A person’s heaven is easily made. 'Tis but black eyes and lemonade.’
Thomas Moore, 1813

Catch it while you can! The exuberantly fun Black Eyes and Lemonade exhibit at Whitechapel Gallery is on only until next month. It celebrates the work of Barbara Jones (1912-78), the collector and curator of English popular art and author of The Unsophisticated Arts (1951). Specifically, it celebrates an exhibition curated by Jones for the Festival of Britain in 1951.

Jones celebrated and championed the judgements made by collectors, makers and consumers and the collective desire for beauty. The 1951 exhibit, in the final years of post-war rationing in Britain, had the feel of a bazaar, a celebration of consuming, with every object pleasing and of equal value.  Even better is hearing how she did her collecting - driving around England with a friend in a converted taxi.

Art director Simon Costin writes about Jones and the Black Eyes and Lemonade exhibit in a post on blog Caught by the River.  Jones, Costin says, collected objects with "long folkloric histories, such as horse brasses, corn dollies, canal boat artwork, ships’ figureheads, and the pearly King & Queen outfits." But in bringing these together with "post-industrial advertising devices like the Idris Talking Lemon, beer mats, pest control adverts, shop posters", Jones

"...gave ‘folk art’ or ‘popular art’ a cultural currency, she made it relevant, exciting. And by putting the machine-made and the hand-made side by side, she blurred the boundaries between what was considered art, liberating a way of seeing that continues to widen our appreciation of the ordinary, the everyday."

I was reminded of Kurt Schwitters, the German artist who devised the concept of Merz in his collages. (Tate Britain recently had a fascinating retrospective of Schwitters’ work.) He incorporated found objects and litter, sweet wrappers and used bus tickets in his work, giving equal value to the everyday and the fine, the costly and the cheap.

In very different ways, both Jones and Schwitters found treasure in the ordinary. 

Black Eyes and Lemonade, Whitechapel Gallery, free, until September 2013.

Bowie fever is over. For now, at least, and here – David Bowie Is has started its world tour and is moving on to Toronto. It was a sell-out show, and every day people queued up outside the museum to try to get tickets. It was an amazing experience, with a high-tech sound system that moved with you throughout the exhibit, with excerpts of interviews and, of course, music. 

For some reason Bowie hadn’t really registered with me in my youth. Maybe it was the time - he was experimenting with music, style and personas in the 1970s, when I was still a preteen. Maybe it was the fact that I grew up in the USA, and he was definitely a Brit-grown artist. But neither of those seems adequate excuse for my lack of appreciation of him and his work. What resonates with me now – in middle age, with relatively tame musical tastes – are his energy for mining a vast range of art and talent to seek out inspiration and the creative focus he applied to doing so. There is an intellectual joy that comes across in this exploration of his work. He found inspiration in theatre, literature, visual art, performing art, fashion. He was also a painter – something maybe many of his fans don’t know. The portrait of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (who committed suicide, or seppuku, in 1970) that Bowie painted during his years in Berlin is particularly beautiful and haunting.

There is a certain irony in learning that Bowie was born just after the establishment of the welfare state in Britain – 1947. The day before I saw the exhibit was a sad day for Britain – a complete rolling back of the social welfare state and a one-sided renegotiation of the social contract, brought about by drastic and nasty cuts to welfare benefits, privatisation of the NHS and withdrawal of most legal aid. How much of Bowie’s creativity was nurtured by the safety net that existed while he developed? Perhaps not a lot – he was, after all, earning a fortune by his mid-20s. But in a single generation we have gone from supporting young people to go to university (yes, in a more elitist way than now), ensuring everyone has health care even if they’re not working, and providing a social housing net that worked for many years and kept London vibrant and diverse – to a position where young people have no idea if they will be able to get jobs, whether or not they’ve gone to university, have very few housing options (especially in London), and who in their lifetime might see the disintegration of a much-admired system of universal health care. We see fear of protest (in light of the draconian sentences dealt out to some rioters and student demonstrators last year) and long-term squatters being evicted.

Rebel rebel, your face is a mess. It makes me wonder where the future Bowies will come from.

See a trailer for the film of the David Bowie Is exhibit.