We close down the Blog three times a year - Christmas/New Year, very briefly at Easter and for the whole of August - so you won't hear from us again until January 7th, 2008.

These silences are because we think it is important not turn As It Happens into a machine for churning out opinions to meet expectations. Having established an ideological baseline of sorts with our first fifty or so posts, we hope to produce shorter, sharper comments next year, with more items of news as we 'walk the walk' around London's political and commercial streets.

We are closing this year with a guest column from Roger White, Managing Director of our sister company Pendry White. His critique of the corporate mismanagement of Christmas spirit is a critique of a wider failure to understand that using Christmas cards as a sales tool and for faux-relationship building is worse than useless - it can be counter-productive in energy and time.

So, until next year, best wishes from me, Jenina, Roger, Sharon, Laura, Claire and Kathryn (and, if you don't know who these people are, you should) ...

The Roger White Christmas Column - Scrooge Speaks!

It’s the time of the year when the blood of every sensible communications professional runs cold. Seasoned veterans find the Annual Report or the Chairman’s Speech needs an inordinate amount of their personal attention.

Yes, to quote the great Noddy Holder and Slade “its Christmas!!!” …and that means the trauma of the corporate Christmas card has come around once more. Let me share a few painful lessons from bitter experience.

Lesson 1: Avoid the job like the plague.

Now, I know from many years of personal anguish that being tasked with producing the company card is a challenge best avoided completely or, more realistically, rapidly delegated to the newest and/or lowliest member of the communications department.

Many careers have been built on the ashes of dismal festive embarrassment but they leave scars that last you a lifetime – I still wince at the memory of the robin hopping through the pristine snow leaving company logo footprints in its wake.

It seemed such a good idea at the time, the Chairman approved it as such - but a terrible one when he complained about the “rubbish card” less than a week after it was sent out to the largely disinterested client list.

So, Lesson 2; never trust the artistic taste of senior management and Lesson 3: whatever you do it will be your fault .

Over the years I have learned a few other painful lessons in other areas of corporate life but this Christmas has really been a classic one for naffness which has added a few more to my growing seasonal-specific list.

The first question to be asked now is: real card or e-card? Lesson 4: In the great sum of things, it makes no difference!

They all end up in the same place. If it is not personal, nobody really notices if you sent them one or not. Otherwise, nobody remembers or cares about yours because they are all too busy sending out their own unwanted and unloved attempts at politically correct, environmentally friendly, charity-supporting, humourless pieces of corporate bad taste.

OK - so I am being a bit of a 'scrooge' here but, even if all corporate cards seem to be disproportionate effort for the sales reward, we have detected a real polarisation this year between real cards and e-cards. From our conversations with clients, suppliers, friends and my wife’s mum, some new lessons have emerged with a vengeance.

Lesson 5: all e-cards get deleted instantly ... – “it could be a virus” they say when quizzed on why they do this, “better play safe”. But actually, if you are not in the recipient's inner circle (those who give you money or are real friends), your treasured e-card with its donation to the great god Oxfam, just takes up space in an already over crowded inbox. 

There is a high chance that the recipient won’t remember who you are in any case and the obligatory donation looks like meanness rather than generosity - i.e. we'll send cash to a charity this once in a year so we don't have to waste time and money sending you something personal that takes time and trouble to organise.

Lesson 6: ... but real cards do not get binned until the first week in January – of course, “we keep them as a check on who to send to next year”: I have heard this every year for more years than I care to admit but I have never yet seen anybody do it – and how anally retentive,if not disturbed, would it be if somebody really did? 

You should send a real card to someone with whom you have a relationship (as we do) in any case or not at all. If you keep to this rule, you will not have to sit there worrying about whether you should add someone to next year's list after the fact. Mixing sales and Christmas strikes us as missing the point completely.

Oh, we had one exception to Rule 6 this year. Some cheapskate sent us a postcard with a self adhesive address label on one side and completely illegible writing on the other – that one took the e-card route straight into the recycling bin.

OK, before you ask, we did send out Christmas cards but real ones to people we actually knew … the principals of the business avoided all responsibility for design and production, the younger members of the team were given the job (and, of course, it will be their fault if you get one and think it naff), all e-cards have been deleted with effortless abandon, and, yes, we have kept the real cards we received, but not so we can see who to send to next year but to see if we were ungracious or disorganised enough to leave off someone, in error, who matters to us as a friend. 

Personally, I blame our Chairman for everything anyway.

The serious point is that the Christmas message has long lost any meaning in the world of corporate communications. It is just a mess that needs cleaning up. Corporate Christmas cards should be banned in any new company law reform.

Bright young communications upstarts should be given something more meaningful and valued on which to earn their professional scars. And company Chairmen should be prevented by city regulators from having any influence over matters of style and good taste or that impact on corporate communications effectiveness.

Bah humbug, I say.

Lesson 7: Thanks to irritation with naff Christmas cards, somebody always ends up, on his last day in the office, whinging about something nobody else is remotely interested in.

www.pendrywhite.com

The Chairman, Bob Marley, would like it noted that he recognises that he has no taste, that he did delegate the task to the junior team, that they did a fine job and that those who got a card got a really classy job from the Victoria and Albert Museum ... our overseas relationships got something even more personal and very English.

I have just spent an hour and a half producing a carefully argued analysis that demonstrates, beyond question, that China should now be seen as an integral part of the Western capitalist system. It was a classic. Unfortunately, the Square Space software that underpins this Blog glitched, claimed that it had saved the text and then asked me to re-log in in order to post it. 

You can guess the rest - this masterpiece is now lost and I am disinclined to pull together all the detail and spend another hour and a half in the week before Christmas in order to enlighten the world. Of course, the real lesson is that one should never, ever trust assurances given by software and always, always save as you go along.

So here is one I prepared earlier [March 2007 actually], with some judicious edits ...

Dr. Stephen Alexander of Warwick University closed his series of lectures [at Treadwells in March] on the grey zone between being human and being animal with a demanding but surprisingly lucid account of what the French philosophers D&G (Deleuze & Gattari, not, as he noted, Dolce & Gabbana) had written on the matter. Perhaps they are the only philosophers to take werewolves and vampires as a legitimate subject of enquiry.

I am not even going to try and attempt to reproduce his dense argument, especially as I hold to a more 'classically' existentialist view that a great deal of French continental philosophy represents a back door attempt to rescue essentialism rather than face, head-on, any of the tough choices that raw existence presents us with. In this case, D&G were trying to make Heraclitus, who believed that all things were in constant flux and there was no permanence, 'work'. 

But, having said this, if we see this sort of philosophy as a branch of art, weaving words to express the ineffable, making us think and provoking us, then there is no real need to get angry or irritated with it. 

It is good just to sit back and let the occasional insanities roll over you and realise that some of these culturally self-referential daftnesses can be wiser guides on how one might conduct one's life than the rational logic of grey analysts who run our lives so clumsily and inhumanely.

There was one thought that Alexander provoked, probably unintentionally, that was liberating and troubling. He explored the Nietzchean interest (expressed in literature by DH Lawrence) in reviving the animal in us - not as a silly Rousseau-esque idyll or as a reversion to barbarism and cruelty but as the construction of the 'post-human' or 'ubermensch'. 

This moves beyond the human to re-connect with our animal natures in terms of something new and beyond nature. There is a lot of daft fearful talk about the inherent fascism or Nazi element in philosophers like Nietzche or Heidegger, yet there is something very disturbing to liberal rationalists about the cold hard use of reason to privilege lives lived unreasonably or 'authentically'.

Liberal intellectuals often see the Holocaust as the fruit of these illiberal thinkers. The existentialists are more likely to see it as the epitome of rational technologism, with its camps, trains, gases and management discipline, all representative of an inhuman system that was itself based on a hypertrophied use of reason and of analysis to meet ends justified by reference to a now-discredited 'science' of eugenics. Communist 'scientific materialism' was no more intelligent in this respect.

The implication of the post-human is that, far from reverting to the natural, technology gives the human endless possibilities to go beyond nature and become (not evolve into) a new breed of animal for new conditions. 

If such technology is not commanded by persons who are stronger than it, then weak humans with all their fears, desires and prejudices intact will be taken over by the possibilities that the technology offers. And so we have death camps, nuclear weaponry, military-industrial complexes and environmental degradation. Scary stuff!

The Eastern religions were very influential on the late-Germanic branch of Western philosophy that critiqued reason through the use of reason - the paradox in this is in itself classically Eastern. Buddhist philosophical instincts continually move around concepts of nothingness, paradox, unknowability and the relative unimportance of rationality except as tool. 

American pragmatism is perhaps the only branch of traditional analytic philosophy that recognises the hole at the centre of thinking but makes this a strength by seeing 'thinking' as a tool for other purposes. 

Wittgenstein eventually ditched any claim for the use-value of language at the point that it touched the ineffable. He noted that there was that about which nothing could be said - at least not in the analytical language of 'true' statements. 

Yet, to the irritation of the analytical mind, we continue to try and say these things. To speak what analytical philosophers would call 'non-sense' and still get sense out of them 'inside' ourselves. 

This appears to be a great divide amongst us humans - that is, between those who live on either side of the boundary that Wittgenstein identified, those who deny and those who embrace this abyss where meaning ceases to be linguistic or where language becomes analytically meaningless. And this brings us back to the liminal world between the human and the animal. 

Is it possible that personal liberation does not just involve using rational tools for private and public ends? Are many of us not also engaged in a twin search for transcendance in the future (the search for nirvana or the state of post-human being) and for reproducing the one thing that animals seem to have that we do not - the ability to live briefly in the moment without past or future?

Some with rational analytical minds often seem terribly scared of the strength of emotions like desire and fear and of this loss of self in the moment. They avoid the Dionysian moment of intoxication with the 'animal'. Perhaps they fear where they might go - that Srebenica, Satanism or BDSM are just around the corner. 

They will also use their reason to argue away the big questions of Being so as not to face them directly, perhaps so as not to face the fearful fact that these questions cannot be answered except through leaps of irrational faith. Accepting even one small leap into the unknown might chip away insidiously at all liberal reason with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Often they will analyse and research moments of transcendance in others but will never really let go when they participate themselves - they will not stand up and hold a crowd in a political meeting, or lose themselves in orgasm, or space and time for a brief moment in ritual magic or religious practice and certainly never experience the  creative 'madness' that William Blake once enjoyed in a Soho street. 

Politics, sex and religion are so often subjects of such earnestness for the Western liberal middle class that they are in danger of losing all sense of joy in life. Maybe this is what being post-human will look like when the last earnest bourgeois has moved on - a final isolation of functioning reason to its rightful role as hand-maiden of the ineffable, the joyful and the irrational. Scary stuff, indeed.

And Merry Christmas, Eidh, Yule and (belatedly) Hanukah and a Happy New Year - indeed, best wishes for whatever your preferred holiday is at this time of year!

It can be interesting to revisit old postings in other places on the web and see what has changed in one's views over months or even years. This posting takes us away from international relations completely to ask some basic questions about how we respond to Art. 

It is a 'wild card' on As It Happens and we hope you appreciate the occasional break from politics - though we can rarely resist some commentary hidden in our texts. The original posting related to the major Gilbert & George retrospective in London earlier this year.  Only the internet permits this process of editing one's own views over time quickly and simply.

Can any art rooted in place be fully appreciated by someone who has not shared that sense of place to some degree with the artist? 

You may see a work that owes its apparent meaning to a particular place yet know that a combination of art market pressures and perhaps the sheer scale of a work may mean that it is displaced quite quickly to the large and spacious houses of the rich or to the public gallery of a foreign land. 

How can a wealthy collector understand references to the East End street in Gilbert & George's work? How much of a work by Anselm Kiefer or Georg Baselitz requires the owner not merely to understand German history and culture but to be 'German'?

Is Art appropriately universalised by the art market and popularity or is this universalism nothing more than inauthenticity and commodification? Do owners as investors even need to care if detachment from original context causes no loss of value?

Similar questions apply to portraiture when the subject of the portrait becomes detached from the person or the family and their purpose in commissioning it. If you commission a work of art, you are laying some claim to its meaning but if an artist entrepreneurially takes your image for his purposes, then he is taking meaning from you. 

If an artist takes a commission and does not produce the meaning you intend, is he engaged in a fraud? This might mean, by extension, that an artist who takes your image and uses it for his purposes is engaged in a 'theft of meaning'. 

We have 'economic crimes' in both Soviet and American regulatory culture - perhaps, one day, some future culture will create a category of 'creative crimes' in which 'theft of meaning' becomes a criminal act and schools of artists categorised as organised crime.

Only this weekend, we have seen one pop realist artist, Sebastian Kruger, produce retrospective portraits imagining the Rolling Stones as children of 10 - it is poignant that Brian Jones has not been included. 

Is this stealing childhood? It would seem that the 'meaning' of this programme of work did not have room for one founding 10-year old because history has been retrospectively fitted to meet current reality - this Rolling Stones is preferred to that Rolling Stones in an act of artistic arbitrariness. 

On the one hand, Kruger has sold the work on to a German collector so the enterprise is commercial as well as artistic. On the other hand, the artist claims friendship with Ronnie Wood and says that he has the band's blessing and that Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards are collectors. 

The transfer of 'meaning' seems to be one that the owners are happy to see pass on, probably because they long since detached their real selves from the hoopla and show business involved in being a major cultural icon. 

This brings to mind Hockney's Ossie Clark painting and all the pop portraits shown currently at the National Portrait Gallery. The 'iconic' Marilyn and Elvis portraits detach the images wholly from any sense of the real person that inspired them, the sources as unknowable to themselves no doubt as to their friends and the wider public.

The 'real' Marilyn, the 'real' Diana, the 'real' Jesus - how much human energy has been spent on attempting to 'know' (or rather appropriate) so many unknowable different godheads. 

This is the cult of celebrity brought down to its basics - the appropriation of meaning regardless of underlying truths. Art has always been a vector for belief. Once it was belief in God and now it is belief that other people and places can be known without being them, without knowing them, without meeting them and without being there.

In all these cases of place and personality, meaning changes the further that an art object travels from its moment of creation. Some artists are engaged with the facticity of their inspiration - they want to connect with the real object. Others use the object as mere medium to create a new object which has more meaning than the original - that is often truly great Art.

The cynical, however, will grab place and personality to meet the meaning needs of others, even if those needs are crass. Supplying meaning to lives is a trade like any other and artists have as much right to make a buck out of it as politicians, churchmen and businessmen.

We can probably agree that a Duccio madonna and child cannot be fully understood without thinking about how it fitted into its church environment. The 'presence' in the icon was once Mary Mother of God, certainly the divine, but on the wall of an art gallery its meaning will have changed so drastically that the same object will, in effect, have become transubstantiated - in a sinister reversal of what is believed by many Catholics to happen in the Mass. 

If the host can become the Body of Christ through transubstantiation, the Madonna or Pieta ceases to contain the divine as it moves from church to gallery - or to a rich man's home (having presumably failed to reach them through the eye of a needle) unless the rich man is, in fact, a man of belief.

Even then, the 'belief' of the owner may involve a re-sacralisation of the object but the actual belief will be new and not a true reproduction of the old. In most cases, the object is transsubstantiated away from the divine to the material - or at least to the social.

If the divine and personality are lost as a work moves through the exchange system into socially constructed reality, fixing place is going to be equally difficult. Students of Art spend lifetimes trying to recreate the symbolism or the cultural, social, economic and even political context of a work of art.

What cannot be reproduced is the felt sense of being in a place and time shared by the artist any more than we can know God or another person long since dead once the work of Art has come between us and the original. That the art acts as a path back to God or a person is not plausible unless we knew that particular iteration of God or that person originally.

You might now come to see why many Byzantines and all Muslims disliked and dislike the artistic representation of Mohammed and Allah. What appears to be an honour to God in Western tradition degenerates, in practice, into something else disconnected from the original inspiration, a displacement.

All the perceptions, the gestalt, of place in particular may be partly reproducible in living memory but still not be conveyed through the work of art itself to a 'stranger'. Art might fix some aspect of place but only so that other aspects are crowded out. 

The whole draft that we call reality will then be rewritten by the observers of the Art, much as they have done with the Art of the numinous and the personal, to fit their own needs. Art is, self-evidently, never precisely what it represents and there are plenty of French philosophers to tell us more if we really need to have all this confirmed for us.

Two artists bring out this reaction in me because I know the places which contributed to their art (though I would not be so presumptuous as to believe that I understood their art any better than anyone else and certainly no better than the artists themselves).

Gilbert & George (counted as one artist) produce their work within a few streets of East London in territory I know well and Tracy Emin was born (as I was) and raised (as I was not) in Margate. Those streets of Gilbert & George's are very familiar to me. London's cultural shifts and changes are expressed almost precisely in work after work. 

An entire cultural experience over five decades is reproduced, in admittedly simplified terms, to someone who has lived through them without always comprehending what was going on at the time. I rewrite my own perception of my own historical context as I look at them in sequence.

This sense of place lived in and then fixed as a 'memory of sentiment' must be impossible for many owners of these works to understand, so something else is driving them to buy and appreciate. Yet the evocation of a specific time and place is still core to the art and will be lost when people like me and others in my generation die.

The same with Emin. Neither her work nor G&G's can be reduced to this evocation of place but anyone who grew up in the depressed culture of an English seaside town (mine was the neighbouring town of Ramsgate) can see in her graphic work direct reference, perhaps unconscious, to the primitive graffiti and seedy culture of an economy that lived hand-to-mouth on seasonal visitors who sometimes never turned up and, if they did, had little to spend. 

Her autobiographical reactions to a culture of desperation and abuse and her reconstruction of herself through art could have taken place in any zone of deprivation - even in an abusive wealthy context - but the visuals and textures of her work evoke a particular time and place to someone who also participated in it. That aspect of her work will also die as her generation of observers die.

Does this link matter, between the artist's possibly unconscious drawing down from place and the minority of people who may not appreciate what should be appreciated in the art but who still see these unconscious references to a shared world? 

Probably not to the artist or the collector or the art market or the critic or the historian, but this evocation of experience provides a surprising link between watcher and watched. The two sides do not have to like each other but they share an admittedly attenuated sense of being 'distant family'. 

And like a 'family' that shares childhood memories but, otherwise, has nothing in common in adult life, this bond can still draw some people back in a crisis to the art - as a family gets called to a funeral, a wedding or to survival in a war. 

This brings us to Gilbert & George once again. The very first room of the retrospective showed early work very different from the rest of the Exhibition except in scale - a rural idyll of sorts with Gilbert & George apparently celebrating the same sort of English sense of place that dominates Tate Britain. 

There is an essay to be written on how English art moves from celebrating ownership of land [Gainsborough] to becoming integrated with the land as a national ideal, especially in the context of wartime experience and subsequent reactions to postwar changes in society. 

Gilbert & George's sharp shift to specific place from generalised national place in the 1970s and Tracey Emin's reversion to the personal in a revolt against place (yet never entirely leaving it behind) and so many other examples of trying to fix or avoid memory or fix and move on from place seem to indicate that 'English' artists are engaged in a continuous troubled process of coming to terms with the fragmentation of national identity. 

This was especially clear in the very last rooms of the Gilbert & George retrospective where the arrival of Islamic culture in the East London streets is recorded with the same aggression as the arrival of AIDS. There is something nasty in this work and more expressive than any words of the mutual antagonism between the gay culture that emerged in the Thatcher-Reagan years and the new Islamism. They actually hate each other.

One of the 'enfants terribles' was born in Italy and Emin is of Turkish descent with continuing Turkish links. It may be that this enables them to see or feel or express what the indigenous English have long felt - that there is a profound disconnect between what our inherited national culture claims for us and what is experienced in the streets. 

Not that most of us care any more. The English now believe with LP Hartley that the 'past is another country'. But the shift from the culture of the 1940s and 1950s to the urban multicultural highly sexualised culture of the 1990s and 2000s has shattered the old sense of place and nationhood.  

It has replaced it (in many cases) with a stronger sense of specific place, such as that of being a Londoner, and of personal rather than collective memory. 

Our artists, with that genius for the semi-conscious articulation of hidden truths, may be chronicling a cultural revolution in which a world of rootless transient communities has emerged, where there is no longer any shared institutional authority and where memory is unstable because it is not easily reinforced by community norms as a national 'myth'. 

A real war might change that, of course - but not the phoney war on terror. Yet Art is never entirely definable or explicable in words. If it was, we would not need it. We would simply write. Words may be the currency of society and politics but they leave gaps. 

All I have said here is that these gaps, being wordless and numberless, are never fixed. Any original intention or inspiration is unlikely to last long before it becomes acquired by those whose determination is to account, in words or numbers, for the objects in some way.

The person painted at that time, the place that inspired, the divine and the numinous - we can get slivers of original meaning outside the point of creation, but the only way to recreate fully the original inspiration is to be the creator or to have been in at the moment of creation. In a paradox, the price of art is high in direct proportion to its failure to be what it was intended to be (unless the artist started out as a cynic).

Whether a wealthy collector in Luxembourg or Liechtenstein really comprehends any of this - any more than a nineteenth century British imperial collector of Italian altarpieces could understand a late-medieval small town Catholic sensibility - is another matter. But I am sure that the collectors are making some very sound investments and need not care too much about philosophical authenticities.

www.tppr.co.uk