At long last, Faber & Faber have announced plans to republish TS Eliot's complete prose. Under the editorship of Ronald Schuchard of Emory University, and in a projected seven volumes, the edition will include not only Eliot's books, such as his studies of Ezra Pound (1917) and Dante (1929), and his Selected Essays (1932), but also hundreds of articles and reviews. Much of the history of Eliot's intellectual life has until now been hidden in this mass of journalism, and in the introductions he wrote to other people's books.
Faber's decision means that it is gradually becoming a scholarly publisher as well as a trade house. A continuing series—which would make even Oxford University Press envious—might include Auden, Berryman, Gunn, Hughes, Larkin, Lowell and Plath.
How the V&A makes Islamic art secular
Mark Jones, director of the V&A, seems to have got slightly carried away in launching the museum's forthcoming Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art. In the press release, Jones is quoted as saying that the gallery will showcase "the V&A's acclaimed collection of Islamic art in all its beautiful and varied forms, religious and secular." How can Islamic art be secular? And if this is not clear to the V&A, how can the new gallery hope to achieve its aim to, as Jones says, "spread a deeper understanding of Islamic art"?
Theatre Museum crisis
The governing board of the V&A has said it is no longer prepared to cover the curatorial costs—about £2.5m a year—of the Theatre Museum's Covent Garden premises. It seems a shame that people with little apparent interest in the performing arts should close the museum, allowing its holdings to revert to some dusty back galleries of the V&A or possibly to a token outpost within the Royal Opera House. The V&A board retains a list of the Theatre Museum's donors, but will not allow its executive staff to talk to them, nor are they permitted to try to attract separate sponsorship. A 1983 National Heritage Act empowered the board of the V&A to run the Theatre Museum, not to dismantle it. Even if the archive survives, without its Covent Garden site the museum will disappear, just as the Design Council vanished from public view when it lost its shop window in Haymarket.
Revenge of the Danube
The fantastically ambitious Küba project, "Journey Against the Current," is a collaboration between artist Kutlug Ataman and the Viennese gallery Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, which puts Ataman's video installation about the marginalised of Istanbul afloat on the industrial container barge Negrelli and sends it up the Danube to Vienna. Audiences are invited to join the project at its seven stops, where artists from Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia and Austria have been commissioned to create work in response to Küba, with the journey ending in an exhibition in Vienna. The aim is to excavate the histories and politics of this part of Europe. It is apt, then, that the chairperson of T-BA21 is Francesca von Habsburg: in some sense, through Küba, reclaiming ancestral territories, but also, as a Thyssen, taking centuries of art patronage into a new era. Unperturbed by the conjunction of great wealth with art that champions the dispossessed, von Habsburg has even been persuaded to take the place of a bag of money at the top of a 400-person human "Pyramid of Capitalism," to be created in Bratislava. The only protest so far has come from the river. Flooding has forced the organisers to drop the first leg of the voyage. Far from von Habsburg seeing this as a blow, she has added an art auction to the itinerary to raise money for victims of the flood.
