var article_index = {"love":[{"id":54,"category_id":3,"name":"I want to break up","description":"In theory, we already think that strawberries are nice. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut Coorte has made a monument to them. He wants to re-sensitise us to them. He\u2019s reminding us that we love an aspect of the world more than we thought, that there are things we take for granted,  but don\u2019t quite appreciate fully. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nHe\u2019s looking at strawberries like an appreciative stranger, refinding sense of wonder and encouraging us to do the same. There are no distractions: a simply-patterned cream and green Chinese bowl and a white flower provide the ideal setting to reconnect us with a simple delight.  <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe artist knows something about us: how familiarity dulls our appreciation of what is on offer. By inviting us to concentrate just for a minute or two he can refresh our curiosity and sense of value. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe need to do with many things what Coorte did with strawberries. Starting with, at the very least, our partners and spouses.","artist_name":"Adrien Coorte","painting_name":"Bowl of Strawberries, 1704","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/137813513914.jpg","stub":"i-want-to-get-divorced","order":1,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/137813513914.jpg"},{"id":36,"category_id":3,"name":"Can it last forever?","description":"He\u2019s really upset her, and she\u2019s showing it by going off in a huff. What did he do wrong? He doesn\u2019t know - and that\u2019s part of the problem. Is she being hyper-sensitive? Or is he really selfish and unreasonable? He was just being the way he always is, and now it\u2019s a disaster. Relationships deliver terrible moments of self-doubt. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nOf course, we hope that love will flourish, and relationships be satisfying, because we are basically quite decent, well-intentioned people - at least in our own eyes. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nOrchardson\u2019s work is helpful because it is not concerned with blame. it does not suggest that either he or she is at fault. Rather, it gives us a clear, sympathetic sense that it is inherently difficult to live happily with another person. In doing so it propels us to a good question: what are the qualities that I need to develop - beyond just being my own good self - in order to get a relationship to work well? ","artist_name":"William Quiller Orchardson","painting_name":"The first cloud, 1887","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13781305731.jpg","stub":"we-are-unhappy-but-neither-has-done-anything-wrong","order":36,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13781305731.jpg"},{"id":102,"category_id":3,"name":"Does sex have to define me?","description":"He\u2019s male, but he likes looking like a girl. What else might be true of him? Perhaps he\u2019s studying electrical engineering, but has also taken courses in archaeology and philosophy. He\u2019s a fine tennis player. His favourite novelist is Dostoevsky. He\u2019s a good listener. He is right of centre on the economy - and would like to see tax cuts. He is critical of government subsidies for the arts. He loves dancing, but at home he enjoys Bach. When he graduates he\u2019s planning to take a holiday to the north of France to see the cathedrals. He\u2019s good at saving money and likes to follow the stock market. His sister is a corporate lawyer. Mostly, he gets on quite well with his parents. ","artist_name":"Nan Goldin","painting_name":"Cody in the Dressing Room at Boy Bar, NYC, 1991 ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13799410916.jpg","stub":"sex-defines-us","order":54,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13799410916.jpg"},{"id":55,"category_id":3,"name":"Sex and decency don\u2019t mix","description":"We\u2019re used to the idea that erotic images lack dignity and kindness. They tend to create a separate realm for sex, cut off from all the other things we normally care about. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nSo it\u2019s surprising to come across a frankly erotic image which is also interested in other aspects of human nature, which appreciates thoughtfulness and tenderness and is interested in people\u2019s minds.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nShe hasn\u2019t surrendered her dignity just because she\u2019s taking off her stockings and is quietly letting us catch a glimpse of her upper thighs. She\u2019s still the same person who earlier that day made a perceptive comment to the Prime Minister at a reception and later went through the domestic accounts. She knows how to pull off that difficult (especially for men) feat: being respectable and sexual at the same time. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe painting opens up the possibility that we can at once be sexual and good. The picture, perhaps surprisingly, is rather like the portrait of a saint: it shows us someone we should seek to imitate. ","artist_name":"Jan Steen","painting_name":"Woman at her Toilet, 1655-1660","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138071436915.jpg","stub":"sex-and-decency-dont-mix","order":55,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138071436915.jpg"},{"id":66,"category_id":3,"name":"I'd love to meet someone nice","description":"This isn\u2019t just a nice picture. It is primarily (and far more importantly) a picture of a nice person. It shows us how un-banal niceness really is, and how much we might need more of it in our lives.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe picture amounts to a visual essay on the constituents of niceness. <br \/>\n<br \/>\n- She\u2019s nice because the scale of her own niceness has never really occurred to her.<br \/>\n- She\u2019s nice because she knows how to take her time and we know how much of life gets damaged by impatience.<br \/>\n- She\u2019s nice because the care she exhibits with the lace will at other times be given to a friend.<br \/>\n- She\u2019s nice because her ingrained straightforwardness can make her feel the strained artifice of life, rendering her at times awkward, and almost gawky in situations where less sensitive types might simply stride on.<br \/>\n- She\u2019s nice because her mind is detailed and precise, its tenor suggested by the neatness, complexity and harmony of her bonnet, as though the painter had been kind enough to give us a map of her psyche.<br \/>\n- She\u2019s nice because she\u2019s always harboured doubts about her slightly broad-boned forearms.<br \/>\nWe may buy her postcard and talk about how accomplished a painter was Caspar Netscher. But a deeper, less admissible desire may be stirring: the wish that we might meet and befriend someone a little bit like her, perhaps in one of the galleries.","artist_name":"Caspar Netscher","painting_name":"The Lace Maker, 1662","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13782882353.jpg","stub":"loneliness","order":102,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13782882353.jpg"},{"id":103,"category_id":3,"name":"I need others to be generous","description":"She used to be strong and decisive. She had lovers once; she put her make-up on carefully and set out with a quiet thrill in the evening. Now, she\u2019s hard to love and maybe she knows this. She gets irritated, she withdraws. But she needs other people to care for her. Anyone can end up in her position. And there are moments when a lot of people - at whatever stage of life - are a bit hard to admire or like. Love is often linked to admiration: we love because we find another person exciting and sweet. But there\u2019s another aspect to love in which we are moved by the need of the other, by generosity.<br \/>\n <br \/>\nTully is generous to her. He looks with great care into her face and wonders who she really is. ","artist_name":"Sydney Strickland Tully","painting_name":"The Twilight of Life, 1894","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13799413017.jpg","stub":"a-fair-weather-friend","order":103,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13799413017.jpg"},{"id":112,"category_id":3,"name":"I don't know you, but I'm going to find out","description":"Leonardo\u2019s extremely beautiful notes and diagrams, showing how a baby grows in its mother\u2019s womb, teach us something important about love. It\u2019s not that his images today fill in gaps in our understanding of pregnancy - a task which, to be frank, is better accomplished by Wikipedia. The importance lies, rather, in the quality of mind such images exemplify. Leonardo is a hero of curiosity. He lived in a world that did not often seek to find out how things really work. Curiosity takes ignorance seriously - and is confident enough to admit when it's in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it. The fine manner of this page of investigations presents curiosity as a raw, natural elegant accomplishment. Leonardo is not prying, he is not nosy or intrusive. And his will to discover is organised. He wants to understand. It is not a matter - with him - of finding a stray fact here or there. He wants to know something important. And he has contained his insights in a single lucid page. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWithin every relationship is the fear that we will be misunderstood and wrongly imagined by our lover rather than properly investigated. And over time this works to close down intimacy. We are disturbed when our partner just assumes knowledge of our needs and troubles - and gets it wrong. They don\u2019t try to find out; they don\u2019t carefully and lovingly seek out the precise nature of what is going on inside us. They simply say: \u2018Your problem is...\u2019; or \u2018what you need to do is ..\u2019 and one feels bereft, because the comments are not stupid, just inaccurate in our case. They could very well be true of someone else (our partner\u2019s ex; their difficult brother; their father; when we don\u2019t investigate the present, we tend to project theories from the past). Leonardo teaches us the value of attending closely to experience, of looking at what is actually before us, and respecting the true diversity and individuality of the world. And it is just such attitudes which lie at the heart of the kinds of conversations we wish we could have in love - but so often don\u2019t.","artist_name":"Leonardo da Vinci","painting_name":"Studies of a foetus, c.1510-12","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13805401882.jpg","stub":"i-dont-know-you-but-im-going-to-find-out","order":112,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13805401882.jpg"},{"id":113,"category_id":3,"name":"We fight all the time","description":"People seldom talk with complete sincerity about what is happening inside their relationships. Behind the silence lies a need to maintain face about one's progress through one of the most significant challenges of adult life: a capacity to succeed at being happy with someone else.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn truth, relationships are often harder than the official story makes out. Many couples have painful conflicts. The spark often looks quite small: the way someone asked \u2018how was your day?\u2019 - with what feels like a sarcastic or sceptical intent. One person says something harsh, the other looks numb with misery; the one who storms out is furious but feels like a monster.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe need works of art that can show us that our troubles are both sad and normal. We don't need the diametric opposite of the saccharine images of Hollywood. Extremes of domestic violence are - mercifully - rare. But day to day struggles are universal, though often unrepresented and unseen. We wonder if we might be the only ones. Art can console us by showing us that we are not.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn Jessica Todd Harper's image, a couple has perhaps been planning to have a nice evening: the table is beautifully laid. Yet it has now all gone wrong. One person is feeling incensed; the other is crying. However, importantly, these are nice people. We are not to condemn them. They are likeable, but in the grip of a genuinely difficult problem. And you have been there yourself.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nRecognising a problem as common does not make it go away, but it can hugely reduce the level of panic and isolation we otherwise feel in relation to it. Good enough relationships simply do have many points of bitterness and disappointment in them.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nArt can function as a private repository for truths that are too peculiar and too unacceptable to be shared with people we know. It can help us to feel less alone with, and confused by our own experiences.","artist_name":"Jessica Todd Harper","painting_name":"The Agony in the Kitchen, 2012","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13805402353.jpg","stub":"we-fight-all-the-time","order":113,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13805402353.jpg"},{"id":114,"category_id":3,"name":"It's hard to get in the mood","description":"It can be hard to be sensual. Sensuality - defined as unembarrassed enjoyment of touch and movement, of the delights of swaying one\u2019s hips to music or of caressing and being stroked - may be difficult to find as a relationship develops. We become awkward because we get worried that we will appear ridiculous or leave ourselves vulnerable to rejection. Will the other person want to stroke us back?  If we get up and dance, will our movements be fluid and enticing - or shamefully disjointed and inept? Or it can simply feel hard to make the transition from all the other themes of a relationship - the need to persuade one\u2019s partner to change their attitude to the distribution of domestic chores, to agree that the children\u2019s school has serious failings or to manage one\u2019s tendency to get irritated or morose - and surrender to physical sweetness and allure.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOscar Niemeyer\u2019s Casa de Canoas carefully constructs an environment designed to help us with such troubles. It repositions sensuality as part of a sophisticated, mature life. Instead of suggesting that sensuality might be the special province of the young, the carefree, the louche or the pretty, he creates a place where you can be an accountant or work in the ministry of infrastructure (be a responsible, hard working person much concerned with technical and administrative problems) and relish your body. You can have a conversation that stretches your mind and also be gently exploring the back of your lover\u2019s knee; or you might kiss in the warm shadows before taking a conference call about worrying regional sales projections.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe house is a bit like a confident and encouraging friend who makes reassuring murmurs at the right time. One could imagine a couple feeling safe enough in this house to be sexually adventurous in a way that felt impossible for years in their normal home. The passage from where they are now to the more risky, intense and dramatic elements of their sexuality is made simpler here. The house is a temple to erotic hope: the hope that one can be sexually adventurous and, at the same time, a decent, productive adult.","artist_name":"Oscar Niemeyer","painting_name":"Casa de Canoas, 1953","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13805404615.jpg","stub":"its-hard-to-get-in-the-mood","order":114,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13805404615.jpg"},{"id":115,"category_id":3,"name":"It was so amazing at the start","description":"In his Daphnis and Chloe, Pisano evokes the beginnings of love, a moment when the sweetness and grace of the other is intensely present to us. Daphnis regards Chloe as so precious, he hardly dares to touch her. All his devotion, his honour and his hopes for the future are vivid to him. He wants to deserve her; he does not know if she will love him and this doubt intensifies his delicacy. In his eyes, she absolutely cannot to be taken for granted. This is a representation of how one should properly appreciate a person one loves. The beauty of this work of art should in turn help us see, and be convinced by, an attitude which we might not have taken sufficiently seriously had it merely been depicted in words in a philosophical tract. Seen by someone in a long-term relationship, after years of shared domestic life, and hence the inevitable conflicts about sex and money, childcare and holidays, and when habit has made the other completely familiar, this image comes across as particularly necessary, because of its power to return us to a woefully forgotten sense of gratitude and wonder.","artist_name":"Nicolo Pisano","painting_name":"An Idyll: Daphnis and Chloe, c. 1500 ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13805405036.jpg","stub":"it-was-so-amazing-at-the-start","order":115,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13805405036.jpg"},{"id":126,"category_id":3,"name":"I'm bored in this relationship","description":"There are lessons for long-term relationships in the way Manet approached asparagus. Aside from chefs, gourmands and farmers, few people in nineteenth-century France would have been likely to detect anything especially interesting in asparagus \u2013 that is, until Edouard Manet painted a tightly wrapped bunch in 1880 and thereby called attention to the inherent wonder of this spring vegetable\u2019s yearly apparition. However exemplary Manet\u2019s technical skills may have been, his painting achieves its effect not by inventing the charms of asparagus but by reminding us of qualities which we knew existed but which we have overlooked because of our spoilt and habituated ways of seeing. Where we might have been prepared to recognise only dull white stalks, the artist observed and then reproduced vigour, colour and individuality, recasting his humble subject as an elevated and sacramental object through which we might access a redeeming philosophy of nature and rural life.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nTo rescue a long-term relationship from complacency and boredom, we might learn to effect on our spouse much the same imaginative transformation which Manet performed on his vegetables. We should try to locate the good and the beautiful beneath the layers of habit and routine. We may so often have seen our partner pushing a buggy, arguing with a toddler, crossly berating the electricity company and returning home defeated from the workplace that we have forgotten that dimension in him or her which remains adventurous, impetuous, cheeky, intelligent and, above all else, worthy of love.","artist_name":"Edouard Manet","painting_name":"Bunch of Asparagus, 1880","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13805413934.jpg","stub":"im-bored-in-this-relationship","order":126,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13805413934.jpg"},{"id":134,"category_id":3,"name":"It\u2019s only a bit of fun","description":"We hardly know who this naked man is \u2013 he is just a stocky back disappearing behind a thin curtain, his cropped or balding head bent down, a white towel, perhaps, in his left hand. Something sexual is going to happen but we don\u2019t know what. Something far beyond the bounds of conventional decorum, something he needs.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nSex used to be thought of as dangerous, something religious authorities told us to be very careful about and something we understood lay near a precipice.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe official story is now more cheerful and innocent. Sex, like tennis, can be fun and healthy. Francis Bacon\u2019s painting reminds us otherwise. Sex is exciting partly because it is close to danger. It can overwhelm us; it can approach violence and sadism; it can upturn everything else we cared about. This is good to know and even, with proper respect, to celebrate.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Francis Bacon","painting_name":"Study from the human body, 1949","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14019755431.JPG","stub":"its-only-a-bit-of-fun","order":134,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14019755431.JPG"},{"id":135,"category_id":3,"name":"I can\u2019t be sexy","description":"Being thought sexy by others and feeling sexy oneself are amongst the most coveted and most enjoyable of all experiences. These feelings, however, can be elusive, especially for thoughtful, serious people. It can feel as if they will never come one\u2019s way; that they are only for other people.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAlthough this bustier is hanging on the wall of an art gallery it is actually designed to be worn. And that means it can also be put aside. It proposes an identity to be tried on, without having to commit the whole of who you are.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe work doesn\u2019t say anything about the rest of what may be going on in a person\u2019s life: they might be holding down a highly responsible job, caring for a family, going to church, worrying about their debts or studying for a degree in archaeology. All of which are compatible with sometimes wanting (or needing) to see oneself as a sex-goddess.","artist_name":"Issey Miyake, Tokyo","painting_name":"Bustier 1980\u201381 autumn\u2013winter","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14019756082.JPG","stub":"i-cant-be-sexy","order":135,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14019756082.JPG"},{"id":140,"category_id":3,"name":"I rarely place an arm around my spouse","description":"The warmth and quietness of their love for one another, even though neither is especially attractive or particularly accomplished by the standards of the world, is shocking, as well as deeply moving. Outstanding though this is, it is a picture that is geared to produce an ambivalent reaction. We delight in it, yet \u2013 at the same time \u2013 feel regret. We don\u2019t live up to the beauty of the picture. We have too often been mean, angry, curt with the person we love; or we catch our breath with a sigh because so little of this loyal, tender devotion has come our way. Rembrandt illuminates, with painful accuracy, our lack: we don\u2019t have nearly enough genuine love in our lives and in our world.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nA lover\u2019s gaze is more accurate than public opinion. The world does not easily recognize the reason why we deserve to be loved; we may be modest, only very average to look at, not especially distinguished; and yet the need to be \u2013 in the eyes of someone \u2013 an object of beauty and tenderness cannot \u2013 must not \u2013 be denied.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn","painting_name":"Isaac and Rebecca, Known as \u2018The Jewish Bride\u2019, 1669","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14019761396.jpg","stub":"i-rarely-place-an-arm-around-my-spouse","order":140,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14019761396.jpg"},{"id":141,"category_id":3,"name":"No one is paying me enough attention","description":"Think of how invisible, tiny, poor and unrecognized you must feel to be drawn to buying a tea service like this.","artist_name":"Meissen Porcelain Factory","painting_name":"Tea service, 1732 ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14019763187.jpg","stub":"no-one-is-paying-me-enough-attention","order":141,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14019763187.jpg"},{"id":142,"category_id":3,"name":"Sex is natural","description":"He is still a youth, she is a professional. We like to think of sex as the natural expression of desire and so not as something you might have to learn how to do, or which requires professional coaching (although we readily accept these ideas when it comes to golf or maths). Instead, the print suggests that expert help is needed. The courtesan is not the last resort of the person who is too incompetent, selfish or lazy to find a lover; rather, she is an important professional, guiding us in an important area of experience. The print opens up what sounds like an unusual idea: we might need to learn how to have sex.","artist_name":"Kitagawa Utamaro","painting_name":"Young Man Smoking with a Courtesan, 1799","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14019763718.jpg","stub":"sex-is-natural","order":142,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14019763718.jpg"},{"id":145,"category_id":3,"name":"I\u2019ve got time","description":"We know that people long ago had hair, that they combed it, paid special attention to how it looked at formal receptions (or in a high wind), touched it at nervous moments in the drawing room and stroked each other\u2019s strands during the more intimate moments of courtship. Yet it is still surprising, moving, and most of all frightening, to find Jacoba\u2019s hair here in front of us \u2013 largely because the rest of Jacoba isn\u2019t here to go with it. The personality, daydreams, ambitions, sense of regret and kindness of heart that used to be tied to this hair have all gone, they are dust and ashes, at the very moment when Jacoba, through her eternal and rather youthful looking hair, seems newly and strikingly present.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe thought of death, abstract and therefore not too scary until now, starts to grip us more tightly. We are all headed Jacoba\u2019s way. Only bits of us, and not the most important parts, will endure, perhaps to be stared at by strangers in cabinets many centuries from now. This shouldn\u2019t be grounds for panic; the hair is just an ever-important reminder that the sand is running mercilessly fast through all of our hourglasses.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Unknown","painting_name":"Lock of hair from Jacoba of Bavaria, 1436","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140197652711.jpg","stub":"ive-got-time","order":145,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140197652711.jpg"},{"id":146,"category_id":3,"name":"I feel excluded","description":"So often we are on the wrong side of the door. We reckon that interesting things are going on somewhere else, but we are not privy to them. This model is generous towards this longing. It says: I know you want to see what is going on inside and in minute detail, and I\u2019ll help you. The model takes us into the tarry dank of the orlop deck (where the cables are stowed below the waterline), and along the noisy gun deck, reeking of gunpowder and cabbage soup, and up high in the salty wind of the main topmast staysail.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nArtworks have the power to take us into places we can\u2019t easily go: from the president\u2019s conscience to the lover\u2019s diary, from the pirate\u2019s headquarters to the middle of a boardroom dispute \u2013 thereby extending the range of experience that we can understand and use. They humanize the world.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Unknown","painting_name":"Model of the 84-gun ship of the line Neptunus, 1837-1842","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140197663512.jpg","stub":"i-feel-excluded","order":146,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140197663512.jpg"},{"id":147,"category_id":3,"name":"Only idiots like pretty, sweet things","description":"This is an unashamedly pretty picture, and educated people today quite often feel a bit queasy at the idea that art can be sweet and lovely. Isn\u2019t this a denial of all that is wrong with the world? Shouldn\u2019t art be about more weighty and worthy matters?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nVan Looy knew a lot about human suffering \u2013 not least his own (he lost both parents when he was five). Once life has shown us its darker sides, we start to take this sort of pretty scene more seriously. Beautiful flowers aren\u2019t a way of avoiding the tougher facts; they are a consolation now that we know what things are really like. We need beauty around us to keep up our spirits and to refresh our appetite for life. Cheerfulness \u2013 the mood that beauty naturally encourages \u2013 is a good state of mind to be able to access, given the number of practical problems we have to face. A taste for pretty art isn\u2019t a denial of the troubles of the world; it shows a wise awareness of the extent of suffering and a concern for bolstering oneselfagainst despair.","artist_name":"Jacobus van Looy","painting_name":"Summer Luxuriance","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140197670513.jpg","stub":"only-idiots-like-pretty-sweet-things","order":147,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140197670513.jpg"},{"id":148,"category_id":3,"name":"I\u2019m too old for hugs","description":"The intensity and depth of their closeness is moving. The child\u2019s nose nestles into the mother\u2019s cheek. The closing of the mother\u2019s eyes is not a sign of distance, but makes us feel how absorbed she is in the moment of devotion, care and protection. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe need for love is one of the basic features of our common humanity; we want to be cherished and accepted, and we want to find someone who will never turn their backs on us in boredom or contempt. Yet so often this is achingly missing from our lives. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nA work of art can go some of the way towards meeting this need. It cannot embrace us, but it can offer the image of someone who understands, who forgives, who searches always to meet our true needs, to whom our sorrows are always of profound importance. While we have endless models of fame and material success before our eyes, we have far fewer which remind us of the shape of love \u2013 and our need for its embrace. <br \/>\n","artist_name":"Barbara Hepworth","painting_name":"Mother and Child","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140197682914.jpg","stub":"im-too-old-for-hugs","order":148,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140197682914.jpg"},{"id":149,"category_id":3,"name":"I\u2019m feeling impatient, and getting too many emails","description":"The grain of the lines is delicate and reserved. Whatever claim it might have upon our admiration is advanced very quietly, almost shyly. This image gets us to rehearse, in the safety of an art gallery, an attitude of attentiveness and patience that really needs to be a part of the rest of life. It can be so hard to access in times of stress, yet that is when it is most needed. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe know in our hearts that mental health involves attending to a few things well, being rational, calm, logical and focused. But so much about our lives is set against such priorities. Agnes Martin\u2019s work is likely to move us not because our lives are like it, but because we so much want them to be, and yet they are almost always far more chaotic and disrupted. We would ideally spend a few moments in front of this work, willing our lives into the spirit it shows us, then buy a postcard and repeat the exercise a few times a week. We would be kinder people, and easier to live with too.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAttentiveness and patience don\u2019t sound very romantic. But they are crucially important if love is to endure the tensions and frustrations that are almost inevitable in relationships. ","artist_name":"Agnes Martin","painting_name":"The Rose","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140197689015.jpg","stub":"im-feeling-impatient-and-getting-too-many-emails","order":149,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140197689015.jpg"},{"id":150,"category_id":3,"name":"I have difficulty remembering why we ever got together","description":"They are so in love and it\u2019s easy to see why. They are having such a good time with each other: teasing and gazing fondly into each other\u2019s eyes. It seems a bit too good to be true, if we imagine it as telling us the whole truth about relationships. Of course, the troubles come along. There are worries about career, disagreements about how to furnish an apartment, fury at what might look to other people like tiny things. One day she will turn coldly on him for not cleaning his clogs before coming indoors; in time, he will get irked by how much she spends at the fruit shop. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut that\u2019s not the point. This picture is a reminder of how most relationships start \u2013 two people in love with each other. Later on, when they are a bit sick of their relationship, they should look back on this image and refresh their sense of why, after all, they do love each other. The love has not disappeared \u2013 it has only been hidden by the normal distractions and frustrations of life. ","artist_name":"Fran\u00e7ois Boucher","painting_name":"The Wooden Shoes ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140197698316.jpg","stub":"i-have-difficulty-remembering-why-we-ever-got-together","order":150,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140197698316.jpg"},{"id":154,"category_id":3,"name":"Thinking sex is just good clean fun","description":"On closer inspection this is quite a disturbing, even creepy, image. An average, slightly upmarket couple is kissing. To their friends they are respectable, quite successful. He has a good position as an officer in the military. She\u2019s a bit of a society figure. They are a bit greedy, on the lookout for a bit of fun. Maybe they tell a few lies here and there to smooth things over. They are pretty imperfect, but they are not at all unusual. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut then, behind them and around them are the bizarre and confronting symbols and semi-divinities of the ancient world. As many works of art do, this one is telling us something about the minds of the central characters. These people carry within them a whole lot of strange baggage. They think of themselves as up to date. They have opinions and attitudes that, in their own circle, pass for enlightened. But the artist is telling us that deep down these people have, like everyone, destructive urges, obscure lusts, wild fantasies (which could sound deranged if described). They are haunted by the fear of death. The Egyptians gave names and faces to their dark parts of the mind. More often than not, we keep them hidden from view. But they are there all the same. ","artist_name":"Thomas Rowlandson","painting_name":"Modern Antiques","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140197781120.jpg","stub":"thinking-sex-is-just-good-clean-fun","order":154,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140197781120.jpg"},{"id":155,"category_id":3,"name":"I think that sex should only ever be gentle","description":"It could start out as a kiss, a sweet caress of the neck. But it\u2019s about to turn into a bite. She could turn playfully nasty and then outright destructive. And maybe there\u2019s part of him that wants that. If he\u2019s a victim, then he might be a willing one. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nAt times we like to think of sex as the expression of love, as the physical manifestation of care and admiration. But sex has many other, far darker dimensions: we may want to hurt and be hurt as much as we want to caress and nurture. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt can be hard to reconcile loving feelings \u2013 including tenderness, sympathy, care, gentleness and equality \u2013 with some of the requirements of our sexual imaginations. Munch knew a lot about the violent, obsessive, sadomasochistic aspects of our sexuality and did humanity an enormous favour by giving these a public and dignified expression. It\u2019s easy for some of our sexual wishes to be dismissed as weird, perverted and sick. Munch does not judge his figures. In fact, he wants to stretch our conception of ourselves and suggest that we are more like these people than we would normally admit. ","artist_name":"Robert Munch","painting_name":"Vampire","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140197786421.jpg","stub":"i-think-that-sex-should-only-ever-be-gentle","order":155,"category_name":"Love","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140197786421.jpg"}],"work":[{"id":25,"category_id":1,"name":"My work is so banal","description":"It can be hard to see beauty and interest in the things we have to do everyday and in the environments where we live. We have jobs to go to, bills to pay, homes to clean and keep running and we deeply resent the demands they make on us. They seem to be pulling us away from our real ambitions, getting in the way of a better life. Art, and art galleries, feel far away from all this: they are for a day off, somewhere to visit on holiday. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe  linen closet itself could easily be resented. It is an embodiment of what could, under an unhelpful influence, be seen as boring, banal, repetitive - even unsexy. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut the picture moves us because we recognise the truth of its message. If only, like de Hooch, we knew how to recognise the value of ordinary routine, many of our burdens would be lifted. It gives voice to the right attitude: the big themes of life  - the search for prosperity, happiness, good relationships - are always grounded in the way we approach little things. The statue above the door is a clue. It represents money, love, status, vitality, adventure. Taking care of the linen (and all that stands for) is not opposed to these grander hopes. It is, rather, the way to them. We can learn to see the allure of those who look after it, ourselves included. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt\u2019s a hard message to hold on to, because we are constantly being told other things. This painting is small in a big and noisy world - but that so many people revere it is hopeful, it signals that we know, deep down, that de Hooch is onto something important. ","artist_name":"Pieter de Hooch","painting_name":"At the Linen Closet, 1663","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13801953432.jpg","stub":"ordinary-work-is-merely-a-drudge","order":7,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13801953432.jpg"},{"id":61,"category_id":1,"name":"I wish I could be more creative","description":"Imagine your life is one in which you can be decently rewarded for being creative, for turning your inner life into money. That\u2019s what he did - and the idea has spread across the whole of society. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut there aren\u2019t many opportunities to do this in the world. A handful of notable artists (along with fashion models and rock stars) have glamourised a particular kind of career - in which one is paid well for essentially being oneself. This is extremely appealing, yet few people can access it. The painting should come with a warning: \u2018You won\u2019t be like me\u2019. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe owe ourselves a certain amount of sympathy, just for being caught in a dilemma not of our own making. We need portraits of accountants, tram-drivers and IT managers to bring out the quiet heroism of just getting by.  ","artist_name":"Wouter van Troostwijk ","painting_name":"Self Portrait, c 1805","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/137813623721.jpg","stub":"my-job-should-be-more-creative","order":26,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/137813623721.jpg"},{"id":68,"category_id":1,"name":"You have to be tough to make it","description":"Most of the time, we have to be strong, we must not show our fragility. We\u2019ve known that since the schoolyard. There is always a fragile bit of us, but we keep it very hidden.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nYet Venetian glass doesn\u2019t apologise for its weakness. It admits its delicacy; it is confident enough to demand careful treatment; it makes the world understand it could easily be damaged.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt\u2019s not fragile because of a deficiency, or by mistake. It's not as if its maker was trying to make it tough and hardy and then - stupidly - ended up with something a child could snap, or that would be shattered by clumsy mishandling. It is fragile and easily harmed as the consequence of its search for transparency and refinement and its desire to welcome sunlight and candle light into its depths. Glass can achieve wonderful effects but the necessary price is fragility. Some good things things have to be delicate - the dish says: \u2018I am delightful, but if you knock me about I\u2019ll break, and that\u2019s not my fault.\u2019<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt is the duty of civilisation to allow the more delicate forms of human activity to thrive; to create environments where it is OK to be fragile. And we know, really, that it is not glass which most needs this care, it is ourselves.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt\u2019s obvious the glass could easily be smashed, so it makes you use your fingers tenderly; you have to be careful how you grasp the stem. It teaches us that moderation is admirable, and elegant, not just a tedious demand. It tells us that being careful is glamorous and exciting - even fashionable. It is a moral tale about gentleness, told by means of a drinking vessel.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis is training for the more important moments in life when moderation will make a real difference to other people. Being mature - and civilised - means being aware of the effect of one\u2019s strength on others. CEO\u2019s please take note. ","artist_name":"Unknown","painting_name":"Early Venetian Glass Goblets","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13782885695.jpg","stub":"you-must-always-be-tough-to-make-it","order":61,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13782885695.jpg"},{"id":88,"category_id":1,"name":"I can\u2019t afford nice things","description":"It's secretly exciting that such a highly sophisticated and evolved culture as China could concentrate not only on the production of grandeur, but also on the production of small, outwardly simple items of daily use \u2013 things not so different from those we might pick up cheaply from IKEA.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe bowl is telling us that things that are precious in their meaning needn\u2019t be financially precious - and this is very good news in a world where hardly anyone has lots of money. It is one strand of how we can deal better with consumerism, disrupting the linear relationship between expense and goodness. Significantly, it\u2019s close to some of the ideals associated with Dutch culture and what outsiders look for in Holland. Vermeer would have liked it. ","artist_name":"Unknown","painting_name":"Dish, Chinese, 11th-12th century","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1379340605L.jpg","stub":"i-cant-afford-nice-things","order":88,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1379340605L.jpg"},{"id":26,"category_id":1,"name":"I can't concentrate","description":"The architects of the building depicted here, and the artist himself, were convinced of challenging idea: if you want to get close to the important things, you will need a lot of calm, of whiteness, of emptiness, of peace. Serenity, concentration and order aren\u2019t luxuries, they aren\u2019t a superficial concern for a style of interior decoration. They are preconditions for a thoughtful, balanced life. The picture sends a slightly stern but welcome message: you have to fight off distraction, it can ruin your life; you have to prioritise ruthlessly; entertainment is the enemy; simplify, get rid go what you don't really need; don't check your email all the time; focus is an achievement. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe right building can  bring you closer to the things that matter. This picture might move you, it might make you think 'I want to be there. I want more of that in my life' - and the artist would have been happy you feel this way. When we find something beautiful it is often because it contains a hint of how we want our lives to be. We should take that impulse seriously. We should visualise that we are there, imagine the kind of life we'd be living. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nSaenredam didn\u2019t just paint a church, he painted an attitude to life. ","artist_name":"Pieter Saenredam","painting_name":"Interior of Saint Odulphus Kerk, 1649","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13801955113.jpg","stub":"distraction","order":95,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13801955113.jpg"},{"id":131,"category_id":1,"name":"I didn't get promoted","description":"Belisarius used to be very successful, the most high ranking general in the Emperor Justinian's armies, rich, envious and powerful. Now he has a white beard, he\u2019s blind, penniless - begging in the streets. He has lost his strength and fallen foul of court politics. The soldier on the left was once under his command. Now he is shocked to see the man he once admired so much in a condition of extreme want and abasement.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe sufferings and sorrows of old age are universal, but feel all the more significant because of the general\u2019s earlier triumphs. Power and competence are no safeguards against nature. It happened to him. He was once like you - even more burnished and triumphant. In one form or another some version of this will happen to you.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe point of the picture, though, isn\u2019t to make us depressed. It is, rather, to help keep clear in our minds that we are frail, mortal creatures, lacking complete control over our lives. By focusing our thoughts on the big anxieties - that fate may be cruel, that death will come for us, however splendid we may be at certain points - we gain a helpful perspective on the lesser sufferings, which so often feel so big.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAcknowledging bad news is an important part of life. Think of the parent whose child has done badly in a crucial exam and now won\u2019t be able to get into the University on which they\u2019d set their heart and to which their two best friends are going. Or the person who has just been unceremoniously dumped by the business they have work hard for over the last six years. We don\u2019t pretend that such things are unimportant, or OK. They are deeply wounding. But such sorrows can produce great tenderness in others. We love these people all the more because of their pain. Their pain is, or soon will be, our own.","artist_name":"Jacques-Louis David","painting_name":"Belisarius Begging for Alms, 1781","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138054191622.jpg","stub":"i-didnt-get-promoted","order":131,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138054191622.jpg"},{"id":152,"category_id":1,"name":"I hate consumerism","description":"Consumerism is regularly considered to be an evil scourge on the modern world. Yet consumerism is founded on love of fruits of the earth, delight in human ingenuity and due appreciation of the vast achievements of organised effort and trade.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis picture returns us to an instructive time when abundance was new and not to be taken for granted. People in the 1640s were still amazed that they could control the world enough to have oranges and figs. Marshes had to be drained, trees planted and journeys undertaken for these fruits to reach the table. People knew how hard it all was, how astonishing that human beings could do this. They felt the beauty of trade and understood how easily it could be disrupted by blockades or war. Every pleasure of the table was sending money around Europe \u2013 a force for peace and prosperity.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nA good response to consumerism might be to recognise what is required to provide these products justly. Our desire to acquire luxury cheaply is the real problem. If the route to your table was dignified and honourable at every stage, of course an orange would cost more. Maybe then we would appreciate its zest all the keener.","artist_name":"Jan Davidsz. de Heem","painting_name":"Still life with fruit, c.1640\u201350","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140197757318.JPG","stub":"i-hate-consumerism","order":152,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140197757318.JPG"},{"id":153,"category_id":1,"name":" I love art, but I hate commerce","description":"We tend to think that art is at odds with commercial considerations; that it is somehow above and beyond the demands of the market- place. William Morris had a different idea. He lived through a period when the crafts and traditional skills he loved were being displaced by machinery. The factory was taking over and he hated that. But Morris realised that if crafts were to survive, and even flourish, they would have to compete for sales.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nMorris and Co. was set up to make products according to craft methods for sale in big department stores (they had a lot of success with their wallpaper line). Morris wasn\u2019t snobbish about trade or commerce because he took the optimistic view that good things could also be quite popular.","artist_name":"Morris & Co, London","painting_name":"Sussex armchair c.1865","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140197763319.JPG","stub":"i-love-art-but-i-hate-commerce","order":153,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140197763319.JPG"},{"id":156,"category_id":1,"name":"My life revolves around business","description":"The architects of the building depicted here, and the artist himself, were convinced about a challenging idea: if you want to get close to the important things, you will need a lot of calm, of whiteness, of emptiness, of peace. Serenity, concentration and order aren\u2019t luxuries, they aren\u2019t a superficial concern for a particular style of interior decoration; they are preconditions for a thoughtful, balanced life. The picture sends a slightly stern, but welcome message: you have to fight off distraction, it can ruin your life; you have to prioritize ruthlessly; entertainment is the enemy; simplify, get rid of what you don\u2019t really need; don\u2019t check your email all the time; focus is an achievement. Saenredam didn\u2019t just paint a church, he painted an attitude to life.","artist_name":"Pieter Jansz Saenredam","painting_name":"Interior of the Sint-Odulphuskerk in Assendelft, 1649","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140197805922.jpg","stub":"my-life-revolves-around-business","order":156,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140197805922.jpg"},{"id":157,"category_id":1,"name":"Order is for accountants and boring people","description":"Stop and think how weird \u2013 and rather wonderful \u2013 it is that there\u2019s a linen cupboard in the middle of the nation\u2019s pre-eminent treasure house. We expect paintings to be here, but not bits of domestic furniture. Linen cupboards don\u2019t usually hold a place close to the centre of a society\u2019s self-image, although they should, and here they do.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn the seventeenth century, a family might have spent as much on this cupboard as we would on a car; they might have saved for years to buy it and considered its allocation in a will with great care. Perhaps their priorities have something to teach us. Everyday things should be beautiful and dignified. We need tools of order because we quite easily fall apart and go off the rails. A lot of art starts with a will to create order and bring calm. People from the past are strange in so many ways, but here they\u2019re just like us. The details of housekeeping have changed, but the need for order goes on.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nA well-organized cupboard doesn\u2019t just reflect an ordered mind; it reflects a passion for a life of reason. It tells you, rightly, to sort yourself out. Perhaps you have too many things. Could all you really need be kept in one fine container? Should you clean the cupboards when you get home?<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Unknown","painting_name":"Cupboard, 1607","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140197811223.jpg","stub":"order-is-for-accountants-and-boring-people","order":157,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140197811223.jpg"},{"id":159,"category_id":1,"name":"Never trust people in power","description":"Power corrupts, but not always. The picture is showing us an unfamiliar scene: men in power who \u2013 surprisingly \u2013 seem genuinely to have the best interests of the public at heart, who take their responsibility seriously and discharge their duties in a sober and thoughtful way.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe\u2019re worried about this. Is it just flattery? Is it naive or submissive to take the image at face value? We should ask of power that it meets the challenge set by the picture \u2013 and to do that, we have to believe that power could be good. A belief in the inherent corruptness of power is, paradoxically, not a good starting-point for getting the kind of governance we need and deserve.","artist_name":"Karel Dujardin","painting_name":"Werkhuis, Amsterdam, 1669","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140197826925.jpg","stub":"never-trust-people-in-power","order":159,"category_name":"Work","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140197826925.jpg"}],"anxiety":[{"id":116,"category_id":6,"name":"I worry about everything","description":"Caspar David Friedrich shows us a striking, jagged rock formation, a spare stretch of coast, the bright horizon, far away clouds and a pale sky to induce us into a mood.  We might imagine walking in the pre-dawn, after a sleepless night, on the bleak headland, away from human company, alone with the basic forces of nature. The smaller islands of rock, each swept endlessly by the grey sea, were once as dramatic and thrusting as the major formation just beyond. The long, slow passage of time will, one day, wear them down as well. The first portion of the sky is formless and empty, a pure silvery nothingness, but above them are clouds which catch the light on their undersides and pass on in their pointless, transient way, indifferent to all of our concerns. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe picture does not refer directly to our relationships or to the stresses and tribulations of our day to day lives. Its function is to give us access to a state of mind in which we are acutely conscious of the largeness of time and space. The work is sombre, rather than sad; calm, but not despairing. And in that condition of mind - that state of soul, to put it more romantically - we are left, as so often with works of art, better equipped to deal with with the intense, intractable and particular griefs that lie before us. The tensions in my marriage or the frustrations of my work are not my problem alone, they are part of the structure of the universe...","artist_name":"Caspar David Friedrich","painting_name":"Rocky Reef on the Sea Shore, c. 1825 ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13805405627.jpg","stub":"i-worry-about-everything","order":29,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13805405627.jpg"},{"id":117,"category_id":6,"name":"What will happen next week?","description":"Somewhere here, though the untrained eye does not know where to look, a star is in the final stages of a cataclysmic explosion. The unimaginably vast residue of its matter - which was pulled together so infinitesimally slowly and which burnt for aeons in a blinding furnace of power, is finally flung back into the universe. Science joins art to dignify and lend tragic grandeur to our inescapable fragility. We do not know what will happen in our lives, we do not know where we will end up, what will befall those we love, what will be the results of our efforts, whether our devotions will bear fruit, whether our hopes will be fulfilled, and our dreams realised or dashed. The NASA image can guide us to a helpful perspective. It offers to sooth our worries about next week by holding our attention to something vast and impersonal. We are reminded of how minor our own preoccupations can look. The problem isn\u2019t that we worry about next week - rather it is our tendency to fret excessively, unproductively, to dwell on worries without resolving them. The image helps break that circuit. We will, of course, have to face next week when it comes. But we can do so a little refreshed, thanks to a few moments with a globular cluster.","artist_name":"NASA","painting_name":"Globular Cluster","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13805406038.jpg","stub":"what-will-happen-next-week","order":30,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13805406038.jpg"},{"id":118,"category_id":6,"name":"Time moves so fast","description":"This photograph seems at first glance a little sad. It sits astride a difficult truth: leaves wither and fall; after summer, autumn always comes along. Time moves forward relentlessly. The seasons pass - and we hasten towards old age, death and oblivion. But the image takes these awkward truths and, through its technical skills, lends them dignity and grandeur. The aspens have been surprised by the photographer's light and stand out as strands of silver against the blackness of night. The mood is sombre, but elegant. There is a consoling message within the artistry, something to appease our raw grief and anxiety about our mortality and the fleetingness of time. The image invites us to to see ourselves as part of the mesmerising spectacle of nature. Nature's rules apply to us as much as they do to the trees of the forest. It\u2019s not personal. The photograph is a reframing device: it invites us to think of our own lives as having a natural order that has nothing to do with individual justice. The photograph tries to take the personal sting out of what happens to us.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nMost works of art do not present us with radically strange and unexpected ideas: rather, they lend life to truths that had become cliches. Their power lies in getting us to feel important thoughts that had become merely intellectual and sterile. Thanks to Adams, we feel with renewed, redeeming force the idea that we are subject to nature's implacable laws.","artist_name":"Ansel Adams","painting_name":"Aspens, Dawn, Autumn, Dolores River Canyon, Colorado, 1937","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13805406699.jpg","stub":"time-moves-so-fast","order":35,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13805406699.jpg"},{"id":119,"category_id":6,"name":"I find it hard to relax","description":"We should encourage our eyes to wander over the vast grey swell of the sea, and immerse ourselves in the attitude of serene indifference it invites. There is no very definite horizon in the photograph, just a gentle zone of transition where the sea merges with the sky. The black at the bottom becomes the white at the top through a multitude of tiny stages. This has a tranquilizing effect which has a chance to enter into our own being and adjust how we respond to challenges and anxiety.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nA tranquil state of mind is supremely valuable in connection with many of the lesser troubles of life. Our capacity to get infuriated (and hence, usually, to make matters worse, by flying off the handle) is often driven by a refusal to accept how things are. Another person simply isn\u2019t very interested in what we think; the world is not going to re-organise itself in sensible ways; the traffic just will be maddeningly slow, the train over-crowded. At times, we should know how to close down our hopes and give ourselves over to the contemplation of all that we will never be able to alter, here symbolised by the even, pure tones of an eternal horizon.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nSugimoto hasn't just photographed the sea. He has provided us with a work that captures an attitude of mind to be summoned up at times of trial.","artist_name":"Hiroshi Sugimoto","painting_name":"North Atlantic Ocean, Cliffs of Moher, 1989","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138054074410.jpg","stub":"i-find-it-hard-to-relax","order":45,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138054074410.jpg"},{"id":57,"category_id":6,"name":"I can\u2019t cope","description":"Guanyin is the Buddhist counterpart to the Virgin Mary and she fulfills a similar role: that of hearing us in our distress, meeting us with tenderness and strengthening us to face the tasks of life.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe centrality of these maternal figures in both Buddhism and Christianity suggests that mature adult lives share moments of deep self-doubt - and longings to recover some of the security of childhood. We need to be reassured that these wishes are not a sign that we have failed as human beings. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nModern society struggles deeply to update what this figure represents. A challenge for today's artists might be to provide us with a contemporary version of the nurturing \u2018mother\u2019 - or father.","artist_name":"Unknown, China","painting_name":"Guanyin, 12th century","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13801979266.jpg","stub":"i-cant-cope","order":57,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13801979266.jpg"},{"id":35,"category_id":6,"name":"It\u2019s all too much","description":"It looks terrible. How can they survive this?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut the boats were designed for this, their hulls minutely adapted for these conditions. The crew have practiced for this. This is an homage to planning and experience. The older sailors on the ship are saying to the novice, with a laugh, that just last year off the coast of Jutland, there was an even bigger storm - and slapping him on the back with paternal playfulness as the youth is sick overboard.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe should feel proud of  humanity\u2019s competence and skill in the face of these dreadful but strangely awe-inspiring challenges. We\u2019 re better able to cope than we think.   ","artist_name":"Ludolf Bakhuysen","painting_name":"Warships in a Heavy Storm, 1695","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/137813003512.jpg","stub":"its-all-too-much","order":64,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/137813003512.jpg"},{"id":30,"category_id":6,"name":"I worry I'm too nice","description":"It was a fantastic day; we smashed them to smithereens; we blew them thirty feet into the air; their brains went everywhere; my friend gouged some guy's eye. We won. We totally owned them. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn its raw, energetic triumphalism the picture gives a corrective nudge to our present attitudes. We are so conscious that thuggish people must never be encouraged that decent people have learned all too well to suppress their own appetite for a fight, their own desire for victory. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn a world where conflict is unavoidable, good people need to strengthen their willingness to face down opposition - not always to comprise and play it safe - to take risks, to relish victory, and to be a bit more ruthless in the service of noble and deeply important ends. Sometimes it is not enough to be right, you also need to win. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe picture is frank about pride in achievement. The naval battle, which was hideous in reality, was crucial to the formation of a free and secure society. It took great courage, great readiness to face danger and to desperate resolution to win to bring about that historic development. Today - obviously - the enemy is not a foreign fleet and the battles are not fought with cannonballs and gunpowder. But how many great things have been lost to the world because their originators - while having the requisite insight - lack the sheer courage and force of character to see them through. Goodness should be strong. ","artist_name":"Van Wieringen","painting_name":"Explosion of the Spanish Flagship, 1607","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13801212167.jpg","stub":"i-couldnt-hurt-a-flea","order":104,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13801212167.jpg"},{"id":64,"category_id":6,"name":"I worry I'm not cultured enough","description":"Although we profess a huge respect for culture, in practice, we may greet it with a certain degree of private trepidation - and in our franker moments, a painful realisation of its dullness.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nYoung Cicero is as yet immune to such fears, as children are. He picked up a copy of The Odyssey in the living room in the late afternoon; he has skipped supper, he\u2019s hardly noticed the night coming on or the chill breeze swaying the cypress trees outside. All that he cares about is whether Odysseus will manage to make it out of the Cyclop\u2019s cave in one piece.<br \/>\n\t<br \/>\nThat\u2019s what culture should be, and what we fear it isn\u2019t. The piece is moving because at some level, we\u2019ve cut ourselves off from our most basic hope in relation to culture: that what is good for us might be loveable. Indeed, we fear the opposite: that the things we like most are bad for us.<br \/>\n\t<br \/>\nFoppa\u2019s work is a memento of an ideal posture we might adopt in relation to culture: one foot up, comfortably seated, doing it for sheer delight, forgetting supper in its name, and setting off on an adventure into other worlds.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe want \u2018good\u2019 culture to be the grown-up version of reading The Famous Five or Harry Potter; something you really like, for which you stay up late. But we\u2019ve too often made it instead like an extension of going to work or school. ","artist_name":"Vincenzo Foppa","painting_name":"The Young Cicero Reading, c 1464","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13801981761.jpg","stub":"cultural-anxiety","order":116,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13801981761.jpg"},{"id":87,"category_id":6,"name":"Catastrophic foreboding ","description":"It\u2019s testimony to how large a role anxiety plays in our lives, and how bad we are at containing it, that one of the world\u2019s major religion pivots around trying to help us to cope better with it. Buddhism seeks to free its followers from unhelpful worry. It raises the attempt to attain calm to an art form worthy of the highest admiration and devotion.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis is the head of someone who someone who excelled at this project. Nobody really knows what the Buddha actually looked like, so the artist has devoted his considerable skill to creating a face that shows us his much-desired inner state.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe\u2019re not being invited to look critically at this face, but to look with the intention to become like it; to share the quality of mind it exhibits.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe statue is arguing that it\u2019s not enough just to hear what the Buddha said. It\u2019s also very helpful to use our visual appreciation, so as to implant his philosophy of calm more deeply in our lives.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAfter all, this is something we do anyway without noticing. We are attuned to the faces around us, constantly picking up the emotional signals they convey. So spending time with the right faces is a very good idea.","artist_name":"Unknown","painting_name":"Head of a Buddha, Indonesia, c 800-850","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1379340475K.jpg","stub":"catastrophic-foreboding","order":117,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1379340475K.jpg"},{"id":92,"category_id":6,"name":"Addiction to status","description":"The project of making art - paintings, sculpture, decorative arts - has throughout its history been vulnerable to being co-opted into a rather troublesome project: that of impressing other people. So much so that for some people, art can seem synonymous with the expression of status, and it\u2019s worth restating that art can do so many other things: help us appreciate the world, console us, guide our hopes, enlarge our horizons. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe clock is a particular conspicuous example of the kidnapping of art by the idea of status. It can be seen as yet one more example of greed and compulsive materialism. But it may be better to see it as a poignant example of vulnerability, fragility and anxiety that one\u2019s worth will be missed - unless endorsed by enamel and two golden putti.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIf one is slightly repelled by the object, think of it as a homeopathic dose: that by seeing a particularly virulent instance of the desperation to impress, it strengthens our antibodies. There may be no better cure for the disease of status anxiety than to see this clock.","artist_name":"Louis Montjoye","painting_name":"Pendule, 1782","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1379341546P.jpg","stub":"addiction-to-status","order":118,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1379341546P.jpg"},{"id":120,"category_id":6,"name":"I feel alone in suffering sadness","description":"We're often intensely lonely in our suffering. In an upbeat world which worships success, our miseries feel shameful. We're not only sad, we're sad at being the only ones that seem to be so. We need help in finding a sense of perspective and honour in some of our worst experiences.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe can\u2019t remove suffering from life, but we can learn to suffer more successfully, that is, with less of a sense of persecution or an impression that we have unfairly been singled out for punishment. 'Fernando Pessoa' is a beautifully dark monumental work by Richard Serra, named after a Portuguese poet with a turn for lamentation (as he wrote: \u2018Oh salty sea \/ how much of your salt is tears from Portugal.\u2019).<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe work does not deny our sorrows, it does not tell us to cheer up or point us in a brighter direction (what people often do when we tell them our troubles). The large scale and monumental character of this intensely sombre sculpture implicitly declares the normality and universality of grief. It is confident that we will recognise and respond to the legitimate place of solemn emotions in an ordinary life. Rather than leaving us alone with our darker moods, the work proclaims them as central features of life. In its stark gravity, like many of the greatest works of art, Serra's 'Fernando Pessoa' creates a dignified home for sorrow.","artist_name":"Richard Serra","painting_name":"Fernando Pessoa, 2007-8","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138071380711.jpg","stub":"i-feel-alone-in-suffering-sadness","order":120,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138071380711.jpg"},{"id":121,"category_id":6,"name":"I lose hope too easily","description":"Matisse's picture is very pretty. It's a perennial bestseller in postcard form. This makes sophisticated people suspicious. Isn't it naive to be too hopeful? Isn't the picture merely sentimental, given how grim a lot of the world is? Hasn't Matisse forgotten about murder, rape and theft?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut Matisse is doing something hugely important and mature with his work, something that a lot of popular works of art have the courage to do and that should never be looked down upon. He's remembering to lend us hope. Far from forgetting how grim things can be, we're often laid low by excessive gloom. We are only too aware of the injustices and problems of the world, but we feel debilitatingly small in the face of them.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nBecause we lose faith so easily, cheerfulness is an important, serious achievement. Matisse's picture helps us with a task we find immensely hard: it puts us back in touch with our most hopeful disposition. The dancers speak of a blithe, carefree part of ourselves that often shuts down and yet that is key in getting us to cope with the inevitable rejections and humiliations of daily life. They are having such a good time; it\u2019s all so simple, bright and natural. Dance is obviously not a picture of how life usually is, but it distills a feeling of joyous energy and excitement that we need to be reminded of.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOur capacity to get on and make a decent go of our talents and opportunities can be undermined by nothing more than the fact that we get disheartened too soon. We give up on the confidence needed for success. We are thwarted not by lack of skill but by an absence of hope. Matisse knows this and, with his dancers, is on hand to help.","artist_name":"Henri Matisse","painting_name":"Dance (II), 1909","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138054086212.jpg","stub":"i-despair-too-easily-should-become-i-lose-hope-too-easily","order":121,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138054086212.jpg"},{"id":122,"category_id":6,"name":"I want it to be forever","description":"We have a desperate and fateful urge to try to make nice things permanent. We want to marry the person we love, we want to own the building we like, we want to live in the country we enjoyed as a traveller.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe Impressionist painters of the nineteenth century had an implicit philosophy of transience that points us in a wiser direction. They accepted the transience of happiness as an inherent feature of existence and could in turn help us to grow more at peace with it. Sisley's painting of a winter scene in France focuses on a set of attractive but utterly fugitive things. Towards dusk, the sun nearly breaks through the landscape. For a little time, the glow of the sky makes the bare branches less severe. The snow and the grey walls have a quiet harmony; the cold seems manageable, almost exciting. In a few minutes, night will close in.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nImpressionism is interested in the fact that the things we love most change, are only around a very short time and then disappear. It celebrates the sort of happiness that lasts a few minutes, rather than years. In this painting, the snow looks lovely; but it will melt. The sky is beautiful at this moment, but it is about to go dark. This style of art cultivates a skill that extends far beyond art itself: a skill at accepting and attending to short-lived moments of satisfaction.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe peaks of life tend to be brief. Happiness doesn't come in year-long blocks. With the Impressionists to guide us, we should be ready to appreciate isolated moments of everyday paradise whenever they come our way, without making the mistake of thinking them permanent.","artist_name":"Alfred Sisley","painting_name":"The Watering Place at Marly-le-Roi, 1875","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13805411420.jpg","stub":"i-want-it-to-be-forever","order":122,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13805411420.jpg"},{"id":160,"category_id":6,"name":"I can\u2019t bear busy places","description":"You\u2019re in a crowd of hundreds, and you\u2019re looking at a picture of a crowd of people. But there\u2019s a difference. Your crowd is anonymous and the enemy of good things happening. Ideally, you\u2019d like to be alone, while, in the picture, their comradeship is bringing a glow to a dark, rainy day.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nImagine you are with them, part of the Night Watch. You\u2019re going out in dreary weather to deal with the drunks, move on the troublemakers and keep an eye out for thieves and burglars. It\u2019s going to be great. It beats being at home, because you\u2019re doing it with your friends. It\u2019s a picture of how nice it is to be doing something with people you like. The Night Watch \u2013 which is perhaps the most revered picture in the country \u2013 speaks of the appeal of joining in; they are going to do something that is hardly appealing in itself \u2013 patrolling the streets on a foul day \u2013 but how readily we would join them if we could. Companionship is so much more important than ease and comfort.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt is a terribly poignant message: for here we are in this room, in a crowd, yet without a collective purpose. They \u2013 in the picture \u2013 are what we should be, and what, in times of honesty, we wish we could be: a band of brothers, a true team, people who will bring out the best in one another. Strange though it might sound, this picture is about loneliness, for it tells us what we are missing when we feel lonely. And getting to know what our loneliness is about is the first step to lessening its pangs.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn","painting_name":"The Night Watch, 1642","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140197887726.jpg","stub":"i-cant-bear-busy-places","order":160,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140197887726.jpg"},{"id":161,"category_id":6,"name":"I feel a desire to rend my cloak","description":"Jeremiah has just heard some terrible news. The city that mattered most to him has been destroyed by the Babylonians (as he\u2019d predicted). They\u2019ve destroyed the temple, kidnapped the king, killed the children and destroyed all the houses.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nJeremiah is trying to understand the way the world works. Like another memorable figure from the Old Testament, Job, he knows there might not always be a proper answer. We are playthings of mysterious forces that exceed us. We must somehow stomach necessity. Why do appalling things happen? Who is to blame? Why did we not act in time? We cast around for explanations. We could so readily turn our misery int o hatred or a furious longing for vengeance; we might get lost in a spiral of regret \u2013 if only this hadn\u2019t happened, if only things had been different, if only I had acted otherwise \u2013 or we could descend to the depths of depression.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nJeremiah is the saint of not going wild with anger \u2013 when it would be so understandable, but not helpful, to do so. We should keep him in our minds \u2013 and Rembrandt helps us to do that \u2013 when faced with our own woes. This lesson matters because we know how readily we can become bitter or brutal, how quickly we get enraged when awful things happen. The picture does not try to lull us with false comforts; it does not pretend that nothing bad has happened. But it provides us with a good model in the most trying of times, when we need all the help we can get to focus on understanding rather than give way to rage and despair.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn","painting_name":"Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, 1630","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140197893927.jpg","stub":"i-feel-a-desire-to-rend-my-cloak","order":161,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140197893927.jpg"},{"id":162,"category_id":6,"name":"I feel lost in the great big world","description":"Art can be sympathetic to our fear of being lost in a complex world by making a smaller and more contained world that we can explore. In real life, the ship would have been filled with officers shouting at the sailors, the swell would have dashed you against the cannons, and the sound of the wind in the sails would have kept you up all night. Moreover, the threat of violent conflict would always have been in the air. But the model allows us to explore all this from a safe distance. You can imagine being inside this little world, setting out on a wonderful voyage. You can be adventurous, yet out of harm\u2019s way.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe desire to turn dangerous things into toys isn\u2019t trivial. It\u2019s a way of taming the world \u2013 and it\u2019s what art (among many other things) does. It domesticates the wildness that might otherwise overwhelm us. By the simple, lovely trick of changing the scale, we make ourselves a bit bigger in relation to our problems. What\u2019s happened with the ship is a trial run for what we need to go on to do with a lot of our challenges.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Adriaen de Vriend & Cornelis Moesman","painting_name":"Model of the \u2018William Rex\u2019, 1698","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140197898928.jpg","stub":"i-feel-lost-in-the-great-big-world","order":162,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140197898928.jpg"},{"id":166,"category_id":6,"name":"People are so pompous about art","description":"We know they are taking art very seriously, but the picture doesn\u2019t let us into the reasons for their enthusiasm. If you went in and asked the very basic question, \u2018But why is this important?\u2019 you might be met with a frosty stare. You would be left in no doubt that your very enquiry marked you out as unworthy of admission to the temple of art.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe reasons behind art\u2019s prestige have for much of its history been left remarkably undefined \u2013 leaving us to suspect in our more cynical moments that it might have a bit too much to do with social standing and conspicuous consumption. But in truth, we should feel free to ask \u2013 in this room better than anywhere \u2013 what the convincing reasons behind art\u2019s elevated status might rightly be.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nArt matters because it offers us assistance in the project of getting on well with our lives, coping with our sorrows, remembering what matters to us, avoiding what harms us, guiding us to our better natures, rebalancing the excesses of our characters and expanding our sympathies. It\u2019s on this basis that prestige should properly be accorded. The reasons for art\u2019s importance aren\u2019t mysterious; they can be simply stated, and they don\u2019t just belong to a small coterie of the initiated.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Adriaan de Lelie","painting_name":"The Art Gallery of Jan Gildemeester Jansz, 1794-1795","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14019793532.jpg","stub":"people-are-so-pompous-about-art","order":166,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14019793532.jpg"},{"id":167,"category_id":6,"name":"I don\u2019t know what to do in front of a picture","description":"We\u2019re often not 100% sure what we\u2019re supposed to do in an art museum (other than stay quiet and look out for the artist\u2019s name), and our lack of direction means we easily get bored. But there is one thing in particular we can do to keep ourselves entertained. In public spaces, especially in restaurants and pavement cafes, it can be fun to speculate about what the people around us are like, what their lives might hold, what it might be like to be their friends and how their relationships might be going.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis kind of speculation is also more than suited to the study of certain pictures in museums. Though this is far from the case now, the value of this activity should be up there with learning dates and historical influences. In the case of this painting, look past the slightly unfamiliar clothes and odd woodland setting, and you have four people who invite, and reward, imaginative enquiry perfectly as to their personalities. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe wife looks like someone who would be unafraid of administrative tasks, tolerant of minor failings (though skilled at knowing when to draw the line), outwardly gentle yet inwardly robust and tough when necessary. She might be just the person with whom to share a somewhat humiliating career anxiety. As for her husband, he seems thoughtful and sensitive while still capable of getting the job done and staying realistic, a balancing act he perhaps got better at pulling off when he married and came under his wife\u2019s good influence. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis is only a rough start\u2026you can carry on, here and with other works \u2013 and then the next time you are sitting in a cafe.","artist_name":"Pierre Prud\u2019hon","painting_name":"Portrait of Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck and his Family, 1801-1802","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14019794231395955458fig.-40---SK-A-3097-02.jpg","stub":"i-dont-know-what-to-do-in-front-of-a-picture","order":167,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14019794231395955458fig.-40---SK-A-3097-02.jpg"},{"id":168,"category_id":6,"name":"What year was this painted in?","description":"Try to stop worrying about who painted this and when. What\u2019s good about this work is primarily the enchanting human dynamics at play. The older boy, delighting in the antics of the little brother, is torn between disciplining him and goading him on. But the child\u2019s naughtiness is motivated by nothing worse than a desire to engage the attention of a much loved \u2013 and eminently lovable \u2013 sensible older sister.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOrdinary human experience is all we need in order to get to the heart of this work. But, unfortunately, we have tended to hold ourselves back from such projective exercises. We tell ourselves that unless we know the artist, the dates and the stylistic influences, we should keep quiet and study the catalogue.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis picture isn\u2019t pretending that all children are continuously sweet. But because family life can be very trying, because siblings can be truly mean to one another, the picture tries to keep the best moments of their interaction imaginatively available.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Willem Bartel van der Kooi","painting_name":"Piano Practice Interrupted, 1813","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14019794773.jpg","stub":"what-year-was-this-painted-in","order":168,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14019794773.jpg"},{"id":169,"category_id":6,"name":"I\u2019m status conscious","description":"It\u2019s been a good year for this couple. They are part of the elite and can afford almost everything the other colonizers have. Though he\u2019s illegitimate, he\u2019s been acknowledged by his father, the Governor General, and lives in his house \u2013 where they have three maids and wallpaper imported from Rotterdam. The dress was a real feat, in the heat as well. Life seems solid. They have a place in the world. They have their own pew at church. Perhaps next year a card will come calling them to one of the smaller dinners.","artist_name":"John L. Riker ","painting_name":"Portrait of a Couple in Suriname, 1846","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14019795394.jpg","stub":"im-status-conscious","order":169,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14019795394.jpg"},{"id":170,"category_id":6,"name":"I\u2019ve got to admire everything ","description":"If we\u2019re honest about how we feel in museums, we have to admit that quite a lot of the objects leave us cold \u2013 and our thoughts turn eagerly to the possibilities of cake in the cafe. That\u2019s OK and compatible with being a good person \u2013 and being interested in and responsive to art. What makes an artwork great is what it can do for you. Life is short and not all artworks are doing things that you need. We tend to blame ourselves if we feel bored in an art gallery \u2013 but boredom can be an insight: a signal to yourself that nothing worthwhile for you is on offer. We are shy about recognizing the individuality of our responses to art. The prestige of art doesn\u2019t help us with this.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt\u2019s quite possible that this work \u2013 which would be highly relevant to those who suspect their lives may be suffering from too much partying \u2013 isn\u2019t speaking to your dilemmas. So you should move on without guilt. If you haven\u2019t got that disease, you don\u2019t need this medicine.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Lucas van Leyden","painting_name":"Worship of the Golden Calf, 1530","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14019795915.jpg","stub":"ive-got-to-admire-everything","order":170,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14019795915.jpg"},{"id":171,"category_id":6,"name":"I hate all this materialism","description":"Artists tend to distrust money, as well as bourgeois values like punctuality, industry, time-keeping. But here we have an artist celebrating work in a variety of forms. Everyone is busy, eagerly engaged in getting the ship loaded, while other people are on their way to the market to purchase things they need that have recently landed at the docks. Still more are heading to offices that organize the finances; an entrepreneur will be coming in looking to invest in another ship. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nBecause money can invite \u2013 both personally and in our thinking about society as a whole \u2013 such negative reactions, it is helpful to encounter a corrective, balancing image of the positive achievement of industry, work and money. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nObviously, not everyone needs to learn this lesson. But for those who do, it is important to hear this message from a trustworthy source. Pissarro obviously understood beauty \u2013 he was devoted to contemplation, he didn\u2019t like to be hurried, he loved looking for hours at grey skies and small, choppy waves. He understood all the attractions of indolence. And yet, he\u2019s the one telling us about the importance of industry, work and getting the job done. He loves what we might call materialism. But that\u2019s not because he is shallow or lacking in imagination. ","artist_name":"Camille Pissarro","painting_name":"Point Boieldieu in Roueu, Rainy Weather","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14019797606.jpg","stub":"i-hate-all-this-materialism","order":171,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14019797606.jpg"},{"id":172,"category_id":6,"name":"I worry that money is evil","description":"Brancusi loved to work with expensive-looking materials. There is unusual luxury and refinement in his pieces. Recently, one of his works sold for more than $30 million, setting a world auction record for a sculpture. When we think of art, money often feels like a crude and offensive consideration. Money seems opposed to the higher values that we expect art to deal with. Many of the best things in life \u2013 looking at the sky on a windy day, reading to one\u2019s child, laughing with a friend \u2013 don\u2019t have price tags and don\u2019t require cash. So the instinct for sensitive, serious people is to denigrate money, or at least politely ignore it, or to see it as at odds with beauty, dignity and depth of feeling.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe fact is, though, that money is not essentially or necessarily opposed to good values. The sheer luxury of Brancusi\u2019s work pulls us toward an awkward but important idea. Sometimes money can work in the service of good things. It can give lustre to important aspects of life that might otherwise get lost. We are familiar enough with the stupidity of luxury. But here Brancusi tells us something else: money can help to add a necessary prestige to the deepest, most important truths.","artist_name":"Constantin Brancusi","painting_name":"The First Cry","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14019798177.jpg","stub":"i-worry-that-money-is-evil","order":172,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14019798177.jpg"},{"id":173,"category_id":6,"name":"The rich are all awful","description":"She was wealthy \u2013 whatever she wanted she could buy. She lived in a large, beautiful house. She had servants to do the domestic chores. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThere are many negative images of the rich, so it\u2019s not hard to conclude that they are almost universally scandalous, unfit to manage their privileges and a waste of time. There may be a little truth in this, but there is also \u2013 understandably \u2013 a lot of repressed envy too. The most natural response to being denied something one desperately wants is to pretend it isn\u2019t worth having. That is comforting but ultimately impoverishes our self-understanding. In fact, the wealthy Mrs. Benson was a woman who used her privileges well. She was \u2013 and looks \u2013 sensitive, serious, refined. She is an exemplar of how to put money to good use. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThat may sound like a depressing idea, because it seems to vindicate inequality. But actually it\u2019s making a demand. We may very well not be able to remove inequality, which seems to be a fixture of the modern world. Instead we should have higher expectations of wealth. She\u2019s not admirable because she\u2019s got money. She\u2019s a fine person and she has resources, and that combination is too rare and one that we should want more of. ","artist_name":"George Richmond","painting_name":"Portrait of Mrs. William Benson","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14019798658.jpg","stub":"the-rich-are-all-awful","order":173,"category_name":"Anxiety","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14019798658.jpg"}],"self":[{"id":33,"category_id":2,"name":"Bitterness","description":"Jeremiah has just heard some terrible news. The city that most mattered to him has been destroyed by the Babylonians (as he\u2019d predicted). They\u2019ve destroyed the temple, kidnapped the king, killed the children, and destroyed all the houses. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nHe is trying to understand the way the world works. Like another memorable figure from the Old Testament, Job, he knows there might not always be a proper answer. We are playthings of mysterious forces that exceed us. We must somehow stomach necessity. Why do appalling things happen? Who is to blame? Why did we not act in time? We cast around for explanations. We could so readily turn our misery into hatred or a furious longing for vengeance; we might get lost in a spiral of regret - if only this hadn\u2019t happened, if only things had been different, if only I had acted differently, if only others had been more aware of the looming dangers \u2026 or we could descend to the depths of depression. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nJeremiah is the saint of not going wild with anger - when it would be so understandable, but not helpful, to do so. We should keep him in our minds, and Rembrandt helps us to do that - when faced with our own more modest, but to us very real and painful, woes. All the more so, when the disasters are large and deeply frightening. He could have painted this in America at the end of 2001. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe lesson matters because we know how readily we can become bitter or brutal. How quickly we get enraged when awful things happen. The picture does not try to lull us with false comforts; it does not pretend that nothing bad has happened. It leads us to the proper idea of mourning and lamentation. The picture dignifies sorrow. It reminds us that - inevitably - grim events will cut into our lives. But it provides us with a good model in the most trying of times: when we need all the help we can get to focus on understanding, rather than rage and despair. ","artist_name":"Rembrandt","painting_name":"Jeremiah Lamenting, 1630","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/137812958910.jpg","stub":"bitterness","order":4,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/137812958910.jpg"},{"id":46,"category_id":2,"name":"Everyone else but me has fun","description":"Christianity is upfront about the idea that our lives can be burdened by suffering. It takes the view that loss, self-reproach, failure, regret, sickness and sadness will always find ways of entering life.  Our troubles need practical help, of course. But Christianity identifies another need as well: for our suffering to have some honour or dignity. <br \/>\n            <br \/>\nThis picture of the Crucifixion gives dignity to suffering. It shows a good - indeed perfect - man being humiliated, injured and ultimately killed. It is tenderly sympathetic to sorrow without being hysterical or vengeful. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt invites us to contemplate the centrality of suffering in the achievement of all valuable goals. Rather than concentrate on the moment of fulfilment - when one feels the joy of success - it directs our attention to the times of hardship and sacrifice and says they are the most important, the most deserving of admiration. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt strengthens us a little - and offers consolation - for the hard tasks of our lives. ","artist_name":"Diego Velazquez","painting_name":"Christ Crucified, 1632","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138012141311.jpg","stub":"the-legitimate-place-of-sorrow-in-a-good-life","order":33,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138012141311.jpg"},{"id":48,"category_id":2,"name":"I don't understand myself","description":"We are not transparent to ourselves. We have intuitions, suspicions, hunches, vague musings and strangely mixed emotions - all of which resist simple definitions. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThen, from time to time, we encounter works of art that seem to latch onto something we have felt, but never clearly recognised before.  Alexander Pope identified a central function of poetry: to take thoughts that we experience as half-formed and give them clear expression or in his words, something \u2018was often thought, but never so well expressed.\u2019 In art a fugitive and elusive part of our own thinking and experience can be taken up, edited, and returned to us better than it was before so that we feel, at last, that we know ourselves more clearly. <br \/>\n","artist_name":"Jeff Wall","painting_name":"Untangling, 1994","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138071281913.jpg","stub":"i-have-moods-but-i-dont-really-know-them","order":46,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138071281913.jpg"},{"id":62,"category_id":2,"name":"I'm a tough guy","description":"This is an unashamedly pretty picture, and educated people today often feel a bit queasy at the idea that art can be sweet and lovely. Isn\u2019t this a denial of all that is wrong with the world? Shouldn\u2019t art be about weighty and worthy matters? <br \/>\n<br \/>\nVan Gogh knew so much about human suffering - not least his own. Once life has shown us its darker sides, we start to take this sort of thing more seriously. Beautiful flowers aren\u2019t a way of avoiding the tougher facts, they are a consolation now that we know. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe need beauty to keep up our spirits and to refresh our appetite for life. Cheerfulness - the mood beauty naturally encourages - is a good state of mind in which to confront difficult practical problems. Like confidence, cheerfulness isn\u2019t a denial of the troubles of the world, it just makes us a little better able to deal with them.","artist_name":"Vincent Van Gogh","painting_name":"Almond Tree in Bloom, 1890","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/137813635222.jpg","stub":"im-sceptical-about-pretty-things","order":48,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/137813635222.jpg"},{"id":65,"category_id":2,"name":"I'd like to get less selfish","description":"It\u2019s late at the night and the child awoke, frightened and sick. She\u2019s boiling some milk to soothe him. In the morning, the boy will have only a confused recollection of these fevered pains.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe have all been that child. She has done more for him than he knows; she kept herself awake when she feared she might not be able to go on. This night was no exception. She has so often put her own priorities aside, has smiled reassuringly even though she was afraid, has applauded even when his efforts were nothing special - and yet she won\u2019t remind him of any of it or even expect him to be especially grateful. We are likely to understand - eventually - but only years later, and maybe too late to return the kindness. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe evidence of what she did for us lies not in any conscious memory of the fact, but merely in our capacity to love and care for others. As adults, we often demand this sort of love of each other - and are likely to make a bitter discovery in the process: that we cannot now re-find the love we knew as children. We rage against this and blame the other person for their inability to perfectly intuit our needs, until the day we reach a true maturity, realising that the only release from our longing is to stop demanding such love for ourselves and to learn to give it to somebody else.","artist_name":"Esaias Boursse","painting_name":"Interior with Woman Cooking, 1656","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13782880432.jpg","stub":"selfishness","order":62,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13782880432.jpg"},{"id":79,"category_id":2,"name":"I'm feeling down","description":"This is just the sort of teapot that started Modernism, in that it would have enraged the early Modernists. They wanted a world stripped bare, where everything had a clear function. What on earth is the purpose of a bird or a flower on a teapot? Does it help you to pour tea?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nSo much of tenderness and love is about going beyond what is strictly necessary. It\u2019s never strictly necessary to love another person - nor necessary to paint a blue tree on the side of a teapot. Decoration is an emblem of generosity. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis is a breakfast table temple to care and love. It offers a small intervention into life - to lift our spirits just a tiny bit at the right moment. We\u2019re not asking it to bear the world on its fragile spout.  <br \/>\n<br \/>\nPrettiness gets a bad press. People like pretty things, but sometimes feel they shouldn\u2019t, perhaps because it seems frivolous when many terrible things are happening. Prettiness can feel like a sweet distraction which saps our will to reform the world and face up to reality. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThen along comes a teapot. We know the bad news already; but there\u2019s an honourable place for solace and cheerfulness.  ","artist_name":"Unknown","painting_name":"De Metaale Pot, c 1680 ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1379339020E.jpg","stub":"im-too-mature-to-like-pretty-things","order":65,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1379339020E.jpg"},{"id":82,"category_id":2,"name":"I'm in a mood to get under the duvet","description":"We\u2019ve seen this kind of thing so many times that it\u2019s easy to get anaesthetised to what\u2019s actually going on. A mummy is being really nice to her young child, and this has been commemorated in a highly prestigious public object, created by one of the most talented people of his time and endorsed by powerful public institutions.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nSuch an object is delicate with our longings. It knows that we might still need to be mothered, even though we are adults, and that we might still need a great deal of reassurance and kindness. So much of growing up is about becoming independent and getting by without the comfort on offer here. Being a mummy\u2019s boy remains a stinging insult to our autonomy. This kind of toughness represents an exaggerated repudiation of an important need.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe painting offers comfort by proxy. In our imagination we can get close to Mary without needing to give up the hard-won advantages of adult life (and it might help our identification that the baby looks about 27). In art, the longing that might otherwise damage us and undermine our claims to an adult identity, finds a safe and acceptable home.","artist_name":"William Dyce","painting_name":"Madonna and Child, c.1827-30","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138071294725.jpg","stub":"fear-of-being-a-sissy","order":79,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138071294725.jpg"},{"id":89,"category_id":2,"name":"I'm not very assertive","description":"Most things in museums set out to look as nice as possible. This gentlemen \u2013 one of a pair - has got a different priority in mind. He is doing everything he can to look terrifying and revolting. There\u2019s something endearingly exaggerated about him, like a five-year-old child pretending to be a monster.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe\u2019ve gone so far down the track of teaching ourselves about the importance of tenderness, we\u2019ve unwittingly developed a problem around certain forms of self-assertion and resistance to the demands of others. These guardians remind us that fierceness is valuable when deployed in the service of something good (in their case, reverence and devotion to honoured gods and ancestors), but sadly it often isn\u2019t.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nSometimes the help we need is around comfort, counselling and reassurance. But at other times what we really need is help in exercising our right to say \u2018no\u2019 in an effective way.","artist_name":"Unknown","painting_name":"Two Temple Guardians, Japan, 14th century","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1379340697M.jpg","stub":"im-a-bit-of-a-pushover","order":82,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1379340697M.jpg"},{"id":3,"category_id":2,"name":"Self-division","description":"We are in a classroom, normally a place of ordered learning and natural hierarchy. But today, on a special occasion, chaos rules. The little girl refuses to do what the elderly teacher tells her. The child insists on doing what she wants. She is being 'naughty'. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nProbably you are a bit like this picture. There\u2019s a side of you that is a bit debauched. Maybe you drink, perhaps you display some compulsive behavior, you are not always 'good'. You are, in the language of this work of art, a greedy child. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nAnd we sometimes get very disturbed by this. We become extremely self-critical and preoccupied by our mistakes.  But of course - and this is what we are apt to underestimate - we are also very decent and reasonable in many other parts of our lives. Jan Steen is proposing integration of our troubling aspects with the rest of what we are like. We can be both \u2013 sometimes good, sometimes quite bad. And he is asking us to be less alarmed by this aspect of the human condition. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe painting rehearses, for us, a generous yet constructive response to weakness. It keeps clearly in mind that the adult world is robust and resilient. The child's defiance does not cause the teacher anxiety because the good order of the world is not really going to collapse because of one transgression. This is what we need to learn: to be a little less panicked and disturbed by our occasional follies.","artist_name":"Jan Steen","painting_name":"Feast of Saint Nicholas, 1665-1668","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13807132094.jpg","stub":"a-family-article","order":89,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13807132094.jpg"},{"id":111,"category_id":2,"name":"I can't bear to be alone","description":"It isn't easy to be introspective. There are countless difficult truths lurking within us that investigation threatens to dislodge. And it is when we are incubating particularly awkward but potentially vital ideas that we tend to feel most desperate to avoid looking inside.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nTo confront fears of being left alone with yourself, imagine what it is like to be Marguerite Kelsey (it doesn't matter who she was: stick with imagining who she is from the information the painting gives us). Meredith Frampton's portrait evokes what good solitude might feel like. Look carefully at the sitter's face. Let's try to sense what her character might be: she's a peaceful sort, she rarely loses her temper. She considers what she really wants from things; she doesn\u2019t give her friendship away cheaply; she\u2019s strong enough to feel a bit sad and lonely, rather than suffering from a need always to drown her sorrows or surround herself with frivolous company. She is a kind of secular saintly figure - reminding us of the importance of the ability to be alone.  She helps us over our proclivity to overrate social excitement and under-rate dignity. We should use her as that most old-fashioned sounding but useful of things, a role-model.","artist_name":"Meredith Frampton","painting_name":"Marguerite Kelsey, 1928","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13800176651.jpg","stub":"i-cant-bear-to-be-alone","order":111,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13800176651.jpg"},{"id":174,"category_id":2,"name":"It\u2019s only a chair","description":"It would be fun (were it not strictly forbidden by the Gallery) to climb into this chair, pull in your legs and curl up. It would be so cosy. You could look out at the world, or maybe just at your smartphone, from within your own little contained world. You might want a pillow and a blanket to make the perfect nest.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAnother time it could be wildly exciting to find your lover sitting there naked, inviting you to join him or her. Deep in the recesses of the chair you could whisper your secrets. The designer was not thinking about what a chair was supposed to be like. He was trying to imagine unexpected but real ways a chair could make us happy.","artist_name":"Eero Aarnio","painting_name":"Globe chair, designed 1963\u201365","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020587301.JPG","stub":"its-only-a-chair","order":174,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020587301.JPG"},{"id":175,"category_id":2,"name":"Forgetfulness","description":"It\u2019s a lovely idea: making the words of a poem into a work of art. This way of presenting words is not only beautiful, but is also sympathetic to a very basic human frailty: that we forget things. At the humblest level, the shopping list was invented because we have a tendency to forget what we need when we are at the store. We might not know what this particular poem is saying, but many poems have something important to tell us. When tucked away in the pages of an anthology, poems\u2019 wise, consoling, encouraging or cautionary words are not available when we need them.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nBy making the words physically beautiful, through the elegance of the script and the soothing tone and proportions of the paper, this object becomes a decoration; something to hang in your home, to be looked at every time you pass it in the kitchen or the hall, so the words become part of you. As well as admiring this example of calligraphy we should be guided by its example and make or commission beautiful presentations of the words that mean most to us.","artist_name":"Arisugawa Takahito","painting_name":"Calligraphy (Shojiku), Edo period mid 19th century","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020587902.JPG","stub":"forgetfulness","order":175,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020587902.JPG"},{"id":176,"category_id":2,"name":"Failure to appreciate the wonder of  familiar things","description":"For us, mirrors are among the most common items of domestic life. We scarcely give a thought to the strangeness of looking at ourselves, which for so long was impossible to do, except in the stillness of a lake (if you happened to live near one). This Chinese mirror enhances the experience of looking at your reflection and seeing who you are.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAccording to this mirror, the experience of seeing your reflected image is so remarkable that you might only look at yourself  occasionally. The back of the object is beautifully and elaborately decorated \u2013 to reveal its power you need to turn it over. The symbolic birds and flowers on the back of the mirror protect and bring you good fortune, put you in the right frame of mind before turning it over. You should think more about your life and about your soul.","artist_name":"Chinese","painting_name":"Eight lobed mirror, Tang dynasty early 8th century","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020588413.JPG","stub":"failure-to-appreciate-the-wonder-of-familiar-things","order":176,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020588413.JPG"},{"id":177,"category_id":2,"name":"Too busy to look at the sky","description":"Art is a way of preserving experiences, of which there are so many transient, beautiful examples, and which we need help in containing. Imagine being in a park on a blustery April day. We look up at the clouds and feel moved by their beauty and grace. They feel delightfully separate from the day-to-day bustle of our lives. We give our minds to the clouds and for a time are relieved of our preoccupations and placed in a wider context which stills the incessant complaints of our egos. Art edits down complexity and helps us to focus, for a brief period of time, on life\u2019s most meaningful aspects.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nJohn Constable\u2019s cloud studies invite us to concentrate, much more than we would normally do, on the particular texture and shape of individual clouds; to look at their variations in colour and at the way they mass together. Constable didn\u2019t expect us to become deeply concerned with meteorology: the precise nature of a cumulonimbus is not the issue. Rather, he wished to intensify the emotional meaning of the soundless drama that unfolds daily above our heads, making it more readily available to us and encouraging us to afford it the attention it deserves.","artist_name":"John Constable","painting_name":"Clouds, 1822","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020588954.JPG","stub":"too-busy-to-look-at-the-sky","order":177,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020588954.JPG"},{"id":178,"category_id":2,"name":"We are different, they were old-fashioned, we are modern","description":"This light coloured, high-waisted long dress was a cutting-edge fashion for ladies in England about two hundred years ago, at the time Jane Austen was writing her novels. We can imagine the thrill of the woman it was made for, her feeling that now she would look perfectly modern and smart. She looked at the long, narrow sleeves which extend past the wrists, and felt they were just right. She would be the envy of her friends.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe next year, however, the dress started to date. Eventually it was folded away in a trunk, stowed in an attic and forgotten. Children occasionally came across it while looking for things to dress up in and were amazed at the ridiculous, even creepy way their grandmother or great aunt had dressed. It became a period piece: a messenger from another, now strange, world. So it will be with our things.","artist_name":"England","painting_name":"Dress c.1809","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020589535.JPG","stub":"we-are-different-they-were-old-fashioned-we-are-modern","order":178,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020589535.JPG"},{"id":179,"category_id":2,"name":"It\u2019s not right that things are this hard for me","description":"He hasn\u2019t done anything wrong. He has tried to help people and do what he thought was right. Now they are standing around him shouting, laughing at his humiliation, mocking him. He\u2019s just got to take it. He understands them, he knows the fear behind their insults; but they won\u2019t back off.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nChristianity made the powerful decision to show its most noble and esteemed figure \u2013 Christ, the son of God \u2013 going through extreme versions of ordinary suffering. It is incredibly hurtful to be mocked; it makes us feel alone and desperate. Why are people so cruel to you? Trying to fight back only seems to make it worse.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nYou put forward an idea that might have been interesting and get shot down; you did not match someone\u2019s expectations \u2013 you were only being yourself \u2013 and suddenly they are assassinating your character.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis wooden sculpture from the Middle Ages holds onto the idea that decent people, and people who do important, serious things, can be humiliated. It can be hard for us to believe \u2013 maybe some of the people who look successful and secure also know a lot about what failure feels like.","artist_name":"France","painting_name":"The derision of Christ, mid 15th century","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020590066.JPG","stub":"its-not-right-that-things-are-this-hard-for-me","order":179,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020590066.JPG"},{"id":184,"category_id":2,"name":"Restlessness","description":"Although this painting leaves all the troubles and imperfections of life quietly aside, it does not ask us to deny that existence has many difficulties and injustices. We should be able to enjoy an ideal image such as this without regarding it as a false picture of how things usually are. A beautiful, though partial, vision can be all the more precious to us because<br \/>\nwe are so aware of how rarely life satisfies our desires.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe picture functions as a way of storing the positive, life-enhancing tranquillity of mind which is frequently undermined (in day-to-day existence) by endless irritations, disappointments and troubles. Strategic exaggerations of what is good can perform the critical function of distilling and con- centrating the hope required to chart a path through the challenges of life.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt is more perfect and tranquil than anything we encounter outside art.","artist_name":"Joseph Wright of Derby","painting_name":"Lake Nemi, sunset c.1790","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140205928611.JPG","stub":"restlessness","order":184,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140205928611.JPG"},{"id":185,"category_id":2,"name":"Life\u2019s a fairly straightforward business","description":"As we stare through the open window, we see what looks like a model house. The model, however, is of the very same house into which we are looking. Perhaps if one were to open a window in the model house one would find another smaller model, just the same in there, and if the window of that house were opened ... and so on, forever.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nRene? Magritte intended his art as a corrective to overconfidence in our powers of reason. He takes us to the place where ordinary logic and rationality tips over into an eerie illogicality and chaos, where our powerful and impressive minds start to spin out of control and haunt us. We recognise the mood from nightmares and from times in waking life when things have been in danger of turning hellish. Whereas we like to forget these moods, Magritte preserves them and makes them public: it\u2019s as though he has been into our minds and found our most unnerving private thoughts. He makes us a little more comfortable with the tendency we think is uniquely our own but which are in fact very common: to go a little mad for stretches of time.","artist_name":"Rene Magritte","painting_name":"In praise of dialectics (L\u2019Eloge de la dialectique), 1937","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140205934113.JPG","stub":"lifes-a-fairly-straightforward-business","order":185,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140205934113.JPG"},{"id":186,"category_id":2,"name":"I have a misplaced longing for glamour","description":"On this wall, probably behind three rows of people, hangs one of the most famous works of art in the world. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis is bad news. The extreme fame of a work of art is almost always unhelpful because, to touch us, art has to elicit a personal response \u2013 and that\u2019s hard when a painting is said to be so distinguished. This painting is quite out of synch with its status in any case because, above all else, it wants to show us that the ordinary can be very special. The picture says that looking after a simple but beautiful home, cleaning the yard, watching over the children, darning clothes \u2013 and doing these things faithfully and without despair \u2013 is life\u2019s real duty. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis is an anti-heroic picture, a weapon against false images of glamour. It refuses to accept that true glamour depends on amazing feats of courage or on the attainment of status. It argues that doing the modest things that are expected of all of us is enough. The picture asks you to be a little like it is: to take the attitudes it loves and to apply them to your life. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIf the Netherlands had a Founding Document, a concentrated repository of its values, it would be this small picture. It is the Dutch contribution to the world\u2019s understanding of happiness \u2013 and its message doesn\u2019t just belong in the gallery.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Johannes Vermeer","painting_name":"View of Houses in Delft, Known as \u2018The Little Street\u2019, 1658","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140205941014.jpg","stub":"i-have-a-misplaced-longing-for-glamour","order":186,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140205941014.jpg"},{"id":187,"category_id":2,"name":"I\u2019m too ordinary for special things to happen to me","description":"Because this picture hangs in the Rijksmuseum and because we have, perhaps, seen it many times before on postcards or in books, we might make the mistake of thinking that, of course, what Ruisdael shows us is beautiful. But look again. It is a scene we would not admire if we were to drive past it, or see it in a news report. We would probably think things like: what a horrible gloomy day, I wish the sun were shining; it\u2019s a disgrace that windmill has fallen into disrepair; God, the river is so slimy and disgusting.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAnd yet, something remarkable is happening in the picture. The artist, we feel, is aware of life\u2019s problems but isn\u2019t dwelling on them. Instead, Ruisdael wants to bring out what is loveable and good here. He looks with devotion to the best that the world has to offer, when this is not obvious. So he is doing an essential thing: helping us to love something by looking with generosity at its best features. We aren\u2019t going to be artists, but we need to do a little of what he did. Because the horrible features of the world are so readily perceived, it is essential for our sanity and well-being that we learn how to see the less obvious \u2013 but real \u2013 good sides. Like a loving parent, he doesn\u2019t just love the accomplishments, success and perfection. He is drawn to seek out the secret beauty of things that others would pass by with a shrug. This is a radical, political picture, a manifesto.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael","painting_name":"The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede, 1670","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140205949915.jpg","stub":"im-too-ordinary-for-special-things-to-happen-to-me","order":187,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140205949915.jpg"},{"id":188,"category_id":2,"name":"I couldn\u2019t hurt a flea","description":"It was a fantastic day; we smashed them to smithereens; we blew them thirty feet into the air; their brains went everywhere; my friend gouged out some guy\u2019s eye. We won. We totally owned them.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn its raw, energetic triumphalism, the picture gives a corrective nudge to our present attitudes. We are so conscious that thuggish people must never be encouraged that decent people have learned all too well to suppress their own appetite for a fight, their own desire for victory. But in a world where conflict is unavoidable, good people need to strengthen their willingness to face down opposition \u2013 not always to compromise and play it safe, but to take risks instead, to relish victory and to be a bit more ruthless in the service of noble and deeply important ends. Sometimes it is not enough to be right, you also need to win.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe picture is frank about pride in achievement. The naval battle, which was hideous in reality, was crucial to the formation of a free and secure society. It took great courage, great readiness to face danger and desperate resolution to win in order to bring about that historic development. Today \u2013 obviously \u2013 the enemy is not a foreign fleet and the battles are not fought with cannonballs and gunpowder. But how many great things have been lost to the world because their originators \u2013 while having the requisite insight \u2013 lacked the sheer courage and force of character to see them through? Goodness should be strong.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen","painting_name":"The Explosion of the Spanish Flagship during the Battle of Gibraltar, 1621","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140205975216.jpg","stub":"i-couldnt-hurt-a-flea","order":188,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140205975216.jpg"},{"id":189,"category_id":2,"name":"Nothing interesting ever happens to me","description":"We\u2019ve all known nights a bit like this. The ordinary preoccupations of the day recede and, away from the familiarity of home, you access unfamiliar, yet important, parts of yourself. You feel a freshness and openness to new experiences. You feel curious, unafraid and thoughtful, out there in the world at 3 a.m.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe artist is trying to hold on to a mood of heightened consciousness at being alone in a strange, unfamiliar, beautiful world. We feel (as we didn\u2019t during the bustling hours of the day), how odd it is to be alive and how peculiar it is to walk this earth. The majesty of the evening may prompt what could be called a religious impulse. This isn\u2019t a desire to join an established religion, but to find some way of expressing the strange, and powerful, conjunction of an awareness of our own isolation and fragility and \u2013 at the same time \u2013 our intense love of the beauty of the cosmos. It is an impulse that religions have taken seriously (although they have often interpreted it in unfortunate ways). It is a mood that we all know but generally neglect. We don\u2019t go there enough; we leave it to chance. We should be more strategic and set up the opportunity: \u2018There\u2019s a bright moon tomorrow, let\u2019s go for a walk by the river at 11.15 in the evening\u2019.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe picture bottles the mood and helps us remember it (getting the postcard might quickly return us to it). It makes it communicable: in the future you might be able to say, I had a Van der Neerish experience \u2013 and a friend who had seen the picture would understand.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Aert van der Neer","painting_name":"River View by Moonlight, 1650","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140205980217.jpg","stub":"nothing-interesting-ever-happens-to-me","order":189,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140205980217.jpg"},{"id":191,"category_id":2,"name":"I\u2019m too mature to like pretty things","description":"This is just the sort of teapot that led to the emergence of modernism. It would have enraged the early modernists, for they wanted a world stripped bare, where everything had a clear function. So what on earth is the purpose of a Chinese-style bird or flower decoration on a teapot? Does it help you to pour tea?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut it does have a function, just an emotional rather than a practical one. So much of tenderness and love is about going beyond what is strictly necessary. It\u2019s never strictly necessary to love another person \u2013 nor necessary to paint a blue tree on the side of a teapot. Decoration is an emblem of generosity. For us, this is a breakfast-table temple to care and love (even if tea was not yet a breakfast drink when it was made!). It offers a small intervention in life \u2013 to lift our spirits just a tiny bit at the right moment. We\u2019re not asking it to bear the world on its fragile spout.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nPrettiness gets a bad press. People like pretty things, but sometimes feel they shouldn\u2019t. Surely too many terrible things are happening. Prettiness can feel like it\u2019s just a sweet distraction that saps our will to reform the world and face up to reality. But the teapot knows that there will always be time for bad news. So for a moment, over breakfast, it makes a place for solace and cheerfulness.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"De Metalen Pot ","painting_name":"Teapot, 1690","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140205990619.jpg","stub":"im-too-mature-to-like-pretty-things","order":191,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140205990619.jpg"},{"id":192,"category_id":2,"name":"I\u2019m more into facts","description":"This intriguing scientific instrument reminds us of something that the Enlightenment kept well in mind but we have rather neglected: that our reasons for liking art and science can be remarkably similar. When this model of the heavens was made, art and science were understood to be cousins, with interest in one leading naturally to the other. The reasons for being interested in science were not so dissimilar to the motives for turning to art: a search for beauty and a taste for a grander order of things that could put our lives into consoling and encouraging context. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nScientific work was not reserved for the laboratory; it could enter daily life and be a talking point over dinner. You didn\u2019t need to understand every last detail to feel that you had the right to join in; you could have an aesthetic relationship with science \u2013 a possibility neglected in our times, but helpfully pointed out by this model of the solar system. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe object signals that it\u2019s not enough for a scientific theory to be true: complex concepts (in this case the movements of the planets) need to be presented with elegance and charm if they are to live as they should in our imaginations. We need today\u2019s scientists to hang out a little more with artists.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Hartog van Laun","painting_name":"Table orrery, 1808","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140205995720.jpg","stub":"im-more-into-facts","order":192,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140205995720.jpg"},{"id":194,"category_id":2,"name":"Death happens to other people","description":"He got a doctorate from Amsterdam. She became a piano teacher, mostly young children. He married a French girl the family wasn\u2019t too happy with. They had seven children, three lived. She married a poet, it was a sorry story, there were no children. He\u2019s 63 now, she a couple of years younger. He can still remember that day, how long they had to stand, the need to suppress their giggles, and how they went to have some sherbert afterwards at Aunt Klaartje\u2019s house.","artist_name":"Unknown","painting_name":"Portrait of a Young Boy and Girl, 1845","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020600892.jpg","stub":"death-happens-to-other-people","order":194,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020600892.jpg"},{"id":196,"category_id":2,"name":"I have this fear of being a sissy","description":"We\u2019ve seen this kind of thing so many times, it\u2019s easy to get anaesthetized to what\u2019s actually going on: a mummy is being really nice to her young child \u2013 and this has been commemorated in a highly prestigious public object, created by one of the most talented people of the time and endorsed by the most powerful public institutions.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nSuch an object subtly responds to our emotional needs. It knows that we might all still long to be mothered, even though we are adults. We might still need a great deal of reassurance and kindness. So much of growing up is about becoming independent and getting by without the comfort on offer here. Being a mummy\u2019s boy remains a stinging insult to our autonomy. But this is an exaggerated repudiation of an important need.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe statue offers comfort by proxy: in our imagination we can get close to Mary without having to give up the hard-won advantages of adult life (this is helped by the fact that the baby looks about 27). The longing that might otherwise unman us, that could undermine our claims to an adult identity, finds a safe and acceptable home.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Unknown","painting_name":"Virgin and Child, 1424","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020601924.jpg","stub":"i-have-this-fear-of-being-a-sissy","order":196,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020601924.jpg"},{"id":199,"category_id":2,"name":"Don\u2019t be so defensive","description":"Armour is nicely honest about our wish not to get hurt. The makers have gone to extraordinary trouble to protect every last joint and tender surface of the body from a stray arrow or savagely wielded axe. It\u2019s frank about danger. It doesn\u2019t pretend that it\u2019s a good idea, or a sign of bravery, to expose yourself to risk. It knows that life is dangerous enough anyway. In an ideal world we might like to open the cabinet and try it on \u2013 one might feel as safe as being a baby, but in an iron casing instead of a comfy sling.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nNowadays the risks to our safety are not from a heavy mace or a lance. The perils we face are more psychological, but our need for safety is just as great. And the need for ingenuity in responding to risk persists. We need the new makers of armour to protect us from the modern equivalent of the flanged mace or a deadly thrust from a halberd.","artist_name":"Armour of Pankraz von Freyberg","painting_name":"1500-ca. 1550","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020603847.jpg","stub":"dont-be-so-defensive","order":199,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020603847.jpg"},{"id":200,"category_id":2,"name":"I like my art to be \u2018about\u2019 things","description":"Unlike most things in this museum, these shapes don\u2019t mean one thing in particular, but our minds can make something of them nevertheless; that\u2019s one of the powers of stylized patterns, whether or not based on natural forms. So what is it \u2018about\u2019? Like music, it speaks in non-specific way, and yet it can touch our emotional chords.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe pattern seems to hit the mark exactly between our need for spontaneity and our need for coherence. So often we tend to one extreme or the other: we vigorously pursue order, but become clinical and impatient with the ordinary confusion of life. Or we abandon ourselves to chance and whim, but end up lost and confused. This little piece of fabric seems to show the vitality of life contained within the order of reason. It is a metaphor for so much: a good relationship, a great conversation, the dynamics of an orchestra, even a family. It induces a mood of serene pleasure in the interplay of complexity and order.","artist_name":"Chris Lebeau","painting_name":"Fabric covering","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020604238.jpg","stub":"i-like-my-art-to-be-about-things","order":200,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020604238.jpg"},{"id":201,"category_id":2,"name":"Art can\u2019t be about my life","description":"We\u2019re still oddly flattered and touched by the thought that something we might possess \u2013 or might have seen in a friend\u2019s apartment \u2013 can have the honour of a place in the Rijksmuseum.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe task of the museum isn\u2019t to show us things that are simply old or rare \u2013 that\u2019s only an accidental feature of something more important, which is to show us what is good and can have a power to excite and help us.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIdeally, the things in museums shouldn\u2019t be rare at all. We might be able to buy them in a shop down the road.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe are confused about the merits of rarity. Because good things are in short supply, we might unreasonably conclude that being in short supply is a requirement, a sign, of quality. We start to get impressed by rarity itself. This is an unfortunate habit of mind. Actually we should resent rarity, we should hope instead that what we admire and like is as widely and easily available as a simple office chair.","artist_name":"Gerrit and Wim Rietveld","painting_name":"Prototype of the \u2018Mondial\u2019 chair","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020604779.jpg","stub":"art-cant-be-about-my-life","order":201,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020604779.jpg"},{"id":206,"category_id":2,"name":"We grow up too fast","description":"She wears the finery of a fashionable young woman, but underneath she is still really a bit childish and naive. It wasn\u2019t so long ago that she was playing with dolls and thought her parents were the best people in the world. The figure in the little oval picture she is holding looks like a winsome young soldier. Yet what does she know of the difficulties<br \/>\nof relationships?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt is not her fault. Suddenly she has the power to attract men; if she displays her wrists the right way, puts some lace round her bodice, they are falling over her. She\u2019s entering into the adult world.","artist_name":"Joseph Highmore","painting_name":"Susanna Highmore, c.1740\u201345","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140206097714.JPG","stub":"we-grow-up-too-fast","order":206,"category_name":"Self","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140206097714.JPG"}],"politics":[{"id":123,"category_id":4,"name":"I'm ashamed of my country","description":"Sophisticated people feel understandably wary of expressions of national pride, since these are often ridiculous and, at times, menacing. Yet, artists and architects have a vital role to play in helping us to crystallise what is actually attractive about our country; they can channel our capacity for national pride in intelligent and valuable directions. They can tell us of what there is to love in our land.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe Swiss embassy in Washington DC is more than just the place where a senior diplomat happens to live; it is an essay about the best aspects of being Swiss. The building beautifully emphasises certain features associated with the Swiss character. It is quite upfront about elegance, Calvinist austerity and formality. The edges of the building are picked out in charcoal concrete; visual boundaries are made as distinct as possible. A pin-striped neatness is carried across the facade; the building looks reticent but quietly dignified. One could imagine a more apologetic architect feeling that the Swiss obsession with such things is slightly embarrassing, but Steven Holl has given these attitudes noble expression. It\u2019s as if the architect were saying to the Swiss: 'This neatness, which you know people sometimes mock you for, is in fact worthy of pride.\u2019<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe key point is that elegance, care and accuracy really are admirable qualities. They are characteristics a nation should be proud of and should hold up as its collective ideals - to give themselves encouragement to live up to them. National pride doesn't have to involve waving flags mindlessly, it should mean picking up on the genuine virtues of a country and celebrating them in great works of art and architecture.","artist_name":"Steven Holl","painting_name":"Swiss Ambassador\u2019s Residence, Washington DC, 2006","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138054102913.jpg","stub":"im-ashamed-of-my-country","order":96,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138054102913.jpg"},{"id":124,"category_id":4,"name":"Political art is always so crude","description":"'Political art' has a bad reputation. It is synonymous with crude hectoring posters for ignoble causes. But that's a betrayal of the real possibilities of political art, which is to understand what is wrong with group life, and to arrive at intelligent, acute responses that can push an audience to evolve in more fruitful directions.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nA nation's problems don't only involve economic injustice; they may lie in any number of small intra-personal behaviours that corrupt daily life. For example, one of the leading problems of developed, technological societies is that their citizens are becoming ever more aggressive and impatient. Therefore, one mission for modern political art might be the encouragement of serenity and forgiveness.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nViewed in this perspective, the Danish artist Kobke\u2019s Outside the North Gate of the Citadel is a superlative piece of political art, because it is attempting to change how citizens relate to one another. In the painting, an officer cadet can be seen lounging on the bridge, quite at ease with an itinerant young salesman and a couple of poor local children, all of them enjoying the sunshine on the water. Without labouring the point, it presents an attitude of informal companionship between different levels of society where there could so easily be tension and distrust. It is a moment of quiet democratic simplicity. The beholder is invited to recognise patient thoughtfulness and a lack of snobbery as public virtues. Thus it acts as a counterweight to the general tendency to lose a sense of community and to get instantly agitated whenever one sees things one dislikes in the political realm. One could imagine this image being beamed into every home before the news, to reduce the likelihood of people screaming at the screen and posting an irate comment online.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nKobke is trying to tell Danes what they should be like - and to nudge them to change. Remarkably, the picture has had trangible success in this endeavour. It - along with many others - has helped to crystalise a conception of what it is to be Danish, what a Danish attitude to life might be like. You see this work on postcards, posters and even kitchen towels across Denmark. Art has played its part in the development of one of the world\u2019s sanest and most decent societies.","artist_name":"Christen K\u00f8bke","painting_name":"Outside the North Gate of the Citadel, 1834","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138054121814.jpg","stub":"political-art-is-always-so-crude","order":123,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138054121814.jpg"},{"id":133,"category_id":4,"name":"I want to be proud of my country","description":"Cynicism is fashionable, particularly when it comes to our own country: we're constantly given reasons to do down the place we live. But a well founded national pride is a valuable asset. Nations are continually beset by problems that require great collective effort if they are to be properly addressed - and often they are not addressed because there is a shortage of collective devotion. We should take seriously the idea of being proud of one\u2019s country. But it can be tricky to see what there is for pride to latch onto in a level-headed and considered way.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn a house that he designed for himself in South Australia, Murcutt used many of the architectural elements that are familiar in the country he loves: the corrugated iron, the big cylindrical water tanks, and the shed and garage doors. These are not just rural features - but are very common in the suburbs where almost everyone lives. Despite this ubiquity, Murcutt has brought these together in an unusually refined and beautiful composition. Usually water tanks are placed wherever happens to be convenient to catch the run-off from the roof, and they may well be tucked away, on the assumption that they are unworthy of notice; or because it is felt to be slightly embarrassing to pay attention to the aesthetic merits of an avowedly utilitarian structure. But Murcutt\u2019s house is a lesson in pride. It does not simply assert that water tanks are great, and that \u2018we are great because we have lots of them\u2019. Rather it seeks a way of bringing out what can be lovely about these elements. In the composition they are somewhat reminiscent of the round defensive towers on either side of a castle gate. Those, too, were utilitarian in origin - but their beauty and poetry of association have gradually come to the fore. Murcutt helps us to recognise the dignity of a style of building which is regarded as humble only because it has not until now been attended to properly or integrated with adequate skill into domestic design. Along the way, he also points to some of what there is to be proud of in Australia, in a realistic and practical way.","artist_name":"Glenn Murcutt","painting_name":"Glenn and Ruth Murcutt House, Woodside, South Australia, 1995-6","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138054227624.jpg","stub":"i-want-to-be-proud-of-my-country","order":124,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138054227624.jpg"},{"id":125,"category_id":4,"name":"Where might my country go?","description":"Art does not just have to show us how things are, it can also give us a sense of how things could be - it can point hopefully, encouragingly or sometimes sternly, in a good direction. Brazil is a country of frenetic economic activity, of rainforest and Amazonian villages, favelas, soccer, beaches and intense disagreement about political priorities \u2026 none of which is apparent from contemplation of the National Congress. Instead the building imagines the Brasil of the future; it is a glass and reinforced concrete ideal for the country to develop towards. In the future, so the building argues, Brazil will be a place where rationality is powerful; where order and harmony reign; where elegance and serenity are normal. Calm, thoughtful people will labour carefully and think accurately about legislation; in offices in the towers, efficient secretaries will type up judicious briefing notes; the filing systems will be perfect - nothing will get lost, overlooked, neglected or mislaid; negotiations will take place in an atmosphere of impersonal wisdom. The country will be perfectly managed. The building, therefore, could be seen as an essay in flattery. It hints that these desirable qualities are already to some extent possessed by the country and by its governing class. Ideals flatter us - because we experience them not merely as intimations of a far distant future but also as descriptions of what we are like. We are used to thinking of flattery as bad - but in fact it is rather helpful, for flattery encourages us to live up to the appealing image it presents. The child who is praised for his or her first modest attempts at humour, and called witty as a result, is being guided and helped to develop beyond what he or she actually happens to be right now. They grow into the person they have flatteringly been described as already being. This is important because the obstacle to our good development is not usually arrogance, but a lack of confidence.","artist_name":"Oscar Niemeyer","painting_name":"National Congress, Brasilia, 1956","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138071230716.jpg","stub":"where-might-my-country-go","order":125,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138071230716.jpg"},{"id":127,"category_id":4,"name":"My country needs to make a fresh start","description":"The need to put past mistakes to rest and to make a fresh start applies to nations, just as it does to individuals. We sometimes need to stop raking over past guilt or accept that a particular phase of national history is over. In 1995, the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude had a go at this task in relation to Germany's history by wrapping up the Federal parliament in Berlin. Although a nineteenth century work, the Reichstag had a particularly painful memory attached to it. The Nazi party rose to power in 1933 on the back not of force (as it might be convenient to believe), but of popular electoral success. This has traumatised modern Germany. Yet a vote cast in 1933 hardly entails agreement with every element of party policy up to 1945, let alone the actions of the government over the massacre of European Jewry or the behaviour of its armies on the Eastern front. Nevertheless, the election results are a fraught reminder of collective responsibility.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nJeanne-Claude and Christo did not change the Reichstag; but by covering and then unveiling it, they set up a grand public opportunity for renewal of the nation\u2019s relationship to its foremost political building. It allowed Germany to give its parliament back to itself. The Wrapped Reichstag was a secular political form of baptism. Baptism is a symbolic moment in which past wrongs are put aside and the individual is rededicated to the future. Political art has a pivotal role to play in allowing nations to learn to start again even while they acknowledge their guilt for past sins.","artist_name":"Christo and Jeanne-Claude","painting_name":"Wrapped Riechstag, June-July 1995","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138054147917.jpg","stub":"my-country-needs-to-make-a-fresh-start","order":127,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138054147917.jpg"},{"id":132,"category_id":4,"name":"A defence of censorship","description":"Censorship does not, today, meet with much enthusiasm. We tend to think of censorship as a small minded, defensive interference with a cherished freedom to express ourselves. We associate it with book burning, political repression and ignorant intolerance. However, it is time to recognise that, in most countries, this phase has decisively passed. We should revisit the idea of censorship - and consider it potentially not as an unenlightened suppression of crucial ideas but as a sincere attempt to organise the world for our benefit. The threat now is not that wonderful truths will be repressed by malign authorities but rather that we will drown in chaos, overwhelmed by irrelevant and unhelpful trivia, unable to concentrate on what is genuinely important.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe most beautiful cities in the world are almost never the product of accident. They get to be as they are because of rules about what you are not allowed not do. The New Town of Edinburgh was built - from the late 18th to the early 19th centuries - by the efforts of a large number of private speculative builders, who bought plots of land and constructed houses on them. But a magnificent and harmonious result was achieved only because of a master-plan indicating the line of the streets and squares and the positioning of major public buildings. There were elaborate regulations about what could be built: the houses were to be put up in a continuous line, no signposts were to project from the walls, there were rules about the height of buildings in different streets, the number of storeys they could have and the kind of stone they had to be faced with.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe rightful celebration of freedom as an organising principle in democracy has blinded us to an awkward truth: that freedom should in some contexts be limited for the sake of well-being.","artist_name":"Unknown","painting_name":"New Town Crescent, Edinburgh, 1820","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138071247223.jpg","stub":"a-defence-of-censorship","order":128,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138071247223.jpg"},{"id":128,"category_id":4,"name":"I don't want to go into business: I love art","description":"The Ideal City, traditionally ascribed to Piero della Francesca, imagines a perfect urban space: a sequence of noble - but fairly restrained - buildings, which probably have administrative and commercial roles as well as providing domestic accommodation, grouped around a circular temple-like structure, which is a focus for civic life. There is a great sense of harmony and dignity here - yet there is variation in the details of individual buildings. Some have open arcades, others have widely protruding eaves; some have balconies; the delicate colouring of the materials moderates the rigour of the composition. This city does not fear formality - but knows how to make it humane and charming.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIf we are impressed by this work of art, what should we do? Perhaps we should get worried about who actually painted it? Is this really by Piero? Such concerns have been taken seriously. Following extensive X-ray investigations it turns out that the picture is probably not by Piero at all but by the architect and theorist Leon Battista Alberti. This kind of investigation has cachet in the art world.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nHowever, there is another reaction to this image which is perhaps more important, yet less explored and that is to want to know how the fine urban qualities the artist (whoever he was) cared about could be made more widespread in the minds of property developers and legislative bodies. We don't just want to look at a picture, we want to change the world.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nHowever, to pursue this aim, we do not need to take the picture to the X-ray laboratory or spend too long in the museum. We need - metaphorically speaking - to take our hopes to the wing of government where key decisions are made about the country\u2019s housing policy and the design of its cities.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWorks of art often show us fine values - but the right way of honouring these is not always to produce more works of art, to write scholarly tomes or to take out membership for the museum. Art points a way beyond itself.  It shows us how the world might one day be, but it is not in itself the final destination. It gives us particularly clear and beguiling images of values that then need to make real in the world outside the museum - not by artists through art, but by you and me, in all the work we do.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Leon Battista Alberti","painting_name":"The Ideal City, 1480-1484","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138054162919.jpg","stub":"id-rather-go-into-art-than-politics-or-business","order":132,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138054162919.jpg"},{"id":96,"category_id":4,"name":"Who cares about typefaces?","description":"This is one of the first things that a visitor to the Netherlands sees, and fortunately it says something eloquent and accurate about the character of the Dutch people and their ideals - while also directing us efficiently to collect our suitcases.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe designer Benno Wissing knew how significant a choice of typeface can be. This one carries out the task of characterising a quite abstract thing \u2013 namely, \u2018Dutchness\u2019 - in something very utilitarian. It anchors a big idea in a straightforward, everyday item. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis signage can also be a legitimate location for national pride. It\u2019s not an idealisation of the Netherlands. It foregrounds real qualities: unfussy efficiency, a sense of dignified egalitarianism.  This is Vermeer for today, and ultimately these arrows are pointing us to a quiet alley, to Vermeer\u2019s Little Street.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nNowadays, Vermeer may not have painted Delft, instead seeking out that strange moment of stillness between the Frankfurt shuttle and the Jakarta-bound KLM flight. He may have painted Concourse D at Schiphol.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nA country\u2019s identity doesn\u2019t only reside in its grand museums, war memorials and flags. It can also be found in tram benches, street lamps, door handles and, of course, the way to the airport facilities. ","artist_name":"Benno Wissing","painting_name":"Signage for Schipol, 1967","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1379349696T.jpg","stub":"only-prestigious-objects-can-tell-us-important-things","order":133,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1379349696T.jpg"},{"id":213,"category_id":4,"name":"I tend to switch off when the news is too awful","description":"One big function of art is to show us suffering and injustice to which we have closed our eyes \u00ac\u2013 and thereby encourage us to pave the way to a better world. Art takes the first crucial step of raising consciousness, and thereby helps to generate the political will to remedy big social ills. Vincent Van Gogh directed the attention of a prestigious urban audience to the plight of a hitherto neglected constituency: the rural poor.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOf course, it\u2019s not that before van Gogh people in France weren\u2019t aware of the horrifying statistics. The news \u2013 then and now \u2013 is always informing us of appalling facts. The average life expectancy for a peasant in France in 1880 was 35. One out of eight peasant women died in childbirth. To switch centuries, nowadays the unemployment rate in Greece is 28%. The average wage in Liberia is less than $200 per year. And no one much cares...<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThat\u2019s why we need art. The prestige of data is fed by the tempting but false idea that \u201cknowing the facts\u201d is what matters. Abstract statistics look clever and serious, but so often they just wash over us. The woman with a spade takes us in the opposite direction. We are creatures designed for intimate contact, for local lives and personal relationships. For ideas to become powerful in our souls, they need to be anchored in experience. We need to feel them, see them. This is what art, at its best, can help us with.","artist_name":"Vincent van Gogh","painting_name":"Woman with a Spade, Seen from Behind ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020615831.jpg","stub":"i-tend-to-switch-off-when-the-news-is-too-awful","order":213,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020615831.jpg"},{"id":214,"category_id":4,"name":"Nothing is ever perfect","description":"Perfectionism is something we tend to feel mixed about. Without it, we lose the will to drive ourselves through difficult challenges. We compromise too soon and give up on the grander opportunity. Of course perfectionism is also a recipe for frustration and disappointment. Nothing is ever quite as shiny and clean and neat as it could be. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIn this work, Donald Judd is generous to the perfectionist instinct: order, harmony, serenity are political ideals, which the world continually fails to live up to. We have to both love those ideals of perfection and cope with the fact that they are merely ideals \u2013 they will never be fully realized in the world. Judd keeps the perfectionist impulse alive and nurtures it when we may be all too ready to abandon it a little too soon.","artist_name":"Donald Judd","painting_name":"Untitled","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020616332.jpg","stub":"nothing-is-ever-perfect","order":214,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020616332.jpg"},{"id":215,"category_id":4,"name":"Patriotism feels embarrassing","description":"At first sight this picture is utterly remote from the concerns of modern politics. It illustrates a foundational episode in the collective national myth of the Roman people. Aeneas was their distant ancestor, and it was (they imagined) his descendants who founded the city of Rome. Here he is with his mother, who happens to be a goddess, receiving a present of military equipment \u2013 the material he happens to need at that time in order to help his people. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nBut the point of this picture is simple and highly relevant. It is an attempt to answer a question that we often feel uncomfortable about, but which is actually of great political importance: What should I feel proud of about my country? The question has so often been badly answered that it has come itself to feel embarrassing, but it shouldn\u2019t be. Every country needs to understand where it comes from, what it stands for and what it can legitimately feel proud of. What Poussin was doing for the Romans, we need to find a way to do with Canada today.","artist_name":"Nicolas Poussin","painting_name":"Venus, Mother of Aeneas, Presenting him with Arms forged by Vulcan","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020616973.jpg","stub":"patriotism-feels-embarrassing","order":215,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020616973.jpg"},{"id":216,"category_id":4,"name":"If we upset people enough, things will get better","description":"Her life is hard. She can just scrape a living by working on the land. She is cold and tired. She hasn\u2019t done anything to deserve this.  She is just as alive, just as real as those who enjoy a comfortable existence, whose work is interest- ing and are well-rewarded for what they do. The artist who painted this big picture did not expect her ever to see it. The painting was destined for a public place where those in power could see it and see her suffering \u2013 he wanted to make others see the injustice, especially those who could do something about it.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe work thus follows one of the main strategies of political art, to draw the attention of comfortable, well-placed people towards the troubles of others which they might otherwise ignore. It\u2019s a compelling idea and one that is endlessly recycled in the claim that art should shock and disturb. But how many problems of modern politics really have this character? Maybe we already know enough about what is wrong. The difficult thing is to point out solutions that can work.","artist_name":"Jules Bastien-Lepage","painting_name":"October (Saison d\u2019octobre), 1878","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020617874.JPG","stub":"if-we-upset-people-enough-things-will-get-better","order":216,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020617874.JPG"},{"id":217,"category_id":4,"name":"For goodness sake, it\u2019s just a cup of tea","description":"It is one of the surprises of Zen Buddhism that it has taken an act which in the West is synonymous with the most routine and unremarkable activities and imbued it with a solemnity and depth of meaning akin to the Catholic Mass. Every aspect of the Japanese tea ceremony, from the patient boiling of<br \/>\nthe water to the measuring out of green tea powder, relates to Zen\u2019s philosophical tenets of the importance of friendship and the transient nature of existence.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt\u2019s open ended where this approach to everyday life might go. It leaves open the possibility that many actions and daily habits might, with sufficient creative imagination, become similarly elevated, important and rewarding in our lives. The point isn\u2019t so much that we should take part in tea ceremonies, rather that we should make aspects of our everyday spiritual lives more tangible by allying certain materials and sensuous rituals.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThere is a latent sympathy between big ideas about life and the little everyday things, such as certain drinks, foods, flowers and scents. These are not cut off from the big themes; they can make those themes more alive for us.","artist_name":"Kimura Morikazu Tea bowl (Chawan)","painting_name":"Showa period, mid 20th century \u2013 late 20th century","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020618495.JPG","stub":"for-goodness-sake-its-just-a-cup-of-tea","order":217,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020618495.JPG"},{"id":219,"category_id":4,"name":"I say I admire thinking, but in fact I don\u2019t","description":"We would like to think of ourselves as thinkers. To be called thoughtful is a very nice compliment. Sadly, thinking can go wrong in so many ways: one circles around the same conundrum, shoots off in distracted directions, or simply feels a bit numb and blank.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe actual prestige of thinking is quite low in comparison with other things: action, money, fame, physical attractiveness. Auguste Rodin is trying to correct our perspective, to bring to our attention, in a memorable way, to the appeal of thinking (absorbing oneself in reflection, musing on great matters, sticking with a conundrum, working out what one really believes and why). He is not reciting facts to himself.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe are so familiar with the low estimate of thinking that we rarely notice it. We take it for granted that the world will be full of aeroplanes, restaurants, car showrooms, hotels, supermarkets and banks (to start the list) that we fail to notice temples devoted to thinking.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Auguste Rodin","painting_name":"The thinker (Le Penseur) 1884","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020619667.JPG","stub":"i-say-i-admire-thinking-but-in-fact-i-dont","order":219,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020619667.JPG"},{"id":220,"category_id":4,"name":"Beauty must come in familiar guises","description":"We might easily imagine his friends kept on telling him not to paint this scene. It\u2019s got all those hideous gas towers in it and there\u2019s that nondescript bit of waste ground in front. Perhaps we tend to share the romantic prejudice which says that industrial places can\u2019t be beautiful, can\u2019t speak to our souls.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nPaul Signac wasn\u2019t trying to annoy us. He was aiming at something more important: to teach us how to appreciate and take delight in objects which are actually visually fascinating but to which prejudice closes our eyes. He  is discovering the potential of new kinds of objects to move us.","artist_name":"Paul Signac","painting_name":"Gasometers at Clichy, 1886","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020620538.JPG","stub":"beauty-must-come-in-familiar-guises","order":220,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020620538.JPG"},{"id":221,"category_id":4,"name":"You won\u2019t respect me unless I show how serious I am","description":"It is like something designed by a child: a playful experiment in seeing how many toy bricks you can get to balance on top of each other, with a fun bit at the top which looks like a stick man. Unexpectedly it is also elegant and harmonious. It does not repudiate childish impulses, but extends and perfects it with the skills of adult life. It is an image of healthy growth \u2013 the kind that doesn\u2019t require us to denigrate where we used to be, or lose faith with what we used to love. Time can improve without destroying.","artist_name":"Ettore Sottsass","painting_name":"Carlton room divider 1981","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020621129.JPG","stub":"you-wont-respect-me-unless-i-show-how-serious-i-am","order":221,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020621129.JPG"},{"id":222,"category_id":4,"name":"I could never be like her","description":"She looks a bit of a snob \u2013 very impressed by her own grandeur and probably in the habit of putting other people down. We like to think of how unlike her we are.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nAnd yet, is she really always alien to us? If you are sitting on a crowded tram with some loud, annoying people, it might at times cross your mind that not everyone is of equal worth.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis picture is not an image of the ideal mode of existence. Rather, it is a corrective. Just as it is possible to be much too dismissive of other people and much too sure of one\u2019s own superiority (like the Countess of Southampton), we can also be too ready to accept everyone as equal to ourselves, thereby underselling our own merits.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe ideal is to have an accurate view of one\u2019s worth. If we accept that it\u2019s possible to have too high an opinion of oneself, we should also admit that it\u2019s possible to have too low an opinion of oneself. If this were the case, being a little bit more like Rachel de Ruvigny would genuinely represent progress.","artist_name":"Anthony van Dyck","painting_name":"Rachel de Ruvigny, Countess of  Southampton, c.1640","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140206216410.JPG","stub":"i-could-never-be-like-her","order":222,"category_name":"Politics","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140206216410.JPG"}],"free-time":[{"id":129,"category_id":5,"name":"I get bored going for walks","description":"In principle it would be great to go for lots of walks, whether in the country or the city. And yet going for a walk can turn into a chore. You feel you should but don\u2019t really want to. We should make more of a fuss about going for a walk - in a good sense. For three decades, the British artist Hamish Fulton has been recording his walks around different parts of the world, listing their time, place, route and the prevailing meteorological conditions. These are written up in solemn fonts on large framed prints (some many meters high and wide). The effect is incongruous. We expect this sort of treatment to be accorded to the commemoration of a battle or the efforts of a national government. That it is merely a walk by an ordinary citizen is an argument for us to reconsider the value of this sort of activity. Fulton doesn\u2019t tell us what he thought about or felt when he left the northern suburbs of Kyoto on foot and made a circuit of mount Hiei. We are left - intriguingly - to imagine. His concern is more elemental. The august, refined lettering and the short precise statements of his work conveys the dignity he rightly feels that his walks (and ours) deserve. He wants us to recognise that some walks (\u2018on a circuit of ancient paths\u2019) can be central events in our lives; our inner transitions assisted by our outer wanderings.","artist_name":"Hamish Fulton","painting_name":"Ten One Day Walks from and to Kyoto, 1994","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138054169420.jpg","stub":"i-get-bored-going-for-walks","order":25,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138054169420.jpg"},{"id":130,"category_id":5,"name":"I can't bear the rain","description":"Where you live, it's likely to rain far too much. You probably spend some intense moments every year wishing you could move somewhere else, a place with a balmier, lighter climate.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nFrustration with the weather can be intense, but that\u2019s not the same as fully seeing what it is we are missing in our own land. The trouble might not merely be climatic. It\u2019s not just the rain, but what the rain seems to stand for: psychological gloom, sexual repression, a lack of imagination, conservatism, joylessness. A craving for the sun hints at needs that extend beyond the sun, and indeed, could be secured without it: an openness of mind, a sense of adventure and possibility, a sensuality, an integration with the community, a feeling of hope.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nHockney\u2019s Portrait of an Artist was painted in California, where the artist had moved from his native Yorkshire. California was for 20th Century artists what Rome had been for their English and German counterparts in the 18th and 19th Centuries: it was a place of pagan happiness.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nHowever, the ideal response to Hockney's picture is not necessarily to head for the sun. You don\u2019t actually need to go to California to get access to the things that Hockney found there (and which might elude you if you simply booked yourself on the next flight). You need to get more accurate about what you are missing at a psychological level and try to infuse your day to day life with it, whatever the state of the skies. The reason the picture is so moving is that it is a symbol of what is ultimately an inner destination. It should be a place we learn to take our spirit to, rather than our bodies.","artist_name":"David Hockney","painting_name":"Portrait of an Artist (Pool with two figures), 1972","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138054181321.jpg","stub":"i-cant-bear-the-rain","order":43,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138054181321.jpg"},{"id":9,"category_id":5,"name":"Longing for glamour","description":"On the wall, normally behind four lines of people, hangs one of the most famous works of art in the world. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis is bad news. The prestige of a work of art is almost always unhelpful because in order to touch us, art has to elicit a personal response - and that\u2019s hard when a painting is so distinguished.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe painting is in any case quite out of sync with its status because, above all else, it wants to show us that the ordinary can be very special. The picture says that looking after a simple but beautiful home, cleaning the yard, watching the children, darning a sock - and doing these things faithfully and without despair - is life\u2019s real duty. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis is an anti-heroic picture: a weapon against false glamour. It refuses to accept that true glamour depends on amazing feats of courage or on the attainment of status. It argues that doing the modest things, which are expected of all of us, is enough. The picture asks you to take the attitudes it shows, and apply them in your life. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nIf the Netherlands had a Founding Document, a concentrated repository of its values, it would be this small picture. It is the Dutch contribution to the world\u2019s understanding of happiness - and its message doesn\u2019t just belong in the gallery.","artist_name":"Johannes Vermeer","painting_name":"The Little Street, 1658","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1376481206Johannes_Vermeer_-_The_Little_Street_-_WGA24617.jpg","stub":"a-misplaced-longing-for-glamour","order":44,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1376481206Johannes_Vermeer_-_The_Little_Street_-_WGA24617.jpg"},{"id":43,"category_id":5,"name":"Why make art?","description":"The urge to make art starts with the desire to preserve. This is something you know from your own life. The impulse to pick up a camera stems from an awareness of our cognitive weaknesses in relation to the passage of time. We will forget the Taj Mahal, the walk in the country and, most importantly, the precise look of a child aged seven as they feed an animal. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nArt makes the fruits of experience both memorable and renewable. It is a mechanism to keep precious things and our best insights, in good condition and makes them publicly accessible. Art banks our collective winnings.","artist_name":"Ruth Hollick","painting_name":"Janet Armstrong, Woodbury Estate, c 1939","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/13801973838.jpg","stub":"the-urge-to-make-art-starts-with-the-desire-to-preserve","order":52,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/13801973838.jpg"},{"id":70,"category_id":5,"name":"I\u2019m too old for toys","description":"Children are naturally able to project themselves into different roles, across what might initially seem like very fundamental barriers: the sweet five year old who gets into the persona of a bloodthirsty pirate.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe contain multitudes, there are many ways that we might have been had life prompted us in different ways. Reconnecting with toys let us try out parts of ourselves that don\u2019t normally get an airing.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThese parts might be quite unusual. With this dolls house, one could be:<br \/>\n- a dignified sea captain of 52 recently returned from Java<br \/>\n- a docile scullery maid who was abandoned at birth by her alcoholic mother.<br \/>\n- a cross dowager with chilblains and a sour temper but a fondness for little dogs.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe truth about us is spread across multiple roles - not all of which we can easily inhabit or live out in ordinary life. This is not only an exercise in self-discovery; it is also a way in which empathy grows. The lives of others feel less distant, when we have privately rehearsed some version on it, lying on the playroom carpet or peeping into a miniature painted salon. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe dolls\u2019 house is an emblem of art: it enables you to try things out before living them. ","artist_name":"Anonymous","painting_name":"A dolls' house, Netherlands, c.1686","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/138074456027.jpg","stub":"im-too-old-for-toys","order":84,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/138074456027.jpg"},{"id":81,"category_id":5,"name":"I\u2019m always checking my phone","description":"The prayer nut is an aid to the interior life. It is specifically designed to provoke an inner state.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThere are lots of things that we care about in theory but forget about in practice. Religions understand this and design all sorts of vehicles (from cathedrals to the smallest of all cues, the prayer nut) to help us keep important ideas closer to the front of our minds. Religion can be seen as a gigantic memory-prompting machine that is always trying to get us back on track. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe nut understands our frailties. It doesn\u2019t condemn them, it seeks to respond very creatively. The person who made this would have started with the question: How do I get people to remember the truths of the gospels, given how many distractions there are around?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOur modern technology is very good at telling us what is immediate and urgent, but less good at keeping us in touch with what is important. Apple has something to learn from the prayer nut.","artist_name":"Adam Theodric","painting_name":"Prayer Nut, 1435","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1379339280G.jpg","stub":"im-always-checking-my-phone","order":90,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1379339280G.jpg"},{"id":90,"category_id":5,"name":"For goodness sake, it\u2019s just a cup of tea","description":"It\u2019s one of the surprises of Zen Buddhism that it has taken an act which in the West is synonymous with the most everyday and unremarkable activity, and raised it into a ceremony that has a solemnity and depth of meaning akin to the Catholic mass.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nEvery aspect of the tea ceremony - from the patient boiling of the water to the measuring out of tea leaves - is brought into a huge project: reminding us about the importance of friendship and the transient nature of existence. It supports and amplifies the philosophical tenets of Zen.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nIt\u2019s open-ended where this attitude might take us. It leaves open the possibility that many actions and daily habits might, with sufficient creative imagination, become similarly elevated and important and rewarding in our lives.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe point isn\u2019t so much that we should take part in tea ceremonies \u2013 rather, that we should identify that certain ideas are made more tangible via sensuous rituals.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThere\u2019s a latent sympathy between big ideas about life and little everyday things and activities: certain drinks, foods, flowers and scents. They\u2019re not cut off from larger themes \u2013 indeed, they can make those themes more alive for us.","artist_name":"Ichinyu-Raku IV","painting_name":"Tea Bowl, 1600-1699","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/1379341040N.jpg","stub":"for-goodness-sake-its-just-a-cup-of-tea","order":129,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/1379341040N.jpg"},{"id":224,"category_id":5,"name":"Art can\u2019t be about my life","description":"We are still oddly flattered and touched by the thought that something we might possess \u2013 or might have seen in a friend\u2019s apartment \u2013 can have the honour of being in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. The task of the gallery isn\u2019t to show us things that are simply old or rare: that is an accidental feature of something more important, which is that these objects are good and have a power to excite and help us. Ideally these things should not be rare at all. We might be able to buy them in a shop down the road.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe are confused about the merits of rarity. Because good things are in short supply, we might unreasonably conclude that being in short supply is a requirement, a sign of quality. We start to get impressed by rarity itself.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThis is an unfortunate habit of the mind. Actually we should resent rarity, we should hope instead that what we admire and like is as widely and easily available as possible.","artist_name":"Alvar Aalto","painting_name":"Armchair 41, designed 1930","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020624341.JPG","stub":"art-cant-be-about-my-life","order":224,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020624341.JPG"},{"id":225,"category_id":5,"name":"I\u2019m sceptical about pretty things","description":"This is an unashamedly pretty picture. Educated people today quite often feel queasy about the idea that art can be so sweet and lovely. Isn\u2019t this a denial of all that is wrong with the world? Shouldn\u2019t art be about more weighty and worthy matters?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nOnce life has shown us its darker sides, we start to take this sort of thing more seriously. Beautiful flowers are not a way of avoiding the tougher facts; they are a consolation now that we know suffering. We need beauty to keep our spirits high and to refresh our appetite for life.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nCheerfulness, the mood beauty naturally encourages, is a good state of mind in which to confront difficult practical problems. Like confidence, cheerfulness isn\u2019t a denial of the troubles of the world \u2013 rather, it makes us more able to deal with them.","artist_name":"Gustave Caillebotte","painting_name":"The plain of Gennevilliers, yellow fields (La plaine de Gennevilliers, champ jaunes), 1884","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020625222.JPG","stub":"im-sceptical-about-pretty-things","order":225,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020625222.JPG"},{"id":226,"category_id":5,"name":"That\u2019s not art","description":"You might say this is not really a work of art at all. It\u2019s just a rock that happens to have been put on a base and exhibited in an art gallery. However, the rock invites us to reconsider what \u2018art\u2019 \u2013 a word that alludes to a heightened sensitivity to all aesthetic phenomena \u2013 really is.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWhen you look at clouds across the horizon, or the way the light falls across your child\u2019s neck, or the texture of the dough in a loaf of bread and you see charm and interest and beauty therein, this is art. It is not necessarily art with someone\u2019s name attached, but art in its primordial, essential form, the stuff from which the \u2018works of art\u2019 in museums have been made. The people who isolated the Scholar\u2019s rock and put it on an elegant base were trying to teach us a far deeper lesson than to appreciate objects in museums. They were trying to tell us that you must appreciate the world around you \u2013 as that is the true work of art.","artist_name":"Chinese Scholar\u2019s rock","painting_name":" 17th century","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020625943.JPG","stub":"thats-not-art","order":226,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020625943.JPG"},{"id":229,"category_id":5,"name":"Only rare things deserve to be in museums","description":"It\u2019s always strange to see an object in a gallery that is not terribly different from something  that can be bought in a shop. This particular item may have refinements and a pedigree that set it apart from what\u2019s on offer in the high street, but the kinship is definitely there between them. It might cause a moment\u2019s anxiety. Isn\u2019t the point of a gallery that it\u2019s a place where you can encounter things you cannot find (let alone buy) anywhere else?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nPerhaps we\u2019ve mistakenly fallen into the habit of linking beauty to rarity. It is actually rather sad to think that only a very few things are lovely enough to deserve special attention. We should wish for the opposite to be true. We should hope that the world (and our homes) can be filled with things that are truly delightful and yet widely available. This little sweet container is hinting at cultural revolution.<br \/>\n<br \/>\n<small>Work Located at NGV International Level 1<\/small>","artist_name":"Japanese, Sweet container (Kashiki)","painting_name":"Muromachi period 15th century \u2013 16th century","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020627567.JPG","stub":"only-rare-things-deserve-to-be-in-museums","order":229,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020627567.JPG"},{"id":230,"category_id":5,"name":"I hate the way I look","description":"She is not the shape a lot of people have come to idealise. Maybe she sometimes wonders if her hips are too big; someone said she has beefy thighs. But right now she is feeling confident \u2013 you can see it in way she stands: shoulders back, head up (we imagine). She is actually quite fit; it\u2019s not that she doesn\u2019t care about what she eats; it is the right shape for her.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nFeeling good about the way you look is not easy. We have seen so many images of attractive people who are impossibly perfect.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe sculptor is opening our eyes to beauty when it comes in a slightly unfamiliar guise. He is not saying no-one ever has to watch their weight, or that exercise is a waste of time.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe do not get to choose our body type. Pride doesn\u2019t make sense if you admire everything. But prejudice can get in way the appreciating what is really good. She looks great and more people should recognise this.","artist_name":"Gaston Lachaise","painting_name":"Torso c.1912\u201327, cast 1937","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020628408.JPG","stub":"i-hate-the-way-i-look","order":230,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020628408.JPG"},{"id":231,"category_id":5,"name":"I\u2019ve got good taste, I only like plain things","description":"Because these dishes were made more than two hundred years ago at the prestigious Meissen Porcelain Factory they would carry a huge price tag. But this general kind of thing \u2013 pretty painted plates with pictures of flowers, vegetables (and a sweet-looking camel) \u2013 need not be expensive at all. The objects\u2019 ambition is to be as pleasing as possible, to charm the eye, they are decorated in lovely colours and their edges are made into gentle curves.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThese objects are generous to the precarious- ness of our moods. You are sitting down to dinner \u2013 it\u2019s been a tricky day. You don\u2019t feel very social, your mind is on a report you didn\u2019t finish and an awkward meeting is scheduled for the morning. The plates are designed to ease us into a lighter, friendlier, more playful frame of mind. They are elegant fun \u2013 just what we\u2019d ideally like to be.","artist_name":"Meissen Porcelain Factory","painting_name":" c.1738\u201350","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020628909.JPG","stub":"ive-got-good-taste-i-only-like-plain-things","order":231,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020628909.JPG"},{"id":233,"category_id":5,"name":"I don\u2019t do sentimental art","description":"Although elites may feel awkward about it and dismiss it as mawkishly sentimental, this image speaks directly to the heart. A mother has lost her child; it is winter, there\u2019s no food, she knew he was in danger, she tried to feed him, she tried to keep him warm but in the end he succumbed. Her grief feels all the more real, all the more like ours, for being inarticulate and wordless \u2013 pure anguish. The crows are unbearably cruel. They gather when another is in agony, they sense the opportunity opened up by the grief of others. They are like the people we most fear \u2013 those who like it when we are miserable. The mother won\u2019t be able to stand guard always; they will win.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nSentimentality is an overhasty attempt to get us to feel emotions that might be very important, in this case, compassion. The painting stands on the edge of the dangers of sentimentality, yet arguably gets away with it. The artist, August Friedrich Albrecht Schenck, has made a memorial not so much to a dead lamb as to a crucial capacity. Having this picture in our heads increases our own ability to be and feel tender.","artist_name":"August Friedrich Albrecht Schenck","painting_name":"Anguish (Angoisse) c.1878","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140206299511.JPG","stub":"i-dont-do-sentimental-art","order":233,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140206299511.JPG"},{"id":235,"category_id":5,"name":"Art is for the weekend","description":"This museum was designed in the nineteenth century to function as a replacement for the old cathedrals: it was to be a cathedral of art. Culture was to replace scripture. The ambition was huge: art would bring us meaning, consolation, direction and comfort, just as the pages of the Bible once had.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe in the modern world still love art \u2013 but in a different way: more modestly, more tentatively. If you started crying in front of a picture in this museum, you would be thought a little odd and perhaps led outside by a guard. It is perhaps symptomatic of this cooler modern approach to art that this hall was literally whitewashed beginning in the 1920s. It was a way of brushing off too close an analogy with religion \u2013 especially in a Protestant country where the de facto state religion was Calvinism (and the over-ostentatious \u2018cathedral of art\u2019 had been designed by a Catholic!). It was, moreover, a way of saying that art should be kept free of ideology, and removed from day-to-day life and issues of redemption and meaning. Art should be enjoyed \u2018for art\u2019s sake\u2019.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nSome of us are starting to realize that this was a terrible mistake. This show is a symptom of that collective realization. We are learning to appreciate once more the old ambition that art might heal our souls and show us how to live. In restoring this Great Hall to its original design, the museum has restored the memory of a grand and very important ambition. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nArt can tell us how to live. It should heal us: it isn\u2019t an intellectual exercise, an abstract aesthetic arena or a distraction for a Sunday afternoon.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Rijks Museum","painting_name":"Entrance Hall","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140206311613.jpg","stub":"art-is-for-the-weekend","order":235,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140206311613.jpg"},{"id":236,"category_id":5,"name":"I try not to think too much about the meaning of life","description":"The picture was painted with satirical intent. It was designed to show up \u2013 and elegantly mock \u2013 an obsession with religious difference and to tease contemporaries for their over-zealous desire to convert each other to their favoured brand of Christianity. Yet, for us moderns, the scene may be more moving than ridiculous. For these are people who really worried about the state of their souls and the spiritual well-being of their fellow citizens. They cared so much that they could launch feeble boats into a treacherous river and try to haul their compatriots from the waters.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe details of their beliefs, no doubt, may strike us as strange. But even if you don\u2019t think you have a soul, their dedication is inspiring. For what\u2019s secretly thrilling is the intensity with which they cared about their inner lives. They thought it really mattered what big beliefs you have, and how these guide your conduct. What you thought about love, duty, goodness, forgiveness, repentance, sorrow and the fear of death was felt to be crucially important, demanding radical action. Ideas were an arena of intense competition.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nWe don\u2019t want to copy them, but we do want to recognize that they were onto something (even if not in what we might consider the right way). They were taking the life of the mind and soul seriously \u2013 as we should continue to do today.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne","painting_name":"Fishing for Souls, 1614","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140206316814.jpg","stub":"i-try-not-to-think-too-much-about-the-meaning-of-life","order":236,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140206316814.jpg"},{"id":237,"category_id":5,"name":"Another cold, rainy day in Amsterdam ","description":"The weather is perfect, you can stroll in simple clothes under the trees, ignore the demands of work and the law, and laze about; it\u2019s all so fresh and simple. There\u2019s always an \u2018elsewhere\u2019: we long to go to places that promise to make us happy. Dreams that sound unrealistic feel embarrassing, but they should be taken seriously. Always being \u2018practical\u2019 means that good insights sometimes get closed down too soon. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe picture is officially about seventeenth-century Brazil, but it speaks of things that we want here and now: sex without emotional entanglement, time just to be yourself, a sense of adventure, not feeling responsible for the big, awkward things in the world (overfishing the seas, renewable energy). But you might need to look at a picture of Brazil to awaken the yearning for these legitimate aspects of life. The problem probably isn\u2019t geography. But geography can help us to grasp our needs.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Frans Jansz Post","painting_name":"View of Olinda, Brazil, 1662","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140206321515.jpg","stub":"another-cold-rainy-day-in-amsterdam","order":237,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140206321515.jpg"},{"id":238,"category_id":5,"name":"I\u2019m too creative to tidy my room","description":"Putting things away on shelves hardly sounds glamorous. A little mess and chaos still seems connected to creativity and imagination. This cabinet thinks otherwise \u2013 and is eloquent on the pleasures of ordering and organizing and putting everything in its proper place. The grandeur of this piece of furniture and the expensive materials from which it is constructed have an important point to make: good order and clear organization are noble accomplishments, worthy of our deepest respect. It invites us to sample the pleasures of the storeroom, and to instil more order in bigger parts of our mind.","artist_name":"Unknown","painting_name":"Apothecary cabinet, 1730","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140206330316.jpg","stub":"im-too-creative-to-tidy-my-room","order":238,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140206330316.jpg"},{"id":239,"category_id":5,"name":"The world is always to hand","description":"Unfortunately, it now takes only three hours to get to Istanbul from Amsterdam\u2019s Schiphol Airport. Back then, it took six months or more \u2013 and you might never make it home. Ease of travel has, paradoxically, made it harder to appreciate the wonder and beauty of the world. This painting is imbued with pride, immortalizing the astonishing view of the Bosphorus from the dining room of the Dutch embassy in Constantinople during the mid-18th century. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nOur globalized world has made many good things more available, but one thing it has placed under threat is our ability to appreciate the qualities of other lands. Of course, the city now called Istanbul is really just as fascinating as ever \u2013 it\u2019s just that our capacity to notice this has been, unwittingly, undermined by modern air travel. Art is one mechanism by which we might become alive again to the charms of \u2018abroad\u2019.","artist_name":"Jean Baptiste Vanmour","painting_name":"View of Istanbul from the Dutch Embassy at Pera, 1737 ","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140206335517.jpg","stub":"the-world-is-always-to-hand","order":239,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140206335517.jpg"},{"id":242,"category_id":5,"name":"What next, a washing machine in a museum?","description":"Machines have of late so spoilt the earth, it can be hard to feel well disposed towards them, let alone welcome them into an august cathedral of art. But, of course, at their best, machines exhibit many of the same qualities as works of art (balance, the harmony of parts, the subordination of detail to an overall purpose, a triumph of logic over fear and chaos). We shouldn\u2019t be surprised if we sometimes have moments of strangely powerful aesthetic delight in the presence of machines. To think well of art, we don\u2019t need to do down machines.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nMachines have a purpose: they are for something. Everything about a plane is carefully adapted to improve its capacity for controlled flight. Because we know what it is for, the design makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, the supposed divide between art and machines can lead to the neglect of purpose in art. We are much less ready than we should be to ask what an artwork is for. One of the ambitions of this project is to encourage the idea that works of art have more in common with machines than is usually thought. That, in addition to their original function, they can be psychological machines to help us live the lives we want is often overlooked.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Frits Koolhoven","painting_name":"F.K. 23 Bantam, 1918","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/140206351320.jpg","stub":"what-next-a-washing-machine-in-a-museum","order":242,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/140206351320.jpg"},{"id":243,"category_id":5,"name":"I\u2019m fed up with celebrity culture","description":"The idea of imitating a celebrity has slavish associations nowadays. It feels humiliating. Why should we be so impressed by their doings? So it\u2019s fascinating to come across Saint Agnes. She was a celebrity follower of early Christianity. That someone of her status and good looks should be convinced of Jesus\u2019s teachings was a matter of intense public gossip. It seemed shocking that a religion that was, at that point, mainly for outcasts and slaves should have attracted her attention and devotion. She was pilloried by the establishment and died at the hands of some thuggish aristocrats.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nRather than expect celebrities to inspire our choice of shoes or a restaurant, we should want them to guide us to virtue. Agnes\u2019s example of kindness, integrity and courage points the way to a new use for celebrity. We should not reject the impulse to excited admiration just because it is currently abused. We should recruit it to more elevated and useful ends. A saint was just someone famous for being genuinely admirable.<br \/>\n","artist_name":"Adriaen van Wesel","painting_name":"Saint Agnes, 1480","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020635751.jpg","stub":"im-fed-up-with-celebrity-culture","order":243,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020635751.jpg"},{"id":244,"category_id":5,"name":"Fashion is a trap","description":"Clothes evoke the characters of the people who might wear them. Let\u2019s imagine the kind of woman who might buy a dress like this \u2013 let\u2019s call her Maartje. She\u2019d be:<br \/>\n- very reasonable, but playful<br \/>\n- sexy, yet austere<br \/>\n- proud of herself, without being stand-offish<br \/>\n- not exuberant, but capable of moments of dry wit and the occasional sarcastic judgement (but you\u2019ll have to be careful to catch it)<br \/>\n- pretty, but unconcerned with her looks; confident that she\u2019ll prove interesting enough to those who interest her<br \/>\n<br \/>\nMaartje doesn\u2019t exist, and we do know the original owner of the dress. But for our purposes, the character we\u2019ve discerned in the material and Yves Saint Laurent\u2019s design is real. The dress invites the wearer to become a little like Maartje by slipping it on. Though fashion can seem frivolous, its true task is to help us to identify our optimal personalities. Finding the right fashion for us is a route to becoming slightly better versions of ourselves. Fashion has an honourable psychological purpose and is rightly at home in the nation\u2019s gallery.","artist_name":"Yves Saint Laurent","painting_name":"Mondrian dress","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020637153.jpg","stub":"fashion-is-a-trap","order":244,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020637153.jpg"},{"id":245,"category_id":5,"name":"Only prestigious objects can tell us important things","description":"This is one of the first things that many visitors to the Netherlands see \u2013 and fortunately, it says something rather eloquent and accurate about the character of the Dutch (while also sending us efficiently in the right direction). Benno Wissing knew how significant every choice of typeface could be. This one carries out the task of embedding quite an abstract quality \u2013 \u2018Dutchness\u2019 \u2013 in something very utilitarian. It shows that a big idea can be anchored in a straightforward, everyday item.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe signage can be a legitimate location for national pride. It\u2019s not an idealization of the Netherlands. It reflects real qualities: unfussy efficiency and a sense of dignified equality. This is Vermeer for today: ultimately the signs point us back to Vermeer\u2019s Little Street. Nowadays, Vermeer wouldn\u2019t just have painted Delft; he might have captured a strange moment of stillness, a hiatus in the air, between the Frankfurt and Jakarta KLM gates. He would have painted Concourse D at Schiphol.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nA country\u2019s identity doesn\u2019t reside only in its grand museums, war memorials and flags. It can also be found in tram benches, street lamps, door handles and, of course, the direction to the toilets or arrivals hall.","artist_name":"Benno Wissing","painting_name":"Signage system for Schiphol Airport","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020637714.jpg","stub":"only-prestigious-objects-can-tell-us-important-things","order":245,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020637714.jpg"},{"id":247,"category_id":5,"name":"I lack perspective. I\u2019m too wrapped up in routine","description":"This is nature, entirely independent of us. There are no signs of human endeavour, no reminders of technology, industry or settlement. It is the world apart from people \u2013 with no need of anything from us. The day-to-day concerns of our lives don\u2019t matter here. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nNakamura is providing a balancing experience. Most of the time we just have to be obsessed with our own lives. We have to live in cities, think about money and plot and scheme to keep our lives in reasonable order. ","artist_name":"Kazuo Nakamura","painting_name":"Blue Reflections","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020639466.jpg","stub":"i-lack-perspective-im-too-wrapped-up-in-routine","order":247,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020639466.jpg"},{"id":248,"category_id":5,"name":"I get cynical when things seem too nice","description":"Lorrain sought out particular moods that nature could speak to \u2013 and sought to intensify them in his pictures. He\u2019s not trying to be realistic \u2013 perhaps no part of nature could be as artfully composed as this. Everything is calculated to make us feel wistful. It is evening, and the mild sunlight tinges the western sky. The shadows are lengthening, but far away on the horizon there is a distant island. The headlands break sweetly into the bay as the lines of the hills melt away. <br \/>\n<br \/>\nObviously, this painting is not paying much attention to the darker aspects of existence. That\u2019s not because it is ignorant of them or wants to pretend that everything is rosy. Rather it is giving us a restorative break. It is deliberately drawing our attention to more delicate and sweet states of mind, because it understands how easily they get swamped by the tribulations of everyday life. ","artist_name":"Claude Lorrain","painting_name":"The Embarkation of Carlo and Ubaldo","image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/560x1000\/14020639957.jpg","stub":"i-get-cynical-when-things-seem-too-nice","order":248,"category_name":"Free time","large_image":"\/dynamic\/thumbs\/960x960\/14020639957.jpg"}]}