Letter from London

摘要

On the face of it, car manufacturing and the world of art and sculpture have little to do with each other, except in the case of Pop Art or super-realist images of the projecting wing or the gleaming chassis. We don't connect Jeremy Clarkson with Bernard Berenson. Yet culture is indivisible, a fabric of many ideas, a weave across time and space which can bring very different worlds into unexpected conjunction. Thus on Monday this week, Tate Modern held a media conference to announce a long-term partnership with the Korean car manufacturer Hyundai. Vice-chairman Chung Eui-sun described the connection between art and cars as being similar to a 'needle and thread', which might seem pushing it a bit. On the other hand, the two organisations have a shared interest in several areas: innovation, the emotional relationship between people and what they experience, internationalism and, not least, art itself.