Sculptor Erwin Wurm's study, at his home in Austria,features a mix of his own pieces with works like Andy Warhol's, a small Alighiero Boetti collage from the 1980.
Page 72
Features 68 The Case of the Accidental Superstar
72 The Shape Shifter
In the peculiar-looking, former crossdressing Shakespearean actor Benedict Cumberbatch, Hollywood has found an unlikely leading man.
At the Austrian estate of Erwin Wurm, blue-chip paintings and the artist’s own whimsical sculptures live in oddly compelling harmony.
By Sarah Lyall. Photographs by Karim Sadli. Styled by Joe McKenna.
By Maura Egan. Photographs by Andrew Moore.
80 London SE8 3JF
The workaday uniform gets a shot of youthful British insouciance. Photographs by Karim Sadli. Styled by Joe McKenna.
ON THE COVER: Photograph by Karim Sadli. Styled by Joe McKenna. Hair by Paul Hanlon. Grooming by Hannah Murray. Benedict Cumberbatch in an Ermenegildo Zegna Couture T-shirt, price on request, shirt, QR2500, and T-shirt (worn underneath), QR2100.
88 Small Museums
Looking beyond elite instituitions like the Louvre and the Met, an award- winning novelist makes the case for ultrapersonal museums — including his own — that offer a more meaningful experience.
By Orhan Pamuk. Photographs by Jackie Nickerson.
ANDREW MOORE
Men’s Fashion May - June, 2014
Table of Contents
Page 51
Page 49
Page 54 From left: the artist Takashi Murakami in Bar Zingaro, his new cafe in Nakano, Tokyo; the musician Zachary Cole Smith in Balmain overalls, QR5,800, and T-shirt, QR1,300; Owen Neistat atop a sand dune in Sossusvlei, Namibia.
18 Sign of the Times
Decoding the meaning of the man bag. 22 The Moment
Men’s wear calls in sick to work with a hang-loose vibe that’s perfect for the beach.
Quality 45 In Fashion
Arena 51 Wanderlust
The new play on shifting proportions.
The YouTube filmmaking sensation Casey Neistat takes his teenage son to Africa, documenting every hashtagworthy moment along the way.
49 Style Memo
Four indie frontmen whose hairstyles are as singular as the music they make.
54 Food Matters
Takashi Murakami teams up with a trio of Norwegian coffee and design gurus to open Tokyo’s hippest new bar.
30 This and That
Teju Cole explains why New York stole his heart; dangerous accessories; socks that rock; and more. 32 Take Two
Judy Blume and Danny McBride get hopped up on hefeweizen while contemplating pillowcases and backpacks. 33 Media Report
Andrew Ross Sorkin wonders if Big Data is bad for business.
56 Legacy
A storied French neo-Classical salon gets resurrected in San Francisco.
100 Document
Charles Veley has clocked over two million miles in flight, and he’s got nine weathered passports to prove it.
FROM LEFT: KEIICHI NITTA; MARTON PERLAKI; CASEY NEISTAT.
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Table of Contents Publisher & Editor-In-Chief
Lookout Qatar
Arena Qatar
QELA finds spring inspirations from art; Robert Tateossian crafts wild accessories; and Etel Adnan draws connection of poetry and painting.
Be it amazed acceptance or grudging acknowledgement, Richard Serra's take over of Doha with his signature steel plates has got the community abuzz.
35 Market Watch
62
Collector's Piece
Qatar’s most prolific collector, Sheikh Faisal bin Qassim has had long glorious decades of buying art but it is the treasures of his family that he holds most dear.
34 This and That
Middle Eastern designers take an experimental interpretation when it comes to menswear, be it updating the thobe or injecting embroideries into jackets.
Yousuf Jassem Al Darwish Chief Executive
Sandeep Sehgal Executive Vice President
Alpana Roy
Vice President
Ravi Raman
59 Form and Fashion
EDITORIAL Editor
Sindhu Nair Chief Fashion Correspondent
Debrina Aliyah
Senior Correspondents
Abigail Mathias Ayswarya Murthy Ezdihar Ibrahim Ali Sub-Editor
Sue Eedle
ART Senior Art Director
38 Fashion Memo
Jeremy Hackett travels the world in expansion of his fashion label while picking up some life lessons on the way.
Page 59
Venkat Reddy
Deputy Art Director
Hanan Abu Saiam
Assistant Art Director
Ayush Indrajith
40 The Scene
Senior Graphic Designer
Photography
Maheshwar Reddy
Level Shoe District in Dubai is proving to be more than just a shoe boutique with its growing clout among shoe aficianados.
Rob Altamirano
MARKETING AND SALES Senior Manager – Marketing
Frederick Alphonso
Assistant Manager – Marketing
42 On Heritage
Thomas Jose
An art that is becoming increasingly rare, Viscount David Linley speaks on the intricacies of woodwork and its place in true luxury.
Media Consultants
Hassan Rekkab Lydia Youssef
Marketing Research & Support Executive
Kanwal Baluch Accountant Pratap Chandran
44 Going Vocal
The British Paraorchestra and the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra comes together to showcase the talents of differently-abled musicians.
Sr. Distribution Executive
Bikram Shrestha
Distribution Support
Arjun Timilsina Bhimal Rai Basanta P
T, THE STYLE MAGAZINE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES Editor in Chief
Deborah Needleman Creative Director
Page 42
Patrick Li
Deputy Editor
Whitney Vargas Fashion Director at Large
Joe McKenna
Managing Editor
George Gustines Photography Director
Nadia Vellam
THE NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICES Left: Linley's work in wood. Top: Richard Serra's 7 becomes the focal point of a fashion editorial by blogger Anum Bashir.
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Sign of the Times
To Have and To Hold
Once upon a time, a man’s bag indicated his trade. But these days, men have an increasingly complicated relationship with the things they carry their things in. BY TROY PATTERSON
THE MACGUFFIN, IN ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S formulation, is ‘‘the
mechanical element that usually crops up in any story’’ — the object of desire, the ball all eyes are kept on. The Maltese Falcon is a MacGuffin, as are the letters of transit in ‘‘Casablanca,’’ and a MacGuffin par excellence is all the more potent, dramatically, because its exact significance and innate value go unexplained. One thinks of the briefcase in ‘‘Pulp Fiction’’ as an iconic MacGuffin: What is in it? No one will ever know, but every viewer feels the power of the symbol. One thinks also that, in real life, the briefcase — every briefcase and every satchel and knapsack and tote and much derided so-called murse — is itself a kind of MacGuffin. The exact details of the personal effects and professional necessities a man daily organizes in his bag don’t matter. What’s meaningful is the male bag itself, which, ever evolving, has developed into a fascinating index of masculinity. I hope that I will not run afoul of the gender police in supposing that the typical man’s relationship with his bag is different in kind from a typical woman’s relationship with hers — more utilitarian, less personal and mystifying even in its mundanity. He operates according to a system of codes that are harder to read and quicker to change, and when his semiotic 22
knapsack opens, a thousand questions spill out. What can it mean that I have seen the editor of GQ on the street wearing a simple backpack labeled JanSport? Don’t get me wrong; he looked good. But if such a major arbiter of male fashion sees fit to wear a bag scarcely distinguishable from that shouldered by Johnny Sixth Grader or Average Joe Busboy, then we have ourselves a puzzle on (and in) our hands. The pinstriped senior partner porting a leather case back and forth to Larchmont, N.Y., the graphic designer toting a bourgeois revision of a prototypically bluecollar kit bag, the dude swinging a Louis Vuitton carryall to the gym — each is lugging around an awful lot of symbolic weight. No bag in the history of male bags — a history that stretches back to the leather loculus (meaning ‘‘little place’’) of the Roman soldier — has more cultural baggage than the briefcase. With its right-rectangular rectitude and immutable sense of authority, the iconic attaché case is as rigid as the values of the corporate culture of which it remains a symbol. A look around Grand Central Station during the morning rush will suggest that the popularity of traditional leather cases and folios is waning, but common sense tells you that they will never disappear. As long as the British government retains the ritual of the chancellor of the Exchequer
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HEAVY BAGGAGE A man’s carryall is seemingly a simple choice, yet loaded with symbolic weight.
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Sign of the Times
hefting his traditional red box on the day of announcing his budget — and as long as grown-up schoolboys recall that the word ‘‘budget’’ derives from bulga (meaning ‘‘leather bag’’) — the briefcase will have a place in the power game. The world was once a place where, in the right hand, even a softer-handled case indicated firm resolve and projected a comforting solidity. Think of Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch carrying his into the courtroom in ‘‘To Kill a Mockingbird’’; it was a tool of justice and must have smelled to Scout like the promise of safety itself. But in our pluralistic times, the authority such a briefcase represents can feel less like a comfort than a constraint. The object’s associations are more ambiguous; it has become, perhaps, too potent a symbol. One thinks of the poster for Ben Stiller’s recent remake of ‘‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,’’ where the briefcase speaks of the daydreaming hero’s conventionality and humdrum burdens. His head is in the clouds; his briefcase is unhappy ballast. Not for nothing, Mitty is carrying an iconic number called the Zero
person carrying a computer used for business is wearing a reminder of business obligations, and is also mixing his business and personal lives in a way that must, on at least some vague level, change his sense of pleasure. Is there something galumphing and inherently inelegant in this relationship with technology? In having a mobile command center mingling with your own stuff? Or is this the way of all personal things in the time of the personal brand? On the other hand — well, the other hand has a phone in it. This facet of modern life is one reason for the rise of the omnipresent offspring, the bikemessenger bag: Look, Ma, there are no hands for gripping handles because I am texting to ask what’s for dinner. When the messenger bag first appeared — in the mid-1960s, manufactured by a sailmaker — couriers appreciated its shape-shifting ability. When it caught on in the 1990s, as Manhattan Portage nylon bags swarmed the sidewalks, customers appreciated its durability. When it persists in transforming the pedestrian silhouette, as it does, we must conclude that its amorphous quality is in step with the newly flexible idea of masculinity, in which a dude might simultaneously be a daddy in need of a diaper bag, a greenmarket shopper in want of an eco-conscious tote, a gym rat packing his yoga pants and a yuppie announcing his status with a Jack Spade label. This is portable pluralism. It is all to the good to reject the hegemony of the Halliburton and its ilk. It is a fine thing that fancy lads are shopping heritage brands for $5,000 versions of their grandfathers’ tool bags, and it is an irony to be savored that the men in the best position to purchase such status symbols instead demonstrate their status by getting on the Acela with no bag at all and running their hedge funds from their phones. But where’s the romance? It is possible for a man to love his bag, I know, as the veteran of a collegiate companionship with a cotton khaki shoulder bag, Israeli paratrooper gear purchased at Banana Republic back in its safari-shop salad days. The thing was trim but rugged, exotic but uncomplicated — and, right now, remembering its flairful red-winged logo, I find myself smiling wistfully. I Google my paratrooper beauty, see that I can order one online from an Army-Navy store for $20, and contemplate the purchase for a quarter-hour before an internal alarm goes off: Put away childish things. Thus do I resolve to maintain fidelity to my bag of the past year, a tasteful blue Herschel backpack that I kind of stole from my wife, possibly guided by the feeling that its spruce reserve is correct for the cultural moment. Ladies’ hall-of-fame purses — the Birkins and Balenciagas and what have you — are known as statement bags. I wonder if, by contrast, what even a peacock wants is an understatement bag, something to keep him calmly carrying on.
MARKO METZINGER (6)
You can see at least one Walter Mitty and one Invisible Man in every car of every commuter train — guys toting briefcases as if their contents include an empty suit or a set of golden handcuffs. Halliburton, an aluminum model named for the oilman who started the company. That Halliburton’s name — now, of course, most famous as a byword for military-industrial menace — should grace the briefcase amounts to a haiku about corporate imagery. And one thinks, further, that in 2014, the man wielding a corporate briefcase as an emblem of traditional values looks a bit like the protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s ‘‘Invisible Man.’’ In the 1952 novel, the nameless Negro hero wins his briefcase in a night of combat that’s as cruelly and casually absurd as capitalism — and afterward can locate himself only in its gleaming calfskin. ‘‘He carries it everywhere,’’ the Yale scholar Robert B. Stepto once observed, ‘‘never realizing that it possesses him far more than he possesses it.’’ You can see at least one Invisible Man and one Mitty in every car of every commuter train — guys toting briefcases as if their contents include an empty suit or a set of golden handcuffs. And what about the guy just across from him? The 50-something fellow shouldering a blocky Dell laptop in a blockier black synthetic bag is carrying the contemporary equivalent of Willy Loman’s sample case, one fears — and so is that fellow’s younger, more fashionable colleague, the one with a Mac in the twill Ghurka tote that goes so well with his A.P.C. barn jacket. The strap on a laptop bag is also a kind of yoke, for the liberating laptop has its flip side. The
What’s in a Bag?
Utility case Zero Halliburton, QR2,276; zerohalliburton.com.
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Tote Ghurka, QR2,530.
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Messenger Coach, QR2,590; coach. com.
Backpack Want Les Essentiels de la Vie, QR1,912; nordstrom. com.
Soft briefcase Tod’s, QR8,829; tods.com.
Duffel Louis Vuitton, QR9,467; louisvuitton.com.
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Endless Sunday A relaxed hippie vibe runs through men’s wear this spring with casual cuts and let-loose prints — a welcome break from the buttoned-up look of workaday clothes. PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATTHEW KRISTALL STYLED BY JASON RIDER
An Airy, Untucked Shirt Dries Van Noten shirt, QR1,620; Antwerp. Ann Demeulemeester pants, QR3,404; anndemeulemeester.be.
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Socks and Sandals Lanvin sandals, QR3,616. Margaret Howell socks, QR364; margarethowell.co.uk. Missoni cardigan, QR6,608, shirt, QR2,094, and tank top, QR1,784. Tommy Hilfiger jeans, QR506; tommy.com. Proper Gang shorts (worn underneath), QR1,329; doverstreetmarket.com.
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The Moment
Soft, Faded Denim Gap jacket, QR328; gap.com. Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane shirt, QR2,367, and belt, QR1,183. Vince jeans, QR710; vince.com.
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The Moment
GROOMING: KRISTEN SHAW FOR ORIBE HAIR CARE. MODEL: ANDREW WESTERMANN AT TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY. FASHION ASSISTANT: ALEX TUDELA.
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A Cheeky but Sensible Hat Moncler hat, QR765. Canali shirt, QR983. Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane shirt (worn underneath), QR1,056. Tiffany & Company bracelet, QR2,367.
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This and That A Cultural Compendium
Sock Hop
ILLUSTRATIONS BY KONSTANTIN KAKANIAS
The most overlooked of knits gets asked to the fashion dance.
WHEN IN INDIA
Spiritual Healing
ART MATTERS FORCE OF NATURE Clockwise from right: Davide Balula; ‘‘Burnt Painting, Imprint of the Burnt Painting (Ember Harbor #7),’’ 2013; ‘‘River Painting (La Seine, Paris),‘‘ 2009-2010.
A Dangerous Method Buried, burned and drowned, Davide Balula’s canvases brave the elements in his pursuit of perfect imperfection. Rather than languish on a gallery wall, Davide Balula’s art keeps busy: paintings grow mushrooms, spaces heat and bend and sculptures record surrounding movements, loudly playing back what they hear. ‘‘I take inspiration from natural phenomena,’’ says the 36-year-old French artist, who now lives in New York City. His materials of choice are earth, wind, fire and water. With them, he creates situations open to chance and then lets nature do its thing. Blank canvases that he buries in soil attract microbes and mold; drowned in rivers, they collect mineral deposits and emerge as marbled abstractions. For ‘‘Ember Harbor,’’ his current show at Galerie Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels, he used a blowtorch to burn seven panels of wood blocks arranged in checkerboard patterns, squeezing each set into successively narrower frames. By pressing charred surfaces to virgin canvas, he created ghostly charcoal prints, then hung each opposite its original. As viewers pass between the increasingly tapered paintings, the walls seem to close in. ‘‘It’s a weird sensation,’’ admits Balula, who will exhibit new work at Frieze New York in May. galerierodolphejanssen.com — LINDA YABLONSKY
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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: VANA MALSI ESTATE; ‘‘BURNT PAINTING, IMPRINT OF THE BURNT PAINTING (EMBER HARBOR #7),’’ 2013/PHOTO BY HUGARD & VANOVERSCHELDE; JEAN-PACÔME DEDIEU; ‘‘RIVER PAINTING (LA SEINE, PARIS),’’ 2009-2010, SEDIMENT ON CANVAS/PHOTO BY CEDRICK EYMENIER.
Clockwise from top: Marcomonde striped socks, QR87; prospectorco.com. Chup Fair Isle socks, QR127; jcrew.com. Anonymousism polka-dot socks, from QR127; unionmadegoods. com. Moss Green star socks, QR44; mossgreen.co.kr.
While North India has no shortage of ashrams, the recently opened Vana, Malsi Estate, located in Dehradun near the foothills of the Himalayas, is taking wellness to new heights. The 31-year-old physics major-turned-organic farmer Veer Singh has spent nearly five years and $155 million building this tranquil spa retreat, which offers everything from a few days of yoga to three weeks of Ayurvedic healing. From QR1,875 per person, per night, all-inclusive; vanaretreats.com — MAURA EGAN
IN HIS WORDS
Teju Cole’s new book extols the streets of Lagos, Nigeria, where he spent his youth. Here, he expounds on what’s so great about living in New York. I love dancing, and I especially love being in a club at 2 a.m., when one or three drinks, good company and a gifted D.J. collectively liberate me into my body. The place could be Barbès in Park Slope, where old-school Guinean grooves silver the air, or perhaps I’m at Windfall in Midtown, enjoying the latest Nigerian Afrobeats and Congolese ndombolo. Wherever it is, I stop my habitual overthinking and become, quite simply, a body in the half-dark. But this is not the highlight of such evenings, for afterward is the journey home to Brooklyn. From the back seat of a taxi, the city unfurls before me as a series of illuminated sights. If we go down the West Side Highway, we’ll pass by the apparition of One World Trade and enter the Tarkovsky-like glow of the Battery Tunnel. If we take the F.D.R., there’s the jeweler’s display of the bridges: Williamsburg, Manhattan, Brooklyn, all those dreamy rows of diamonds. At such moments, the city is mine alone: its immensity, its beauty, its clear streets, its silent waterways. It is open in a way daylight would never permit. I lose myself in it and belong to it, a happiness no less real for being so fleeting. Teju Cole’s ‘‘Every Day Is for the Thief’’ IS published by Random House.
To Die For
SECOND ACT
Once More, With Feeling Almost half a century after its heyday as a creative haven for the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, the Olympic Studios building in London is back to making noise. It’s been remade as a restaurant, cafe, high-tech movie theater and, come May, a recording studio once again. In order to achieve the hub’s retro-modern feel, the owners Stephen and Lisa Burdge linked up with the interior designer Simone McEwan, who lent her touch to the landmark’s bold use of color. ‘‘It would have been really easy to do an awful guitarson-the-wall thing,’’ Lisa says. ‘‘Instead, we kept the essence of the original.’’ olympiccinema.co.uk — ALEX HAWGOOD
It’s no secret that smoking and drinking are terrible for you. Why, then, are designers determined to make vice look so nice?
PICK YOUR POISON Clockwise from above: Poul Kjaerholm PK Bowl granite ashtray, QR1,329; modernartifacts .net. S. T. Dupont lighter, QR4,296; saksfifthavenue.com. Poltrona Frau 1919 chair, from QR27,963; poltronafrau. com. Baccarat Dionysos decanter by Van Day Truex, QR2,603; baccarat.com.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: LINUS SUNDAHL-DJERF; CHRIS HOUSTON; COURTESY OF DUPONT; COURTESY OF POLTRONA FRAU; COURTESY OF BACCARAT. ILLUSTRATION BY KONSTANTIN KAKANIAS. © MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ, COURTESY MARLBOROUGH GALLERY, NEW YORK.
Stillness in the Move
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Take Two
Danny McBride
Judy Blume
Actor and foulmouthed comedian who will appear in Cameron Crowe’s next film, and is now writing a new HBO series with the cocreators of his hit show, ‘‘Eastbound & Down.’’
Beloved American writer and tween-whisperer who has sold more than 82 million books. Her 29th, which she is currently working on, involves love and loss in 1950s New Jersey.
Even if I could pull off the design, it’s too small a backpack for me to wear. Maybe if I was in Japan in 1995. I still carry around a very basic Herschel bookbag. I go to and from work like I’m headed to high school.
It weighs 100 pounds — so, so heavy. It reminds me of Santa Fe in the ’70s, when I lived there. I could hang it on my wall as an objet and be very happy looking at it. But I’m little, and it just about took me down.
Bag Chanel’s graffiti canvas backpack (QR12,379; chanel.com).
Gadget
There’s something nice about knowing that if something does suddenly come loose, you could tighten it. But no one, not even Marlon Brando, would look cool with this toothpick hanging off his face.
The IN1 case, a multitool iPhone case that includes two screwdrivers, a nail file and a set of scissors, among other things (QR164; in1case.com).
Sunglasses
They look like something one of Judy Blume’s characters might wear. I feel like they should come with gel and tickets to Miami. I wish I knew someone who could wear these around and not get laughed at by me.
Let’s see if I can taste all those flavors of candy and bubble gum that are meant to be in it. [Takes a sip.] Nope. It tastes like wheat beer. I’m usually an I.P.A. man, but this is delicious. I haven’t eaten anything today, so I’m feeling it.
They didn’t inhibit me from sleeping. I never even think about my pillowcases, but now that I’m looking at them, I think I’ve been rocking the ones I’ve got for a long time. Could be years.
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The capsule collection for Moncler Lunettes designed in collaboration with Pharrell Williams (QR1,857).
Beer Primator Weizenbier, the overall winner at the 2013 World Beer Awards ($2.49 for a 16.9-ounce bottle; Total Wine & More, Sacramento, 916-921-5328). Pillowcases by the artist John Baldessari for the latest installment of The Thing Quarterly (QR874 for a one-year subscription; thethingquarterly.com).
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Bedding
I was a girl who hankered for Swiss Army knives. I always wanted my own, and now I finally get one to carry around. I broke a fingernail trying to get the cute little tools out, but still, I like it.
I love the feel of them, but I could never wear these because they have red lenses and I live in Key West. I would use them on top of my head to hold my hair back. They look pretty cool.
I don’t drink alcohol, but that’s because I have reflux. My father gave me beer when I was little and I spit it out, and at fraternity parties I didn’t even try. My husband drank the whole thing even though he said it was way too sweet for him.
I tend to use all white, myself, but I like the double sets of lips. Would I order the magazine? Probably not, but it’s a great gift idea. It’s like a Fruit of the Month club, except a Thing of the Quarter club.
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M C BRIDE: COURTESY OF FOREFRONT MEDIA. BLUME: SIGRID ESTRADA. FROM TOP: CHANEL; CARSON FONSECA; COURTESY OF MONCLER; PRIMATOR WEIZENBIER; MICHAEL O’NEAL.
A dual review of what’s new.
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CROWD SOURCING ‘‘80 Backs,’’ a burlap and resin sculpture by the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, depicts a faceless mass.
Media Report
Big (Bad) Data The buzziest idea in business may be its greatest downfall. BY ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST; PHOTOGRAPH: DIRK BAKKER, DETROIT.
IN LATE DECEMBER, the Twittersphere was set alight by tens
of thousands of voices who were furious about antigay comments made by Phil Robertson, the bearded patriarch of the A&E reality show ‘‘Duck Dynasty,’’ in GQ magazine. Executives at the cable channel were monitoring the response and, understandably, became concerned about the future of its No. 1 program. Based in part on feedback from social media, it seemed as if the show’s audience — and, potentially, its advertisers — might abandon it. The controversy had gone viral. Hoping to quell the firestorm, A&E announced it was suspending Robertson indefinitely. Social media and Big Data, the term du jour for the collection of vast troves of information that can instantaneously be synthesized, are supposed to help us make smarter, faster decisions. It seems as if just about every C.E.O. of a global company these days is talking about how Big Data is going to transform their business. But with increasing frequency, it may be leading to flawed, panic-induced conclusions, often by ascribing too much value to a certain data point or by rushing to make a decision because the feedback is available so quickly. This digital river of information is turning normally level-headed decision-makers into hypersensitive, reactive neurotics. That appears to be the lesson that A&E quickly learned after effectively firing Robertson from ‘‘Duck Dynasty.’’ Many of the negative tweets weren’t coming from the show’s core audience in the middle of the country. Instead, they were coming from the tweet-happy East and West Coasts — not exactly regular watchers of the camo-wearing Louisiana clan whose members
openly celebrate being ‘‘rednecks.’’ About a week later, after A&E analyzed the feedback with some more perspective, the network reversed course on Robertson’s ‘‘indefinite hiatus,’’ reinstating him before he even missed a day of taping. So much for the wisdom of crowds. Or at least we’re finding out that some wisdom is needed to know which crowd to follow. Amazon, eager to get into the content-creation business and rewrite the rules of Hollywood, thought it had a brilliant idea when it announced a plan to crowdsource the views of its customers in choosing which TV programs to greenlight. The shopping giant had seen Netflix use Big Data to help pick its slate of hits like ‘‘House of Cards’’ — Netflix executives had combed through millions of hours of programming and the intentions of its users (what genre they gravitated toward, when they’d watch, pause or rewind) to understand what kinds of shows they wanted to see. Amazon, which didn’t have that data but did have a huge customer base, decided to let its patrons vote on which pilots to turn into full-fledged series. Amazon’s users are unlikely to become Hollywood studio heads, at least not yet: The company’s first big production, ‘‘Alpha House,’’ a political comedy starring John Goodman, was greeted with solid reviews but has gained little traction. The greatest challenge of Big Data — especially social media — is separating the signal from all the noise. A study by the Pew Research Center, for example, found that Twitter users are more often than not negative. The study, which examined reactions on Twitter to news events, including Barack Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s presidential race, discovered that ‘‘for both candidates, negative comments exceeded positive comments by a wide margin.’’ More disturbingly, that reaction is not representative: ‘‘The reaction on Twitter to major political events and policy decisions often differs a great deal from public opinion as measured by surveys,’’ Pew reported. That is due, in part, to the fact that ‘‘Twitter users are not representative of the public’’: They are younger and more likely to lean toward the Democratic Party. It turns out that what’s ‘‘trending’’ on Twitter may not really be ‘‘trending’’ at all. Big Data and massive efforts to analyze it aren’t going away. But the need for judgment — and patience — is more important than ever. A crowd may be wise, but ultimately, the crowd is no wiser than the individuals in it.
May-June 2014
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This and That Bags from QELA's latest collection. Right: Liberal artist, Etel Adnan; Below: Jazz, 1999, Tapisserie, wool, natural color from artists' private collection.
Finding the Soul
When QELA, revealed its new collection at its boutique in The Pearl, “a space dedicated to craftsmanship and creativity”, the fresh new voice did make a mark, first for its individuality in certain elements of design and secondly in its presentation. “Every six months, we invite an artist to exhibit their work in the boutique, as art is emblematic of our values and part of the identity of the brand. Art and QELA share the same values of openness, timelessness, creativity and modernity,” according to Sheikha Noor Al Thani, QELA’s official spokesperson. That QELA would showcase each of its collections against the work of a Qatari artist made the collection even more appealing. The artist in focus for this collection was Ebtisam Al Saffar and her series on women called ‘A Woman’s Look’ which seemed to meld well with the collection. SINDHU NAIR
FASHION ALERT Clockwise from left: Robert Tateossian; cufflinks feature insects; mechanical cufflinks; bracelets braided from rubber and copper wire with silver clasp.
The Wild If you get past the fear factor of realizing that there are actual insects embedded in your cufflinks, then Robert Tateossian is your man. The “King of Cufflinks”, as he is dubbed, has an extraordinary way of presenting ordinary accessories. From funky skulls to real scorpions, the label Tateossian means a walk on the wild side, giving a fresh perspective on accessories for both men and women. Tateossian’s foray into the world of fashion has attracted numerous fans including Naomi Campbell and Sophie Dahl, and kick started collaborative initiatives with giants like Chanel. Insects aside, “none of which was killed specifically for our designs,” according to Tateossian, the label works with semi-precious stones, pearls, fibre optic glass and crystallized Swarovski elements in a Birmingham workshop in homage to the heart of England’s silversmith industry. Tateossian himself, a former investment banker, lives in London these days but finds inspirations from the world. We forsee, perhaps, a collection inspired by the pearls of Qatar. ABIGAIL MATHIAS
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All in One Stroke There cannot be a better person than artist and publisher Simone Fattal to talk about one of the foremost authors, poets and playwrights of this generation Etel Adnan, especially since the two of them have been friends for more than 42 years. The LebaneseAmerican artist and liberal thinker’s extensive body of work is on display at Mathaf:Arab Museums of Modern Art in Doha, and this is her largest solo exhibition to date, and is curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. The exhibition includes film, poetry, writing and teaching while painting is a key component. Through the 1960s, Adnan created accordionfold books, or leporellos, that meld visual and verbal observation, fusing her parallel practices in painting and writing as she transcribes poems and records unfolding landscapes and urban spaces. Her travel and exile is a recurring theme that takes her further in a journey of self-expression. Traveling to Qatar was not possible for Adnan who is now in her 80s. Despite her age Adnan keeps herself informed about world events according to her companion. “She wakes up at night and reads the newspaper online,” states Fattal. Her paintings are done in one sitting. There’s no going back or hesitation. “Etel says ‘poetry is like catching a wave’ which I feel she captures in her paintings. It is the reason her paintings are charged with energy,” says Fattal. Adnan’s work is currently showcased at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Etel Adnan in All her Dimensions is on at the Mathaf: Arab Musuem of Modern Art until 6 July 2014. ABIGAIL MATHIAS
ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE
QELA, MATHAF, TATEOSSIAN.
When Qatar launched its first luxury fashion house, expectations ran amok and some criticism took on a nasty tenor. Did anyone remember the first collections of renowned brands of fashion? Or that they discovered their personal style and vocation and perfected their voices only in subsequent collections?
Market Watch
Men in Fashion
From the traditional thobe to funky print tees, the fashion options for men in the Middle East are mixed but definitely happening. BY DEBRINA ALIYAH
Varoin Marwah Fabrics rule this season, for Varoin Marwah’s new collection, as the designer experiments with textured cotton, pattern-embossed blends and embroidered linen to break away from the traditional menswear norm. Aiming for comfort and wearability, the summer pieces are set in pastel shades with nature-inspired embroidery motifs to set the backdrop to the collection’s narration of a man in love. “Our designs are made for that man, who loves to be in love, who loves his life, who loves himself. It is part of every minute of our lives,” says Marwah. The label has also focused on canvas as the main material for its new shoe designs, which are handmade and printed with motifs derived from its collection’s embroidery. www.varoinmarwah.com
House of Nomad Dubai-based label House of Nomad turns the spotlight on a singletone nude color palette in its debut Spring Collection, offering bold separates such as bomber jackets and drop crotch pants for men. The pieces are unified by its use of heavy jersey and the stylization of Arabic calligraphy as the main print feature. The label, designed by Ahmed El Sayed and Saleh Al Banna, is reflective of the cultural current of the Middle East, where a modern nomadic lifestyle of moving from city to city is prevalent. www.house-of-nomad.com
Lomar Thobe The region’s most sought-after thobe designer label, Lomar Thobe, focuses on three new elements this season,: the Unstitched, the Slide and the Sedery Duo. Unstitched is a visual play on the traditional version, hiding all visible stitches on the front; Slide puts the accent on the collar and the sleeve, while Sedery Duo combines a thobe with a matching double-layer mashlah vest. The label was founded 12 years ago in Saudi Arabia by husband-and-wife team Loai Nassem and Mona Al Haddad with the aim of redefining thobes to appeal to the modern man. www.lomarthobe.com.sa
Franklin Eugene
The eponymous label features a collection of ten silhouettes this summer with a somber color palette of sky blue to jet black. The range of silhouettes is meant to be the complete wardrobe rotation for menswear, from work to play. “With Dubai being a world-class resort travel destination and with our flagship boutique located in one of the city’s premier lifestyle communities, Jumeirah Beach Residence, it was only natural that this collection would come to pass,” says Eugene. Trained at the London College of Fashion, Eugene created the trademark eight-button arm cuff that has become the signature element in his pieces. Franklin Eugene Boutique, The Walk at Jumeirah Beach Residences, Dubai.
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On Stage
Lookout Qatar
Love, Revolution and Redemption We go behind the scenes to talk to the crew of Les Miserables, which was recently staged here in the city by amateur dramatics group, the Doha Players. BY AYSWARYA MURTHY
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBERT ALTAMIRANO
THE ENTRANCE to the Doha Players villa is blocked by a long, towering
barricade, the same one that will be used a few days later by the students Marius and Enjolras to make their last stand against the French Army. To the right, and out of sight, sounds of hammering and drilling filter in as props for the other scenes are erected. The inside of the villa is a colorful, chaotic vortex of props, set pieces and costumes and it feels distinctly, even comfortingly, Bohemian. It is as if the villa is the fret-free zone in which the members of Doha’s most venerable and vibrant am-dram group – bankers, students, engineers, media professionals, housewives – shake off the order of their day-lives and explode into the creative mist that hangs heavily in the air. Elaine Potter, who has been an active member of the group for over eight years, acquaints us with the various pieces of the puzzle that will come together on stage at the Qatar National Theater, giving Doha a chance to catch the world’s most famous and long-running musical, Boubil and Schönberg’s Les Miserables. “It has entertained over 265 million people in 42 countries,” she says as she points out some of the more significant set pieces (“This is a garden at Valjean’s house where Marius confesses his love for Cosette, and here is the sewer through which Valjean carries an unconscious and wounded Marius after the students’ uprising goes south.”). Stunning as they are, it’s even more of a shock when we bump into the person who has been working on these elaborate period pieces, Virginia Christopher, who confesses she has never done anything like this before her whole life. On the walls surrounding her hang pictures and posters from the group’s past productions dating back to more than 20 years. With more than 130 crew and actors gearing up to stage six shows during the coming week, this isn’t even their biggest production, Potter says. But it is certainly something they have had their eye on for a while. “While we traditionally lean more towards pantomimes, some of our members have always wanted to stage Les Mis, and the license for amateur groups was made available only last year. In fact, it’s not yet been made available to amdram groups within the UK,” says Potter. So this could very well be among the first Les Mis performances by any amateur group in the world. While the musical numbers are being performed with help from the Doha Singers and Doha Community Orchestra, the group had to pay for some of the music, which called for a few unusual instruments.
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The seven-member board that currently oversees operations at the Doha Players is in the middle of a meeting, brainstorming some last-minute details over homemade popcorn. Allison Pressley is social chairperson, who manages the group’s membership. Auditions were particularly tough, she says. With Doha’s exploding expat community looking for any sort of creative distraction, the applications came pouring in. “We had to turn away over a hundred people,” she says. Haven Tsang, the expert on lights who spends all the performances in the lighting booth, nods in agreement. “Casting Cosette was so difficult because out of the 15-20 girls who auditioned, four were incredibly good and it was almost impossible to pick one,” he says. But pick they did, and they were even fortunate enough to find a very similar-looking actor to play the older Cosette. A little stage-like setup within the villa is right now stacked with boxes of props and costumes, but it’s hard to imagine over 47 actors, understudies and all, rehearsing in that tiny space for over three months. A handful of them have community theatre experience and a few have even been on West End, but most of them are there on a journey of experimentation and discovery. Today there are no rehearsals, though. A couple of actors trickle in to don their costumes and makeup for the promo shots, tastefully done and extending an irresistible invitation to theater-lovers across the city to witness this timeless tale of love, revolution and redemption during 19th-Century France brought to life at the beautiful and criminally-underused Qatar National Theater. While it is a bit overwhelming to be given a tour of the villa and see at first hand the mind-blowing amount of time and effort being poured into the production, the more incredible story is that of the group itself. With Qatar’s shifting population and changing landscape, both literally and culturally, it’s astounding to think the group has not only survived but thrived since it was first founded in the 1950s, consistently churning out memorable productions like The King and I, The Sound of Music, Grease, Sinbad the Sailor, Uncle Vanya, Annie and more. Even as we sit down eagerly to review Les Mis, we are already looking forward to Doha Players’ next production, Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer. Les Miserables was staged from May 13 - 17.
Section
In Pictures
Depth of Field A team of Brazilian photographers visiting Doha makes us view the city in a new light. BY ABIGAIL MATHIAS PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBERT ALTAMIRANO
PHOTO BY ROBERT ALTAMIRANO
FOR FOUR PASSIONATE photographers, the
Qatar Brazil Year of Culture 2014 has brought about a real cultural encounter; a transcontinental meeting of like minds. Two photographers from the tiny Gulf state and the vast South American country were selected to visit each other’s homelands – taking their cameras with them – and to document the experience in images together. We caught up with the group on a high-spirited photo shoot at one of Doha’s leading landmarks, the Imam Muhammad ibn Abdulwahhab (or National) Mosque. As the two Qatari camera enthusiasts, Aref Mohammad Hussain and Abdulla Al Tamimi, show the Brazilians, Andre Joaquim and Leonardo Wen, around their country, the playful banter clearly indicates that this is a joyful task for all of them. While the Qataris trade jokes about each other’s imputed incompetence, the Brazilians whip out their SLRs and start taking pictures without a moment’s hesitation. Forty-year-old Joaquim is a dentist, woodworker and marathon runner in Rio de Janeiro, as well as a photographer. His underwater photographs have won acclaim and are a subject close to his heart. Back home, Joaquim used to capture images of his patients and soon realized he had a flair for photography. Although not everyone feels comfortable in front of a camera lens, Joaquim completely disregards his subject’s inhibitions. “I don’t hesitate to shoot,” he says, “because if I stop to ask for permission, that precise moment I was about to capture might slip out of my hands.” Leonardo Wen could easily be mistaken for a college student. He works as an independent photographer specializing in documentary photography, photojournalism and portraits.
A DIFFERENT VIEW Clockwise from top left: Brazilian photographers Andre Joaquim and Leonardo Wen at the national mosque; Qatar's Aref Muhammad Hussain takes focus; sharing a meal by Andre Joaquim; inside the national mosque, photograph by Leonardo Wen; Corniche sea front captured by Andre Joaquim.
Wen has also collaborated with Sipa Press photo agency in France and the Financial Times in the UK. On his first visit to this part of the world, he mentions being captivated by the desert landscape, which stands in stark contrast to the landscape in his hometown. Qatar Brazil 2014, a twelve-month series of exchanges, friendly competitions and cultural activities between the two countries, is being organized at this end by Qatar Museums Authority. The QMA took a great deal of care in selecting the photographers for this project, as Faisal Adama, Senior Project Coordinator at the QMA’s Museum of Islamic Art, explains: “We shortlisted the best photographers, and then members of the QMA selected two finalists at an in-house exhibition of images.” An engineer by profession, Hussain heads
the Qatar Photographic Society and spends most of his free time mentoring Doha residents in picture-taking. By contrast, Al Tamimi, his team-mate on the mission to capture Brazil in images, had barely picked up a camera until a few years ago. They both say the experience of that trip has helped improve their photographic skills. “It wasn’t just about visiting Brazil. We were more interested in telling a story,” Hussain explains. But the shutter-happy comrades are all talking again, discussing the visual potential of a planned trip tomorrow to Qatar’s photogenic Jazirat Al Ghanim, otherwise known as Purple Island, off Al Khor, some 50km north of Doha. Qatar Museums Authority hopes to exhibit the images shot by both pairs of photographers this summer.
May-June 2014
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Lookout Qatar
THE BRITISH GENTLEMAN Jeremy Hackett has brought British dressing to a global audience.
The Hackett Philosophy From his love-hate relationship with the World Wide Web to British quintessential brands, Middle East preferences and personal travel muses, Jeremy Hackett talks about the things that matter most. BY DEBRINA ALIYAH
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THE THING ABOUT THE INTERNET, Jeremy Hackett says, is
that everything he says gets shared and stays out there on the World Wide Web forever. “People read it and when they meet me they ask me the same questions again!” he quips. So I decide to take my chance and enquire if Hackett thinks it was a good idea for me to surprise my forty-year-old husband with a gift of a very fashionable and very narrow tie. He pauses before breaking into a grin: “I wouldn’t go there!” Hackett has been traveling to the Middle East frequently in a rapid expansion of Hackett stores in the region, but this is his maiden trip to Qatar, marking the opening of his first-ever store in this city. Throughout his stay he gets chauffeured around in an Aston Martin, which seemed apt, since Hackett is the quintessential British label for a gentleman’s wardrobe, and the Aston Martin is the ultimate ride for a British spy. The whole affair is very British-centric, but this is what the essence of Hackett is all about. There are currently close to 80 Hackett stores around the
IMAGES COURTESY HACKETT
Fashion Memo
world, a huge expansion since the first one opened its doors in 1983 in Parson’s Green in London. The label is the embodiment of what and who Jeremy is, a well-mannered and well-dressed British gentleman whose idea of experimenting with fashion extends only as far as shortening the length of his trousers or wearing a slightly narrower tie (just slightly). “I am in my 60s; I really don’t want to look like mutton dressed as lamb,” he jokes. The far-reaching influence of classic British dressing however, is no joke. Hackett is wildly successful in places half-way across the world from London; cities such as Shanghai and Singapore, where precise tailoring is seen as a measure of personal success. It is also the sense of knowing what to expect that plays well into the psyche of male shoppers. “Menswear is very different. If I am three steps ahead of the customers, I have lost them. Men want to look nicely turned out, but they are not going to rush into stores to buy the latest must-have jackets, though magazines would have you think otherwise,” he shares. In the Middle East, even with the thobe being the gold standard, the label’s suit and classic lines have been gaining rapid momentum, not to mention its casual collection — the main revenue earner. In the last decade, Hackett has quickly become a favorite among men in the Gulf, and now Arab shoppers at the label’s stores in London are seeking out serious tailoring pieces. “I think they like the heritage. There has been a long history and relationship between Britain and this region,” Jeremy explains. Observing the dress code of Arab men, Jeremy finds it fascinating how the thobe can look so freshly pressed regardless of how long it has been worn. “It makes them look so regal, elegant and
‘I like Aston Martin cars and quite love polo, but with the rowing, I prefer watching it from afar rather than actually doing the rowing!’ important,” he says. Polo shirts, rugby shirts, knitwear and t-shirts also forms the basis of Hackett’s many sponsorships and involvement in sporting events closely associated with the British lifestyle that finds its parallel in this region. Dubai’s British Polo Day is one of Jeremy’s favorites, one that he often makes time to travel to Dubai for, along with Aston Martin Racing, the London Rowing Club, tennis and most recently Chelsea Football Club. “I like Aston Martin cars and quite love polo, but with the rowing, I prefer watching it from afar rather than actually doing the rowing!” he says. From his Mr Classic blog and definitively the Internet, I had found out that Jeremy’s favorite color is navy blue, so I ask why. “If you only have one coat, it has to be navy blue,” he says. “It is easier to wear than black, not too somber or too designed.” Perhaps this is a question he has had to answer many times, because for a person who’s concerned about things staying on the World Wide Web forever, he has a pretty active social media presence, including a Jeremy Advises portal where you can ask for sartorial tips. The Mr Classic blog is where Jeremy jots down musings on his travels and his dogs Browney and Muffin, and makes general humorous observations. This year, he will be exhibiting a collection of photographs he has taken over the years
WORLD TRAVELER Looks from the Hackett London spring summer 2014 collection inspired by the global traveler.
in the London store. “The images are mostly black and whites of architecture, a few fashion pictures and pictures of my dogs,” he laughs. Perhaps this year will also mark the beginning of a project that has long been planned but unexecuted for the Hackett brand — breaking into the American market. It has been a recurring story for the past five years that Hackett would finally open its first American store the following year, but Jeremy thinks 2015 is going to be lucky number. “It is a very competitive market, but there’s an appetite for British tailoring, so we will see,” he smiles. And when in the States, Jeremy harbors a dream to travel in an Airstream all over the country accompanied only by his notebook, a camera and his dogs. He is sure to take his British dressing, despite his traveler endeavors, although when I bring up the subject of harem pants, he remarks, “Now, that’s a thought. It just gave me an idea!” Hackett is now open at Villaggio Mall.
May-June 2014
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Lookout Qatar
Fashion Sole Level Shoe District takes up the baton to popularize a new wave of fashion marketing by creating a destination for the shoe lover. BY DEBRINA ALIYAH
IT IS EASY to attribute the sheer size of Level Shoe District to Dubai’s melodramatic flair for ostentatious displays of consumption, with the world’s tallest and biggest buildings already adding to the real estate expanse of the emirate. After all, the 96,000-square-foot space dubs itself more of a shoe metropolis than a boutique. It is the biggest shoe retail space in the world, and coincidentally also resides in the world’s largest shopping mall, The Dubai Mall. But nearly a year and a half on since the first pair of shoes was sold there, Level (as it is nicknamed) has established itself as a very serious and valuable player in the market. A project by Chalhoub Group, arguably one of the most influential fashion conglomerates in the Middle East, Level was conceived to be a destination in itself – a theatrical show of sorts
ONE AND ONLY From left: Alberto Moretti, Louis Leeman, Bionda Castana and Sophia Webster designed exclusive pieces only for Level.
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for fashion and shoe lovers to indulge and immerse in a experience going beyond the shoes. The concept and message of the store is vivacious and engaging; brands are consolidated into different spaces of different positioning, with seasonal pop-ups and visual media to help visitors discover collections. “It is very important that when customers are walking through, the space talks back at you, and doesn’t remain as a flat space,” says Rania Masri, the general manager of Level. The designer floor houses stalwarts like Rupert Sanderson and Manolo Blahnik; the contemporary floor – complete with urban music – is home to cult favorites like United Nude and MM6, while the men’s designer section is a leather haven of dress shoes. Pulling out the big guns, Chalhoub Group sought out instantly recognizable names as partners: Vogue Café with its second global chain, celebrity foot expert Margaret Dabbs’ first spa outside the UK, Louis Vuitton’s first-ever dedicated shoe maison and Saint Laurent’s first boutique with its nouveau branding. The storied associations are impressive, but it is Level’s grit and dedication to seeking the freshest talents in the shoemaking industry that has gained it the cult following and, ultimately, the reality of commercial success. Each season the buying team led by Alberto Oliveros picks out pieces that extend into runway specials — a firm favorite with stylists — and works with selected designers on pairs that are exclusive to Level. Unsurprisingly, the Level-exclusive designs, which are limited to about fifteen pairs each, are always the first to sell out. “The exclusive pieces have to have the DNA of Level, something that represents vibrancy and uniqueness,” Oliveros explains. This season, that direction is a color play of black and gold, with stellar choices from the likes of Sophia Webster, Nicholas Kirkwood IMAGES COURTESY LEVEL SHOE DISTRICT
The Scene
SHOE METROPOLIS From left: display at the designer floor; Vogue Cafe’s second global outlet; The Cobbler completes the shoe experience.
The buying process, which may come with limitations for certain markets, is all fair game for the team at Level as their clientele is truly global and varied.
PRIVATE SHOPPING From top: the styling lounge for men; a separate VIP lounge for women; a gentlemen parlour for male shoppers to consult with stylists.
and Gianvito Rossi. This approach has helped kick-start the careers of certain labels including Louis Leeman, who was first discovered by Level and is now carried by major retailers around the world. “We seek out brands that are very specific and that give us our unique voice. We introduce new designers and help them tell their stories,” says Masri. The buying process, which may have limitations for certain markets, is all fair game for the team at Level, as their clientele is truly global and varied. “Level has such a large regional and international customer base, so it’s a great place for a young designer to be showcased,” says Edgardo Osorio, the designer behind Italian brand Aquazzura. In 2013, The Dubai Mall was the world’s most-visited destination for the third consecutive year, with more than 75 million visitors, overtaking popular tourist spots including New York City and the Eiffel Tower. “We are not limited by tastes, so we just have to focus on our constant challenge to discover new designers and find the next big thing,” Masri says. Designers, too, are able to take bold creative leaps when working on collaborations with Level, just like Alberto Moretti’s muchtalked-about 24-carat gold men’s velvet loafers. “There is a lot of energy and enthusiasm, and it’s admirable that they invest so much time to find emerging designers,” Moretti says. Making sense of literally the sea of shoes is a job best left to Level’s personal styling team. The service, which offers a more private experience of shoe shopping, is often preferred by the region’s shoppers. The strong rapport with clients enables the team to curate selections from the massive collections and narrow down precise choices for personal tastes and special occasions. “Bring your dress, bring your friends, and come let us find your perfect pair,” Masri says. Two dedicated lounges for men and women provide a private enclave to shop and consult in comfort, a service that surprisingly has won many male clients. “Men are less partial to browsing. They just want to see what we have that will suit them,” Oliveros explains. Level is also home to The Cobbler, a UAE-based bespoke shoe service that employs cobblers trained with the Compagnons du Tour de France. “We will be traditional in the sense of the level of distinct quality of service, but we also want to be unexpected in our offerings,” Masri says. In the bigger scheme of things, Level is pushing the envelope by creating a new design future for the region, where the current wave of fashion pursuits is still very much focused on clothing. At the recent Fashion Forward Spring 2014, Masri was part of a panel to work on a new initiative to develop regional talents, with Level providing a platform to launch shoemakers. Aennis Eunis and Private Collection are two regional brands that have been very well received in the store. “We want to be in touch with the community, and this extends to art,” she adds, referring to The Zoo, a homegrown concept store that has an outpost at Level. Books, conceptual art, collaborative collections and some rare quirky finds at The Zoo, help you to take away a piece of the Level experience even if you resist the temptation to buy a pair of shoes. May-June 2014
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Lookout Qatar
On Heritage
For the Love of Wood, British-Style Linley has all the qualities to make it a success — craftsmanship, British-made, bespoke, luxury, and workmanship. Throw in the spice of surreptitious novelty in design, and the mix is heady.
IT’S NOT VERY OFTEN THAT we have a visiting royalty. There's an even lower probability of the visiting royalty addressing an audience on luxury craftsmanship. It was against these odds that Viscount David Linley, the Queen of England’s nephew and Chairman of the auction house, Christie’s UK, came all the way to Doha to speak about craftsmanship, and all in the context of his bespoke woodwork company, Linley. With the famed British sense of humor, Linley tried to explain the terms, true luxury and craftsmanship. Though he did agree that the juxtaposition of the two words might seem paradoxical to the uninitiated, he said the words can come together to bring out the best in a material while enhancing the skill behind the making. “True luxury is time spent on the product,” he says, “while craftsmanship is what is done to enrich the skills of a particular craft.” Even in this 21st century when fashion trends change before they begin, Linley’s ambition is to make things that last. “I always wanted to make things as opposed to throwing things away,” he says, “though I did love to take things apart when I was small — but more with an intention of finding out how they worked.” In an era where the term luxury is becoming ambiguous, as it is being used as a distinction in most products to gain access to the growing middle class, how can a person pick out what he or she really wants, a product that is a valuable addition to their family assets? “Perhaps the world is getting too used to using the word luxury and therefore the real meaning is getting lost as the world of luxury expands,” agrees Linley. “To me, luxury is not about mass-market products but is synonymous with the hand-crafted, bespoke pieces that feel like they have been made especially for you. It is about having something that not everybody else has.” Luxury is not about the end-cost of an object; it is about the spirit and the skill of the creator, combined with the very finest quality that gives a product character and soul and makes it so desirable. Linley wants this personal interaction with his products too, and that, according to him makes the woodwork much more than simply wood. “Your furniture should not be just furniture; it should be something more than that,” says Linley. “A passion of yours that
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you own; a character that comes alive; a stamp of individuality that will carry your heritage to the next generation. It should be all of this.” A tall order to meet but something Linley hopes to achieve with his bespoke furniture. That is as long as it is not massproduced, he says. “The highest level of luxury will not lose its exclusivity as long as we continue to encourage the inventors and creators who are working hard to create these beautiful pieces and not let mass production take over completely,” he insists. Linley is a proud British brand, and the creator is no less self-assured about his country and its craftsmanship. Now we have luxury as a definition, followed by craftsmanship and then English as another defining quality of the brand. How different are British and Italian craftsmanship from each other, and is there a need to categorize talent? “I suppose it is only natural to use the medium that is most accessible to you; therefore the Italians have developed exceptional expertise working with stone because it is abundant
IMAGES COURTESY LINLEY
BY SINDHU NAIR
WOOD CRAFT Clockwise from far left: David Linley stands testimony to British craftsmanship; the store exterior; tectonic bar with its minimal exterior that opens to give an expanse of storage space; the Helix desk; pen collector's cabinet.
sycamore marquetry detailing are but two items Linley’s collection that have no need of any epithet to describe their workmanship; the material and the fine subtle detailing are proof enough. “A love of wood is an essential part of Linley’s character,” he says. Qatari businessman Fahad Al Attiya, the brains behind Qatar’s national food security program, along with his fashion-sentient wife Raya Al Khalifa are patrons of this English craftsmanship. Both of them understand the classiness of this work in wood. Al Khalifa explains: “We started to appreciate the beauty, durability and undated selection from the past by remembering our family heirlooms, and puzzled why some abandoned them for poor-quality, fashionable, home pieces that lacked soul, longevity and painstakingly perfected hand craftsmanship.” Though she doesn’t remember when they discovered Linley, the brand was an acquired taste. “We frequented the shop so my husband could admire the pieces, which are more like works of art,” she says adding, “Secret drawers, awe inspiring wooden inlay as well as that quintessential British quirkiness.
“We are inventing and creating products that push boundaries whilst maintaining the highest levels of quality”
in Italy,” he muses. “In comparison, British craftsmen have developed their skills to produce beautiful things using timber, which grows in abundance in the UK.” Linley stresses that this is not to say that Italy does not have good cabinet makers or that Britain doesn’t have good stone masons and sculptors but the skill sets have developed differently to suit each country’s natural resources. But then Italian craftsmanship has been renowned and celebrated for ages. Linley disagrees. “Craftsmanship in Britain is alive and thriving,” he says. “We are inventing and creating products that push boundaries whilst maintaining the highest levels of quality. As mentioned before, British-made products are instantly recognizable by certain characteristics, and nowhere else achieves those in quite the same way as Britain.” Linley products certainly have a character that distinguishes them from the norm, the run-of-the-mill furniture one can buy off the shelves. The seemingly mundane box bar as an understated chunk of wood opens to compartments set off scientifically, and the Garrick desk collection in rich walnut with
Limited by our small pied-à-terre in London we ended up acquiring many treasured keepsakes: charming secret boxes, stunning picture frames as captivating as the photos they house and other items that made our house a home, with items that could be passed down generation to generation.” The couple settled in Doha, but their tryst with Linley continued. “Since our departure, my husband has been saddened by the loss of heritage and craftsmanship in the traditional carpentry of the region, which is a technique acquired by the Europeans,” she says. “Rallying the help of a friend and a like-minded crusader for preserving craftsmanship, my husband turned to Linley for that direction when setting up his own wood factory here in Qatar.” For Raya Al Khalifa, the art and intricacy is a testament to one’s culture, and an anchor in preserving and showcasing a culture’s core identity. Meanwhile, the story of Linley gets more fascinating, with secret drawers setting the scene for later plots of suspense or just elation in discovery. “I was once discussing a design for a bespoke desk with a client who wanted a certain number of secret drawers included in the desk,” explains Linley. “Something that we always try to include wherever possible to add a sense of fun to a piece of furniture. We decided to put an extra secret drawer, which only the designer, the craftsman, the client and I know about. To this day he still hasn’t told his wife or anyone else where that secret drawer is. I hope in many years to come someone will accidentally stumble upon it and it will make them smile.”
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Going Vocal
The Democracy of Music A professional ensemble of differently-abled musicians shows a Doha audience that in music there are no boundaries. BY ABIGAIL MATHIAS
AS THE SOUND OF the lute gently soothed the audience who had come in from Doha’s sweltering heat, its captivating melody was difficult to
SHARING THE STAGE: From top: The British Paraorchestra performs with the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra at the Katara Opera House in a first of its kind performance; musicians share a moment during the show in Qatar; lute player, Matthew Wadsworth who recently took up dirt bike riding; award winning conductor Charles Hazlewood.
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ignore. The musician, Matthew Wadsworth, had a permanent smile on his face throughout the five-minute solo. It was only when he was assisted, following his performance, that his blindness came to light. Wadsworth is part of an orchestra that is the first of its kind: made up of stellar musicians, who are physically disabled but do not let that inhibit them. The British Paraorchestra, a professional ensemble of differently-abled musicians, came to Qatar for a unique performance with the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra. The event was part of Sasol’s ‘Definitely Able’ initiative. Wadsworth started playing the guitar at the age of six and moved to the lute when he was 18. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music, released six classical albums, one recorded live at London’s Wigmore Hall, and played in operas and orchestras all over the world. He was born blind. The Paraorchestra began two years ago when conductor Charles Hazlewood found himself dealing with a personal challenge. His youngest child, Eliza, was diagnosed with celebral palsy. “She unlocked my mind over the issue of limited opportunities for people with disabilities,” he explains. Over the next few years Hazlewood devoted his talent to bringing together an orchestra that he hopes will, slowly change the way the world perceives the differently-abled. Their first big break included an audience of half a billion people when they performed with Coldplay at the London 2012 Olympics. This was followed by a whirlwind of musical shows; at Buckingham Palace and festivals across the UK. And yet they are still relatively unknown. Using music as a form of bringing rival communities together, Hazlewood started a South African opera company that later went on to win the Berlin Film Festival Golden Bear. “Anyone who loves rhythm and blues can appreciate the classical beats of Wagner. All they have to do is open their minds to it,” says Hazlewood, who is known for his unorthodox style of mixing musical genres. In 2000 he co-
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founded a lyric theatre company in Cape Town, which recruited singers from the poorest townships. Fiercely advocating the fact that music can actually break barriers and alleviate social stigma, he suggests that “if everyone in the world got together and sang, there’d be fewer problems in the world.” What is striking about this group of musicians is that they come from a variety of backgrounds and bring a range of musical styles and influences to the ensemble, from drum and bass to baroque recorder; from lute to Indian sitar and tabla; percussion to clarinet; laptops, iPads and specially designed software to viola. Clarence Adoo, who used to play trumpet, suffered a devastating car accident in 1995 and is now paralysed from the shoulders down. He plays music on a laptop, using a specially designed blow tube. For him and others from the group, music is often the only means to earn a living. Baluji Shrivastav a sitar and tabla player, lost his sight when he was eight months old. He has played with Paul McCartney, Annie Lennox and Boy George but has not yet found a manager to support his music. Wadsworth realizes the challenges but prefers to dwell on his abilities. “It is easy to feel like a victim. But if you behave like that, you will only repel everyone. It is much better to prove yourself,” he says. “I don’t see us as just a group of disabled people. We happen to have a certain disability, but that doesn’t stop us from anything.” Most of Wadsworth’s fellow musicians have rarely traveled outside the UK. For them the journey to the Middle East was daunting. “It’s the first time we are on a tour. We weren’t sure what the logistical challenges would be,” says Wadsworth. A piece of high baroque, titled ‘La Folia,’‘The Madness’ by Arcangelo Corelli, is juxtaposed with newer sounds especially for the Doha performance. Besides being musically challenging, it showcases a range of musical elements from the tabla to a mouth organ. “We are performing a game of global ping-pong, if you will,” laughs Hazlewood, in a fitting metaphor for the diversity of musical elements within the group. In another corner of the room the other musicians share an inside joke. They have a flash mob planned for later in Souq Waqif. “There’s a distinct vibrancy in this group, and we all help each other,” remarks Wadsworth. “At the airport I was pushing another lady in a wheelchair, while I had the lute in one hand besides a coffee as well. (Being blind) I knew where I was going only because she could steer us in the right direction.” The orchestra’s Doha performance was held at the Katara Opera House and began with a rendition from the film, Inception. The orchestra has ambitious plans to release an album with EMI. There is, literally, no stopping them. ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE
IMAGES COURTESY SASOL PHOTOGRAPH BY LES WILSON
Lookout Qatar
In Fashion
The Reinvention of the Suit From cutoff sleeves to elongated jackets and shorts, traditional men’s wear is taking its cues from the street. PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREA SPOTORNO STYLED BY JASON RIDER
SHRUNKEN PROPORTIONS Tallia Orange jacket, QR1,183, and pants, QR546; lordandtaylor.com. Rick Owens top, QR1,631. Yohji Yamamoto sneakers, QR2,876; yohjiyamamoto.co.jp.
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Quality
SUITS WITHOUT SLEEVES Salvatore Ferragamo vest, QR4,478, and pants, QR3,605. Krisvanassche shirt, QR1,355; krisvanassche .com. Jil Sander shoes, QR3,259. Falke socks, QR91; mrporter. com.
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ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE
In Fashion
Quality
AN ELONGATED JACKET Jil Sander jacket, QR6,335, pants, QR2,949, and shoes, QR3,259. Comme des Garรงons Shirt T-shirt, QR510. Falke socks, QR91.
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A BRIGHTER BLUE Calvin Klein Collection jacket, QR3,095, and pants, QR1,547. Raf Simons T-shirt, QR2,476; rafsimons. com.
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ALL PRICES ARE INDICATIVE
MODEL: BEN ALLEN/SELECT MODEL MANAGEMENT. HAIR BY MARION ANÉE AT AIRPORT AGENCY USING DAVID MALLETT PRODUCTS. GROOMING BY FRED FARRUGIA AT CALLISTE. MANICURE BY SOPHIE A. AT CALLISTE. SET DESIGN BY CAROLE GREGORIS AT QUADRIGA. PRODUCTION BY BIRD PRODUCTION. FASHION ASSISTANTS: ALEX TUDELA, LAËTITIA LEPORCQ.
Quality In Fashion
Quality Style Memo
Pump Up the Volume A punk rocker, a hip-hop producer, a dream-pop frontman and a psychedelic singer-songwriter. Four musicians with distinct voices — and coifs — give new meaning to the term ‘hair bands.’ PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARTON PERLAKI STYLED BY JASON RIDER BY JEFF OLOIZIA
Honor Titus The 24-year-old Cerebral Ballzy frontman doesn’t hesitate when asked to describe his band’s sound: ‘‘It’s faded blue-jean, leather jacket, New York J train boys taking you to a party.’’ That attitude has carried the skate-punk outfit from humble beginnings in East New York, Brooklyn, to sold-out shows in Japan and Britain. And while they’ve left an impressive trail of debauchery along the way —
Titus describes the band’s first trip to London as ‘‘an X-rated version of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ ’’ — their influences have developed with age. ‘‘I enjoy a lot of the French writers like Genet and Rimbaud,’’ the singer says, sounding more like a lit scholar than a self-described lover of pizza and skateboarding. ‘‘They’re people who did things on their own terms, and I plan on doing that forever.’’
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Quality
Style Memo
On Titus: Margaret Howell jacket, QR3,732; margarethowell .co.uk. Burberry Prorsum shirt, QR2,166; burberry.com. His own jewelry. Aesop Shine hydrating oil, QR127; aesop.com. On Leary: Moncler Gamme Bleu jacket, QR4,005. Oribe Rough Luxury Molding Wax, QR127; oribe.com. On Smith: Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane jacket, QR10,013, and shirt, QR3,459. Bumble and Bumble Styling Lotion, QR102; bumbleandbumble.com. On Vile: Burberry Prorsum coat, QR6,536. Dior Homme shirt, QR2,002, and necklace, QR2,476; dior.com. His own ring. L’Oréal Paris Txt It Tousle Waves Spray, QR18; cvs.com.
Evian Christ The British D.J. and producer had just finished college when he got word that Kanye West wanted him to supply tracks for his ‘‘Yeezus’’ album. ‘‘At that point, I’d never even really been in a studio before,’’ says the 24-year-old, whose real name is Joshua Leary. Since then, a collaboration with the artist Matthew Barney and strong buzz for his EP, ‘‘Waterfall,’’ have only strengthened his profile. ‘‘I made my entire first mixtape with one speaker,’’ Leary says. ‘‘It’s nice having two now.’’
‘‘It’s been a long two years,’’ the DIIV frontman says, sounding wearier than his age would allow. The 28-year-old singer released his first collection of shoe-gazing dream-pop songs, ‘‘Oshin,’’ in 2012, and was selected by the fashion designer Hedi Slimane for last fall’s Saint Laurent Paris campaign before being arrested for drug possession while driving through upstate New York with his live-in girlfriend, the singer Sky Ferreira. Now, Smith sounds contrite as he attempts to channel those experiences into another album. ‘‘Life informs art,’’ he says. ‘‘And then the circle continues.’’
Kurt Vile The 34-year-old singer-songwriter has a reputation as a stoner’s musician, a fact alluded to in the title of last year’s critically acclaimed album ‘‘Wakin on a Pretty Daze.” But Vile largely ditched the pot smoking before the births of his two daughters, and his sprawling, psychedelic folk tunes are as much the result of an impressive musical I.Q. — he cites Randy Newman and Neil Young as influences — as they are of an experimental past. Still, the Philadelphia native admits his spacey demeanor can come in handy when family life threatens to take him away from his band, the Violators, for too long. ‘‘I can always kind of tap in and out of consciousness,’’ he says. ‘‘So I use that to my advantage.’’ 54
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GROOMING FOR HONOR TITUS AND ZACHARY COLE SMITH: BRENT LAVETT FOR LAVETTANDCHIN.COM. GROOMING FOR EVIAN CHRIST AND KURT VILE: TAMAS TUZES USING ORIBE HAIR CARE. STYLIST’S ASSISTANTS: ALEX TUDELA, RENE FRAGOSO.
Zachary Cole Smith
Wanderlust
Let’s Get Lost By chasing a gonzo new adventure every summer, the viral filmmaker Casey Neistat and his son, Owen, embrace the unfamiliar and forge a closer bond. BY JESSE ASHLOCK PHOTOGRAPHS BY CASEY NEISTAT
LEAP INTO THE UNKNOWN Casey Neistat, jumping after a wildlife tour in Namibia, will likely end up in the Guinness Book of World Records in a category that doesn’t even exist yet. His son, Owen, is more reserved.
FAR IN THE DISTANCE, a tiny figure stands atop a sand dune rising higher
than many skyscrapers, waving his arms. ‘‘He looks like every lost-in-thedesert movie ever made,’’ says Casey Neistat, snapping away with an enormous Canon outfitted with a telephoto lens. Neistat, 32, directs and stars in online ad campaigns for clients like Nike and Mercedes, and in YouTube shorts that get millions of views. The subject in his viewfinder is his 15-yearold son, Owen, who in a few days will begin his sophomore year of high school in Connecticut. Each summer, they embark on a grand adventure together. That’s what has brought them to Sossusvlei, Namibia, an otherworldly place where giant dunes rise over a wide salt plain dotted with groups of springbok, oryx and ostriches. Having already climbed the dunes that tourists generally climb, Owen has gone on to the dune behind them, where there are no footprints. Like his dad, he enjoys going places he’s not supposed to be. ‘‘O.K., that is Owen,’’ Casey narrates, shooting video. ‘‘He just made it up to the apex of that dune.’’ Casey pans along the landscape. ‘‘And this is how far he walked.’’ Owen makes it back down, flushed and exuberant, his Nikes
full of sand. ‘‘Well done, boy!’’ Casey exclaims. ‘‘That is definitely a Facebook-profile-picture-worthy photo.’’ Silhouetted against the desert sky, the two cut different figures. Casey, a triathlete, is muscular and tightly coiled, with a showman’s face that’s all planes and angles; in another era, he might have been a Borscht Belt entertainer. Owen, a runner, is taller than his dad and still gangly, with a natural sweetness about him. But the resemblance is impossible to miss. Casey says, with obvious satisfaction, that they’re often mistaken for brothers, and sometimes it’s easy to forget just who is the parent and who is the kid. Casey is the one who has braces. (They’re gold.) He’s also the one in perpetual motion, while Owen will let you know when he’s tired. Casey becomes anxious when he goes too long without checking Instagram or Twitter or Facebook. Owen uses his phone mainly to prepare for the school year by listening to textbooks on tape. And Casey takes all the pictures. He looks for photogenic locations where he can put his camera on a tripod and set the timer for a father-son selfie. Still, in many ways, Owen — who lives with his mom during the week and at Casey’s apartment in Manhattan or at May-June 2014
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Wanderlust
his house in New London, Conn., on the weekends — is a typical teenager. He loves Starbucks, American Eagle and the mall. He gets bored easily. Casey, meanwhile, is fond of pronouncing paternal nuggets of wisdom (‘‘Let a boy cry — don’t coddle him’’) and tales of great deeds (‘‘I’ve charmed my way out of Middle Eastern prisons’’). The kidlike qualities in Casey are the same ones that have made him such a successful adult, despite having dropped out of high school, and then having a child at 17. ‘‘He was born with an extra battery,’’ says Max Joseph, the co-host of MTV’s ‘‘Catfish: The TV Show’’ and a frequent collaborator. ‘‘It’s what you need to have to be a professional athlete.’’ When Casey was growing up in New London, his mother taught him that possessions were more valuable than travel, because they lasted forever. After a trip to Paris at 18, his first outside the United States, he concluded that she was wrong, and decided to dedicate his life to having experiences — a favorite word of his. ‘‘He’s trying to find the ultimate adventure,’’ says the creative director Andy Spade, who hired Casey and his brother Van to make short films for the fashion lines he was overseeing, Kate Spade and Jack Spade, and later co-produced a feature film with Casey. ‘‘He’ll end up in the Guinness Book of World Records for a category that doesn’t even exist yet.’’ In Owen, Casey has found a willing confrere. ‘‘The only guy I’ve encountered who enjoys flying as much as I do?’’ he asks. ‘‘This guy.’’ When Owen was little, Casey sometimes scraped together extra money working as a dishwasher to buy lessons at a flight school. ‘‘Owen would have his lunchbox,’’ he says. ‘‘He’d be eating an apple in the back.’’ Their first real trip was a package deal to the Bahamas when Owen was 4. As Owen got older, the trips — to Paris, St. Barts, Central America — got more elaborate. Casey’s career was taking off. He went to work for the artist Tom Sachs, running his studio and making short films with Van for Sachs’s exhibitions. In 2003 the duo ventured out on their own as the Neistat Brothers. One of their first projects was ‘‘iPod’s Dirty Secret,’’ an Internet short that called out Apple for its user-unfriendly battery-replacement policy. It garnered national attention, earning the brothers a reputation as Internet provocateurs, as well as commercial clients. Spade remembers marveling at Casey’s precociousness. ‘‘His son would have the idea to make a monster movie on the beach, and he’d just make it. ’’ That monster movie appears in the first episode of ‘‘The Neistat Brothers,’’ a 2010 HBO series that showcased the brothers’ homemade, autobiographical style. It was not a success. The brothers split after it aired and now speak infrequently. Casey went solo, making more shorts in the Neistat Brothers vein and taking on increasingly remunerative commercial work. ‘‘Van was my best friend and partner in crime,’’ Casey says. ‘‘When he left, Owen became that.’’ Two years ago, the father and son trekked through the Andes for five days to Machu Picchu. Last year, they rode motorcycles through Vietnam. This year, Casey says, ‘‘I wanted to show the kid Africa Africa. That thing where you get to do something for the first time? I try to make all our trips that.’’
It’s easy to forget just who is the parent and who is the kid. Casey becomes anxious when he goes too long without checking Instagram or Twitter or Facebook. Owen uses his phone mainly to listen to textbooks on tape.
THE KULALA DESERT LODGE, a collection of thatched dwellings set in the
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN From top: Owen, left, and Casey taking a selfie in a chartered Cessna; Owen ascending one of the dunes of Sossusvlei, in the Namib Desert; the Neistats on a ridge over Namibia; another selfie of the pair having tea at the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town.
middle of a vast plain surrounded by mountains, makes an ideal vantage point. Sweeping vistas of grassland stretch in every direction, giving way to achingly blue skies. It’s possible to spend hours watching wildlife during the day and the Milky Way at night. But Owen isn’t impressed. It’s the second desert lodge of the trip, and he’s not enthused about going on another game tour and listening to the guide drone on about how to tell if an oryx is male or female. ‘‘I’d much rather be riding a motorcycle in the mud,’’ he grouses, while Casey checks his email on the lodge computer. The next day, the two fly in a Cessna to the coastal resort town of Swakopmund. The rest of their adventure is supposed to consist of activities like catamaraning and sand-surfing. But the following morning, in the lobby of the hotel, Casey says, ‘‘Owen had an idea that was kind of interesting, which was that we rent a car’’ to explore the country further, without the pilot or a driver. No cars are available, however, so Casey and
Owen huddle on a sofa with Casey’s laptop for a while, whispering conspiratorially. Finally, Casey looks up. ‘‘I think it’s about to get weird,’’ he says, ‘‘and possibly dangerous. I think we’re going to Zambia.’’ Owen’s face lights up in a grin. Casey had already visited Zambia in 2012 with Max Joseph, for Nike. According to Casey, they were supposed to make an Internet ad for the brand’s FuelBand fitness tracker that showed how regular people ‘‘make it count.’’ Instead, they traveled to 13 countries in 10 days — until their budget ran out — filming themselves making it count. They’d seen a picture on the Internet of the Devil’s Pool, a naturally occurring infinity pool at the top of Victoria Falls where you can swim safely without being swept over the edge. But when they arrived, they learned they couldn’t swim in the Devil’s Pool at that time of year. The moment Casey and Owen’s plane lands in Livingstone, Casey begins asking everyone he meets about the Devil’s Pool. On the way from the hotel to Victoria Falls National Park, the driver informs Casey that the pool can be reached this time of year, but discourages him from trying. ‘‘Every year, a few bodies go down on the Zambian side and wash up on the Zimbabwean side,’’ he explains. ‘‘Do they need visas for that?’’ Casey asks. If the driver gets the joke — or finds it unfunny — he doesn’t let on. In Victoria Falls National Park, Casey runs around consulting maps and asking uniformed personnel where the pool is. Even in the dry season, the falls stun the senses, forming a mile-wide, 355-foot-high liquid curtain that glides down into a long gorge, with a plume of spray rising at the western end to welcome the setting sun. One of the best views for Casey’s constant photos is from the Knife Edge Bridge, a mistenshrouded span suspended before the falls’ eastern side. There, Casey spots Kenneth, a local guide he had enlisted during his Nike trip. After a hug and an introduction to Owen, Kenneth assures Casey that he can arrange a visit to the elusive pool. The next morning, a tourism official tells Casey that the Devil’s Pool can only be visited by boat, and that trips are sold out. But Casey finds Kenneth near the gift shops inside the park entrance, and he makes good on his promise. Vinda, a guide with dreadlocks and bare feet, arrives to lead the way. He starts by striding past a sign that instructs visitors to go no farther, right into the shallows of the Zambezi. There is no path: The only way to get to the Devil’s Pool is to wade through the river and scramble over wet rocks. Vinda tells everyone to form an ‘‘African chain.’’ But Owen doesn’t want to hold hands, so everyone makes his own way. ‘‘See, Owen,’’ Casey says, so excited he’s almost vibrating. ‘‘Persistence and endurance will make you omnipotent.’’ He explains after a minute that he’s paraphrasing the ‘‘Tenacity Prayer,’’ popularized by the McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc. Upriver, an elephant trumpets. The Devil’s Pool is in sight. But to get to it, everyone has to swim through open water against a swift current. Vinda leads the way on a kickboard. The guys clamber onto a rocky outcropping before jumping, one by one, into the pool. At its front is a slick basalt wall, with an inch or so of water passing over it to create the infinitypool effect. Once Casey and Owen reach it, Casey pulls out his iPhone in a LifeProof case and turns on the video recorder. ‘‘This is us,’’ he says. Then he raises it to show the abyss behind them. ‘‘Those are the falls.’’ An enterprising local balances on the precipice, shooting photos for tips. Casey poses on the very edge, as if he were going over, while Vinda and I hold his feet. When Owen’s turn comes, Casey insists that all three of us hold onto his son as he peers over Victoria Falls. ‘‘This is what I thought of when I heard we were going to Africa,’’ Owen exclaims afterward. For a rare moment, Casey is silent, basking in his son’s pleasure. And then it’s time to swim back through the river and climb over the rocks as quickly as possible, because the flight out of Livingstone is leaving soon. We arrive at the airport in our wet trunks. After the plane takes off, I turn around. Casey and Owen are seated a row behind me, both already passed out, their heads tilted slightly toward each other. Casey has on big studio headphones and sunglasses, his mouth open wide in sleep. Owen is wearing earbuds and a serene expression. You really could, right at this moment, mistake them for brothers.
GO THE DISTANCE Casey‘s Instagram photo of Nelson Mandela’s house in Johannesburg; a view of Victoria Falls from the Zambia side of the Zambezi River; Casey and Owen with Vinda, their tour guide, in the Devil’s Pool on the precipice of Victoria Falls; a father-and-son selfie on their flight from London to Cape Town, before visiting Namibia.
The only way to the Devil’s Pool that day is to wade through the river and scramble over wet rocks. Vinda tells everyone to form an ‘African chain.’ But Owen doesn’t want to hold hands, so everyone makes his own way.
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Arena Food Matters
Culture Klatch The Japanese artist Takashi Murakami has teamed up with a trio of Scandinavian coffee and design aficionados to open Bar Zingaro, the coolest new cafe in Tokyo. BY TOBY CECCHINI PHOTOGRAPHS BY KEIICHI NITTA
ON A SATURDAY NIGHT in early November, at the much-awaited
opening of Bar Zingaro in the Nakano Broadway mall in Tokyo, a group of earnest young movers in the city’s art and media worlds mixes with an equal mass of poly-accented gaijin, sipping bespoke cocktails and coffees pulled to order, waiting for the artist Takashi Murakami to arrive. At the bar, a woman from New Zealand gives an impromptu tasting of rare sakes. Nearby, an American surfer chats in Japanese with a curious figure in a wide-brimmed black hat and cape, who turns out to be a stringer for the magazine Monocle. Meanwhile, a blond guy behind the bar mutters orders in Nordictinged English as a group of Japanese baristas makes drinks. The crowd suddenly becomes a crush, with photographers pushing in front, as Murakami finally enters. The 52-year-old artist is, in fact, easily recognizable simply from his paintings, in which he frequently depicts himself in cartoon form, with his long hair in a topknot and wearing his ubiquitous oversize wire-rimmed specs. Making the rounds clutching a gin and tonic that seems to not get any smaller, Murakami is every bit the beatific master of ceremonies. This is his bar, and a longtime pet-dream, but it only came to be with the help of the most unlikely characters in the room: three hulking Norwegians, who seem to be quietly overseeing the show.
The bar/coffee shop is the latest addition to four minuscule satellite galleries on three different floors of the mall, which are collectively called Zingaro (‘‘gypsy’’ in Italian — Murakami has a similar space in Berlin). The artwork is a revolving curation of contemporary artists, ceramicists and illustrators. The locale is vintage Murakami, whose open affection for Japanese kitsch culture has always been a central theme of his work. His recruitment of Fuglen as consultants to design and furnish the spaces, then work their cocktail and coffee prestidigitation, was the canny stroke that gave the project its chemistry. Fuglen (‘‘the bird’’ in Norwegian) began as a revered coffee shop in Oslo dating back to the early 1960s. It was revived in 2008 by a couple of friends, the barista Einar Kleppe Holthe, 31, and the curator Peppe Trulsen, 43, who were joined two years later by the bartender Halvor Digernes, 33. Each contributed his forte to the collective. It quickly became a cult den for Scandinavian roast fans, cocktail mavens and amateur aficionados of Norwegian midcentury furnishings and crafts. Early on in their success, the three decided there were two places outside Norway where they would like to spend time: Tokyo and New York City. If this seems simplistic as a business plan, welcome to their world, where from a bystander’s perspective all things seemingly drop into place with silver linings attached. In 2007 Kleppe Holthe won the Norwegian Barista Championship and went on to compete at the World Barista Championship, held in Tokyo that year. ‘‘I was there for a month by myself mostly. I failed in the competition. So then I did a lot of checking out of Tokyo instead. I fell in love with the city and the
CAFE SOCIETY From left: Einar Kleppe Holthe, Peppe Trulsen and Halvor Digernes outside Fuglen, their original cafe in Tokyo, which first got Takashi Murakami’s attention; Bar Zingaro features vintage Norwegian furniture and objects, as well as works by Murakami.
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Food Matters
Arena
Murakami says that for him, establishing a bar has less to do with intake than with output, giving a berth to a particular scene and set, and feathering the nest that bred him. culture.’’ He left, he says, vowing to return someday for a more substantial stay. A few years later, a Japanese-Norwegian friend living in Oslo who had tried to make a go of a Norwegian restaurant based in his grandfather’s house in Tokyo, offered to lease the space. The three worked maniacally across months and time zones to open Fuglen in May 2012, transforming a demure corner spot in an emerging neighborhood of Shibuya into a fetching midcentury Norwegian living room, where on any given day or night a blend of creative Tokyoites and savvy foreigners takes quiet roost. The easy symbiosis between the Fuglen partners and their Japanese staff points to a shared mindset; the veneer of effortlessness belying a rigorous attention to detail. The coffee, naturally, is roasted and brewed strictly to the Scandinavian palate, a rarity even in this coffee-riddled town. The bartenders carve their large block-ice using Kama Asa knives with ‘‘Fuglen’’ hammered into the blade, and tend assiduously to minutiae like the ‘‘corn syrup’’ for the bourbon cocktail, which is made with fresh kerneled corn. Digernes’s libations, however, openly flout the overweening preciousness of upper-echelon Japanese bartending. One night when he came in to open Fuglen, late from a visit to the Kiuchi Brewery, he dumped his backpack and hand-scrawled a brief menu offering fresh yuzu he had found in a tree near Kiuchi. As the bar began to fill with the night’s curious, he set about cobbling together a drink, laughing and squinting as he dumped numerous nearmisses, until finally — to a round of applause — he had something the whole bar was immediately ordering. Murakami, whose main operating mode seems to be jovial insouciance tinged with a sly mischievousness, tells of the day he first entered Fuglen to approach them about starting a bar with him. ‘‘I went in and saw the entire world coming into Fuglen. I said, ‘I love you, I want to do a business with you!’ ’’ His professional entourage, sizing up these three scruffy, ebullient Norsemen, wasn’t so sure. ‘‘My lawyer says, ‘Wait a minute, looks like children!’ ’’ But Murakami prevailed, seeing — and perhaps sharing — both their obsessiveness in their craft and their goofy fecklessness. ‘‘I thought, We have the same kind of way to think, all
RAISING THE BAR Clockwise from far left: Murakami with his Norwegian pals at Bar Zingaro; at Fuglen, everything is for sale, including the Norwegian ceramics on the shelves; the brandy and gin punch served at Bar Zingaro on opening night.
creative people.’’ Kleppe Holthe concurs: ‘‘The Japanese, because of the culture of respect and organization, if you have your integrity in place, they vet you hard, then trust you totally. Takashi just vibed with us very naturally.’’ Murakami likened the difficulty of wrapping his head around the novelty of the lighter style of Scandinavian roast coffee to his initial confusion upon discovering the work of the American minimalist painter Robert Ryman: ‘‘First I say, this is not coffee? So sour and fruit!’’ But his palate and trust both grew as they hammered out a collaboration for Bar Zingaro that he described as 70 percent Fuglen and 30 percent his own ideas. Murakami says that for him, establishing a bar has less to do with intake than with output, giving a berth to a particular scene and set, and feathering the nest that bred him. ‘‘These galleries are for the young artists I see coming up in Japan, some who don’t have a place yet to show, some who are becoming known already.’’ Having secured Tokyo’s hearty embrace, Fuglen is now turning their sights, as promised, to New York. Trulsen has organized a show that highlights atavistic Norwegian designers and their work, which will come to the area in May. And Fuglen proper is being courted by various interests here (they’re loath to reveal more), specifically about establishing a beachhead in Brooklyn. At the close of the first night’s festivities, photographers are still hounding Murakami as he makes his way around the galleries. Ending up back at the bar, they ask him to pose with the Fuglen posse. He does his best to get his arms up and around the necks of the sprawling mountain of Vikings, eventually having to set his drink down, still nearly full, to get the photo snapped. ‘‘I don’t drink very much,’’ he says, grinning. ‘‘Occasionally a bit of umeshu, a taste of wine, a little gin and tonic. For health reasons, no more.’’ Then, raising an eyebrow, ‘‘But I like to taste!’’ May-June 2014
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Legacy
If These Walls Could Talk
HISTORICAL ACCURACY The Salon Doré, in the process of being restored in San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum, will look as it did to its original owner, the Duchess de La Trémoille.
The restoration of a storied French neo-Classical salon reveals as much about polite society as it does about high design. BY DAVID NETTO PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICHOLAS CALCOTT
AN EXTRAORDINARY SCENE has been playing out at San
Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum over the last year. Through a window installed into a temporary wall, conservators in lab coats can be viewed as they minister over the disassembled pieces of one of the finest examples of French neo-Classical interior architecture anywhere: the Salon Doré, originally constructed in 1781. The $2 million restoration of the roughly 25-square-foot room — four walls of gilded and light-gray-painted paneling — is now nearly complete; and when it is done, one of the most remarkable chapters in its rather eventful, nearly 250-year history will conclude as well. There are well-conceived examples of French period rooms in this country at the Getty in Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and, most notably, the Wrightsman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But the Salon Doré is different. The room will be presented by the curator Martin Chapman as a complete environment, furnished as it originally was when new, rather than simply as a backdrop for important objects. Used in the 18th century as a salon de compagnie — a receiving space for guests — it was specifically designed as what was essentially a stage for conversation conducted in a state of high alertness on small, leggy
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upright chairs arranged in a semicircle. There was no question of being offered a drink or told to make oneself comfortable, as in the basic rites of entertaining today. The idea of ‘‘comfort’’ did not enter the social life of the French aristocracy for almost another hundred years (when it did so in the form of the deeply tufted upholstery of Napoleon III). Like the plan of a church — with nave and side aisles laid out to support a liturgical program — a room of this sort was arranged to allow nobles higher in rank (and senior in age) to be received by the hostess and seated closest to the fire. New arrivals — who understood the protocols on sight — greeted the assemblage and took their position, or perhaps remained standing. In this room you were expected to know your place, sit up straight and converse like Molière. Neo-Classicism as a style made its real debut in the 1760s after several stillbirths. At first a chunky and awkward experiment in the resurrection of Greek and Roman forms, inspired by archeological discoveries like the temples of Paestum in southern Italy, it was equally a response to the relentless curves of the Baroque and Rococo that had been in style for decades. By the late 1770s, neoClassicism had evolved into the graceful iteration we see in the
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certain, but he was its first owner in the New World. While still in Paris, the Salon Doré was rescued from the demolition of the Hôtel d’Humières in 1905. This event attracted great attention at the time; after all the losses incurred by Haussmann’s urban reconstruction of the 1870s, one of the most important surviving 18th-century townhouses was being destroyed to construct an apartment building. (Many assume Paris has always appeared as it does today, but this was one of their Pennsylvania Station moments.) In looking at archives in the Rothschild country house Waddesdon Manor, where much of the other paneling from the Hôtel d’Humières now resides, architectural historian Bruno Pons discovered the Salon’s true origin in the long-vanished Hôtel de La Trémoille — which was demolished in 1877 to accommodate an extension of the Boulevard St.-Germain. So the Salon Doré escaped destruction in the Revolution of 1789, emerged unscathed from Haussmann’s boulevard-cutting swath of 1877 and was not damaged by the profiteering apartmenthouse developers of 1905 — twice faring better than the buildings that housed it. All before leaving for America, where it continued to move at least four more times. The room is not only a masterpiece, but a remarkable survivor. FAME AND FORTUNE Clockwise from top: the Salon Doré at the Hôtel d’Humières, circa 1905, used the room’s 18th-century paneling, but a more convivial style of decoration than the original design; the restored chandelier will be lit to create the illusion of dusk, the time of day when the room would have seen the most use; restorers in San Francisco labor over the Salon’s pieces.
Salon, and with its references to the classical world acquired a new and somewhat unanticipated meaning in the bargain: It gave form and image to democratic political ideals.
By the late 1770s, neo-Classicism had evolved into the graceful iteration we see in the Salon, and with its references to the classical world gave form and image to democratic political ideals.
HISTORICAL IMAGE: COURTESY OF SOCIÉTÉ D’HISTOIRE DU VIIÈME ARRONDISSEMENT.
This was the architecture Jefferson so loved when he lived in Paris as the United States ambassador in the late 1780s. He was fascinated by the Hôtel de Salm, which, in a curious twist of fate, was both the residence of the brother of the original owner of the Salon Doré and the prototype for the museum that now houses it. The fact that this architectural vocabulary was given its most perfect expression by a society that toyed with it as stage design for Bourbon court life — yet was about to be swept away by the very principles to which it paid homage — was an irony not yet manifest. The Salon is easy to recognize as a beautiful interior of arthistorical significance, but to fully appreciate its poetry, you also have to understand the journey it has made to end up in Northern California. The paneling was given to the Legion of Honor by Richard Rheem, a Bay Area manufacturer of HVAC equipment, in 1959. Rheem had bought it from the art dealership Duveen Brothers under the impression that it came from the Hôtel de Crillon — an important but entirely spurious provenance. Duveen had purchased it from the widow of Otto H. Kahn after the financier’s death in 1934. Kahn’s residential portfolio is legendary — he was, after all, the prototype for the Monopoly Man — and the room had been a jewel at the center of his house in New York, which still exists today as the Convent of the Sacred Heart girls’ school. How and from whom Kahn acquired the Salon Doré is not known for May-June 2014
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Arena Qatar Form and Fashion
Material Gain Richard Serra comes to Doha and, through his signature steel plates, tries to induce a new realm of artistic sensitivity. BY SINDHU NAIR
PHOTOGRAPHS BY WAQAS FARID
EPICENTER East-West/WestEast, Serra's sculpture at Al Zekreet makes this part of the desert a cultural meeting place.
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Form and Fashion
THE HORIZON was clouded with the dust that rose behind the convoy of Toyota Land Cruisers speeding to their destination. It was close to 5 o’clock in the evening and the sun shone in a final burst of colored magnificence as it made its downward descent. As the dust storm settled, minutes after the convoy came to a halt, the desert looked almost tranquil and serenely beautiful. We were at the point at Al Zekreet where the land meets the sea at two diagonally opposite ends. As we looked out to the other end of the peninsula, an apparition rose from the desert sands towering, it would seem, up to the skies. Blatantly loud and fierce, the man-made structure seemed to jolt us all out of the melancholy struck by the beauty of the setting sun. Standing still for a moment, gazing into the horizon and looking at the land in relation with the structure, everything seemed just right, almost as if the steel plates were meant to be there, at that exact spot. Tactile structure against loose, light sand. Man-made versus natural. Titled “East-West/West-East”, this sculpture is a landscape art commissioned from Richard Serra at the directive of HE Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani, Chairperson, of the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA). Dubbed the “Culture Queen” of the region, she is on an impulsive but educated acquisition drive for signature pieces, giving the art world a much-needed stimulus at a time when most European countries are under a self-imposed restraint. Amazed acceptance, grudging acknowledgment of the uniqueness of his work; that is the effect induced by this work by Richard Serra, considered by some to be the greatest living sculptor. Almost 60 km away from Doha, in the middle of the desert and set in a natural corridor formed by gypsum plateaus, East-West/West-East spans over a kilometer in length, and crosses the peninsula of the Brouq Nature Reserve connecting the waters of the Gulf. The sculpture consists of four steel plates measured by their relation to the topography. The plates, which rise to 14.7 meters and 16.7 meters above the ground, are on a level with each other; they are also on level to the gypsum plateaus on either side. The installation in the desert is not the only work by Serra that is on display, currently in Qatar. Serra has two shows going on, a retrospective at the QMA Gallery in the Katara cultural village, and a new work, Passage of Time, taking up the whole of the 5,000 square meters of the Al Riwaq exhibition space on the Corniche. Doha is not new to Serra’s work; in December 2011, he erected a tower, 7, on a specially-built pier next to I M Pei’s Museum of Islamic Art. But Serra’s work did not meet with instant recognition, nor did he earn fawning followers in this desert country. For one, the country is on the threshold of a cultural awakening, and there is a marked, though slow, acceptance of art beyond the norm. An earlier work exhibited at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, by Algerian-born French artist Adel Abdessemed, raised protests from various segments of the community. A controversial Zinedine Zidane headbutt statue by the same artist was even removed from where it was being displayed by QMA (at the Corniche) after a strong crusade against the art piece through social media. As with any form of art, the Serra pieces also received their bit of controversy. Some wanted to know the sum the country had spent on such “frivolity”, while others contemplated losing the sanctity of the space; some wondered about the sculpture which had no carving; and a louder voice also asked about the absence of Qatari artist in the art revolution pioneered by the QMA. Serra is interested to hear what people make of his work. “You never know what the reaction will be. It is different in every context, every time. Sometimes you think you have made the most beautiful thing and then people hate it, and when you think people might hate your work, they appreciate it.” Ghufran, the Qatari driver who drove us to the location in a 4x4 with singlehanded expertise, looked questioningly at the structure and asked, “Is it here for a purpose? Is it a sample?” But he agreed, almost grudgingly, that the steel plates enhanced the beauty of the location. Artist Ala Younis, whose work was exhibited at Mathaf, in an exhibition titled “Tea with Nefertiti”, walked with one small group of journalists and invited guests at the launch of this new installation. She is pensive and hates to break the serenity of the moment. “It doesn’t matter whether you like it
CONTEXT From top: Anum Bashir has a fashion moment at 7, Serra's first installation in Doha; Richard Serra walks through the Passage of Time; Bashir at the same setting; another view of 7.
PHOTOS OF RICHARD SERRA AND THE PASSAGE OF TIME BY ROBERT ALTAMIRANO
‘What you find there is that every day the light changes, every day the wind changes, every day your relationship to the place changes.’
(Serra’s installation) or hate it,” she says. “What is important is what it is doing in this space? Fashion follower and blogger, Anum Bashir is making use of this moment to put herself in focus along with the works of some international and a few ingenious regional brands. Being part of this fashion-cum-art movement, Bashir is intent on finding ways to create space for fashion within Qatar’s ever expanding art landscape. “I’m trying to instigate creative dialogue by merging the two,” she says. “Richard Serra’s work is so remarkable that it almost seemed necessary to shoot it from an editorial standpoint.” Art needn’t always come with history; history can be created with art and Qatar seems to be intent on writing its art destiny. Serra, in his quest for a space that would work for his installation, picked this location for its unique topography. “What you find there is that every day the light changes, every day the wind changes, every day your relationship to the place changes. It’s not the kind of desert that has soft sand; it’s a really hard, rough, rugged desert. It is a gypsum-plateaued desert with two very distinct sea levels — with these enormous gypsum plateaus.” While identifying the location took some time, that was not the case for his installation, for “the land almost dictated what had to be done.” “The piece is directly on an axis with east to west, so I called it ‘EastWest’; also because I am a Westerner working in the East, and it kind of multiplies that joining of both propositions,” he says. While the installation was being fixed, Serra remembers that there were almost no trespassers or any inquisitive locals to disturb the installation team at work. “Now the site has a direction, a demarcation,” he says. “You can see the land through art.” His other exhibit, Passage of Time, is on display at Al Riwaq, a large space created for non-permanent exhibits. It earlier housed the Damien Hirst exhibition, Relics, with its medley of shocking exhibits, which incidentally was also the “most visited” exhibition organized by the QMA. In the area where beheaded cows, mosquitoes aplenty, and a gigantic shark shared exhibit space, almost in a study of contrast sit wavy steel plates, the “Passage of Time” by Serra. “I have been making spaces like this, passages, curves and enclosures. I am very much involved in space in relation with time. I use steel but my content is really space and time,” says Serra. “The space that you walk in is as much internal, much more enclosed and much more disorienting. So when you follow the passage, the plates lean in one way and then you turn and then it still leans that way, when you reach the center, it goes vertical and then the plates turn and go the other way. If you go from the other end, it is exactly similar. The piece is almost bilaterally symmetrical,” he says. The passage, while being extremely thoughtprovoking, especially the orientation that it follows, also evokes a sense of disorientation. Explaining this, Serra says, “When you are walking in space that is enclosed, and when you look up and see that the plates are moving faster, as they are set at different width at the top, one tends to walk faster. It is first 7 feet wide, then 11 feet and then it goes to being 7 feet wide again. It is almost like the space within is bellowing out and then enclosing you again.” Serra believes that the medium of work for an artist is a very personal decision. “I never thought I would work with steel, but the selection of material is always very personal. It is part of your sensitivity,” he says. Space and time are indeed the focus in Serra’s work, and it is most significant at the East-West/West-East which according to Serra has made him happier than any other work he has done. “I am very grateful to the Father Emir, HH Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani who walked around the area with me. He told me that when he was a little boy, his uncles would bring him out there — it was where the antelope gathered. He was very nostalgic. So he recognized that the place had a specific aura. It moved me that he was moved by it.” Serra hopes that the space will continue to move others as it has affected him. “I hope that now it will be a cultural spot, a place where people meet. I think that I am making a cultural contribution to the country. The pieces are of a certain height and thickness where I think they will last; the piece has an implied timelessness, and I think it is seen as that.”
ART IN FASHION From top to bottom: The plates are placed in relation to topography; Bashir flaunts a bag by Natalie Trad in an abhaya by UAE label Slouchyz as the sculpture behind takes all the attention; visitors gaze at Passage of Time at the launch; the plates curve in and out at different widths at the top and gives a sense of disorientation.
‘I am very much involved in space in relation with time,’ says Serra. ‘I use steel but my content is really space and time.’
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Arena Qatar Collectors' Piece
Museum of Memories Sheikh Faisal bin Qassim has been collecting since childhood and has the largest and the most richest museum collection in the region; but among all the valuable pieces he owns, the ones that matter most are those that remind him of his family. BY SINDHU NAIR & EZDHAR ALI PHOTOGRAPHS BY SAJIN ORMA
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‘I remember the source and the story behind each of my pieces, ’ says Sheikh Faisal. ‘I may forget some details of my commercial transitions, but not of my artefacts.’ given to me by my father and a watch that my uncle gifted me,” says Sheikh Faisal. His school books are still on display at the big museum, he says, though, “people don’t seem to care much for them.” His love of history was also molded by his father who used to take the young Faisal and his brothers along on visits to Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Greece and Italy and tour the museums in these countries. Among this expansive array of collectibles (at both the new and the old museum), Sheikh Faisal remembers each one of his acquisitions and says quite categorically that each of his artefacts comes with a story; from its origin to the place where he bought it to the price agreed upon. “I remember the source and the story behind each of my pieces. I may forget some details of my commercial transitions, but not of my artefacts. I particularly care for carpets out of devotion FAMILY ASSETS Clockwise from left: Sheikh Faisal started collecting early in his life and the tents of his forefathers hung on the walls above are important pieces of his collection; carpet collection was a passion of his fathers'; this Persian wool rug from the early 20th century, is from Iran and takes the design of first silver dollar; Sheikh Faisal remembers each piece from his collection through the stories, people and the history.
LONG BEFORE Qatar began to actively pursue museum
development, there was one privately-owned museum among the few places to visit in a country that did not have many tourist attractions. Fourteen kilometers west of Doha, near the town of Al Shahaniya, the Sheikh Faisal Bin Qassim Al Thani Museum sits in a desert fortress with stone turrets and arched wooden doors. Spread across 15 halls that hold an estimated 15,000 (and still growing) artifacts, the museum is the private collection of Sheikh Faisal bin Qassim Al Thani, owner of Al Faisal Holding, a Doha-based conglomerate that operates 50 businesses in nine industries. The owner of a collection of luxury hotels in Doha and six other countries, Sheikh Faisal is surprisingly a simple, approachable man who still answers calls from journalists, gives them an honest assessment of his commitments, and finally keeps his promise to sit down for a chat about the developments in his latest collection. Amid his busy schedule of meeting visiting dignitaries and being constantly pursued by his Man Friday to read pages of documents and sign dozens of cheques, Sheikh Faisal takes us through the story of his penchant for collecting. The location for his new collection is the sixth floor of City Tower, part of the Renaissance Hotel complex in West Bay, a hotel that is owned by Sheikh Faisal himself. Occupying an estimated area of 6,500 — 8000 square meters, the museum displays close to 300 carpets from Iran, Turkey, India and Egypt. Qataris are known to be very private people who allow only close friends into their fold and they have a tradition of collecting. Not surprisingly, Sheikh Faisal’s interest in collecting started early when he safely stored away everything given to him by his family members, particularly his father and uncles. “I always held on to my school notebooks and toys. I preserved a defective camera
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Collectors' Piece
come from countries including Iran, Turkey, India, and Egypt. Sheikh Faisal calls himself a rare-items collector. “The way I see it, it is better to share with the public this huge collection of rare items instead of keeping them in stores.” Remembering his early acquisitions, Sheikh Faisal says he found it difficult to isolate one particular piece from boxes, where he stored his mounting stock of collectibles when he wanted to show a piece to his colleagues. “At the beginning I collected many swords, daggers, and even important correspondence. After that I thought of dedicating a small space in my majlis to display some of those artefacts. Then this idea evolved into a full-fledged museum.” Like most collectors, Sheikh Faisal too faces challenges regarding storage and transportation of the artefacts. “Transportation, safeguarding and delivery of items, and their protection, have been a challenge since the beginning.” The sheikh is also not without his quirks. He reveals his early hobby of rearing wild animals. “I had tigers, lions and deer. I went to the desert and brought some rare varieties of gazelles, but when I grew up everything changed with the change in attitudes,” he says. He shares one story of one of the carpets he owns, “Someone had bought a carpet for £20,000 thinking it was only a decorative frame, not realizing that it was really a rare antique. I bought it from him for £70,000. Now I have offers to sell it for £700,000 which I am turning down.”
‘I thought of dedicating a small space in my majlis to display some of those artefacts,’ says Sheikh Faisal. ‘Then this idea evolved into a fullfledged museum.’ to my father who loved carpets and swords; and I have a dedicated room for Qatari traditional arms,” he reveals. But there are some in this carpet museum that are more valuable to him than the rest of his collection put together. The 70-plus-years tent made in camel hair might not be in the best condition but the memories the artefact evokes hold much value for this millionaire who values relationships and holds on to traditional values. “I have two such tents, one from my grandfather’s house and the other belonging to his father. I had this since I was 10 years old,” he says, pointing to the two tents hanging close to the entrance of the carpet exhibition, signifying their value to the owner. Sheikh Faisal has his ethics too when it comes to collecting; he says he would never buy an antique specific to a place. He explains, “I have many acquisitions. They are artefacts and not antiques. I always say antiques derive their importance from their natural locations. So I am against owning an antique such as an Egyptian pharaoh or a Grecian statue because these things are more beautiful in their natural places where they can better reflect the history of the place.” But when it comes to relics from religion, he breaks his own rule, though for a noble reason. “I have some Arab relics representing the eras before the advent of Islam, and I keep them to educate the younger generations about the simplicity of their ancestors who worshiped idols made of mud. I have some fossils, antique manuscripts and carpets from that important period,” says Sheikh Faisal. If you think that the museum artefacts are numerous, his assistants who help in sourcing and identifying important items point out that there are more carpets stored elsewhere, and those on display are just the rare ones from the 16th and 17th century; some of them are knotted with gold, silver and silk threads and
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EXPENSIVE HOBBY Clockwise from top: Panaromic view of the collection; this particular carpet depicts all 50 of the most famous personalities from Moses to Napolean the 1st; this carpet is from the 1st quarter of the 19th century; this carpet collection is a growing one, space is reserved for new carpets that are being catalogued and checked.
FROM TOP: JACKIE NICKERSON; KARIM SADLI; ANDREW MOORE.
May-June, 2014
The Case of the Accidental Superstar Page 68 Erwin Wurm’s sculptors create an odd harmony Page 72 In Praise of Small Museums Page 88
Polo Ralph Lauren suit, $1,895, and shirt, $125; ralphlauren.com. 72
BY SARAH LYALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY KARIM SADLI STYLED BY JOE M C KENNA
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH WAS IN mid-mono-
logue, holding forth on the dangers of the surveillance society, when it suddenly occurred to him that he was meant to be promoting his latest movie, whatever that was (he has been in a lot of them lately). He talks superfast, so that when he paused, the effect was of a train driver slamming on the emergency brakes. ‘‘Why does anyone want to know my opinions?’’ he asked. ‘‘I’m not interested in reading my opinions.’’ He has no idea. There are people out there these days who so love to hear Cumberbatch
talk — who so love to watch Cumberbatch exist — that they do not care what he does, as long as they get to observe him doing it. Somehow, along a career consisting of highly interesting but generally non-megastar-making roles (most recently, the lead in the BBC series ‘‘Sherlock’’; Khan, the wrathful villain in the movie ‘‘Star Trek Into Darkness’’; the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, in ‘‘The Fifth Estate’’ and the voice of Smaug, the very bad-tempered dragon in the latest ‘‘Hobbit’’ movie), Cumberbatch has progressed from be-
ing everyone’s favorite secret crush to one of the most talked-about actors in Hollywood. His celebrity manifests itself in unexpected ways. When Cumberbatch, who is 37, appeared on ‘‘Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,’’ Fallon noted that more people were waiting in the standby line than for any other guest that year. He was reportedly tweeted about 700,000 times in 2013. Last fall, he appeared on the cover of Time’s international edition. Although he has not been a romantic lead in any big films, and although he says he looks like ‘‘Sid from May-June 2014
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ing themselves fans, such as when Ted Danson saw him through a crowd of stars at a preawards party recently and began shouting ‘‘Sherlock!’’ A few days earlier, he had wrapped his most recent movie, a biopic of the British cryptographer Alan Turing. Cumberbatch talked for a long time about the tragedy of Turing’s life and about what has been a series of very intense roles, heavy on iconic fictional characters and real people. ‘‘I am so ready to play a really dumb character,’’ he said. He was born in London, to parents who were in the business — the actors Wanda Ventham and Timothy Carlton — and had his first substantial part in high school at Harrow, the famous boys’ boarding school that is the Yale to Eton’s Harvard. ‘‘I played the queen of the fairies,’’ he said. (That would be Titania in ‘‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’’) Later, when he performed in ‘‘As You Like It,’’ an old alumnus watching the play apparently pronounced him ‘‘the best Rosalind since Vanessa Redgrave.’’ He went to the University of Manchester and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and then slid pretty easily into work; so far he has appeared in more than 30 films and doz-
five minutes. (He came back a couple of weeks later, and the non-phlegmatic people were gaping in the halls.) In the street we had to move quickly, because crowds form if Cumberbatch stands still for too long. In the hotel, we positioned ourselves behind a pillar, but people spotted him anyway (when they asked for autographs, they invariably asked on behalf of their teenage children). As good a sport as Cumberbatch is, he sometimes finds it a bit too much. Filming ‘‘Sherlock’’ last year in Cardiff, Wales, he had an awkward interlude when he had to walk from his trailer to his car wearing a costume that, had anyone seen it, might have become a major plot spoiler. When he failed in his efforts to get a particularly persistent paparazzo not to photograph him, Cumberbatch shrouded himself in a hoodie (‘‘I looked like Kenny in ‘South Park’ ’’) and held up a sign he had hastily fashioned that said: ‘‘Go photograph Egypt and show the world something important.’’ The move was lampooned by the British newspapers, particularly when, to the delight of hundreds of fans massed on the street in London for another shoot, Cumberbatch did it again, this time with signs printed with provocative questions about democracy, government intrusion, journalism and the battle between liberty and security in the war on terror. ‘‘These are very complex questions and very difficult arguments to be very clear about, so to ask the questions is to stimulate the debate,’’ he explained. He has not done it since, though, he said, ‘‘I felt really strongly about it at the time.’’ In New York he was visiting his friend Zachary Quinto, who acted alongside him in ‘‘Star Trek,’’ seeing some movies, going to some museums and trying to keep a low profile. He is currently unattached, and is gearing up for his next batch of work. One question that has excited ‘‘Star Trek’’ fans is whether his character, who all but stole the last film, will appear in the next one. There is certainly that possibility: He ended the film frozen in a pod and stored away in space. (‘‘That was a stupid thing to do,’’ Cumberbatch said, referring to Starfleet Command. ‘‘They should have just blown me up.’’) He pulled a cap over his head and prepared again to withstand the public. He says he has a way of negotiating big-city crowds: ‘‘If you pick a point far behind them they perceive you as not seeing them, and you’re the obstacle they have to get around.’’ For a moment, he sounded positively Sherlockian. ‘‘There is a way of just shadowing through,’’ he continued. ‘‘The higher the walls, the more dark the windows, the bigger the sunglasses — the more people are going to look. The greatest disguise is learning how to be invisible in plain sight.’’
When he recently failed in his efforts to get a particularly persistent paparazzo not to photograph him, Cumberbatch shrouded himself in a hoodie and held up a sign he had hastily fashioned that said: ‘Go photograph Egypt and show the world something important.’
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ens of television, radio and theater productions. But it was his title performance in ‘‘Sherlock,’’ which debuted in 2010, that propelled him to a new league. Part of it has to do with the witty, knowing script, with its clever allusions to the old stories; and part of it has to do with Cumberbatch’s sublime portrayal of the odd, brilliant, infuriating, charismatic detective. Sherlock-the-character has a fanatic following, with fans who debate every Cumberbatchian movement and every plot twist with the fervor of grassy-knoll conspiracy buffs. Cumberbatch takes care to remind them that though they might well love Sherlock, Sherlock would never love them back. ‘‘I always make it clear that people who become obsessed with him or the idea of him — he’d destroy you,’’ Cumberbatch said cheerfully. ‘‘He is an absolute bastard.’’ Over a follow-up breakfast at the Algonquin Hotel in New York a few weeks later, I started to see what his public life is like. We walked there after a quick trip to my office, in which we spoke to no one but which precipitated three breathless ‘‘Is that who I think it is?’’ emails from normally phlegmatic colleagues in under
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‘Ice Age’ ’’ and although he once declared that ‘‘I always seem to be cast as slightly wan, ethereal, troubled intellectuals or physically ambivalent bad lovers,’’ there are numerous websites devoted to the subject of his romantic prowess, e.g., ‘‘Benedict Cumberbatch — Fantastic Lover,’’ a compendium of clips set to Marvin Gaye’s ‘‘Let’s Get It On,’’ that has been viewed more than 490,000 times on YouTube. (These are mostly posted by his army of female fans, who call themselves ‘‘Cumberbitches’’ and who use the hashtag ‘‘Cumberwatch’’ when they tweet about his activities.) His appeal is manifest, yet hard to pin down. His name is odd, Hogwartsian, suggesting both an Elizabethan actor and a baker whose products are made with rustic ingredients no one has heard of. Tall and lean, he has an other-century look about him, with his long, narrow face, his mop of crazy hair (he keeps it shorter off-duty) and bright, far-apart, almond-shaped blue eyes that on-screen can play intelligent, ardent, manic or insane, depending on the job. In ‘‘Sherlock,’’ he looks like the sort of person who has a stratospheric I.Q. and an abysmal E.Q. but is dead sexy with it; at the same time, if you were to remark on his resemblance to an otter, you would not be the only one. When he sat down with a cup of coffee in a Camden pub last November and began to discuss electronic surveillance, the government, his favorite movies, his career, the rabidity of ‘‘Sherlock’’ fans and how coffee affects him (it makes him talk even faster), Cumberbatch had just come off an extraordinary run of work. ‘‘The Fifth Estate,’’ in which he perfectly captures the slippery nature of Julian Assange — free-speech hero, treacherous colleague, possible megalomaniac — had just come out. Over the next two months, three more of his films would be released: ‘‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,’’ in which he gets to intone things like ‘‘I am death’’ in a creepy dragon voice; ‘‘12 Years a Slave,’’ in which he plays a sympathetic slave-owner; and ‘‘August: Osage County,’’ in which he has a small role in an ensemble of superstars like Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep. The Time cover had just hit the newsstands, and Cumberbatch was slightly freaked out. ‘‘It’s one of the more bizarre levels of success,’’ he said. At first he thought it was fake. ‘‘Someone sent me a photograph of it and I thought, ‘Some fan has got hold of a photo and done one of those neat apps where they impose your head on something,’ ’’ he said. Also, he had had an exciting experience on a British talk show, when Harrison Ford, a fellow guest, emerged from his taciturnity to announce that he loved him as Holmes. This has been happening to Cumberbatch a lot lately, fellow actors declar-
Polo Ralph Lauren suit and shirt. Cumberbatch’s own Omega watch. Hair: Paul Hanlon at Julian Watson Agency. Grooming: Hannah Murray at Art and Commerce. May-June 2014
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THE SHAPE SHIFTER The dissonant humor and beauty of the sculptor Erwin Wurm’s biomorphic riffs are also present in his home, where blue-chip art, grand architectural space and his own whimsical work create an odd harmony.
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BY MAURA EGAN PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREW MOORE
OR THE 2011 VENICE Biennale, the Austrian artist
Erwin Wurm reconstructed his suburban childhood home but put it on a diet, slimming it down to the width of roughly one meter. His parents’ bedroom featured a long bed, the kitchen came equipped with a tiny stove and sink, and the bathroom, with its tiny toilet, was covered in a 1960s-style psychedelic wallpaper. Most visitors could only navigate through parts of the house by turning sideways. The effect was a feeling of claustrophobia. Like much of Wurm’s work, ‘‘Narrow House’’ is about the personal, the physical and the political. For Wurm, the piece was a reaction to growing up during the ’50s and ’60s in a postwar, post-Nazi society. ‘‘It was so rigid,’’ says the 59-year-old artist, who was raised by a policeman father and a stay-at-home mother. ‘‘There
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A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY The artist Erwin Wurm’s Austrian estate features a 12th-century castle, a flock of Zackel sheep as well as one of his own pieces, ‘‘Fat House,’’ 2003.
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was only one program on the TV and you weren’t allowed to have long hair. I wanted to wear these orange socks so badly but my school wouldn’t allow me.’’ These days, Wurm lives on a rather impressive spread in a small village 40 minutes northwest of Vienna. Schloss Limberg’s centerpiece is a 12th-century manse surrounded by a cluster of barns and stables that Wurm has transformed into studios and offices for his work and his team of about a half-dozen assistants. ‘‘I added that hill over there,’’ Wurm says. He points to a green mound that rises behind his ‘‘Fat House,’’ a marshmallow-like structure where his flock of sheep takes refuge during the colder months. ‘‘The town was upset with me adding it on the property so I said it was an art piece. It’s called ‘The Sleeping Venus.’ ’’ Wurm’s humor is a subtle blend of quirk and deadpan. The estate, where he lives with his French graphic designer wife and their 3-year-old daughter (he has two older sons from his first marriage), had been occupied by various aristocratic families until the last count, who had no heirs, gifted it to the church. When Wurm bought it eight years ago, the building was in a fairly derelict state — the main rooms had been carved up into apartments and, as Wurm recalls, ‘‘there were lots of brown tile.’’ So he set about opening up rooms and stripping down layers, which in turn revealed an elegant, arched window; scenic mural paintings; even a lion sculpture. ‘‘This place was built like a fortress so there are all of these hidden stairwells and secret rooms,’’ Wurm explains as we walk through a labyrinth of halls to get to the main living room,
which features one of his installations, a wall sheathed in pink wool, with two odd sleeves dangling from it. Clothing and fabric have always been primary materials in Wurm’s work. When he applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he wanted to study painting but wasn’t accepted into the program and was sent to study sculpture instead. ‘‘It became an investigation into what sculpture can mean,’’ Wurm says. ‘‘And when I was starting out, I didn’t have a lot of money so I had to rely on 78
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OBJECT LESSONS Clockwise from left: an assistant in the studio; Wurm’s Obama chocolate figures from 2013; the living room, with his ‘‘Knitted Wall Pullover,’’ ‘‘Strick’’ chairs, both from 2011, as well as a sculpture, ‘‘Psycho 7,’’ 2010. Opposite: Wurm in the kitchen with his dog Ali Baba and pieces he’s collected, like a 1,000-year-old sandstone work from Kandahar, Afghanistan, (behind left) and a 7th-century Chinese head.
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everyday materials. Clothing was cheap and available.’’ (In the early ’90s, he famously created a series from another readily available material: dust.) Wurm would layer himself in clothes to ‘‘add volume’’ and then strip off layers to create a different shape. ‘‘It’s like those weight-loss commercials with the ‘before’ and ‘after’ images,’’ he says. But rather than some kind of artschool stunt, Wurm was attempting to explore how society judges people by their body shapes. ‘‘We view fat people as lazy, poor white trash and slim people as active, organized and successful.’’ For another project, he donned a variety of sweaters, pulled them over to obscure his face and then contorted himself into absurd positions. (They would later become the basis for a series of headless, Dr. Seuss-like sculptures.) Clothing shapes our bodies, but it also shapes our notion of how we see ourselves. It serves as the border between us and the world, a protective armor. ‘‘As a sculptor, I’m interested in this idea of skin as a boundary,’’ says Wurm, who made a series of faceless figures in hoodies, like the British ‘‘soccer hooligans.’’
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CCORDING TO WURM, sculpture has always been
a fluid concept, so for his ‘‘One Minute Sculptures’’ series, he posed or instructed other people to pose with everyday items: A woman sits precariously on top of a pole, another lies down with a suitcase on top of her, a man squeezes himself under a chair. The 60-second juxtapositions are funny one-liners come to life, but they’re also discomfiting and surreal. ‘‘Erwin is a sculptor of thought,’’ the gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac says. ‘‘It’s humor, instinct and irritation brought into the physical form.’’ In 2003, Wurm’s ‘‘One Minute Sculptures’’ earned him international fame when the director Mark Romanek used the series as the basis for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ‘‘Can’t Stop’’ video. In it, the band members put buckets on their heads, stick markers in their nostrils and twirl trash cans in the air. ‘‘I agreed to let them use my idea with one condition — that at the end of the video, I was credited
LIVING ARRANGEMENTS In a study, the artist mixes his own pieces, like the figure ‘‘Telekinetischer Masturbator,’’ 2009 (above), with works like Andy Warhol’s ‘‘Jackie,’’ from the 1970s, a small Alighiero Boetti collage from the 1980s, and a Gerrit Rietveld Zig-Zag chair. Right: gherkins have figured prominently in Wurm’s art, including this ‘‘Gurke’’ piece from 2011.
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as being the source of the inspiration,’’ Wurm says. It’s a dynamic Pop Art video, an obstacle course of pratfalls and slapstick. ‘‘MTV was my biggest advertiser ever.’’ Over the last decade, as he has grown more successful, the scale of Wurm’s work has become more ambitious. In 2000, he created his first ‘‘Fat Car’’: an Alfa Romeo that he plumped up with Styrofoam and resin. The fattened, anthropomorphic automobile looks like something straight out of the Pixar studio. ‘‘It has a technological system and
A COLORFUL LIFE Clockwise from top left: a Renaissance-era sculpture and an original painted door from the same period in one of Wurm’s studies; sketches tacked up in his studio; his sculpture ‘‘Pumpkin (Philosopher),’’ 2008, stands in a downstairs hallway. Opposite: many works, like ‘‘Big Coat,’’ 2010, are scattered around the property.
a biological one,’’ he says. Though the piece may put a smile on your face, Wurm doesn’t think it’s so humorous. He’s poking fun at society’s value system, our need for big, shiny toys. But not every work is charged with some serious or sinister message, or at least not one that Wurm is always ready to offer. In one of the barns, an assistant is working on a sculpture made of sausagelike elements, while just outside stands one of Wurm’s large gherkin sculptures. Why a sausage? Why a pickle? I ask. ‘‘There’s not always a why. . . . ’’ he lightly chastises me. And perhaps the way he deals with his success in the art world — his work commands six-figure prices, he exhibits all over the world — is to not always look for a reason. At his home, mixed in with the Serge Mouille lamps and Prouvé chairs, there are works by Alex Katz, Joseph Beuys, Alighiero Boetti and Pablo Picasso. There are also older pieces like a Christ figure from the Renaissance period as well as a print of Albrecht Dürer’s ‘‘Melancholia,’’ depicting a woman with her head in her hands, plagued by her own thoughts. Wurm gazes wistfully at the image. There is a bit of sadness, a frustration, in Wurm’s work — the artist trying to get across that there’s something not right with the world. But as he casts a glance around his own surroundings, he seems cautiously optimistic. ‘‘It’s nice to be able to have all of this. To be able to give it to my children. What am I going to do? Leave it for the church?’’ Erwin Wurm’s ‘‘Synthesa’’ is on view through April 19 at Lehmann Maupin’s Chelsea location, New York. May-June 2014
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LONDON SE8 3JF
ALONG THE EDGE OF THE RIVER THAMES, FINELY CRAFTED WORK CLOTHES WORN WITH SUBTLE INSOUCIANCE ARE A REMINDER OF THE PAST AND A GLIMPSE OF THE FUTURE. PHOTOGRAPHS BY KARIM SADLI STYLED BY JOE M C KENNA
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Dior Homme shirt, QR10,558; diorhomme .com. Prada pants, QR2,348; prada. com. Bottega Veneta belt (worn throughout, sold with pants), QR3,714. Eytys shoes (worn throughout), QR837; eytys.com.
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Bottega Veneta shirt, QR5,097. Opposite: Yohji Yamamoto jacket, QR8,956; yohjiyamamoto .co.jp. Louis Vuitton shirt, QR2,275; louisvuitton .com. Prada pants, QR3,422.
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Calvin Klein Collection shirt, QR3,623. Prada pants, QR2,348. Opposite: Sacai cardigan, QR3,779; mrporter. com. Junya Watanabe Man shirt, QR1,638; Comme des Garรงons. 89
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Giorgio Armani suit, QR9,630, and sweater, QR3,185. Opposite: Dries Van Noten jacket, QR4,478; Antwerp. Calvin Klein Collection shirt, QR3,623. Prada pants, QR2,348. Models: John Whiles and Paul Barges/Ford Homme. Hair by Matt Mulhall at Streeters. Grooming by Sally Branka at Julian Watson Agency. Casting by Ashley Brokaw.
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MY FAVORITE MUSEUMS tend to be
SMALL MUSEUMS In the age of mega-institutions and competitive building, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk pays homage to the more personal places, like his own Museum of Innocence, whose character and content evoke a deeper experience. PHOTOGRAPHS BY JACKIE NICKERSON TEXT TRANSLATED BY EKIN OKLAP
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small, the kind that showcase the inventiveness and the life stories of private individuals. Though I admire national museums like the Louvre or the British Museum, when I’m traveling and whenever I set foot in a new city, the first places I rush to see are not these institutions that fill me with a sense of the power of the state and of the history of its people, but those that will allow me to experience the private world and the vision of a passionate individual. I have so much respect for the efforts of those creative people who devoted the final decades of their lives to the task of turning their homes and their studios into museums for the public to visit after their deaths. These small museums are usually hidden on side streets just outside the center of large Western cities. They have the power to make us rediscover a feeling that the big national museums, looking more and more like fun-filled shopping malls with each passing day, can no longer make us feel, and that we have begun to forget. Museums must not confine themselves to showing us pictures and objects from the past; they must also convey the ambiance of the lost time from which those objects have come to us. And this can only happen through personal stories. The newly reopened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, for example, is a dazzling demonstration of the sophistication of Dutch culture and collecting, and of the creativity of contemporary museum design. But only places like the small and equally innovative Anne Frank House can be like novels in their ability to make our hearts beat faster with the emotional depth of a personal story. When we visit larger, grander museums, it is always with a commentary, a historical explanation running in the backs of our minds. But small private museums are more open to individual stories. When I was little, I had no interest in museums. At the time, museums in Istanbul tended to look like cheerless government offices designed to exhibit and preserve archaeological artifacts, and the leftover splendors of the Ottoman era. These were boring places, little more than storerooms. During the 1990s, around the time when my books began to get published in the West, the first places I went to on my travels outside Istanbul were major museums like the Louvre, the British Museum, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and the State Hermitage. These massive and highly symbolic institutions did, of course, convey a sense of the creative energy and the wealth of history behind them. But it was only in the smaller museums that I was able to find the fragile histories of individual human beings, to experience the pleasures of that depth of meaning that results from the connection between objects and personal dramas and to feel that metaphysical sense of time that museums must be able to convey. THERE IS ALSO A POLITICAL SIDE
to the matter. Turning the Louvre from a private residence of the Bourbon royalty to a national museum for the people of France was a liberating transformation, both from a cultural and from a political point of view. This transformation had a democratic aspect, not unlike the move from epic histories describing the feats of kings to novels focusing on the lives of ordinary people. But in the more than 200 years that have passed since the Louvre’s conversion into a museum, these large state museums have turned from catalysts for greater freedom and democratization to tourist destinations acting as symbols of state and national power. The massive, Louvre-like state museums that are being set up, at great expense, in non-Western cities like Beijing and Abu Dhabi, where individual rights and freedom of thought are often suppressed, do nothing to nurture the efforts of local artists and individuals. Instead, these monumental new structures seem to crush the area around them, overwhelming the nearby neighborhoods and the city itself, and acting as smokescreens for the crimes of authoritarian regimes. The economic growth that we have witnessed in non-Western countries over the past 20 years has brought with it the formation of a middle class. In order to experience the personal stories that come from within these emerging, modern middle classes, what we need are not huge state museums, but small and innovative museums focusing on individuals. The ingenious developments we’ve seen in museums, in regard to curating and architecture over the past 20 years, can turn small museums into wonderful tools through which to investigate and express our shared humanity.
A MAN OBSESSED Orhan Pamuk in front of 4,213 stubbed-out cigarettes, a display at the Museum of Innocence, the writer‘s physical manifestation of his novel of the same name. The cigarette butts represent those collected by Kemal, the protagonist in the novel, and smoked by Fusun, the young woman he loved.
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PLOT TWIST A spiral staircase designed by the architect Albert Lafon, on the second floor of Gustave Moreau‘s home, is flanked by the artist‘s own paintings. Opposite: the walls of the Moreau‘s bedroom are lined with family portraits, including one of Moreau by Edgar Degas.
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Gustave Moreau Museum, Paris
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USTAVE MOREAU (1826-1898) was an early starter among
those who make plans to turn their homes into exhibitions of their own possessions. At 36, upon the death of his father, Moreau wrote across the bottom of a sketch: ‘‘I think of my death and of the fate of all those works and compositions I have taken such trouble to collect. Separately they will perish, but taken as a whole they give an idea of what kind of an artist I was and in what kind of surroundings I chose to live my dreams.’’ What makes this museum so unique is this sense of wholeness, that particular atmosphere that is generated from the coming together of Moreau’s paintings with his sketches, his collection and his worldly possessions. This atmosphere draws me to the museum every time I go to Paris — more than his own Delacroix-inspired illustrations of mythological, historical and biblical scenes. On the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one will look twice at what is perhaps one of Moreau’s most striking works, ‘‘Oedipus and the Sphinx,’’ displayed there a few steps away from the van Goghs and the Cézannes. But here in Moreau’s own museum, you might find that you can’t get enough of his many preparatory sketches for ‘‘Oedipus and the Sphinx’’ and countless other drawings. In the 1930s, both André Breton and André Malraux used to go to the Gustave Moreau Museum for a taste of its particular ambiance. Upon entering the rooms on the museum’s first floor, where the painter lived with his mother and architect father for many years,
we immediately become aware of a singular sense of isolation from the outside world. The writer J. K. Huysmans, known for his decadent sympathies, wrote that Moreau was ‘‘a mystic locked up at the heart of Paris.’’ The walls are cluttered with framed paintings, photographs, family portraits, knickknacks and souvenirs, just as in the museum of Mario Praz, who was a fan of Moreau’s. It is the same mood as that which characterized Napoleon III’s oppressive Second Empire. Moreau spent his last years fine-tuning his plans for turning the rooms of his home into a museum, and he also brought in copies of paintings, the originals of which were displayed in other museums. Climbing the impressive spiral staircase up to the new floors that were added when the house was turned into a museum, we reach the biggest exhibition room and experience a phenomenon that is also apparent in many of Moreau’s paintings: the illusion that there is light pouring out of people and objects. The joys of smaller, personal museums don’t end with the transformation of space into time, but also allow the opportunity of seeing artifacts and paintings in the context in which they were created and that brings forth their true significance. ‘‘Now that Gustave Moreau is dead, his house is to become a museum,’’ Proust wrote, upon hearing the news of the bequest by the painter he had so frequently mentioned in his novels. ‘‘This is as it should be. Even during his lifetime a poet’s house is never quite a home.’’ May-June 2014
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Bagatti Valsecchi Museum, Milan
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HEN READING ‘‘War and Peace,’’ we tend to
forget that it is a historical novel. Tolstoy wrote the story slightly more than 50 years after its starting date of 1805, relying on other authors’ memoirs and history books. Part of the reason why we hardly notice the 50-year gap while reading the book is that Tolstoy was very much in his element when writing scenes set in ballrooms, in the drawing rooms of the aristocracy and inside people’s homes. We could say the same about the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum in the center of Milan, between Via Gesù and Via Santo Spirito. This museum took on its current appearance of a 15th- or 16th-century Renaissance mansion during the 1880s, when two wealthy aristocratic brothers decided to furnish and decorate their family home in the style of a Renaissance prince’s mansion. The brothers Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi, who continued to live in the mansion with their families throughout this process of transformation, didn’t merely collect Renaissance-period paintings, sculptures, tables, doors and swords, but also found and put to use all sorts of objects, from scissors and nutcrackers to candleholders, cutlery and stools. The rooms are a testament to the truth that what makes a museum unforgettable is not just the collection it houses, but also the ambiance envisaged by those who set it up.
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ROLE PLAY In the 19th century, two brothers chose to turn their home into a Renaissanceera mansion complete with art including paintings, objects and armor (shown above).
Frederic Marès Museum, Barcelona
T PRETTY LITTLE THINGS Among the many collections housed in the Frederic Marès Museum are (clockwise from top left) late-19th-century dolls, early-20thcentury Spanish picture cards from matchboxes, glass bell jars filled with shells and late-19th-century European postcards.
HE CATALAN sculptor
Frederic Marès (18931991) was a truly extraordinary collector. The ground and first floors of his museum in Barcelona hold his collection of religious sculptures from old Spanish churches, which Marès assembled during the first half of the 20th century, and which I will not claim to understand. I would recommend that visitors go up as quickly as possible to the second and third floors, though, which hold a vast and stunning array of day-today paraphernalia and which,
in today’s academic discourse, would be described as a ‘‘poetic museum.’’ Throughout his lifetime, Marès assembled incredible collections of a wide variety of objects from daily life in Spain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including playing cards, hand-held fans, scissors, matches, cigarette holders, snuffboxes and pipes. Displayed in thick-set wooden frames like cabinets of curiosities, the assembled objects — various restaurant menus, Christmas cards, photographs, postcards, views
of Barcelona, miniature portraits, bouquet holders, lighters, ashtrays, calling cards — result in a stunning creation that Marès aptly termed a ‘‘sentimental museum.’’ The unique aura created by these everyday objects and the cabinets in which they are displayed hints to a future where the efforts of passionate, visionary collectors could, through the medium of small museums, preserve the richness, the beauty and the complexity of the way we live today.
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PERIOD ROOM Counterclockwise from right: 15th-century biblical paintings in the Rockox House Museum‘s small parlor; in the large parlor a 17th-century art cabinet, painted with scenes from Ovid‘s ‘‘Metamorphoses,’’ fronts a collection of Baroque paintings; Opposite: the former reception room features Renaissance paintings by the artists Jan Massijs (center) and Jan Sanders van Hemessen, and a wall made to look like the original gilded leather.
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Rockox House Museum, Antwerp
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ICOLAAS ROCKOX (1560-1640) came from a
wealthy Flemish family, and was a patron of the arts and a collector of artworks and coins. He was mayor of Antwerp for a time, as well as a humanist and a friend of Peter Paul Rubens, who painted portraits of him as he was posing in his house among his collections of objects, paintings and furniture. When I entered this house museum for the first time, what affected me most was the strange sense of another time. I could hear the noises of the city, the sound of a tram turning a corner and children in a nearby primary school, but at the same time, as my gaze would travel over the objects, the paintings, the furniture, the rooms, I would also feel as if I were in a completely different time. His tiny, wonderful museum, situated on a side street a stone’s throw from Antwerp’s main square, was not, of course, conceived as such during Rockox’s lifetime. But today, this well-curated space, displaying a passionate art lover’s collection in his own home, among the objects of his day-to-day life, his ornaments and his furniture, provides visitors with a deep insight into a particular culture and era, and into the private world of a man who happened to live during that period. May-June 2014
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Mario Praz Museum, Rome
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F YOU HAPPEN to be walking
along Via Giuseppe Zanardelli in Rome, at a slight remove from the crowds of tourists in the Piazza Navona, you will come upon the Mario Praz Museum, which tends not to draw much attention from passersby, but which is a very special place that will surely figure prominently in the pages of any future book on the history of small museums. Mario Praz (1896-1982) was a historian of art and literature. Among literary scholars and art historians, he is best known for a book translated into English as ‘‘The Romantic Agony.’’ It is an erudite and sensible study of themes of death, sexual idiosyncrasy, Satanism, sadism and other horrors in romantic literature. In one passage Praz discusses ‘‘The Picture of Dorian Gray,’’ claiming that Oscar Wilde failed to construct an atmosphere of anguish in that novel.
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This is because in the middle of the book’s most horrifying passages, Wilde suddenly forgot about the plot and started to describe nearby objects — a pair of lemon-yellow gloves, for example, or a gold-latten matchbox. Praz sees this approach as decadent and superficial, and points out that the author’s main interest is ‘‘decorative.’’ Ironically, Praz’s other well-known work is titled ‘‘An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration.’’ This book is one of the best examples of the kinds of books that address the need to discover the ties that bind artists and thinkers to the places in which they live. Praz takes great pleasure in guiding us on an illustrated tour of the inner worlds of artists and writers, exploring the rooms and objects that surround them, and never failing to entertain us, to educate us and to arouse our curiosity.
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He does the same in his autobiography, ‘‘The House of Life.’’ What makes this book, which Edmund Wilson considered to be Praz’s masterpiece, so unique among autobiographies is that it doesn’t tell its story chronologically, but rather through the furniture and paintings that occupied the apartment where the author lived for 30 years. As the narrative moves from room to room, object to object, painting to painting, the book fills the reader with the same sort of pleasure that is to be had in a visit to a small museum guided by the sensitive and knowledgeable voice of the person who set up the museum in the first place. In 1969, Praz moved his home and his collection from the Palazzo Ricci to their current location on the third floor of the Palazzo Primoli, and spent the rest of his life painstakingly curating this apartment that he
envisaged as a posthumous museum. Those who have read his autobiography will know the sentimental value behind each object; they will remember the author’s love stories, his changing emotions and how he put together his collection, piece by piece. But this wonderful museum, this wunderkammer of sorts, has the same effect on those who are unaware of the author’s other works when they first set foot in the apartment, just as I was on my first visit. As we wander around its rooms, we are reminded that a museum is, above all, a place where paintings, objects, stories and sentiments engage in conversation with one another. In all museums, and not just small ones, the atmosphere that this conversation creates — the museum’s overall ambiance — is much more important than the individual significance of each object.
AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY Right: Mario Praz‘s daughter‘s bedroom, with an early 1900s Tuscan sleigh bed and crib. Below: the gallery with Adamo Tadolini‘s sculpture ‘‘Amore in Caccia,‘‘ circa 1840, beneath paintings by John Newbolt (top) and Giuseppe Bernardino Bison from the early 19th century. Opposite: Praz‘s study, with an early19th-century desk (right foreground), and a fortepiano and music stand from the early 1900s (left).
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The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul
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ETWEEN 1995 AND 2005, while visiting
some of the small museums I have been describing in this piece, I was also nursing a dream of setting up a small museum of my own. When I first began to work on the museum, I had the same enthusiasm of people who discover novels for the first time, and are so taken by this fantastic medium that they go on to read as many more novels as they can, dreaming all the while of the novel they will one day write themselves. Instinctively, I started collecting objects from day-to-day life in Istanbul in the 1960s and ’70s, buying them from flea markets or taking them from friends and acquaintances, with the excuse that ‘‘someday I might make a weird museum out of it.’’ An old DDT pump for mosquitoes, manufactured in Turkey; a meter like those that used to be near the left rear-view mirror of Istanbul taxis; a large, thick brass tap, of the kind I’d last seen in childhood; a locally made toy train set: All of these objects and more filled my office and my home, but while I boldly told my close friends that these things would become part of a museum collection one day, I still wasn’t entirely sure who or what should be the subject of this museum. 102
Those inventive museum-makers who spend the last years of their lives turning their homes into museums provided the answer. In 1999, I purchased an aged and frayed four-floored little 19th-century house on a back street near my office in the poor neighborhood of Cukurcuma. If this house was going to be a museum, then the imaginary people who lived in it should use the objects that were now piling up in my office. So I began to imagine a story that fit in with the street the house was on, with the neighborhood itself, and with the objects I had collected. Over the course of eight years, this story evolved into a novel, rewritten over and over again as I found new things to display in the museum, until it was finally published in Istanbul in 2008, and in English in 2009 under the title ‘‘The Museum of Innocence.’’ At first I picked up things from nearby markets and used bookstores because they caught my eye. But later, I saw in my mind’s eye a love story that would connect all of these objects. Kemal Basmaci, from the Nisantasi neighborhood where I was born and raised, and from a well-off family similar to mine, is soon to be married to the right kind of girl, until he falls in love with Fusun, a girl who wants to be a film
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star and who is the daughter of a distant relative who works as a seamstress. As this love turns into obsession, Kemal spends the next seven years visiting Fusun — who is married to someone else — and her family in their home, which he will eventually transform into a museum dedicated to her. The fundamental difference between the Museum of Innocence and the other small museums that have inspired me is the fact that, unlike Gustave Moreau or Mario Praz, the people whose objects and images we look at in this museum are not real, but fictional. I love to see visitors tricked by the reality of the imaginary characters’ slippers, playing cards, cutlery, ID cards and even their cigarette butts, to the extent that they forget that the characters in the novel are invented. And whether they’ve read the novel or not, I’m always glad to see visitors discovering firsthand that what is being displayed in this museum is not simply the plot of a novel, but a particular mood, an atmosphere created by objects. And when they ask me why I’ve set up this kind of museum, I respond that it is because I love small museums that bring out our individuality.
NOVEL APPROACH A few cabinets on the second floor of the Museum of Innocence, each containing objects that correspond to a chapter in Pamuk‘s book. Opposite: a display, titled ‘‘Istanbul‘s Streets, Bridges, Hills and Squares,‘‘ contains items from a scene in which the protagonist‘s lover first tells him stories of her abuse.
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Document
When it comes to souvenirs, passport stamps can be as effective as photographs. Such is the case, at least, for Charles Veley, 48, who took an extended break from the tech world in 2000 to become king of the niche pastime known as ‘‘competitive travel.’’ Heligoland? The Johnston Atoll? The island of Diego Garcia? Veley, one of the world’s most 104
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extreme travelers, has been to these places, as well as 826 other ‘‘countries, territories, autonomous regions, enclaves, geographically separated island groups and major states and provinces.’’ Here, the voracious wanderer — and owner of nine passports — shares a few of the pages from his never-ending pilgrimage. — LAURENCE LOWE
COURTESY OF CHARLES VELEY
The Long Way Round