Dear Readers,
Good evening and welcome to Off The Fence: a Monday dispatch of deep-dives, featurettes, gossip, tips and links to keep you sated between issues of our handsome magazine. At the moment, we’re putting together Issue 11, which promises to be our widest offering yet, and will be released in early April, but that hasn’t stopped us from being dragged into the discourse – hopefully, at your expense.
On this week’s self-heating content trolley, we have Madonna, Nadine Dorries, and the esteemable Ed Cumming, a supergroup if there ever was one. But first, let us peek under the festering binlid of contemporary arts funding.
Beyond the Realms of Satire
Until 20 March, the Tate are running an exhibition called ‘Hogarth and Europe’, which has placed the bawdy works of the British artist alongside pieces from his contemporaries making their living in other European cities: Chardi, Longhi, Troost and so on.
Alongside the artworks, there are a number of curatorial notes. While it is obviously essential to provide postcolonial and feminist interpretations of the works, to one critic, they read as ‘clod-hopping analyses’ that do little to enlarge our understanding of the singular age that produced this fascinating artist. Of special interest are the panels concerning how consumer goods were acquired in the 18th century, which certainly makes for ironic reading, given that Dame Theresa Sackler, Oxycontin heiress, is still listed as a Tate Foundation trustee.
The Purdue Pharma saga has been assiduously documented by the great Patrick Radden Keefe, whose book, Empire of Pain, is one of the best works of extended reportage of recent years.
While the opioid crisis kills tens of thousands people a year across North America, there is a similar story to be told in Britain, where the inexorable rise of online gambling has caused untold misery, further immiserating the poorest in society. Janice Turner writes very forcefully on the subject here.
This orgy of lonely addiction was legalised by the 2005 Gambling Act, and at the centre of it lies Denise Coates, one of the richest women in Britain, who has been one of the largest donors to the Tate in the last two years: her foundation even provided the money to buy Flora’s Cloak by Gluck (you can download the full report here).
According to a Public Health England study, there are more than 409 suicides in Britain associated with problem gambling every year. Maybe the Tate Britain would like to make a note of that.
Peter O’Hanya-Yanagihara-Han
If you haven’t noticed that Hanya Yanagihara has a new book out, then you’re not walking past enough bookshops. Doubleday have turned on the publicity pump, and To Paradise is everywhere, the first literary smash of 2022, whether you like it or not. Yanagihara is a rare creature in the media; an editor-in-chief and a celebrated author who seems an uneasy fit in either world. D. T. Max’s portrait of her, in the latest New Yorker, paints Yanagihara as a terminal outsider, emotionally off-grid, working with a single-mindedness that excludes readers, critics, friends, and colleagues. Andrea Long Chu, unpicking Yanagihara’s motivations for Vulture, reads her not so much an outsider as a tourist, a voyeur of gay misery and melodrama, whose novels inflict such relentless pain on their protagonists that the reader is driven to pray for their demise – a power that only Yanagihara holds. Whereas A Little Life was almost a send-up of the New York she knows, with its professional jealousies and bacchanalian pretensions, To Paradise is – at least in part – a pandemic novel. And as Rebecca Panovka notes for Harper’s, we ought to buckle up: it’s going to be the first of many.
The Immaculate Conception
A mesmerising clip from the world of A-list celebrity has been doing the rounds: Madonna, Kanye West, Julia Fox, Floyd Mayweather and Antonio Brown all slumped on a couch, hanging out and relaxing in the way that people do when they’ve just met each other for the first time and they’re being filmed their social media managers. The video is very short, and eminently rewatchable, and will likely be memed into obsolescence within the next year, and is so in full and vivid contrast to her full-length 1991 documentary, Truth or Dare, which follows her across the world on her Blond Ambition tour and is currently available on iPlayer. It’s packed full of incident: watch as Madonna tries to sleep with Antonio Banderas, mocks Kevin Costner and fellates a bottle of water in front of her backing dancers. It’s not the easiest thing to sit through, and it’s unlikely you’ll find yourself returning to it, but it’s an astonishing portrait of what life is like when you are the most famous person in the world, and as a few readers have noted, it neatly presages the celebrity-reality TV-social media nexus that has come to define the way we live today.
Auntie’s Balancing Act
Ever wondered why BBC news coverage is so dissatisfying to practically all shades of the political spectrum? Or why the imminent demise of the state broadcaster – as teased in ‘Operation Red Meat’ – elicits nothing more than a collective shrug from the general public? A few issues back, our spy at Broadcasting House revealed the strains to which Auntie Beeb puts herself through as she grasps at the increasingly defunct concept of ‘impartiality’. You can’t say we didn’t warn them.
You’ll Never Work in this Town Again
On Friday, we ran the first iteration in what we hope will be a long-standing feature, in which we visit a restaurant, have a delicious meal and pay for none of it. In conjunction with the editor, Ed Cumming visited Quo Vadis, the louche old queen of Dean Street for a slap-up lunch and free champagne. Yes, you heard it right, it’s lunch for The Fence. You can read Ed’s snickeringly funny piece here. It’s proved extraordinarily popular already, it’s now in the top five most-read articles we’ve ever published, with even Emily Maitlis – the Andyslayer herself – giving it the seal of approval. And we’re already looking forward to our next outing. So if you’d like your establishment to be featured on our series, do get in touch at editorial@the-fence.com, where we are eagerly anticipating your email.
A Touch of Hypocrisy
In a typical display of bonhomie, Ed insisted on not being paid for the piece, and instead chose to give away five free subscriptions in a Twitter prize draw, Now, while we were touched to see this small act of benefaction being so widely shared, it was quietly amusing to see that there were more than a couple of people with prominent public profiles giving it a cheeky retweet.
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In Case You Missed It
David Runciman explores the Substack with its hand around the throat of British discourse right now. No, not Vittles: the other one.
Hotshot American lawyer Alan Dershowitz asks the question we’ve all been pondering: ‘What If Prince Andrew Were Innocent?’
Our toes are yet to uncurl from this menacingly lo-fi vaccine TikTok, released by the Australian government to ostensibly encourage booster sign-ups.
Eva Wiseman’s tender profile of Rylan Clark, the ubiquitous King of Light Entertainment, is an early entry for newspaper feature of the year, and absolutely worth your time.
As Marie Le Conte reveals for Vice, 2021 Twitter phenomenon ‘PoliticsForAli’ was given his break by 2019 Twitter phenomenon, ‘Alex from Glasto’, if you needed any more evidence that we live in a simulation.
And Finally
Culture Secretary, Nadine Dorries, of camel toe fame (eating it on I’m a Celebrity, of course) is leading the latest charge against the BBC. We don’t want to get into the panjandrums at play, but are overjoyed to use this as an excuse to remind you all of the reviews of Dorries’s first novel, The Four Streets: a tale of vigilante castration – yes, really – in the back streets of 50s Liverpool. One reviewer claimed it was the ‘worst book I have read in 10 years’; another, as ‘shite’. The Telegraph’s critic, Christopher Howse, said it was a novel for ‘people who enjoy advertisements for the NSPCC’. Dorries then disinvited him from the book launch.
*
Well, that was the week that was. We’ll be catching up with you again this time next week, in the jittery hinterland between lunchtime and hometime, for something to rest your weary eyes on. Should you want to chat to any of the editorial team for any reason whatsoever (within limits), do so by replying to this email, and we will all receive your message simultaneously. After that it’s potluck on which of us will get back to you, but one of us will.
All the best,
TF
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