Features

The sound in the Grand Hall is like the chattering of sparrows. Milling at the door, most wearing bright yellow T-shirts with plasticky decals so big they practically double the weight of the cotton, are the domino sharks, kibitzing and waiting their turn for the tables. Inside, at the far end, a dais is decorated with an ascending series of enormous silver trophies. And filling the centre of the room, fenced off by the rows of trestle tables behind which spectators sit and holler encouragement, are dozens and dozens of tables of people playing dominoes. That chattering noise is the sound of little plastic tablets being shuffled. We’re in the depths of the Jamaica Grande, a resort hotel in Ocho Rios on the north coast of Jamaica.

Exhibitions celebrating the nation’s art treasures have a habit of backfiring. Within 50 years of the great Art Treasures of the United Kingdom show held in Manchester in 1857, for instance, around half the works of art exhibited in this inadvertent shop window had been sold by their owners and had left the country. What strapped-for-cash country landowner, hit by the agricultural depression of the 1880s, could resist the newly bulging chequebooks of the German museums and the equally bulging American plutocrats? Not least when a loan to an exhibition had proved to the family that it could, after all, live without its greatest heirloom.

Since it has become clear that the Great Bubble of 1999–2000 is dead and not subject to resurrection, information technology has become boring. The limitless promise of a New Internet-Enabled Web-Architected Economy where Everything Is Different appears to have failed. In the United States, the voices that now command media attention range from that of Larry Ellison, founder and chairman of Oracle — who is acting out his stated belief that innovation in IT is over by threatening and launching hostile takeover bids to consolidate markets by liquidating competitors — to Nick Carr, senior editor of the Harvard Business Review, whose May 2003 article summarised its message in its title: ‘IT Doesn’t Matter’.

Some arty readers may have been concerned by the recent news about Monet and Rolf Harris. A substantial section of the population, it seems, is unable to tell the difference between them — some thinking that the Australian entertainer depicted the waterlilies at Giverny. Admittedly, both have or had grizzled beards, but even so the information is a disturbing straw in the wind. So, too, is the information that almost half the population haven’t a clue who painted the ‘Mona Lisa’ (though only one man thought it was by Leonardo DiCaprio). Is this finally the end for the grand old medium of painting? Will it be killed, not — as foretold long ago — by photography but by a general indifference?

The last days of the great essayist and dictionary-maker Dr Johnson were recorded in vivid detail by his biographer, James Boswell. Breathless and in pain, Johnson, aged 75, prepared himself for death with admirable courage. He had been plagued all his life by a fear of the dark, by the insomniac’s dread of not waking up; a dread made sharper by his fervent belief in Purgatory, Hell and the Day of Judgment. For Johnson, religion was no panacea and the prospect of death was appalling. And yet, with characteristic moral strength, he also contemplated his approaching demise with rational detachment. He asked his physician, Dr Brocklesby, to tell him plainly whether or not he would recover.