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Books and arts 85

the technical challenges, seemingly unaware of the purposes their work serves.

The book’s narrative quickens with the arrival in Moscow of Edward Snowden, the fugitive contractor from the National Security Agency who took a trove of spy secrets from America and its allies. The authors, hyper-vigilant about privacy and internet freedom, are his natural allies, yet he refuses to talk to them. They hint that Mr Snowden is a hypocrite, the pawn of a regime which practises the abuses which he and his supporters say are looming in America. The Kremlin’s security agencies, the authors note drily, have received new powers over the internet on the pretext of protecting Russians from the American menace. (Mr Snowden this month broke his silence and criticised Russia’s humanrights record.)

The outlook is mostly bleak. Mr Putin dismisses the internet as a CIA operation, and warns Russian internet companies that they cannot hide. Given Russia’s antiWestern mood, that signals an open season on, say, firms with foreigners on their boards. Western internet companies have proved spineless—Twitter, for example, blocked a Ukrainian political party’s account to appease the Kremlin.

This is not quite the Soviet Union, though. The Putin system, the authors write, relies mainly on intimidation, not outright coercion. It is built to “zero in on a few troublemakers”, but “in times of instability it is average users who spread the information, and the Putin system then breaks down.” Perhaps. But not yet. 7

John Lahr on the theatre

Bright lights

Joy Ride: Show People and Their Shows. By John Lahr. Norton; 592 pages; $29.95. Bloomsbury; £30

“THEATRE,” observes John Lahr, a longtime critic for the New Yorker and the author of “Joy Ride”, is “an artisa-

nal industry in a technological age.” Every performance is di erent, each one a new alchemical product of the players, their lines and the audience. The e ect is like a dance, writes Mr Lahr: the tune stays the same but the moves are subject to whim and mood, and the spectators, like all good partners, are alert and on their toes. The dance ends when the music stops, preserved as memory, if at all.

It is the job of the theatre critic to try to capture this ephemera in words. This has been Mr Lahr’s life’s work. Raised in dusty dressing-rooms, playing among the “costumes and props” while his father per-1

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2 formed as an actor and comedian, he was perhaps fated to be bewitched by the stage. Mr Lahr went on to manage theatres and write for them, too (he won a Tony for his work on “Elaine Stritch at Liberty”), which has given his criticism a rare humility. He appreciates the sweat behind the thrills, the way actors “turn themselves inside out” to deliver the “carnal wallop” of a live performance. In this world of fleeting gifts, Mr Lahr’s work for the New Yorker, where he has been contributing since 1992, o ers something of lasting value.

The strongest pieces in “Joy Ride” are the profiles. Mr Lahr patiently mines the essence of his subjects—playwrights, direc- tors—with the a ection of a fan, the insight of a confidant and the authorial flair of an experienced critic. The e ect is often delicious. He discovers, for example, that David Mamet’s ear for rhythmic, cruel dialogue evolved out of a childhood spent defending himself against the vicious verbal lacerations of his parents. In response to the letters he received complaining about the “language” in his plays, Mr Mamet sent a form letter in the 1980s that read: “Too bad, you big crybaby.”

Tony Kushner comes across as an endearing mess of machinegun wit, thin skin, “wackadoo hair” (in the words of one director) and anxious energy. Wallace Shawn roams New York in a similar disguise as “a fumbling, somewhat timid schlub”. Yet the man who remains best known for his brief, stellar scenes in “The Princess Bride” is actually “one of American theatre’s finest prose stylists and most subversive playwrights”, writes Mr Lahr. Arthur Miller wrote the first act of “Death of a Salesman” in one day, at the age of 33 (“I was the stenographer,” he later wrote.) On the eve of the play’s 50th-anniversary revival on Broadway, he told Mr Lahr, “I think now that [Elia] Kazan [the play’s original director] had it right from the beginning. He said, ‘It’s a love story.’ ”

Plenty of others are anointed by Mr Lahr’s pen, including Sir Nicholas Hytner, former artistic director of the National Theatre in London; Susan Stroman, a rare director “capable of mounting a professional musical,” and August Wilson, whose success as a playwright “almost single-hand- edly broke down the wall for other black artists”. Al Pacino tries to explain to him why Mike Nichols was the “greatest” director he has ever worked with: “He doesn’t say anything, and yet he does.”

Mr Lahr saves some of his warmest thoughts for Harold Pinter, whose “The Homecoming” taught him about life, language and dramatic storytelling. “Before the play,” he writes, “I thought theatre was about the spoken; after, I understood the eloquence of the unspoken.” This revelation spurred a lifetime of listening closely for what is left unsaid. His discoveries are a delight to read. 7

Modern art from the 1960s and 1970s

Colour me beautiful

Pop Art at 50

BERNARD RANCILLAC’S “At Last, a Silhouette Slimmed to the Waist” (pictured) contains a clear visual pun. Painted in 1966 and set against bright green jungle, it shows a soldier plunging a Vietcong prisoner headfirst into a large water vessel. Pushing his boot down on his captive’s back, gripping his twisted leg, the soldier submerges the man to the waist. At the top of the canvas, floating above this scene, five women stretch and pose in bodyshaping lingerie. Labels point out their

slimming corsets.

The work is at the heart of “The World Goes Pop”, a new exhibition about the global dimensions of Pop Art that opens at Tate Modern in London on September17th. The painting imitates magazines’ juxtaposition of fashion and news reporting, and pulls them together tightly with the title. The work can be hung either way up, the reversible composition presenting each exhibitor with a di cult decision: highlight the horrors of the Vietnam war or go for the latest fashion fad?

The choice encapsulates the paradox that is Pop Art, a movement that adopted the aesthetic of commercial design and popular culture—with its clear figuration, distinct colour, neat outlines, bold text and humour—for its own ends. Every work can read as eye-candy or erudite criticism; it can show froth or fury or both.

The Economist September 12th 2015

“The World Goes Pop” addresses this dialectic. Bringing together 160 works from the 1960s and 1970s and from across the world, it contests the idea that Pop was merely an adoring reflection of consumer culture and places the political, purposeful side of the movement under the spotlight. Its geographical range also forces a reassessment of the idea that Pop Art radiated solely from a small nucleus of artists based in New York and London.

There are works here from Japan, the Soviet Union, Latin America, the Middle East and Europe. Barely any of the names frequently associated with it—Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Peter Blake—are included. Filling the colourful rooms instead is work that has never been shown in Britain, by artists whom most visitors will not have heard of (many of them, through ignorance or through active indi erence, did not even see themselves as part of a Pop Art movement).

Despite the diversity, a striking, playful aesthetic unifies the show. There are works that echo Warhol in their use of primary colours, brand logos and press photography. There are also the hard-edged lines, Ben-Day dots and comic-strip figures that frequent Lichtenstein’s work, and threedimensional collages similar to Blake’s.

But the messages that these artists seek to convey are various, a point made straight away by the work in the introductory room. Among them is Ushio Shinohara’s “Doll Festival”, a striking triptych, three metres wide, in which blank-faced figures in traditional Japanese dress surround a man in a black Stetson in a surreal, yet prescient, comment on the Americanisation of Japanese culture. There is Evelyne Axell’s “Valentine”, in which a zip runs down a sinuous, painted silhouette, in a provocative gesture of female sexuality unleashed. “Big Tears for Two, 1963”, by Erró, an Icelandic artist, transmutes Picasso’s “Weeping Woman” into a jaunty cartoon, looking to expose the myths behind image-making. Each represents a type of protest against the established norms. Passing through themed rooms with titles like Pop Politics, Pop at Home and Folk Pop, it becomes clear that, across the world, artists were using a particular visual vocabulary, learned from popular culture and commercial art, to give voice to political, personal and local concerns.

This is not a comprehensive exhibition; Pop was not always protest. A lot of it celebrated everyday culture. Tate deliberately underplays these frivolous dimensions—it chooses the Vietnam war, not the underwear models. But this is a timely reassessment, given that works of Pop Art have become astoundingly expensive commodities, representative—clichés even—of a powerful luxury market. By throwing light on the darker side of Pop, Tate reveals its hidden depths. 7

The Economist September 12th 2015

Markets

Open budget index

Only 24 countries have acceptable levels of budget transparency, according to the latest “open budget index” from the International Budget Partnership, an advocacy group. The index, which is based on 109 questions, measures the amount, level of detail, and timeliness of budget information that is publicly available in 102 countries. The remaining 78 countries (which account for 68% of the world’s population) provided “insu - cient” information; 17 of these provided scant or no budget information. Although transparency has improved since the last survey in 2012, thanks largely to improvements made by countries at the bottom of the index, the average score is still only 45 out of a maximum of 100.

Other markets

Sources: Markit; Thomson Reuters. *Total return index.

†Credit-default-swap spreads, basis points. §Sept 8th.

Indicators for more countries and additional series, go to: Economist.com/indicators

Economic and financial indicators 91

New Zealand

South Africa

United States

Brazil

France

Britain

Russia

Germany

Mexico

Spain

India

Turkey

Nigeria

Egypt

China

Source: International Budget Partnership

The Economist commodity-price index

Sources: Bloomberg; CME Group; Cotlook; Darmenn & Curl; FT; ICCO; ICO; ISO; Live Rice Index; LME; NZ Wool Services; Thompson Lloyd & Ewart; Thomson Reuters; Urner Barry; WSJ. *Provisional

†Non-food agriculturals.

The Economist September 12th 2015

what he modestly styled his “funny mishmash” of a career. It riled him that even after 25 years his internment barred him from a security clearance; it delighted him when the prime minister, Harold Wilson, in 1967 made him head of the same statistical o ce which had earlier rejected him. But his loyalty was to principles, not politicians: in 1970 his refusal—backed with the threat of resignation—to spread the impact of some costly aircraft purchases on the monthly trade figures helped lose Mr Wilson the election. Journalists and academics pored over his brainchild, an annual compendium called “Social Trends”; o - cial statistics, he insisted, were not just for o cialdom.

After serving two more prime ministers he left the civil service to run Rothschilds (though he felt he was “not a natural banker”, having no great interest in money). He became a director of this newspaper, a peer, and sat on countless committees— taking a “boringly, Germanically systematic” approach, as he put it, to the country’s problems. He also ran an Oxford college. It all suited him greatly, but his greatest de- light—and amazement—was that Britain made him, an outsider, chairman of the Royal Opera House.

That gave him the chance to see 2,000 performances, and also a platform to attack a British failing even worse than snobbery: philistinism. How was it possible, he asked despairingly, that the boss of one of the country’s biggest companies could boast over lunch that he did not understand compound interest? It would never happen in Germany or America.

Frightfully clever man

“Education costs money,” he once declared in a much-quoted aphorism. “But then so does ignorance.” No other tongue, he noted sadly, has an equivalent of the English put-down “too clever by half”. Leaving LSE with the best degree of his year in 1943, he was irked to find that the war e ort discounted his brains because of his German origins. Eventually he persuaded the RAF to take him as a lowly “grease monkey” (aircraft mechanic). But he looked back on his wartime service with relish, reckoning it cured him of cockiness and priggishness.

He unapologetically loved high cul- ture—while insisting that it should be available to all who wanted it, not just the rich. He battled and bemoaned the arts-subsidy cuts imposed by Margaret Thatcher’s governments in the 1980s. In the spare time which he could miraculously conjure out of a packed diary, he oversaw a scalding report in 1999 about the national disgrace of innumeracy and illiteracy. One in five Britons, it showed, could not use a phone directory. A successful adult education programme followed. More proof, were any needed, of the power of statistics. 7