Analyse this: why is the idea of a cat cafe so popular with Londoners?

Reviewing London's culture in 2012: an incoherent babble. More of same expected in 2013

Jasper Rees, at The Arts Desk, has a fine summation of the cultural year just gone. What was London coming out with in 2012?

His verdict (I paraphrase): an incoherent babble.

The most effective, or at least the most popular, piece of public art was the least challenging: the Olympic torch relay. Aside from that, a deluge, but little sense.

Rees finds order in the exhibitions of the big old institutions, the British Library and British Museum.

“It was in the great museums where it was possible to discern a lasting statement, a narrative palimpsest taking the measure of Britishness.”

A conservative analysis then, but a powerful one. There’s an awful lot happening on the fringes of London’s art and cultural scene, away from the attention which the great institutions command. But how much of this activity will have any lasting significance?

This contest, between the established and the unknown, was dramatised in one of the most attention-grabbing incidents of 2012 – the Yellowist defacement of a Rothko painting at the Tate Modern.

Vladimir Umanets signed his name and the words “a potential piece of yellowism” on the painting.

Here was the avant garde, or what passes for it, making a direct physical assault on the galleries from which their art is excluded. In its selection of target it was a vibrant act, but in that sense alone. For yellowism is, or was, utterly bankrupt.

Umanets:

“The main difference between yellowism and art is that in art you have got freedom of interpretation. In yellowism you don’t have freedom of interpretation, everything is about yellowism, that’s it.”

What “everything is about yellowism” really meant is that yellowism was about yellowism, and nothing more (the movement’s manifesto builds upon this depressing theme.) This made it coherent, boring, and thoroughly insignificant. Perhaps in 2012, as Rees suggests, the big galleries just had better things to say.

Looking ahead to 2013, we must hope that the grand institutions retain their excellence. Elsewhere, more cultural incoherence may be just what we need. An indistinct babble is exactly the sort of noise a diverse and vibrant city should be setting out to make. Someone, somewhere, must be saying something worth leaning in to listen to.

Link

The Arts Desk – London 2012 and Beyond – The Best of 2012

A minute with circus performer Greville Matthews, who flings his body through the air for a living

If you want to talk meaningfully about London life, the hipsters have to die

Chart: The number of people getting so drunk in London they need an ambulance is increasing

Categorising London locations by who switched on their Christmas lights

Watch 93 Feet East get raided by 175 cops, the Met helicopter, and dog units to arrest five people for possession

Royal's nurse suicide provides opportunity

Croydon chief has jouros kicked out of meeting because they may report on him

— Croydon Council chief executive Jon Rouse after journalists were ejected from the West Croydon Community Forum. The Forum voted to throw out the journos after Rouse ‘said he felt “uncomfortable” with their presence’ and ‘it “be a very different meeting” if they remained.’ The meeting, held last Thursday, was about the regeneration of West Croydon.

H/T Omar Oakes

Being called a "renty-something" is the final insult for a generation on its knees

Rosamund Urwin, in a column with the headline Stop the super rich pricing us out of London, raises the terrifying spectre of a sitcom called Rentysomethings. Plot thus: a collection of attractive young professionals entwine themselves in increasingly tortuous sexual relationships against the hilarious backdrop of above-inflation rent rises and unattainable deposits.

Congratulations, renty-somethings. We’re a generation defined not by our cultural output but by our property status. Heady, heady times.