Chilli Peppers
For thousands of years, humans have taken painful pleasure from adding chillies (also known as peppers or chilli peppers) to their food. A study published in the British Medical Journal in 2015 indicated that a diet filled with spices – including chillies – was beneficial for health. The study, which was carried out by scientists at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, tracked the health of nearly half a million participants in China for several years. They found that participants who ate spicy food once or twice a week had a mortality rate 10% lower than those who ate spicy food less than once a week. Risk of death reduced still further for people who ate spicy food six or seven days a week. Chilli peppers were the most commonly used spice among the sample, and those who ate fresh chilli had a lower probability of death from cancer, heart disease and diabetes.
The health-promoting properties of chillies can be found in capsaicin, which is the odourless, colourless chemical compound that makes chillies hot. Inside a chilli there are yellow stalks that attach the seeds to its sides and in many types of chilli, this is the location of capsaicin, but there are several varieties where this is not the case. The heat of a chilli is measured in Scoville heat units, which is the number of times a sample of dissolved dried chilli must be diluted by its own weight in sugar water before it loses its heat. For a green bell pepper this is zero. But habanero peppers have a Scoville value of between 100,000 and 350,000. For pure capsaicin the figure is 16 million. Pure capsaicin can be bought on the internet, though its use as a food additive is banned in the European Union. The use of chilli peppers as weapons dates back to pre-Columbian times (before 1492), when, it is said, Mayans burned rows of them to create a stinging smokescreen to protect themselves from their enemies. The Aztecs also put chilli on their teeth to kill toothache pain, and the use of capsaicin as a pain reliever continues today.
Joshua Tewksbury, a natural historian at the University of Washington, thinks the burning sensation we experience when we come into contact with chillies is an evolutionary trick. 'We're not actually being damaged by the capsaicin the way we would be if we were touching a stove, but our brain thinks we are,' he says, adding that all mammals experience the same sensation but that birds do not. 'They can eat chillies like popcorn and they don't feel the heat.' In this way, Tewksbury suggests, the plant evolved to repel animals that might crush its seeds with their teeth, but not ones that would help spread them.
Chillies also fight bacteria. This was of great value in the days before refrigeration, when, particularly in the tropics, people were vulnerable to bacteria that could harm them directly or cause their food to spoil. Chillies kill or inhibit 75% of such bacteria. That may just explain the spice's world-conquering success. Just two or three years after the explorer Christopher Columbus brought chilli seeds back to Europe from the New World in 1493, Portuguese merchants took the plants to Asia, where they would transform the cuisine. People in hot countries are said to use more chilli because it makes them generate a lot of sweat, which cools them down. But in 1998, researchers at Cornell University pointed out that the greater use of spices in countries such as India, Thailand and China was likely to be linked to the antibacterial function. By studying books filled with recipes from all over the world, the researchers found that spices including chilli were more likely to be used close to the equator, and were also used more in valleys with high levels of humidity than on high plateaux.
Capsaicin has even been suggested as a potential weight-loss tool. Research conducted by the University of Wyoming on mice that had been fed a high-fat diet found that the substance increased the metabolism of the animals, causing them to burn more energy and preventing weight gain. In another study, researchers at the University of Adelaide found that certain receptors that interact with capsaicin and are located inside the stomach play a role in sensing when you are full. Previous studies on humans seem to back the idea that eating spicy food may curb our appetite.
Capsaicin is a natural painkiller. Capsaicin creams and patches are available in chemists to ease pain. But it's only recently that we have come to understand how something that causes pain can ease it too. Capsaicin binds to the pain receptor TRPV1, which our brains also use to detect changes in temperature – that's why we think chillies are hot. But after being over-stimulated the neurons stop responding, killing the pain. This process involves the release of endorphins, which can give us a 'rush' not unlike the feeling we have when we have done some exercise. This may explain why some people believe that hot food is addictive.
From princes to paupers: how Goya's portraits tell the story of Spain
A There are, according to current scholarship, 160 existing portraits by Francisco de Goya - about a third of his painted output. The real number, though, is much greater since there are no pure landscapes in Goya's work, in that everything he ever painted deals with people. In the work of no other great portraitist are a nation's people, history, traumas, folk traditions, and superstitions so comprehensively and relentlessly captured. His subject was a good one since Goya lived in interesting times: his lifetime was a period that saw Spain pass through the effects of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the restoration of the monarchy; it was ruled by a succession of authoritarian and liberal governments; and was simultaneously marked by the Enlightenment. Put his work together – the public and private paintings, the personal drawings and sketches, and the unsettling and sinister etching series – and what you have is a portrait in the round of Spain itself.
B His work as a portraitist has its origins in the 45 tapestry cartoons he painted after he moved to Madrid in 1775. Although his designs don't show portraits, they do show types – the majos and majas who gave Madrid its street swagger, peasants and rich men, courting couples, singers, hunters, children, and young men and women playing blind man's buff or tossing a mannequin into the air. The pictures have a light, rococo palette and the faces are individualised without being those of individuals. But in them, Goya practised poses and groupings and a way of handling light on and around figures that was to be invaluable.
C The tapestry designs also show social roles rather than the people inhabiting them, but when it came to painting portraits proper, Goya would turn this on its head. His greatest strength as a portraitist is that regardless of the status of the sitter, be they a king and queen, the Duke of Wellington, or a doctor or writer, it was the person he showed first and their position second. It was this trait, most apparent in his royal portraiture, that has led him to be seen as satirising the Bourbon monarchy rather than as a painter who depicted what he saw without showing obeisance to the usual flattering conventions. In Robert Hughes's phrase, he did not 'pay reflexive homage to authority' but instead walked a fine line between respect and truth.
D Goya's success was rapid; in 1785 he was made deputy director of painting at the Royal Academy (his main message to his students was subversive – 'there are no rules in painting') and in 1786 became pintor de cámara, required to paint 'works required for royal service'. He immediately spent some of his 15,000-reales salary on a two-wheeled gig (one of only three in Madrid) which he promptly crashed on his first outing. His amour propre untouched, he wrote to his childhood friend Martín Zapater: 'I have now established an enviable way of living: I do not wait on anyone in antechambers, and if anyone wants anything from me they must come to me; I have made myself more in demand and unless it is a person of rank or at the request of a friend I would do nothing for anyone...'
E Part of the reason for his success was that, unlike Gainsborough, for example, he did not resent portraiture as an economically necessary chore that ate away at the time he could devote to higher art. Portraiture fascinated him; it was, after all, part of that 'sacred science which requires so much study' and his portraits reveal a fully engaged artist. There is hardly any repetition in his poses (to help, he drew on prints of English portraits as well as classical statuary), he worked hard to give his sitters in repose a sense of latent movement, and he defined them by the careful depiction of the space around them. When it came to clothing he allowed himself extraordinary freedom, the frogging on uniforms or lace on a dress sketched in thick impasto rather than being laboriously defined. From close up such three-dimensional scumblings look out of focus but from a distance, they coalesce into silks, braiding, and gauze. Such varieties of technique within a painting keep the eye entertained and moving.
F 'My work is very simple. My art reveals idealism and truth,' Goya claimed. The truth though is always more apparent than the idealism. In the most important commission of his career, for example, the portrait of Charles IV and the royal family of 1800, he eschewed entirely the grandeur of majesty to portray the assembled Bourbons as they appeared - a motley grouping (a French visitor had likened Charles and his queen Maria Luisa to a butcher and his wife) in fancy clothes. Goya may have been a political liberal but he wouldn't have jeopardised his hard-won new position as first court painter – the first Spaniard since Velázquez to hold the role - in order to score political points at the expense of his patrons. That his sitters didn't regard the portrait as unflattering was evidenced by succeeding royal commissions, not least his 1815 portrait of Ferdinand VII. Ferdinand himself was physically unprepossessing, tyrannical, vicious, and small-minded and that is exactly how Goya shows him. The king, however, looking in Goya's particular mirror, saw no such characteristics staring back at him.
G The private side of Goya's portraiture was a world away from the public. The contrast between the Ferdinand portrait and the remarkable 1820 double portrait showing Goya with Dr Arrieta, represents a moral version of the three ages of man – the 73-year-old painter in the throes of a debilitating illness being tended by his doctor. If Ferdinand represents human malignity and Goya its frailty, then Arrieta stands for man's innate kindness. While not all his portraits are successful (some have a doll-like stiffness), this is what Goya at his best could do: in the guise of representing individuals he showed, without judging, man as a universal being.
Tasmania's Museum of Old and New Art
A As an eighteen-year-old living in the small Australian island state of Tasmania, moving to the 'mainland' could not happen soon enough. Now, ten years later, I look forward to going home. This is probably because I've grown up, but also perhaps because the cultural landscape of Tasmania has matured. The latest addition to Tasmania's cultural scene is David Walsh's Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), a museum that has established Hobart, the capital city of Tasmania, on the global art circuit.
B This building is an example of how art and architecture can have an instant impact on the social and cultural reputation of a place. Andrew Bain of The Sydney Morning Herald wrote, 'In a virtual blink, Hobart's cultural landscape has been transformed, with art, wine, fine food and stylish accommodation becoming integral features of the city... . If Hobart's makeover has an origin, it's the opening of MONA–the Museum of Old and New Art.' MONA is said to have been solely instrumental in the reinvention of Hobart as a cultural hub.
C MONA made the national press and international blogs before it opened. After that, Tourism Industry Council of Tasmania's chief executive, Luke Martin, claimed that MONA was proving so popular it was underpinning the tourism industry in Tasmania. However, MONA's effect on Hobart has broader ramifications for Tasmania's tourism industry. As reported in Hobart's local paper, The Mercury, there is concern about how long people are staying in Tasmania. Rather than spending a week in the state and hiring a car to experience the beauty of the Tasmanian landscape, people are making short stays in Hobart only to visit the gallery. The next challenge for the state is how to entice holiday makers to stay longer, and to venture further afield. Tasmania is more than a one-hit wonder.
D According to Martin, possibilities for packaging up MONA with visits to other galleries around Tasmania are being investigated. Although not directly related to these investigations, the 1891 Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery at Royal Park in Launceston is currently being restored to its original condition; there are also plans to extensively redevelop the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart. In addition to this, there are up to twenty other existing quality galleries in the state. So there is more to see than just MONA.
E Although large, the building is rather nondescript, sitting heavily on the edge of the Derwent River. MONA's 'wow factor' comes from the notoriety of David Walsh, the museum's millionaire founder, and his choice of unusual artworks. The architecture has more depth of meaning and does exactly as it should: it supports the vision of the museum, essentially the vision of Walsh. It's a new building in the context of a maturing city. The dark, moody labyrinth of gallery spaces could be likened to the mind of the eccentric founder himself. Each artwork appears to be integrated into the dark materiality of the architecture–the interiors are far from light, bright and neutral, as might be seen in a more traditional gallery. The dim lighting and rough, rocky surfaces are a reminder that visitors are three levels underground.
F The warped, mirrored surface at the museum's entry could be seen as the start of a journey of reflecting on one's existence. Much of the art explores the human condition–there are uninhibited artistic descriptions of human relationships, death, and even the digestion process. Going to a gallery with such confronting artworks with your parents is an interesting experience; I was pleasantly surprised by my parents' openness to the exhibitions. My father, who normally whisks through a gallery while my mother likes to take her time, happily spent almost five hours at MONA; the urge to linger is a common feeling here. This is because the gallery engages all of the senses, and visitors often pause to experience the effect each artwork has on them. This raises the question of who is actually visiting MONA–and it's definitely not just the normal gallery-goers. People from all kinds of socioeconomic backgrounds are curious about what lies within the subterranean maze of MONA. Conservative minds are being opened, which is a good thing anywhere.
G Walsh's antiquities collection is superb, but he knew that old coins would compete for attention against new works that are more challenging in scale and subject matter, hence the device of setting antiquities among twentieth-and twenty-first century works. For me, one of the intriguing outcomes of this strategy was an intensified feeling that the makers of the coins and antiquities were the great contemporary artists of their time.
H The so-called Bilbao Effect has worked its magic on Hobart because, just as Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum has transformed the city of Bilbao in Spain, MONA has been a magnet for tourists in Hobart. However, the architectural 'wow factor' of the Guggenheim was the most famous component of that city's transformation, whereas Fender Katsalidis's MONA does not have the same spectacular impact as the shimmering metal surfaces of Gehry's building. Walsh himself abhors descriptions of MONA as the Bilbao of the south, saying that Fender Katsalidis solved a problem when he designed MONA, in executing a project of this scale in an underground location. Walsh contrasts this with what he describes as the 'architectural self-indulgence' of Gehry when designing the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Call it the Bilbao Effect, but this phenomenon has been around for thousands of years–good public architecture forms the centrepiece of a city. This is probably true, but like the Guggenheim, MONA has initiated something very important for Tasmania, and for Hobart in particular. Now the question is how Tasmania will build on David Walsh's input into its cultural setting.