And what do you DO? Queen wants Kate Middleton to get charity job to counter claims she is workshy - Aug 2008
The Queen is becoming increasingly concerned that Prince William’s girlfriend Kate Middleton still does not have a job.
And senior Buckingham Palace aides say that what is now referred to in the Royal inner-circle as the Kate Problem should be resolved before William announces his engagement to her.
The Sovereign’s private concern about Kate’s lack of a career was first reported in The Mail on Sunday in June.
She has already been nicknamed Waity Katie because of her apparent willingness to do nothing but socialise and shop until William decides when to propose.
Now, Royal aides have revealed that the Queen has privately suggested that Kate, 26, should get involved with a charity to counter the potentially damaging public perception that she is workshy.
According to friends of the couple, plans are in place for Clarence House to announce an engagement either shortly before or just after Christmas.
Several dates have been earmarked for a wedding, which could be as early as May or June next year.
But one senior Royal source revealed last night that the Queen is convinced that it is vital for the Royal Family and its reputation that both Prince William, 26, and his girlfriend should be working before an announcement is authorised.
This newspaper understands that it has been suggested that Kate should get involved with an animal or children’s charity because it would be a ‘safe’ role that would not lead to any comparisons with the late Princess of Wales.
The source said: ‘There is concern at the very highest level that Kate Middleton still does not have a job.
The Queen is keen that the Monarchy should lead by example and that the Princes and their girlfriends should all be seen to be hard workers.
‘The Queen has made it known that she feels Kate should get involved with a charity, possibly an animal charity, where she can be seen to be doing something proactive and something entirely safe.
‘It is important that Kate isn’t seen to be doing anything controversial, and she needs to do something completely different from any of the charity work that Diana did.’
It is understood that Kate has been approached by several charities to represent them, including a number involving children, but she has yet to accept any of the roles.
At present, her only charity work is as a committee member of a roller-disco fundraising event for Oxford Children’s Hospital.
Kate was invited to a fundraising event at the Royal Marsden Hospital in Chelsea in May this year but pulled out at the last minute even though Prince William attended.
‘Kate has been asked many times to do charity work,’ a friend confided.
‘She is often asked when she is out at parties. I was with her at one event when a representative from a rather high-profile charity suggested that Kate get involved.
‘She was really keen at the time and said she would love to get on board. She gave the organiser all her details but, when they wrote to her, Kate didn’t even reply.
‘She has quite a bad reputation for being rude when it comes to responding to letters.
She often fails to RSVP when she is asked to attend events. She once failed to reply to a wedding invitation from one of William’s friends and it didn’t go down very well.’
And the friend pointed out: ‘Kate is well aware of what’s being said about her not working. She is, however, in a bit of a rut.
‘She is really keen to develop her photography career and also has an interest in fashion. But she’s quite limited in terms of what she can do because of the interest in her.
‘She was offered a job by a leading fashion house a while ago but she said that everything had to go through Clarence House.
'In the end it was just too difficult to make the whole thing work and nothing ever came of it.’
Kate has not worked since she quit her job as an accessories buyer for the High Street fashion chain Jigsaw last November.
She recently took some photographs for the online company Party Planners run by her parents Carole and Michael but sources say she has not done any other paid work for months and is still being financed by them.
As Prince William’s girlfriend, she is one of the most photographed and discussed women in the world.
But the fact that she is seen to spend her time shopping, holidaying and partying instead of working hard at a career has triggered a bitter backlash.
The Mail on Sunday’s website was last week inundated with comments by angry readers who criticised Kate’s lack of drive.
Dozens of comments were posted in reaction to one article about the couple’s visit to the London nightclub Raffles after their return from a holiday on the Caribbean island of Mustique.
One reader, Natalie from Bristol, wryly remarked: ‘It’s good to see them letting their hair down.
They must be exhausted after their holiday.’ In another less than flattering comment, Tracey from Paisley wrote: ‘This waste of space – Kate Middleclass never does anything but party and enjoy herself. Evidently work is not a word in her vocabulary.’
Identifying herself as Karen from the UK, another internet reader concluded: ‘A pair of lazy louts, it’s about time they both got a proper job.’
Echoing what many senior courtiers are said to believe, reader Sara Ruiz ‘from England’ noted: ‘What would she do if he breaks up with her?
'Currently she just goes to the gym, to the hairdresser, shopping, on holidays and to party hard. She’d better hold him tight or the encounter with reality is going to hurt her a lot.
‘What are you thinking, girl? What kind of respect do you expect from the people?
‘You could have been someone as you had the studies and the means to do it but instead you have let everybody see that you are just a lazy girl. Shame on you!’
Despite the fact that Kate does not receive a salary, she has enjoyed a number of luxurious holidays this year.
As well as a skiing trip to Klosters with the Royal Family, she has twice visited the Caribbean.
Kate and William were in Mustique two weeks ago after he completed his training with the Navy.
The couple and a group of friends stayed at the luxury home of Belle and John Robinson, the owners of Jigsaw.
Kate spent her mornings swimming laps of the private pool before hosting lunch parties for her friends.
She also enjoyed trips aboard a luxury yacht with Prince William and the couple attended several private parties.
A source said: ‘Kate and Wills had the best time ever. Kate’s brother James and sister Pippa were also out there and it was a totally idyllic break.
'They had the most amazing villa free of charge, complete with their own maids.
'They were living it up, with booze-fuelled parties most nights. Kate would swim in the pool every morning and then they would spend the rest of the day sunbathing and getting on to these amazing yachts.’
Last night, Clarence House refused to comment on Kate ‘because she is a private person’.
Despite this reluctance to co-operate with the Press, Kate’s friends say she has access to Press officers and senior aides at Clarence House, where she is free to come and go at her leisure.
‘Kate has a hotline to Clarence House and she listens to everything the Royal aides tell her to do,’ said a friend.
‘When they advised her to pull out of the cross-Channel dragon boat race last summer, she did it immediately.
‘Kate is approached about doing lots of things but the Clarence House staff are often against her taking part because they think it’s too high-profile and they want to keep Kate out of the limelight. She’s in a bit of a Catch 22 situation.’
Kate lives with her 22-year-old sister Pippa in a flat in Chelsea paid for by their parents.
Because of her celebrity status, she is given free clothes by leading designers, including the Brazilian label Issa.
Her romance with Prince William has also enabled her to buy a cut-price Audi, the preferred make of car for the Royal Family.
She doesn’t even need to pay for gym membership, having full use of William’s private gym at Clarence House.
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Warhol by Blake Gopnik review – sex, religion and overtaking Picasso
Book of the day
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/22/warhol-life-in-art-blake-gopnik
A splendid life of Andy Warhol claims him as the most influential artist of the 20th century, and isn’t shy of exposing his private life
Kathryn Hughes
Sat 22 Feb 2020 02.29 EST
Andy Warhol: His biographer claims he has ‘overtaken Picasso as the most important and influential artist of the last century’.
There are so many Warholian moments in this superb biography that it’s hard to know where to start. There is the time someone turned up to a party at the Factory dressed as a box of Brillo. Or the great man’s habit of answering a routine “How are you?” with a whispery “I’m OK but I have diarrhoea.” Or the social nightmare of being invited round to watch the unwatchable Sleep, a home movie consisting of five hours of a naked man snoozing. How to get through the ordeal without dropping off and starting to dribble on Andy’s shoulder? (Actually, this would never have happened – Warhol hated such physical contact and was capable of throwing out any guest who overstepped the mark.)
It is a testimony to Blake Gopnik’s skill that he is able to acknowledge
how silly these provocations sound while simultaneously insisting on their enduring art historical significance. Dressing up as a box of Brillo may count as a stunt, but Gopnik, a veteran critic and contributor to the New York Times, sees it as the logical extension of Marcel Duchamp’s gesture 50 years earlier when he exhibited a porcelain pissoir as art. Responding to someone’s standard greeting with a detailed report on your bowel movements may be childish but it also pointedly disrupts the genteel discourse of a rapidly capitalising art market. The fact that today we are inclined to roll our eyes at such anecdotes is evidence not of Warhol’s nullity, but of his continuing ubiquity. Whether we like it or not, we are still living in his world. This spring’s Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern is one of the most eagerly awaited of recent years.
All the same, it would be wrong to imply that Gopnik’s book is one that Warhol might have written himself or, indeed, even liked very much. Far from being a ready-made, assembled from the detritus of the scholarly-industrial complex, Warhol: A Life As Art is the product of years studying 100,000 or so original documents housed in Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum. The artist was a lifelong hoarder, and Gopnik’s research is intricately based on a florid haul of engagement diaries, business letters, love notes, theatre tickets and tax returns. To help the reader keep their bearings through nearly 1,000 pages, each chapter starts with a handy precis along the lines of “Classmates and teachers”; “A dose of failure”; “Window dressing”. It is a charmingly old-fashioned touch.
Perhaps Gopnik feels the need to supply these handholds because of the vertiginous nature of the claims he is about to make. The first, and most audacious, is that Warhol has “overtaken Picasso as the most important and influential artist of the 20th century”, even ascending to a spot on “the top peak of Parnassus, beside Michelangelo and Rembrandt”. This is big talk, but Gopnik persuasively assembles his case over the course of this mesmerising book, which is as much art history and philosophy as it is biography. For instance, rather than get caught up in the stale debate about whether Warhol’s silk-screens of Marilyn, Jackie and Mao were art, design, pop, mechanical reproduction or simply a bad joke, Gopnik argues that they serve to demolish the very terms on which such a discussion rests. “At his best, Warhol didn’t think outside the box,” he insists; “he thought outside any artistic universe whose laws would allow boxes to exist … Warhol always wanted to make work for a world where X and not-X would be true at the same time.”
Gopnik is also keen to dislodge the many canards about Warhol’s private life. The most adhesive of these is the one about him surrounding himself with every kind of kink and freak while remaining fastidiously hors de sexual combat. Gopnik carefully rummages through the laundry basket to reveal plenty of evidence that Warhol was an enthusiastic player in the NYC gay scene from the moment he first stepped off the Greyhound bus from Pittsburgh in 1949. What’s more, despite his self-consciousness about his patchy skin and baldness, there’s plenty of photographic and anecdotal evidence that Warhol had a gym-honed body with particularly good legs, and plenty of body hair. If we are determined to continue seeing Our Andy as fey and de-natured, Gopnik suggests, then it says more about our lingering homophobia that cannot bear to contemplate an artistic genius “caught in the act with men”.
The other myth he is keen to stamp on is the one about Warhol being deeply devout. While in his later years he took to popping in to the fabulously turreted St Vincent Ferrer on the Upper East Side, Warhol treated religion just as he treated everything else, which is to say entirely on his own terms. He avoided mass because it went on too long – five minutes, he opined, was quite enough for anyone – and shunned confession because he was convinced the priests would recognise him through the grille and gossip about his sins (and potentially disappoint him, perhaps, if they didn’t). He liked the clothes, the buildings and the props, and was not above splashing holy water around at home “as a kind of heavenly disinfectant”, but he left it to his mother, who was also his housemate, to keep the Warhola clan in good standing with their Rusyn-Carpathian God.
And then there’s the soup. “Almost every recollection of Warhol’s early days comes clogged with soup cans,” notes Gopnik wearily, and then proceeds to kick them away one by one. It is simply not true that Andy fell in love with the red and white Campbell’s tin in his early childhood, and then clung on to it for dear life as a highly charged transitional object with which to negotiate the perils of adult life. In Depression-era Pittsburgh, no one was flush enough to buy ready-mades for the table. Instead, Julia Warhola mushed together some water, salt, pepper and ketchup (the latter was allowed because it was Heinz, and Heinz owned Pittsburgh) into an approximation of something from the old country. Even once Andy’s career was taking off in New York, Mrs Warhola was still offering visitors chicken soup cooked from scratch, rather than poured from a tin.
The real origin story of Warhol’s encounter with Campbell’s soup will never be known. Various old-timers claim that they were the ones who first called Andy’s attention to the potential of the red and cream label with its folksy cursive font, even supplying him with the ur-can, the one from which all the others derive. But what really matters is not where Warhol got the soup, but what he was trying to do with it. The answer turns out to be nothing less than the destruction of painting’s then current dominant mode, abstract expressionism, which had held sway since the second world war. He knew he couldn’t drip like de Kooning or drop like Pollock and so, drawing on his decade as a commercial illustrator, he set about the radical business of returning subject matter to art.
It is hard now to recapture the shock of 1962 when the iterations of Campbell’s soup went on display at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles (New York wasn’t interested). But the cumulative effect of their pristine forms, their tromp l’oeil construction, their obsessive reiteration (there were 32 prints, one for each flavour), luminous banality and, above all, their thereness, was to blast apart everything that we thought – and think – we know about art.
• Warhol is published by Allen Lane (RRP £35). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
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