The dollar sank to new lows in Europe February 27 following a series of dour reports on the U.S. economy & expectations that the Federal Reserve'll continue slashing interest rates. The 15-nation currency hit a series of highs, culminating at $1.5087 before falling back slightly to $1.5059 in afternoon trading, from the $1.4967 it bought in late trading in NY on February 26. In other trading, the British pound soared to $1.9971 before falling back to $1.9897, up from $1.9862 late Tuesday, while the dollar fell to 106.07 Japanese yen from 107.26 yen. With the rising pound, which is nearing $2 again, the muscular euro will not be kind to Americans visiting Europe. They'll have to pay more for a hotel room in Rome, for entrance to the Louvre in Paris, for chocolates in Belgium... The stronger euro makes shopping trips to the U.S. more appealing to Europeans. A higher euro makes goods from the euro-zone more expensive for customers abroad. And cuts into manufacturers' profits if they try to keep the American dollar price of products constant. In Paris, France's budget minister Eric Woerth called the euro "a handicap for our exports." The strong euro isn't expected to have any lasting effect on Germany's economy. Volker Treier said that they can't yet speak of a threshold of pain for German exporters. Howard Archer, the chief UK and European economist for Global Insight, said that the euro's strength isn't likely to weaken anytime soon, given that any worsening in U.S. interest-rate differentials dilutes a key support for the dollar. Archer said that growth prospects in the USA, coupled with its deficit, will exert a significant downward influence in the long term & cause some countries to shift more of their reserves from $ to other currencies, including the euro. He added that in addition, there is the very real possibility that several countries could switch a proportion of their foreign currency reserves out of U.S. dollars over time. Gary Thomson, an analyst with CMC Markets in London, said that markets'll be looking for clues from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke about more rate cuts in the USA when he addresses lawmakers Wednesday. Investors shrugged off a 1 percent rise in the producer price index this week. The data could effect rate decisions coming out of the Fed. Thompson said, referring to a string of dissapointing economic reports out of the USA on Tuesday that inflation (or perhaps more to the point stagflation ) remains a concern for the Fed as seen with yesterday's PPI data and as a result now that the most significant of psychological levels since parity has gone, we could see further downside pressures emerging for the greenback. The NY-based Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index fell to 75 in February from 87.3 in January Its lowest level since February 2003. Inflation number that was worse than expected, Standard & Poor's reported that USA home prices fell 8.9 percent in the last 3 months of 2007 from a year earlier, its sharpest drop ever. Those reports, along with remarks by Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn that appeared to diminish inflationary concerns & focused instead on greater near-term risk to growth were seen as a clue that more rate cuts may be forthcoming...


This room (54 x 14 x 6 m) is an extension of the temporary exhibition entitled «Art of Islam in the Belgian collections». Exhibit organized for the Cinquantenaire from 5 December 2003 to 25 April 2004, that had allowed the Royal Museums of Art & History to show their riches in this field. A survey carried out among the public & the guides of the educational and cultural services contributed to define precisely the concept of the room. In a splendid venue, designed by architects Jan Goots & Anne Pire, it hosts 340 of the 1200 objects from the collection. Not to mention the thousands of shards from Fustat & the nearly 200 weapons momentarily stored at the Musée de l'Armée...
Richness in textiles, carefully selected & restored for this event, cover a wide territory, from Southern Spain up to Northern India. The most famous ensemble is the one of the textiles, made up for the greater part from the donation of Isabella Errera (1869-1929). It includes the Egyptian textiles from the beginning of the Islamic period, a linen qamis dated between 1150 and 1230.
Also Andaluzan and Sicilian silks; Turk silk weaved cloths with a fragment from the çatma, probably the most ancient Turkish velour in the world; the Iranian textiles and those from central Asia, with its lampas that look like miniatures.





January, 2008


The great American musical of the early 21st century is an opera and it born in Britain. A convincing case for the rights to that title was made by the celestial "Jerry Springer: The Opera,” the notorious show from London about the transcendent within tabloid television, when it opened Tuesday night in a gorgeously sung concert version at Carnegie Hall for a sinfully short run of 2 performances. This remarkable work, which features a spectacularly inventive score by Richard Thomas, with a book and lyrics by Mr. Thomas and Stewart Lee, uncovers something grand within the small, squalid lives it portrays. Those who attended “Jerry Springer” (which stars an affectingly disaffected Harvey Keitel in the non-singing title role) expecting to snigger & hoot were not disappointed. There’s a guaranteed off-the-charts camp quotient in a show that sets the televised confessions of pole-dancing housewives, men with diaper fixations to music that often leans more toward Bach than Broadway. “Jerry Springer” is a work that features numbers with mock-liturgical titles like “Jerry Eleison.” The demonstrators who assembled outside the theater on Tuesday to protest a show that “blasphemes our Lord” would be disarmed if they ever got to see “Jerry Springer.” They would find all the ammunition they need to continue their vigil in the show’s otherworldly 2nd act. But from the moment the chorus files on, caroling in sweet harmony and sour language about the television host who fills their lives with wonder and excitement, you intuit that there’s much more than easy satire afoot. If there weren’t, the basic joke of combining sacred music and profane content would endure for only the length of a cabaret comedy sketch. That “Jerry Springer,” directed here by Jason Moore, only occasionally loses traction during its two-and-a-half-hour length is because it hears genuine beauty in the hunger for glory of the attention-starved souls it portrays. If the real “Jerry Springer Show” turns its rowdy, angry guests into objects of sneering sport, “Jerry Springer: The Opera” sees them as figures of passion, whose impulses, however base, translate into song that reaches for the stars. Let’s address the outrage factor that sparked a firestorm of protests in London after the show was aired on BBC television three years ago. Before that, “Jerry Springer: The Opera” had enjoyed a relatively untroubled existence of critical esteem & commercial success at the National Theater before transferring to the West End. The 1st act, which depicts the taping of a fairly typical Jerry Springer episode, bisexual cheating fiancé, diaper fetishist, woman with strip-club dreams, surely has more obscenities per minute than any work that ever played Carnegie Hall. It’s the second act, which takes Jerry straight to hell to arbitrate a debate between Jesus & the Devil, that has raised hackles high. In truth, the show, which was originally conceived as only one act, isn’t as strong in the second act as the 1st. An air of glib, giggly impiety (of an adolescent urge to see just how much it can get away with) is more clearly evident here, as Jesus (Lawrence Clayton) & Satan (David Bedella) squabble like potty-mouthed siblings & God (Luke Grooms) shows up to complain about how weary it is to be He, in an irresistible high-corn-pone... But even this half is infused with what is truly shocking about “Jerry Springer: The Opera”: an all-embracing empathy that finds the sublime in the squalid and vice versa. Mr. Thomas’s score, which blends, among other elements, Baroque oratorio, Gershwin-esque gospel & Samuel Barber-esque arias, unfailingly lends grandeur to lives contemptuously dismissed as “trailer trash” by Jerry’s warm-up man, also Mr. Bedella, who created the part in London & wears it with radiant naturalness. Backed by a small but sumptuous orchestra led by Stephen Oremus, both the chorus members, who function, among other things, as the Springer studio audience & a chorus line of tap-dancing Ku Klux Klansmen & soloists fully meet the music’s demands, even more than the performers I saw in London several years ago...

While they were denigrated at first, these days the French impressionists enjoy an unparalleled reputation. Influenced by the scientific discoveries of their day, particularly by Eugène Chevreul’s law of colour contrast, they juxtapose their colours in free brush strokes, paving the way for abstract art. The summits reached by Monet’s works almost make us forget the very lukewarm welcome his works received in 1874 at the first exhibition of impressionist paintings in Paris. He showed Impression, soleil levant (1872-73), a worwhich has since become emblematic of the movement, giving it its name. Over the last twenty years, Monet has accrued 262 million-plus sales, of which 23 results at more than USD 10 million! In June 2007 a Nymphéas painting reach a record, set at GBP 16,5 million Sotheby's London (USD 32.7 million).
So great is Monet's popularity that his works are highly sought-after in the British and American sales with no masterpieces to be found at auction in the other markets. The rare, relatively unspectacular paintings up for auction in France, for example, achieve no more than EUR 5 million. Recently a late work (1924-1925), Iris jaunes, from the collection of Alice Tériade, was sold by Arcurial Paris in October 2007 for EUR 2.8 million, or USD 4 million. Monet does not, however, hold the sale record for the movement. Auguste Renoir is well out in front with Au Moulin de la Galette, which sold for USD 71 million at the peak of the 1990 speculative bubble. After the collapse in the market in the early 1990s and the gradual pick up in confidence, Renoir was the focus of speculative interest. His painting Femmes dans un jardin, for example, has come up for auction on four occasions since 1993, of which two between 2006 and 2007. In June 2006, the work went for GBP 4.4 million, or USD 8.1 million at Sotheby’s London before being resold in New York in November 2007 when it achieved USD 10.9 million.
The lucrative capital gain realised by Paul Cezanne's magnificent Nature morte aux fruits et pot de gingembre was even more impressive: sold for the equivalent of USD 16.4 million in June 2000 (GBP 11 million, Christie’s), it was to bring the hammer down at close to USD 33 million just six years later (Sotheby's NY, November 2006)!
Edouard Manet’s record again illustrates the robust health of the market. It was set in May 2004 for Les courses au Bois de Boulogne, a very complex and forceful composition coming from the Whitney collection, which changed hands for USD 23.5 million (Sotheby’s NY). This spectacular sale supplanted the previous record equivalent to USD 22 million, held by La rue Mosnier aux drapeaux, 1878 and set during the speculative frenzy of the 1989 New York sales (Christie’s). Manet produced some 400 paintings which represent just 4% of the work sold at auction. Many of the works on the market are prints (91% of transaction volumes) which are affordable at less than EUR 5,000. A number of very fresh prints on chine appliqué paper can, however, achieve more than USD 10,000, particularly the portraits of Berthe Morisot, and some paper-based works go for more than USD 50,000! This was the case in October 2004 for one of the artist’s favourite subjects, Les courses, which achieved USD 80,000 at Sotheby’s NY. Paper-based works, drawings or prints by Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Armand Guillaumin, numerous Degas pastels and some photographs frequently come on the market. Degas pastels of dancers and women washing easily achieve more than USD 200,000 and sometimes more than USD 1 million: a Femme à sa toilette, for example, sold for GBP 1.5 million in June 2007 at Christie’s London (close to USD 3 million). On the other hand, simple charcoal sketches are affordable at under USD 20,000. Degas is the only impressionist to have really explored photography. His negatives are so rare and highly prized that some are more expensive than the drawings: in July 2004 Beaussant-Lefèvre presented five prints in Paris, of which one achieved five times its estimate, the bidding culminating at EUR 170,000!