Panicology

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  Worse was to come a few days later. As the Japanese umbrellas were being dismantled, a crane operator was electrocuted when the boom of his crane struck a high-voltage power line. ‘Japan crane operator killed dismantling Christo umbrellas,’ noted the same paper four days later.

  What is the problem with art? Does it really pose a mortal danger? And why is the problem apparently getting worse? The main factors are easy to identify. But the true nature of the phenomenon is obscured by the attitude of the media. Disproportionate coverage of accidents of this type – compared to, say, accidents suffered by members of the public on building sites or while at leisure facilities – reflects newspapers’ pretended bafflement over ‘conceptual’ art.

  Art in galleries is the province of the critics and may safely be ignored by the rest of the press corps. But when art escapes these boundaries, it becomes fair game for any philistine reporter, especially when the work has been paid for with public money. Thus, the Guardian lost no time in dubbing Agis’s Dreamscape ‘the Arts Council-funded PVC installation’. Gormley’s Another Place, though also partly funded by the Arts Council, avoided this tag in the Liverpool Daily Post, which was campaigning to keep the work in the area.

  The first reason that art goes wrong is that, at some level, it is meant to. Art is risky. Part of its job is to revive in us a feeling of visceral sensory connection with the world, and this in principle includes its dangers. Carsten Höller produced a French sociologist who claimed that one merit of his work was its ability to induce ‘a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’.

  After the double tragedy of the umbrella deaths, Christo acknowledged he was saddened by the loss of life that his work had occasioned, but then offered this brazen piece of post-rationalization: ‘All my works of art are created to challenge normal views of art. [Umbrellas] challenged the view that art is safe. They’re not make-believe. The risk is real – almost like climbing the Himalayas.’1 It is perhaps curious then that on his personal website, in an otherwise detailed chronicle of the setting up and taking down of the umbrellas, Christo makes no mention of the deaths that he seems to believe validated his work.

  Art is different in this respect from architecture. The media tends to regard the more substantial and widespread problem of architectural failures as deserving of serious treatment. With catastrophic building collapses, the press may occasionally rejoice in the misfortune of the architect and developer, but any hazard to the public is taken seriously. This is because, unlike art, where our expectations are uncertain, we expect buildings to perform properly and are shocked if they don’t. Where fatalities occur, as in the wave of collapses of sports halls and similar buildings prompted by exceptionally heavy snow in eastern Europe during the winter of 2005–6, the tone is appropriately sombre. The media’s handling of building failures only resembles that of its art coverage when the architecture concerned is self-consciously avant-garde and when it is judged that lives are not seriously at risk. Thus, the wobbling of Norman Foster’s Millennium Footbridge across the Thames between St Paul’s Cathedral and Tate Modern, which came to light when the first pedestrians crossed it, was treated with broad good humour.

  While it might be considered desirable that art should involve the sensation of taking a risk, then, any actual risk must of course be minimized in the same way that it is for other facilities open to the public. Ignoring Höller’s sociologist, the administration at Tate Modern was therefore keen to stress not the feelings of panic that Test Site might have induced, but the stringency of the safety checks that the work underwent. And even the artist himself felt driven to point out of his slides: ‘They are much safer than stairs; stairs are quite dangerous.’

  But perhaps this is to overemphasize the need for safety. Many people seem unexpectedly prepared to make allowances for art. Even at the time of the umbrellas tragedy, Californians seemed to sympathize as much with the artwork and its creator as with the human victims. ‘It was just an accident of nature. Why should it ruin everything for the rest of us?’ responded one visitor to the site, a retired construction worker, when questioned by the San Francisco Chronicle.

  Some time later, the lifestyle supplement of the Los Angeles Daily Times headlined: ‘Umbrellas: a year later shock of deaths wearing off’. The article discussed Christo fans’ plans to commemorate the short-lived art installation and took the unusual step of quoting a professor of art on the matter of risk assessment. ‘People get killed in building roads and bridges and no one thinks about it. Art should be judged on the same scale,’ he felt.

  In fact art is judged on the same scale because accidents involving art are not so numerous that they warrant a category of their own. Because he was at work, the Japanese crane operator on Christo’s umbrellas is regarded as just another construction industry fatality. The death in 1983 of a studio worker of the New York sculptor Beverly Pepper, who was crushed when one of the artist’s iron sculptures fell on her, was likewise an industrial accident because it happened in the workplace.

  When members of the public are the victims, the situation becomes less clear. In the UK, the Health and Safety Executive records the 200 or so fatalities a year at work in gory detail. But the 12,000 or so other accidental deaths each year are simply logged by where they happen, mostly ‘at home’ or ‘elsewhere’, rather than by cause. The US National Safety Council does list deaths by 117 accidental means, including ‘bitten or crushed by reptiles’. Christo’s Californian victim would simply have been ‘struck by or striking against object’.

  Two more conclusions may be drawn from these examples. The first is that art simply becomes more dangerous as its scale expands – when it becomes very large or massive, when it requires numerous crew to set it up and take it down, when it covers large areas, when those spaces are unrestricted to the public, when those spaces present wild or unfamiliar terrain, and so on. In the case of Christo’s umbrellas, two unconnected deaths make the art look dangerous indeed. But, set against the scale of the work, the coincidence is less remarkable.

  The final reason for the apparent growing danger posed by art is its growing popularity. If nobody visited these works, there would be fewer human injuries. Half a million people were reported to have seen Christo’s umbrellas in Ibaraki. Seven thousand turned up on one day in California. Each week, 44,000 rides were taken on Höller’s slides at Tate Modern. There was a surge in visitors to Gormley’s seaside ‘iron men’ when it was announced that they were to be removed. It was one of these visitors who became stuck in the mud.

  Cheers!

  ‘Binge drinking deaths soar’ Daily Mail

  ‘Binge drink deaths soar’ and ‘Quarter of children so drunk they have passed out’ are typical of the recent headlines in British newspapers. The problem – known as the ‘English disease’ – seems to affect adults, youths and even children. One foreign journalist describes pub closing time in an English town: ‘When the pubs shut, the drinking tribes charge out like wounded bulls, piss in the alleyways, wrestle with the rubbish bags, smash bottles on the pavement, break the occasional shop window and do a lot of braying.’1 Other countries have heavy drinkers, but the gratuitous violence and vandalism are not on the same scale.

  The tendency for people to drink more on the occasions that they do drink – ‘binge drinking’ – is higher now in virtually every country compared to a decade ago. According to the International Center for Alcohol Policies,2 a not-for-profit organization funded by leading alcohol producers in America, there are diverse definitions of binge drinking, more formally referred to as heavy episodic drinking. One of the increasingly common thresholds is for men drinking five or more drinks or for women four or more, on one occasion. Canada defines binge drinking as the consumption of eight drinks within the same day, while Sweden considers half a bottle of spirits or two bottles of wine on the same occasion to constitute a binge. Such serious drinking usually occurs in large groups.

  There are some occasions, and some cultures
, where heavy drinking is accepted: for example the rites of passage into adulthood (Japan and the Pacific Islands), certain university cultures (in the US and Canada), at sporting events and for exceptional celebrations beyond conventional behaviour, such as weddings, New Year’s Eve and Mardi Gras celebrations. In Europe, binge drinking is most prevalent in northern Europe, notably Scandinavia, and least common in the southern part of the continent, in Italy, France and other Mediterranean countries.

  But it is Britain and Ireland where the culture of drinking has changed most for the worst in recent years – and has a grim reputation. David Ginola, the talented French football player of the 1990s, said that he would not bring up his children in England because ‘I don’t want my daughter to be an Englishwoman’. He observed that across the country he saw women trying to keep up with men, drink for drink, usually concluding with unsavoury behaviour such as ‘vomiting in the streets’.3

  Survey data seem to support Ginola’s view. A sample of teenagers aged between twelve and seventeen suggests that 5 per cent have been so drunk that they have had their stomachs pumped and a further 13 per cent admitted suffering from such a bad hangover that they had played truant from school.4 The problem, according to the charity Alcohol Concern, is not that more young people are drinking alcohol than before but that those who do drink drink more. As official figures show that over nine out of ten fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds have drunk alcohol, there is little scope for the participation rates to rise.

  Heavy drinking is associated with a series of negative outcomes. Some of these are medical in their nature, leading one EU-funded report to say that ‘Alcohol is public health enemy number three, behind only tobacco and high blood pressure, and ahead of obesity, lack of exercise or illicit drugs.’5 Dangers of alcohol include an increased risk of stroke and other cardiovascular problems, neurological damage and adverse effects on the health of the foetus of a pregnant woman. Drinking can, of course, also damage the liver – one British newspaper noted a 37 per cent rise in the number of drinkers dying from alcoholic liver disease in the last five years, with hospital admissions for the condition doubling in a decade to over 35,000 a year. Alcohol can also lead to poisoning. An article titled ‘Hospitals swamped by young drinkers’ told us that at least twenty youngsters are diagnosed every day with alcohol poisoning or behavioural disorders because of excessive drinking. The paper also told the story of a seven-year-old treated for alcohol poisoning.

  However, it is the adverse social consequences that generally attract more attention in the media. An EU report estimated that the tangible social costs of alcohol in Europe were around €125 billion, equivalent to an annual cost of €650 for every household.6 These include: unemployment, absenteeism, traffic accident damage, criminal damage, the cost of police, courts and prisons, and the medical bills. It estimated that the costs in the workplace, along with those due to crime and traffic accidents, were in total at least four times as great as the health-care costs. The addition of the more intangible costs, such as the loss of healthy life, impaired professional and academic performance, anti-social behaviour (and hooliganism at football matches) and relationship difficulties including the suffering of domestic violence victims, would add considerably to the cost.

  Young people are, for a variety of reasons, at increased risk of harm due to excessive drinking. Many risks stem from young people’s relative inexperience with alcohol consumption and a greater tendency towards risk-taking, but still-growing young people are also more susceptible to brain and other physiological damage. Young drinkers also have a greater chance of alcohol dependency later in life – or so we are told. The New York Times ran a story, ‘The grim neurology of teenage drinking’, which explained that children drinking heavily at age fourteen or younger have a 50 per cent chance of becoming an alcoholic – a risk roughly five times greater than for the general population.7 The problem is that people who start drinking that early are often very different in a whole host of ways from those who don’t. They are more likely to have at least one parent with alcoholism – itself presenting a 40 per cent risk of alcoholism for the child – and are more likely to come from chaotic homes and to have suffered from child abuse.

  According to one American newspaper article, under-age drinkers find it easy to get hold of alcohol via the internet. One article told us that ‘one in 10 teenagers have an under-aged friend who has ordered beer, wine or liquor over the internet’.8 It also told us that more than a third thought they could easily do it and nearly a half thought they wouldn’t get caught. All of this sounds pretty scary, but closer analysis suggests that the survey, which was paid for by the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America, a group that competes with direct sellers of alcohol, perhaps tells another message that suited the sponsors less well and would have had less media impact.9 Despite most teenagers using the internet daily and often spending many hours online, and despite almost half believing they could buy alcohol online, only 2 per cent had ever done so. This is not a very large proportion given almost half of those surveyed were between eighteen and twenty years of age.

  Heavy drinking is clearly a problem that we could live without, and the press regularly debates the available policy options. One senior British judge criticized the levels of weekend drink-related violence on the streets during his summing-up in a case arising out of a Saturday-night brawl, and suggested that pubs close at nine o’clock in the evening. Higher taxes, especially on the drinks favoured by young people, could also play a part in reducing consumption. And a Scottish community is hoping to reduce crime by encouraging local shops to ban the sale of alcohol after 7 p.m. Others advocate that premises only be granted a licence to sell alcohol if there is plenty of seating, on the grounds that bars with standing room only encourage more rapid consumption of alcohol. But pessimists argue that the problem runs deeper than drinking regulations and is rooted in a working-class tradition of loutish youths ‘moving in packs’ – groups that are at their most visible when travelling abroad as football hooligans.

  Treating the English disease is definitely proving difficult. A recent British government initiative removed the traditional eleven o’clock closing time of pubs, allowing them to apply for licences to stay open later. They argued that this was ‘the European way’ and that by easing pressure of last orders, bingeing would be reduced. Those against the change said that it would merely prolong the misery and cause more damage. One year on from the change, the impact seemed not to have been significant one way or the other – although the government, which has learned to manage the news flow, did leak to the press prior to the publication of the figures that the number of drunk and disorderly people decreased in the period immediately after the change in the law.10

  The EU report advocated more extensive random breath testing of drivers, higher taxes on alcohol, shorter opening hours for the sale of alcohol and restricting the extent and content of alcohol advertising. It also wanted tougher measures aimed at young adults. There is no doubt that one constraint on government’s pursuit of such policies is the size of the developed world’s drinks industry, which takes advantage of its association with prestige products and even national identity to foster close contacts with ministers. There are roughly three-quarters of a million jobs in Europe’s drinks production industry, with many others indirectly linked to the business working in shops and bars, and it produces billions in tax revenues annually. France and Italy together account for over half of the world’s wine exports, the UK and France account for over half of the world’s spirits exports, and the Netherlands and Germany account for over one-third of the world’s beer exports. Governments end up treading very carefully.

  Social attitudes might change. In the nineteenth century, European elites were faced with a situation of urban squalor that included unprecedented public drunkenness. This led to the growth of temperance movements across Europe. Initially they were focused on the idea of drinking in moderation and only later moved on to the idea of prohib
ition. Finland, Iceland and Russia were among the countries that adopted some form of prohibition, while other countries allowed individual areas to vote on prohibition. Might we again see bans on alcohol? The City of York Council, for one, has drawn up proposals for an Alcohol Exclusion Zone in two parts of the city in response to pleas from residents who have experienced alcohol-related disorder.

  While there is no doubt that consumption of large quantities of alcohol is damaging for health, there is some evidence – especially popular among wine drinkers – that modest quantities of alcohol can give beneficial effects. A study in the Lancet over twenty-five years ago compared the death rates of men in their fifties and sixties from heart disease in a number of countries. It found the highest death rates were in traditional beer- and spirits-drinking countries, while France had the lowest number of deaths and the highest wine consumption. A Danish study of 24,000 people also found that drinkers of wine, as opposed to other forms of alcohol, benefited from an overall reduction in deaths from all causes. But the village of Gers in south-west France seems to provide the conclusive evidence that wine is good for you – it has double the national average of men aged ninety or more. This is put down to the wines being very rich in procyanidin, which somehow seems to counter the otherwise negative effect on life expectancy of the French diet, which is typically high in saturated fats.

  This positive view of moderate drinking is not new. The Greek physician Hippocrates was using wine as an antiseptic, diuretic and sedative 2,400 years ago. Louis Pasteur, no less, said in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘Wine is the healthiest and most hygienic of drinks,’ and in an era predating modern manufacturing and sterilizing processes, wine provided products with a stability and cleanliness that water could not. Even before Pasteur, a serving of wine each day on the convict trips from England to Australia contributed to a reduction in malnutrition and scurvy during transit. So successful was this that some of the British doctors involved started their own vineyards in Australia.