Latest news with #GirlwithBalloon
Irish Examiner
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Colin Sheridan: Is a €8m handbag a sign that moral rot within society is beyond redemption?
Last week, while most of us were trying to figure out whether we could stretch a pack of sausages to Wednesday, a handbag — yes, a handbag — sold for over €8m at auction. Not just any handbag, mind you. This was Jane Birkin's handbag, a Hermès Birkin, apparently so fabulous it makes the Ark of the Covenant look like something you'd pick up in Mr Price. Can you live in the handbag? Will the handbag score 12 goals from midfield for your favourite football team? Does the handbag masquerade as a consultant obstetrician? I had to check the headline thrice to be sure it wasn't satire. But no, some anonymous collector with more money than shame decided that owning a dead woman's carry-all was worth liquidating the GDP of Latvia. One wonders if the buyer realises that, in the end, it's still a leather sack for lugging around tampons, loose Polo mints, and the odd receipt from Boots. We are in a golden age for absurdity. The global elite, presumably bored of space travel and tax avoidance, have turned to auctions to alleviate their crushing ennui. They'll throw millions at anything with a whiff of celebrity: Hair clippings, stained lyric sheets, Willie Joe Padden's bloodstained head-sock. The only criterion is that it must be fundamentally useless. Consider, if you will, the painting by the American artist Robert Ryman, which sold for $20m. A lovely canvas of — wait for it — white paint. Just white. You'd be forgiven for thinking someone had accidentally left the undercoat unfinished and called it a day. The shredded Banksy painting 'Love is in the Bin' exhibited at the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden in 2019. Picture: Uli Deck, DPA via AP The Sotheby's catalogue, in all seriousness, described it as 'an exploration of absence and presence'. Fools! I would've given them twice as much absence and presence for half the price. Then there's the shredded Banksy. You remember that one: Girl with Balloon, which was run through a hidden shredder the moment the hammer fell. The partial destruction somehow made it more valuable. It's now called Love is in the Bin and sold for €21m. Because nothing says 'serious art' like a prank worthy of a drunk teenager. You can't even hang the thing without a health-and-safety risk assessment in case it completes the shredding mid-dinner party. Not just about visual art Lest you think this is purely a visual art problem, let's not forget the world of music memorabilia. Kurt Cobain's battered cardigan from MTV Unplugged went for €300,000. Not because it was woven from unicorn wool — though at that price, it ought to be — but because it still had a few cigarette burns in the sleeves. Some poor intern probably spent the entire auction standing guard over it in a humidity-controlled glass box, as if it were the Shroud of Turin. Of course, nothing tops the slice of stale wedding cake from Charles and Diana's nuptials, which fetched €1,800. Imagine explaining that to your dinner guests. If ever proof was needed that the British monarchy has warped the collective brain, there it is. I realise that by now, I sound like the man shouting at a shredded cloud. But can we acknowledge that an €8m handbag is a sign that the moral rot within society is perhaps beyond redemption? Jane Birkin herself was reportedly ambivalent about the bag's absurd symbolism, once complaining that it was too heavy to be practical. Indeed, if you were the owner of such a thing, you'd be terrified to take it to Dunnes Stores for fear someone would brush against it with a trolley and take €200,000 off its resale value. What do the owners do with this stuff? Keep it in a bank vault? Gloat over it at dinner parties? Invite friends round to sniff the lining? 'Go on, that's the authentic aroma of 1960s Gauloises and existential dread.' And yet the madness persists. We live in a time when working people must remortgage their house if they want a new boiler, but if you're rich enough, you can drop seven figures on the decaying remnants of someone else's broken dreams. The whole ecosystem thrives on scarcity and snobbery. There's no limit to the price as long as it remains tantalisingly out of reach for the rest of us. One could argue there's poetry in it — a reminder of the surreal hierarchy of value humans assign to the meaningless. But I'd wager it's mostly ego and the desperate need to be seen as a connoisseur. In reality, the only thing you're a connoisseur of is spectacular bad taste and the art of burning cash. So, to whoever bought Jane Birkin's handbag: Congratulations. May you treasure your absurd purchase as a monument to the world's most expensive nonsense. And when the day comes that the bottom falls out of the collector's market — and it always does — you can use it to carry your tears.
Vancouver Sun
08-05-2025
- Health
- Vancouver Sun
Opinion: Helping those with heart failure centres on one word
I love Banksy's iconic drawing Girl with Balloon — the profile of a little girl releasing (or is she trying to grab it?) the string of a red heart-shaped balloon. I love it, not just because I'm a cardiologist but because it symbolizes hope. That's something that's crucial in health care, and particularly in my specialty, heart failure. We need to have hope. Heart failure is a serious chronic disease involving a progressive reduction in the heart's ability to pump blood effectively throughout the body. Over time, this causes increasing inability to perform basic functions without discomfort, fatigue and shortness of breath. Why do I find hope in such a condition? I see hope in many places because heart failure can be effectively managed and treated to delay or reverse progression and improve symptoms and outcomes, particularly if it is diagnosed at early stages. A daily roundup of Opinion pieces from the Sun and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Informed Opinion will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. Because heart failure takes a huge toll on our health system, ensuring early diagnosis for as many people as possible can go a long way to helping improve care for everyone. More than 19,000 British Columbia residents were newly diagnosed with heart failure in 2022, a number that keeps rising every year as our population ages. In 2022, there were more than 137,000 B.C. residents living with diagnosed heart failure, up 20 per cent from just five years earlier. Heart failure is also a leading cause of hospitalization — almost 9,000 in the past year with an average length of stay of 9.2 days, one of the longest of any major reason for hospitalization. A projection shows the number of annual hospitalizations almost doubling to more than 17,000 in 10 years. We can do more to diagnose and treat those with heart failure. But it requires targeted investment. A recent national survey of 501 acute and urgent care hospitals across Canada, including 69 in B.C. (representing 85 per cent of all such facilities in the province) conducted by Heart & Stroke showed shortfalls in equipment needed to provide timely and accurate diagnosis of heart failure and to track its progression. In B.C., only slightly more than half of the facilities in the survey had access to on-site echocardiography (ECHO) that should be performed in all patients with suspected heart failure. For more advanced imaging to determine underlying causes of heart failure, fewer than one in five facilities in B.C. could do a cardiac MRI scan, just over a third could do a coronary CT scan and a similar number myocardial perfusion imaging (to show heart muscle blood supply) and only four out of 10 could do a stress ECHO test (to show how the heart functions under stress, such as with exercise). These limitations in access to important testing, diagnostic procedures and medical therapies, as well as a lack of awareness of heart failure in general, often result in delays in treatment. Unfortunately, 50 per cent of people with heart failure have had symptoms for up to five years and one in six people over 65 years of age presenting with breathlessness in primary care will have unrecognized heart failure. The result? Many only appear for care when symptoms get serious. They head to emergency departments, often resulting in those long hospital stays. There is hope — in new research and policies. With May 4 to 10 marking Heart Failure Awareness Week, it's a time to reflect on these opportunities for hope. The MAPLE congestive heart failure study is evaluating if AI assisted ECHO testing will increase early diagnosis among patients with multiple risk factors is one of many bright lights. Pharmacists can also help by having a greater role in monitoring patients and flagging the need for changes in medication or other care. This will help over-stretched heart failure specialists who are only able to see the more advanced cases. It is also important for the health system in general to work better together to improve patient care and wellbeing. System-level investments are needed to improve, expand and coordinate services across the continuum of care, including supporting early diagnosis and treatment and improving access to specialized clinics and community-based services. There is also cause for hope that new technologies can soon screen for early heart failure to help prevent further progression, in the same way we now screen for different cancers. The artist Banksy, who gave the hope of the heart-shaped balloon, has been described as the world's most famous invisible person. Heart failure is perhaps our most serious invisible disease. But like with Banksy, from that invisibility, there also comes great hope. Dr. Nathaniel Hawkins is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia with dual training in heart function and heart rhythm management. He is the medical lead for research and quality at Cardiac Services B.C., and the physician lead for the Vancouver Coastal Health Regional Heart Failure Program.
