Saturday 28 June 2014

Solar PV With Emin's Unmade Bed


Well, I've added up my last four electricity bills (£1,446.26) and added up my last four cheques for the solar feed-in tariff (£1519.55) and I'm £73.29 in credit.

Allowing for the fact we have also used the best part of a 47kg bottle of Calor gas at £65 for the separate gas hob (and that was for more than a year), I'd say we're just above breaking even. That means the house costs nothing to heat or power, despite us having under-floor heating - which is not the most economic means of house heating by any means, but certainly the most comfortable.

Well, that's so long as we keep getting the £0.43 per KWh feed in tariff, which should be till I'm 84, if I live that long. I suppose we could always increase the input value in future years as solar PV arrays become more efficient and cheaper.

I hear Tracey Emin hopes her unmade bed will end up in a museum. I hope it ends up in a municipal dump. To quote Brian Sewell (with whom I am in total agreement): "Contemporary art has largely abandoned intellectual enquiry; it is subject to no formal discipline, nor has it a formal language; it is not concerned with aesthetic or empathic consequences for the viewer and, having no rules, has become unjudgeable self-indulgent by largely self-declared, but wretchedly ignorant and ill-educated practitioners. Art, in most manifestations supported by the public purse, is now neither the learned profession of the High Renaissance and the Age of Reason, nor the skill-based trade of the earlier 20th century - it has become the business of the circus freak managed by the circus barker."

That was from the coda to Sewell's Naked Emperors, an illuminating expose of the contemporary art scene - how it's run, who controls it and how the tax payer funds it. Marcel Duchamp didn't realise that his urinal heralded the collapse of art - it's art, Jim, but not as we know it.

Apparently UK fertility clinics are facing a shortage of sperm, which may force them to accept poorer quality sperm. They could try using Tracey Emin's unmade bed as a source...


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for bringing Mr. Sewell to my attention.
A critic who calls this windbag Hirst "fucking dreadful" can't be bad.