes against the water and to keep them in a good state of repairs.  I suspect that the two nations' quite different attitudes to taxation goes back all the way to these ancient origins.

Taxation for many centuries was not seen as the panacea for all of society's ills, and only grudgingly accepted for special purposes.  The contemporary welfare state with its high taxation levels is a relatively new phenomenon.  I don't want to debate here the merits of high or low taxation societies, but I think it's only realistic to note that the state has an interest in promoting its own importance and so justify its size.

I think we need to see George Osborne's planned clampdown on gifts to charities in this light. This intervention would not have occurred if there hadn't been the 2008 bursting of the credit bubble, and the subsequent squeeze on government income (and increased demand on its services).  The charities and the state have become competitors for the same money stream. The chancellor himself admitted that there are only a few known "dodgy charities", and those could be dealt with in a much simpler way than to overthrow the whole charitable giving framework.

But what if we assume that most charities do essential work that otherwise in a civilised society would have to be undertaken by the state, probably at higher cost and with less job satisfaction?  And what if we dream a bit, and envision a society where people tax themselves voluntarily, and lots of functions of the state are taken care of in different, less top-down ways?

Before you say: that sounds like David Cameron's "Big Society" idea, do remember that people on the left also have often argued that they should be able to target their tax money, i.e pacifists and anti-militarists have long argued that their taxes should not be used for the army.  So the desire to have a say and direct one's money to goals that the donor finds worthwhile has floated around on both sides of the political spectrum.

And tax experts know that to a large extent taxation is already voluntary, for better or for worse.  The UK income tax rate of 83% in the 1970s was abolished not because it was ethically unsound, but because it was counter-productive and didn't work.  The same doubts exist about the 50% income tax rate.  Large corporations, whether one likes it or not, have a certain freedom to base their operations where they can make money and remain competitive. Because of this the Inland Revenue reasons with and sometimes cajoles large companies rather than using enforcement through tribunals and courts.  Again: in practice there is an element of voluntarism already existent within the corporations tax system.

Whilst we are still some way off from a voluntary society with voluntary contributions,  I do believe that the future is voluntary.  For this reason alone I believe that the UK government's attempt to get their hand on more of the money given to charities is counter-productive and out of step with the times.

In two of the chapters Malcolm delves into the ENRON scandal of 2001, when one of the most lauded American energy corporation suddenly went bankrupt.  It has since paled in significance and size with the banking and credit crisis of 2008, but it was big, and, Malcolm argues, if the true lessons of the ENRON debacle had been learnt, the 2008 crisis need not have happened.

ENRON stood out, not because it stood out as sleazy, corrupt or old-fashioned, but because it was inspired by modern management theories to hire the most talented staff from the best universities, and pay them top dollar.  They also gave these talented department managers much more freedom to follow their hunches, believing that this would lead to the most advanced business practices, and hence highest profitability. These practices were strongly advocated by management consultants McKinsey at the time, which is one of the reasons why ENRON had such a good name. 

ENRON's exposure and sudden downfall were caused by two practices that were quite common, but poorly understood by the general public: mark-to-market accounting and Special Purpose Entities (SPEs).  Mark-to-market accounting means that the profits of projects that haven't come to fruition yet (and may never happen) are shown in the company's financial statements, and are used by shareholders and others to estimate the company's value and therefore share price. SPE's are soft loans by 3rd parties to the company to enable it to expand and fund new investments, that enable the company to avoid having to go to traditional lenders, who, seeing a company that is rather exposed, would charge a higher interest.  The problem is, that these 3rd parties are kept happy with a stake in the business, they become part owners of the business, just like a mortgage company owns your house.

You can see that once all these mechanisms are in place (with the documentation running into thousands of pages), it becomes extremely hard to assess in what state of financial health a company really is.  This is where the similarity with the trigger for the current economic crisis comes in: The assets of lenders of sub-prime mortgages were close to worthless, the banks had next to no liquidity (cash in hand), and countries like Greece were taking financial risks on the strength of being cushioned by a strong currency kept strong by other nations.  Over-exposure across the board in other words.

So how come that this could happen to a company that had hired the best talent and paid so well to keep them? Gladwell delves deeper into this question than I can do here, but he believes that a theory by psychologists Hogan, Raskin and Fazzini helps to understand what happened. They describe a type of manager that they call the Narcissist,  who will take credit for things that go well, but don't take responsibility when thing don't go so well.

Gladwell also refers to research by psychologist Carol Dweck, who found that people whose self-esteem relied on their intelligence and talent, were likely to exaggerate their skill, and play down their mistakes.  He then concludes that inadvertently ENRON had staffed the higher echelons of its business with these psychological types, and that his, combined with the opaque financial dealings of the company, led to its downfall.

The point I'm coming to is that there are all kinds of intelligence, and organisations ignore this at their peril.  Someone who is judged to have an IQ of 60 may not be able to hurt an animal, but a "highly talented graduate" may smoothly move into research that involves vivisection.  Someone with a deep appreciation of classical music can run a death camp....

Now these are deliberately extreme examples, but one can make the case for there being, for instance, emotional intelligence, musical intelligence, pragmatic intelligence, specialist intelligence, spiritual intelligence and visual intelligence.  Society needs all of them.

What baffles me about the recruitment of the "highly talented" by companies such as ENRON though, is that I do not think that any child when asked "what would you like to become later?" would answer "I would like to sell oil and gas, mummy".  I can just imagine a child answering "I would like to be rich", but that would be more likely when either growing up in grinding poverty, or growing up with parents who give love conditional on achievement.

It seems to me that many people who choose to work for big corporations, do so for remuneration and status, in other words for external validation, not for a particular passion for the company's services.  That to me does not seem very smart.  Whilst I'm not applauding the image of the struggling, eccentric artist (although there are many great specimens), I do believe that by and large artists are smart enough to do what they love and to love what they do.

I've been reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's "Roumeli, travels in Northern Greece", and it is enlightening.  Leigh Fermor is a bit of a hero of mine, and best described as a cross between Laurie Lee and Lord Byron.  Having walked in the mid thirties from Hook of Holland to Constantinople he was recruited to work behind enemy lines in Greece during WWII and was influential in the abduction of the German general Kreipe with the help of the Cretan resistance.  His character was subsequently played by Dirk Bogarde in the movie "Ill met by moonlight".

Leigh Fermor became a lifelong lover of Greece, and spent much of his life there.  In "Roumeli" he discusses the Greek's own discomfort with their more recent history.  At one point he quotes a train conductor (a refugee from formerly Greek Smyrna, now Izmir) who states he is sick of the obsession with the ancient Greek, as "it makes us feel inferior".  Leigh Fermor then discusses the current fashion of the Greek to call themselves "Hellenes", when for a thousand years or so  they called themselves "Romaios" or "Romios", meaning Romans of East Romans.  This term however lost its lustre because it became associated with the practice of a subjected people trying to survive under Turkish rule. Hence even to the Greek the terms "Romaikes doulies" (Romaic doings, meaning Greek practices) became tainted with associations with the habits of a subject people to use clever but underhand practices to survive.  Follows the post-independence bent for the word "Hellenes" harking back to classical Greece.

The recent turmoil and real suffering in Greece has everything to do with this recent history. Tax dodging and cooking books would have been a completely natural to a people who felt superior to their Turkish conquerors, and a habit hard to shake off in over a century of independence that saw ill-fated attempts to reconquer Istambul/Constantinople, civil war, conquest by the Germans, military coups and what not....

The Germans, who are presently resenting having to rescue the Euro currency, might understand the Greek predicament a bit better when they reflect on how much two generations of being under the Nazi and Communist yoke affected East Germany's citizens.  I think the comparison is not  idle.

In the mean time the rest of the western world could do with re-appraising the Byzantine (East Roman) world which, much more than the ancient Greek civilisation, lies at the root of modern Greece.

This re-opens a debate that has simmered ever since the invention of the camera: if a machine can  reproduce a likeness why bother with art and individual artists?  The difference here is that the end result of the robot Rubens' efforts has the erratic creative lines that we associate with creativity.  But it is actually the result of a £300 program that with a bit of attention could create a less "artistic looking" and more "exact" result.  Questions abound...

What is the difference between a machine that creates a drawing with erratic lines that look like what we've come to associate with a free-spirited artist and the real thing?  But also: what is the difference between this particular robot and a photocopier with someone placing their private parts on top of it (or any other part of their anatomy)?  Or a camera?

Not that much I would say to the second question.  Photo-editing software can also turn any photo into something that looks like a textured painting made with  palette knife. But that doesn't necessarily let artists breathe more easily in response to the first question.  

What gives the current robot ("worker" in its original Slavic meaning) it's publicity value is it's erratic/creative use of lines, which ever since the invention of photography has delineated artists from "mechanical" photography.

Apart from Rembrandt's sketches and etchings in the 17th Century, we have to wait until after the invention of photography before artists started to use "inexact" lines to distinguish themselves from the new all-conquering camera.  But then of course soon after photographers started to manipulate their shots to create startling results and get away from faithful renderings of reality.  Photography became creative and joined the arts.... All very confusing....

Whilst my work is currently largely hand-made (and I love that) I am not dismissive of mass reproduction and technology aided creativity. I've been particularly impressed with what can be done with programs like Photoshop on screen.  All of this is an interaction with and blurring of the boundary between man and machine, which is fine by me.  What maybe Paul Tresset's Rubens Robot achieves is a lowering of the man-created distinction between "repetitive machine" and "artistic genius", and that may not be a bad thing.

But returning for now to the more familiar story, there is a lot more happening before the Impressionists came along, and they certainly had their groundwork done for them before their first show of independents.  Turner, already mentioned is a true one-off and so is Friedrich, but Constable also did radical work with a free brush stroke that pre-empts what was to follow. The school of Barbizon (Th. Rousseau, Millet, Courbet) is well-known, as are Jongkind and Corot.

What was radical about the Impressionists (Pisarro, Monet, Morisot) was that they went solo, they bypassed the conventional way of being shown and recognised, and eventually pulled it off.  This independence and stubbornness in its turn led to a flowering of such different styles that it actually a misnomer to talk about the Impressionists as a style. How different can it get? Monet and Pisarro, Seurat and Toulouse Lautrec, Renoir and Degas: their styles are so different, and that is where the real significance lies.  As a group they were soon overtaken by new movements for who they had opened the door.

It is worthwhile noting that despite their current popularity with the Impressionists also starts the separation between a large section of the public and modern art.  This was made possible by both artists' stubbornness, the will to do their own thing, and the growing diversifying urban market.  That didn't stop van Gogh from hardly selling a painting during his life.

With the post-impressionists individual radicalism and experimentation reach a peak (van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin) and colour explodes helped by new paints created by new chemistry. But again I'm impressed by the other movements that split off at the same time: the symbolists and art nouveau artists (Redon, Klimt) and the first noted "naieves" (Rousseau).

Early 20th century we then see an explosion of styles and movements (the Fauves, the colourists, Cubists, Futurists, Expressionists, Constructivists et al).  The old art history has depicted these as a movement towards ever greater abstraction, but this is now generally seen as flawed.  Basically on the continent anything goes from the early 20th Cy onwards, with Britain and the US lagging some 20 years behind.  There are streams and influences running right through the age and any artist can choose what they wish to do and who they feel affinity with.  There are clearly families of thought, for example conceptual art is hugely indebted to Dada, and self-taught naives like Wallis have opened up opportunities for many who followed.

I'm not even going to try and name landscape artists that followed or where they fit in. Some show cubist influences, others return to a super realism or a magical realism.  The field is just to wide to capture.

One last point I would like to make however is that with the advent of Modern Art (capital letters!) a second split was created other than that between the general public and the new art movements: the distinction between art and illustration, generally with an implied hierarchy of the former being of a higher order.  But when we realise that the last century's linear story of art was never real in the first place, it makes it easier to see that the format of illustration is another creative outlet for outlets, and the work created, often in mass media, is as worthy of attention as individual works hanging on gallery walls or in whichever modern format.  I'm often taken aback by the quality of work created just to illustrate a one-off news paper article in a weekend magazine.  Artistic diversity in a diverse market is the order of the day, and that's how it should be.

The funny thing about landscape painting, despite the cliched image, is that it is a relatively recent addition to a the art pantheon, and gained a relatively short period of dominance (romantics and impressionists) to be now consigned to a kind of sub-status in the modern art world.  They certainly won't teach it at art college, although I have noticed lots of art students returning to it after graduation....

Let me indulge you in a short tour of my favourite artists in this genre:

Sticking to western art (the Chinese were there earlier as in most things) it is hard to find landscape artists before the Renaissance, then landscape, clearly enjoyed by the artist, turns up as a backdrop mainly to mythological of religious subjects (Giorgione, Bosch, Altdorfer).  To my mind Brueghel the Elder was the first however to make the landscape undeniably the subject rather than an ornament to a primary subject.  In his "Hunters in the snow" and "Winter landscape with a birdtrap" the artist is clearly indulging his love for the landscape, and, quite unusual for his time, painting Northern European scenes rather than fanciful Holy Lands or Italianate views.

The development of the landscape than stays in Northern Europe with the genre for the first time gaining respectability in the Dutch Republic in the 17th Century, where a whole raft of artists supplied the rich burghers with scenery: Rembrandt did wonderful sketches and etchings; van Ruysdael, Koninck, Seghers, Cuyp and van Goyen are just a few of the artists worth mentioning.  They all paint in the Northern baroque claire-obscur style of the day.

Where landscape surfaces in Southern Europe it remains mainly a backdrop to religious or mythological themes, with France offering a kind of halfway house.  Noteworthy are Poussin and Lorrain (not so keen) and Watteau (I'm a fan).

It is in England though that landscape develops further, first with wholesale importation of Dutch works, then growing into an English style of its own.  It's worthwhile noticing the impact of religion and class on the art of nations: to my eye the English landscape of the 18th century and early 19th Cy (Gainsborough, Constable) has a distinct Anglican feel about it compared with the more prosaic, even dour Dutch art.

Like in the Netherlands the growth of an affluent middle class allowed a growing number of artists to carve out a living outside of court and noble patronage, and this had an impact on the choice of subjects.  Landscape fits in the increasingly utilitarian and rationalist outlook of the period.  There is Wilson doing romantic mountain scenery in Wales (a possible source for thousands of poor imitations), and Sell Cotman and Towne being important in the development of watercolour.  Other names worth mentioning are De Wint, Cox (we're well into the 19th C by now), Glover, Barker and Chrome. Some of it is a backward looking (with hindsight) but all of these artists have in common that in this Romantic era they choose landscape as a subject in itself.

One of the advantages of post-modernism in the arts is that we can now look at the 19th century as a creative and diverse period in its own right, rather than in a teleological way seeing it only as leading up to the Impressionists.  As a result we can look at and admire artists like Friedrich, Turner, Daumier and so many others with fresh eyes.  There is so much diversity out there, and that in many ways can be seen as a precursor to the current situation, where in my eyes, anything goes.

Illustration takes off in a big way (Dore' springs to mind), orientalism (Roberts, Johnson) and what we now think of as high Victoriana (Becker in Britain, Cole and Bierstadt in the US), but also the Prerafaelites emerge (although less relevant to this subject) and many other individual artists.  The message to take from this is that lots of movements and trends were happening, a lot of them survived the onslaught of Impressionism and Postimpressionism to live another day. (to be continued)

I have to admit that I have been quite ambivalent about tools in the past.  On the one hand I have oggled at and admired beautifully made implements such as wood carving sets, billhooks, mattocks and the like. On the other I have been less than respectful about modern technology, the equipment that builds our cities, bridges and even spacecraft.  I can now see that they are all related and extensions of the first primitive poking stick or flint axe our ancestors used. 

As I type this on a keyboard, watching a screen and soon sending this off into the ether thousands of small inventions and innovations contribute to this effort that you are now reading.  Isn't that staggering?  A keyboard, a PC, an orbiting satellite, these are of course as much tools as are an inkpen, a palette or a lino-cutter.

The amazing thing is, and that is what I love about tools, that in tools function informs form, but doesn't dictate it completely.  A vase needs to be able to hold water, a pan needs to be able to cook food, but within those perimeters there is the scope to create a beautiful object, and so design is born, and therefore art.  

The prehistoric beaker people in NW Europe created beautifully shaped and ornamented pots thousands of years ago, but the ornamentation was surplus to requirement. No doubt the potters got joy out of it, and the consumers of the day enjoyed bringing beauty into their lives in the same way we do today.  Steve Jobs enjoyed adding beautiful fonts to his Apple Macs and we now enjoy the flexibility of a choice of typesets.  The continuity in humanity baffles me and is encouraging.

Ornamentation aside another wonderful thing about tools is that in many cases (but not all) functionality creates a beautiful object quite by chance.  An aeroplane looks a bit like a bird. An arrow needs to be balanced and stable to do its job.  A flint hand axe needs to be tear shaped.  And have you ever driven past an oil refinery in the dark? Ignoring pollution issues here for a moment, they are staggering pieces of modern art, but completely unintentional.  The wonders and paradoxes of civilisation....

 

Not lacking in friends or social life (in fact often feeling bad about not being able to keep up with people regularly) I quizzed myself over this attachment to being contacted, of being thought of by someone else.

There was a 50% chance that the message would be spam of course, but even so, why, I reflected (still watching the road....), do we enjoy being connected so much?  As it happens I do believe we're all connected anyway, and that the word "mankind" or "humanity" is more than a useful collective noun.  The thing is that most of the time, and through most of human history, we don't feel like that.  In fact, a lot of the time in our heads we set up petty differences and quarrels with others, artificially separating ourselves to bolster our identities.

To me however that doesn't take away from an underlying truth that we as mankind (and the wider universe come to that) are invisibly connected and ultimately one (One).  Modern technologies, starting with the mail service and the telegraph, increasingly are catching up with what is already and has always been so: one some level we are one.  The ping on my smartphone reminds me of that.  Isn't that great?  

A good yarn it is, although the prose does improve where (near imperceptibly) du Maurier takes over.  Regardless of whether one buys into the romanticism that people see in all things Celtic, Cornwall has a stunningly historic landscape, and on my trip I visited the ancient hillfort of Castle Dor of course, believed to be the site of King Mark's castle.  The first day of my trip had been incredibly wet, so I walked to the fort on the second day.  Still got drenched by a heavy shower though!  The second day also saw me discovering the stunning viewpoint of Helman Tor (including the "Logan Stone"), just when the sun was getting low, and rain had cleared the skies.  I took some wonderful pictures, some of which I hope to turn into paintings soon.  

I also found an old straw-filter cider press still in operation at Hay Farm, near Polruan (strong sweet cider...) and revisited pretty Polperro.  But Helman Tor has now become my favourite spot in Cornwall.

When I was talking to Rob Walker, of the West Gallery, West Putford, Devon recently, he said that in the current economic climate his top end sales were holding up, it was the medium priced works that were selling less.  I thought this was interesting in more than one way.  It may show that the top end of the market is less affected by the current economic restructuring than people on median incomes are, and it may also indicate that where interest rates are low, and share values are dropping or flatlining, buying art is seen as a good investment.  This is good news for artist with an established name.

It made me think about the economic events of recent years.  Having a fairly solid grounding in economics and having been a political activist in the past, I have followed the debates and public responses with interest, albeit from a distance. 

Now, that both the public and governments around the world want to avoid having to save failing banks ever again is entirely reasonable.  But a lot of the other name calling and anger is misplaced and counterproductive.

At the time of the first bank bail-outs I watched a debate on TV where a panel and the audience were debating who was most the blame for the mess: the government, the bankers or the regulators.....  Everyone had their own favourite culprit, and, strikingly, nobody thought of pointing out that an important participant in this game was being left out: the great British public!  Having myself got into debt in the past, and having indeed found it easy to access credit, it never occurred to me to blame the banks who lent me the money....  I was there, conscious, aware, alive at every spending decision I made wasn't I?  I took risks based on expectations of future income, and it didn't work out.  The elephant in the cupboard here is what I call the "R" word: responsibility.

And I knew, shallowly following the news, that 3/4 of all credit card debt in Europe was held by Brits!  I had read about Greece being seen as having cheated itself into the single currency, running larger deficits than the rules allowed.... I knew that the US were carrying large debts on the strenght of dollar being the global trading currency.... It was a gamble, and whilst the going was good, which politician was going to kill the goose with the golden eggs?

But ultimately, prosperity comes from taking full responsibility for where you are.  Bankers like money and are unashamed of it.  Most people on the left think that money is bad, corrupts and/or destroys the planet.   Is it surprising that it is hard to be solvent  when your underlying beliefs are so mixed up about such a crucial part of life?  And is it surprising that the people who like the money-game are coming out of the current phase of turmoil more or less alright?

My remedy is to get on with what you love doing, have faith in your ablilities and, crucially, take responsibility.  Blaming others will never get you out of a rut.