Martin Barnes, one of the V&A’s photography curators, suggests that: ‘by the end of the 1960s “freaky” could be used as a term of excitement and interest to describe something or someone’.

So Diane Arbus, who had a relatively privileged background, may not have been looking down on her subjects when she called some of them freaks. Not that that really matters, because the real point seems to be that everyone is a freak is some way or other and so none of us are. We came to this fresh from Degas, Sickert & Toulouse-Lautrec at Tate Britain, where Degas courted controversy by making art that refused to present a prettified vision of the world. Diane Arbus Revelations challenges in much the same way. But these don’t feel like contemporary revelations. These black and whites help turn the 1960s into a foreign land populated by strange people… ‘freaky’ indeed.

Scrawl graffiti over this »

There’s an awful lot to Degas, Sickert & Toulouse-Lautrec, London & Paris 1870-1910 at Tate Britain, but fortunately the website is rather good (see the paintings, view video clips et cetera) and the multimedia guide is even better (even if Stephen Fry’s the narrator). It’s worth mentioning the latter because even though it’s the same price as an audio guide and works the same way (tap in a number and press enter) the Tate’s staff is keen to push the older technology. Restricted to audio, you don’t get to compare what you’re looking at with other works, see what place look like today or view archive film footage. So ask for the multi-media guide and plan to be here for hours.

Fully immersed you’ll get a real sense of the time in which these artists were working and why their work was controversial. Particularly enjoyable is Room 5, a homage to dandyism and, at the other end of the social scale, there’s real insight to be gained into the world of the variety theatres in Room 2. L’Absinthe gets Room 4 and a mocked up newspaper charting the controversy that raged. Many felt that L’Absinthe could not be art:

‘A man and a woman, both of the most degraded type, are seated on a bench in a wine-shop, their backs reflected in a glass screen behind them… the total effect… is one which most of us will be anxious to banish from our minds as quickly as possible’

The work told us nothing of Degas’ skill that we didn’t know already. The subject was ‘repulsive’ and so this could not be art… though nobody denied it depicted a reality. These ideas meant that visiting Diane Arbus at the V&A, as we did that afternoon made perfect sense. It showed how completely the establishment’s view of what art is for has changed.

Scrawl graffiti over this »

Early in my career I worked for one of the grand old men (although not that old really, let’s call him X) of the Manchester PR scene, who’d been exiled to Stoke-on-Trent following a misfortune arising from the recession of the early 1990s.

The interview for my next career move was with someone I sort of knew and we got talking about my former boss, X, as you do. My prospective employer (let’s call him Y) had met X in a professional capacity and told me how X had been shocked to see that Y wore a cheap plastic watch. In fact Y’s watch was so very cheap that X seemed quite distressed and concerned that Y might bring the PR industry into disrepute. People might think we were all struggling financially (although, ironically, it was X who was in trouble). I pretended to agree that there was nothing wrong with wearing a cheap watch, even though watches are jewellery and Y’s was the equivalent of something you’d find in a Christmas cracker. At least X was going down in style.

Anyway. A little while ago I suggested easy4men was a silly idea. I’m not sure I was wrong, but it’s still going. On this basis there must be plenty of people who think cheap watches are okay and will be delighted to herald the arrival of easyWatch, the fifteenth ‘easy’ branded business launched by Stelios and the easyGroup in the last 10 years. easyWatch watches are made by Zeon.

If you wear a watch for purely practical reasons – perhaps you want one for sport or you just take it easy – then easyWatch, with prices starting at just £9.99 and never topping £20 (at time of writing) is for you. Some of the watches are bright easy orange, but on others easy branding is more subtle. It may be that just as Primark clothes can be combined with Prada, so an easyWatch will sit well on the arm of someone wearing an Armani suit.