UK GOSSIPS

UK GOSSIPS. Cont'd.

Portsmouth city council hailed the move as "great day for Portsmouth". It now plans to demolish the Tricorn later this month to make way for a scheme to regenerate the city centre. A rival scheme to preserve the Tricorn, which was supported by the Portsmouth Society, will now be ditched. Owen Luder, the Tricorn's architect, expressed his dismay at the decision. "It's a great pity that it will not be listed. It is a 'gee whiz' building, not a 'so what' building." Mr. Luder, who is former president of the Royal Institute of British Architecture, added: "It's an architectural statement about the early 1960s - a time of new ideas and an economic explosion." Mr. Luder, who is nicknamed "Owen car park" in the architectural press, also designed the multistorey car park in Gateshead which featured in the film Get Carter. He claimed that Tricorn had been "unfairly pilloried" in the press and the council had allowed it to fall into decline. But Mike Hancock, Portsmouth council's lead member for regeneration, said preserving the building would have been "disastrous". John Laker, director of Centros Miller, which is developing the replacement, scheme added: "The new development will reflect some of the original street pattern that was there before the Tricorn and will introduce links with the neighbouring parts of the city. "In complete contrast to the Tricorn, it will be designed around open shopping streets and public spaces, and it will include a new department store, leisure amenities and new residential flats." Mat Weaver. GuardianNews.London.

Poster to fetch up to £200,000

Jack Vettriano, poster king of millions of teenagers' bedrooms, was well on the way yesterday to commanding the price levels set for serious art. Vettriano's best known work, The Singing Butler, right, is expected to fetch £150,000- £200,000 when it is auctioned in London next month by Sotheby's. Six years ago, it sold for £32,000. But since then, more than 1m reproductions of it have flown off the shelves in Britain, outstripping Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Monet's water lily sequences. Sotheby's called the elegant, anachronistic image of a couple in evening dress waltzing on a beach, "one of the most frequently reproduced paintings of any era. It has lent its nostalgic, romantic forms to millions of greetings cards and posters." Vettriano, 53, is already a millionaire who refuses more marketing deals than he accepts. Born Jack Hoggan in Fife, with a Scots father and Italian mother, he trained as a mining engineer, teaching himself to paint by copying Old Masters. The Singing Butler sold for £3,000 when first painted in 1991. Some artists dismiss his can vases as kitsch of the kind which sometimes achieve intense, transient popularity and are then almost forgotten. But other artists maintain that his wit and implied satire puts him in a higher class. Vettriano calls his work " a cross between 1930s railway posters and the covers of pulp fiction". John Izard.

Museums in Britain victims of their own mistakes.

My Italian brother in law has been to stay for four days. He spent one day at the Victoria & Albert Museum, one day at Kew Gardens, one day at the British Museum, and his final 24 hours split between the Science Museum and Tate Modern. He returned with feet sore and eyes sparkling - and in a state of amazement that the cost of four days entertainment (excluding bus and tube fares) had been the £8.50 it cost him to get into Kew. Living among them, it is easy to forget what fantastic value our museums represent. That's one reason why representatives of more than 2,000 institutions across the country came together yesterday to launch a manifesto for museums, to draw attention to all the good that they do. The facts and figures assembled in pursuit of their cause are impressive. They welcome 100 million visitors a year, and generate around £3 billion by their presence and activities. Thirty-seven per cent of the population visit a museum at least once a year, with an 80 per cent satisfaction rating on the experience. The manifesto proclaims: "We stimulate creativity and enrich the cultural, social and economic life, not only of our nation, but of the whole world." Beneath all the fancy language, there is a rub - a request for an annual increase in funding of £115 million to allow the sector to continue to thrive and grow. There's something horribly familiar about this cri de coeur, heard again and again from different parts of the arts community over the years. But they do have a strong case. Since the government-directed abolition of admission charges in 2001, museums have become victims of their own success. As Lindsay Sharp, director of the cluster of museums that includes the Science Museum points out, his visitor numbers have more than doubled to about three million a year. This puts