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Your support makes all the difference.BUT IS IT ART? In 1874 a critic coined the word Impressionists as a term of ridicule for Monet and fellow artists exhibiting in Paris; in 1877 Ruskin said Whistler had thrown "a pot of paint in the public's face" (Whistler sued); Marcel Duchamp exhibited a gentleman's urinal in 1917 and in 1919 a copy of Leonardo's Mona Lisa with an added moustache; concert-goers to John Cage's 4mins 33secs (1952) watched a pianist reading a score for that length of time but playing nothing; in the 1960s Piero Manzoni, chief exponent of arte povera (so-called after the cheapness of the materials) signed hard-boiled eggs and canned his own excrement; in 1972 the Tate Gallery outraged the press by spending £4,000 on Equivalent VIII - 120 fire bricks assembled by Carl Andre; Damien Hirst's dead sheep in formaldehyde attracted outrage and vandalism last year at the Serpentine Gallery, London; French artist Christian Boltanski has assembled two tons of secondhand clothes at the Serpentine for visitors to rummage through and take away.
TODAY is the feast day of Saint Ludger who lived in Friesland (the Netherlands) during the days of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne. Ludger was educated and ordained in England before returning home to the profitable and not very holy business of sacking pagan temples in Saxony. Later he seems to have repented this brigandage but his piety angered Charlemagne who heard that Ludger was giving church money to the poor rather than decorating the emperor's churches.
26 March, 1945: David Lloyd George (above), prime minister from 1916 to 1922, died aged 87. The son of a schoolmaster, he rose in politics by eloquence and passion. As chancellor of the exchequer he laid the foundations of the welfare state and provoked constitutional crisis with his People's Budget of 1909. In 1916 he replaced Asquith as prime minister. Victory and the Versailles peace treaty established his stature on the international stage and his coalition with the Conservatives survived until 1922, when a scandal over the selling of honours and resentment over the Irish treaty brought him down. Churchill said of him: "When the English history of the first quarter of the 20th century is written, it will be found that the greater part of our fortunes in peace and in war were shaped by this one man."
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