Let's be honest, there are losers and winners in this world Cambridge's decision to let students know about their exam results in private is the latest evidence that we are bent on breeding fragility into the young, says Celia Walden.   By Celia Walden
Published: 5:51PM BST 03 Jun 2009
The young, it appears, are becoming fragile. For the first time in 300 years, exam results at Cambridge are to be sent privately to students, to curb the "fear" and "humiliation" of finding out from the board outside the university's senate house that you got a 2:2, while standing next to someone you despised who got a first. Meanwhile, Sir Ken Robinson, who is advising the Government on education, thinks we should do away with the whole exam thing, and leave children free to daub primitive murals along school walls. He didn't say that, but he did insist that we have to "develop children's creativity", and once the c-word has been mentioned pretty much anything goes.
Have you tried saying "creativity" without screwing up your face and affecting a peevish whine? It's impossible, and it's a whining, cloying, self-righteous word used by people who appear convinced that rigorous learning and a flourishing imagination are incompatible. Nothing in history suggests that this is true. Great painters studied the Old Masters to learn their craft: Turner, for one, worked at the Dutch masters as a preliminary to developing his freer, original style. Those were the days when artists painted pictures rather than "creating art". Now, trendy educationalists would play down the nasty business of spelling, grammar and academic rigour, leaving us all free to emote. Yet many a parent would welcome some hard academic graft in state schools, when an increasing number of the most successful painters, actors, playwrights, musicians and even pop stars seem to have benefited from a more demanding education in the private sector. In other areas, we seem bent on breeding emotional fragility into the young, from the egg and spoon race with no winners, to the diplomatic announcement of exam results, to produce a generation of brittle – but oh-so-"creative" - little souls. * This time last year, women – and Harriet Harman – were all at it: planting great big kisses on each other's mouths at parties and political conferences nationwide. This year, it's the men who are grasping each other in headlocks, grappling full-frontally like sumo wrestlers – and even kissing on the lips. At Tuesday night's Glamour magazine awards, the man-tussle was rife, with presenter James Corden making a grab at every male guest, in a display so primal we needed David Attenborough to do the voice-over. "What's it all about?" he would wonder. "Women have always had the greet thing to themselves," Corden tells me. "It feels good to say hi with a big old man-hug – everyone's doing it now – and actually, it proves how straight you are." Formula One driver Jenson Button, who…

  How the French Charles Saatchi became the merchant of Venice Anges Poirier takes a first look inside the impressive Venice home of billionaire François Pinault's contemporary art collection     Agnès Poirier The Guardian, Wednesday 3 June 2009 Article history
La Dogana took a mere 18 months to renovate into an exhibition space. Photograph: Andrea Jemolo  It's easy to understand why Alison Gingeras, the curator of French billionaire François Pinault's art collection, suggests we meet at the bar of the Monaco Hotel in Venice. The view from the hotel terrace over to Dogana del Mare, the 17th-century customs house across the Grand Canal, is spectacular. La Dogana, as the building will now be known, is also where Gingeras has worked night and day for the last six weeks. Timed to coincide with the opening of the Venice Biennale, it will throw open its doors later this week.Rewind to spring 2001, when Pinault, who built a business empire on everything from timber to fashion (he owns brands including Gucci and Yves St-Laurent), left his eldest son François-Henri running the group in order to focus on his art collection – 2,500 pieces by celebrity artists such as Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Cy Twombly, Takashi Murakami and the Chapman brothers, alongside rising stars including Matthew Day Jackson, Adel Abdessemed, Nate Lowman and Kai Althoff. But there was a problem: the art had no home.   Pinault's prize ... Dogana del Mare Pinault needed somewhere to base his foundation and exhibit the collection. Initially, he chose a location just outside Paris, near where Renault used to have its factories. But negotiations with the French state were tough, and not eased by Pinault's friendship with the president at the time, Jacques Chirac. After three years going nowhere, Pinault threw in the towel.Then, in 2005, he heard that the impressive 18th-century Palazzo Grassi in Venice was looking for an owner. Pinault didn't think twice, and even poached the French culture minister and former Pompidou Centre director, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, to become his man in Italy. The space opened in spring 2006 with a shock for regulars who had attended its impeccably curated exhibitions of Italian renaissance architecture in 1997: Jeff Koons's monumental inflatable Balloon Dog (Magenta) tethered to a floating island in the canal. Even so, Palazzo Grassi was only phase one of Pinault's grand designs: he needed yet more space. So he found himself competing with the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation – which owns the famous museum nearby – to acquire the abandoned Dogana. It was with some inevitability that, in spring 2007, the city authorities chose Pinault. "Only he could muster the team and invest the necessary amount of money to turn around the restoration so quickly,"…

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