How we spent St Valentine Day

... surrounded by @rt:

Valentine's night at Tate Modern Gallery

We saw three exhibitions: Kippenberg Exhibition; the Poetry and Dream Galleries hosting Surrealism and Beyond Surrealism; and Rachel Whiteread's Turbine Hall while sipping a sweet strawberry based Valentine cocktail. All very interesting. I particularly appreciated Kippenberg's social and, sometimes but not necessarily, political conception of art. In a sense, he went beyond Duchamp (the anti-artist for antonomasia) and Andy Wahrol's beliefs in that he not only embraced the credo that "everything/one can be art(ist)", but he also professed the concept that "every artist is also a human being".

We then shopped in the bookshop, and bought: The Great Bear by Simon Patterson, some postcards by Japanese artist Nara Yoshimoto, depicting the little girl below in several poses and variations, which both Lofty and I find really cute for her naughtiness but also quite ironically disturbing for her evil look. We also think that she resembles Ilsa (Lofty's youngest niece).

Oh, we also purchased the Bargain's Hunter London guide with the intention of exploring more of the capital's underground culture. I wanted to buy these three books as well: Love Poems; Frida Kahlo 's catalogue and Every Woman's Luck Book, but I didn't.

Finally, we watched a classic from 1945: Brief Encounter. If on one side I may agree with some of the spectators' comments that I caught soon after the screening, such as that it was not a very engaging film, or that it aged quite a lot, I enjoyed it precisely because it was an old style film dealing in an entertaining way with the interior turbulences of a woman having an extra-marriage affair in the forties England. As Lofty pointed out, some scenes were intentionally funny (for example all the woman's thoughts voiced aloud), while others were only funny for a contemporary audience who kept laughing at every slightly unusual incident (for example at the woman's mannerism proper of that time), and thus, to me, quite inappropriate.

All in all, a very stylish night indeed. UPDATE: Lofty got me the book Every Woman's Luck Book, and it is h-i-l-a-r-i-o-u-s... as well as scary for all the superstitions and luck predictions I was not aware about. And mind that this was written in the thirties, it is therefore part of the heritage of popular beliefs! Pictures, from above: Auguste Rodin The Kiss (detail) 1901-4 © Tate; © Estate Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; © Nara Yoshimoto.