Badly Behaved Children, Spurious Polling

                                       Art Restoration             

Pandora Mather-Lees, an Oxford educated art historian and conservationist, was asked for help, by a billionaire, to restore a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat.[One of Basquiat’s paintings was sold at auction in 2017 for £84.5million] 

Portrait of a Grammarian

unknown artist

Photo Credit: University of Aberdeen
[CC BY-NC-SA]

The painting was not at the rich man’s house. It was on his super-yacht. How had it been damaged? By sea spray perhaps? No. His children had thrown their cornflakes at it, over breakfast, because they thought it was scary. The crew had made the damage worse by wiping the mess off the painting.

(The Observer, 2019)

No pocket money then for children or crew. Mather-Lees offers a fine-art appreciation course titled “The Practical Care of On-Board Art Collections” to superyacht crews who know nothing about the millions of pounds’ worth of art displayed in the owner’s second, third or fourth home. The cost? 295 euros a day. No courses for the children’s behaviour then?

Polls

Minerva Spearing Ignorance

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) (and studio)

Photo Credit: The Banqueting House - Whitehall Palace, 

Historic Royal Palaces [CC BY-NC-ND]

5% of British adults indicated they did not believe the holocaust happened and 8% say that the scale of the genocide has been exaggerated according to a poll marking Holocaust Memorial Day (The Times, 27.1.2019). Were these people telling the truth? We don’t know. Were they taking the poll seriously? We don’t know. Not reported, initially, in the paper was the size of the poll. According to radio 4 the size of the poll was 2,000. Can such generalisations be made from such a small number polled?

On the 9^th of February, Matthew Paris, writing in The Times had this to say on the subject:

“Without meaning to, and though they acted only in good faith, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s poll has defamed this country. Its findings deserve sceptical scrutiny.”

He also suggested it was more likely that one in 20 did not know the meaning of the word “Holocaust.”