It's the real thing

+There’s a lot of handwringing going on about the re-emergence of street riots in Northern Ireland. Tory ministers, who lied so much about there never having to be a post-Brexit border between the province and GB are now fretting that 12 year old Molotov cocktail throwers have picked up on this injustice, and are expressing their dissatisfaction with the Northern Ireland protocol in the only way they know how. Yes, of course there are a few other considerations to be taken into account, such as longstanding traditions of religious-aligned criminality. In truth, it probably doesn’t take much to strike a match in parts of Northern Ireland. When I once visited such world famous avenues like the Shankill Road, I saw the militarised police fortifications and the ‘peace’ walls, the painted curbstones, the gable end murals, the flags, the sinister looking black cabs, the decorated scaffold arches—none of this cultural war was eliminated by the peace process.  I doubt that we’re really heading back to the 1970s, but as we’ve seen it doesn’t take too much to kick off a good old fashioned round of rioting in Northern Ireland, and I’m quite sure that there will be ‘real’ nationalists and unionists figuring out how they can capitalise on this latest burst of trouble, assuming of course that they will have encouraged it in the first place. Brexit has left the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ looking decidedly dodgy and as I have blogged before I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing. The way that the ‘fringe’ countries attached to England have been marginalised, colonised and abused has a long history, and one feels that self-determination is the answer to England’s post-colonial malaise. The ‘United Kingdom’ is increasingly a fiction, and it perhaps wouldn’t do any harm in Northern Ireland particularly if the concept of self-determination came to fruition. What if there were two republics of Ireland (for the time being)?
 
+I turned art investigator today. This was prompted by the appearance in a local art auction of a picture by the Russian artist Nikolai Suetin (1897-1954), ‘Geometric Composition’ in pen, pencil and watercolour, estimated at between £300 and £400. Suetin studied with Chagall and Malevich (he of the black square) and can be said to be a significant figure in early Soviet art. So it looked underpriced, except of course for the words ‘attributed to’ which means you can’t know whether this picture was actually made by the hand of Suetin. A search on the web revealed an identical painting being offered in a Brussels auction in 2017 for between €2000—€3000 (update 9th April - it sold for 4,500). Enlarging both pictures on the screen, they really did look absolutely identical. I don’t know what the Brussels picture actually sold for, but given the plethora of forged Russian art of the modernist era, it seems hard to imagine that a genuine Suetin could be picked up for £300—hence the phrase ‘attributed to.’ Still, money aside I’d probably rather have a fake Suetin to errr . . .  a genuine Hockney.