Tim Cornwell's Arts Diary: Is Zaha really the Robert Mugabe of architecture?

Published on Wednesday 15 April 2009 19:41

ZAHA Hadid, the creator of Glasgow's striking but costly new transport museum, found herself being described rather uncharitably as the Robert Mugabe of architecture in a London debate on the power of good design.

Hadid, a global name in architecture and winner of the Pritzker Prize, was the chief target of an attack on "jewel-making" by so-called "starchitects", it was reported by the magazine Building Design.

Hadid, pictured, was invited to joint the debate at the Barbican on "Can Good Design Change the World", but pulled out at short notice. Cameron Sinclair, a co-founder of Architects for Humanity, said he was shocked to hear she had even been asked in the first place: "It's like asking Robert Mugabe if he'd like to speak about human rights.

"I don't mean to offend her, but what (she is] representing is a split in the industry. There is a street fight going on between arrogance or exuberance or excess and honesty."

The new museum on Glasgow's riverside, complete with Hadid's striking zigzag metal roof, is due to open in the spring of 2011. Two years ago its projected costs rose from around 50 million to 74 million, but appear to have been contained since then.

A little digging goes a long way

The "tattie howkers" who came to Scotland after the Irish Potato Famine – and in some cases continued coming into the 1970s – are celebrated in a new television documentary.

In a little known story of Scottish rural life, tens of thousands of Irish immigrants began arriving here after the 1840s famine, desperate for any kind of paying work, and settled for the back-breaking labour of lifting and bagging the yields from the potato fields of Scotland.

It was still common for groups – often including children from large families – to come over to work right up until the 1970s, but their story was little known beyond the potato fields themselves. Now the programme, Here Come the Tattie Howkers, will air on BBC2 Scotland on 20 April.

Edinburgh Film-maker Jennifer Stoddart, of Lichen Films, who made the programme with support from BBC Scotland and Scottish Screen, says: "People don't really know about the Irish tattie howkers, but they were the backbone of the Scottish potato industry."

Those featured range from Frank Quigley, a tattie howker who came over from Donegal in 1953 at the age 14 and now lives in Forfar, to retired Edinburgh parish priest Canon Michael Cassidy, dubbed the "tattie priest" for his work in the 60s and 70s with the Irish community in the Lothians.

Time to bag a arty bargain?

A CREDIT crunch, some art dealers suggest, is the time to shop for bargains by your favourite painters in the auction houses – if you've got cash to spare.

But what kind of capital gain would you make?

Merryn Somerset Webb, financial columnist and the editor-in-chief of MoneyWeek, suggests that the art market probably has "underperformed every other kind of investment", and reckons that sweet painting of fishing boats you bought for 500 will never make a penny.

The pattern of falling prices shows "the great contemporary art boom was just another bubble", she concludes. The Mei Moses index, which tracks auction results, plunged 35 per cent in the first quarter of 2009.

Sky-high prices for contemporary art, she continues, have been held up by investors who had leveraged their borrowings against their works of art and intervened in auctions to keep prices high.