THE BEST TEN TIPS EVER. IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER- 1    BE TALL 2    MEASURE YOUR COMMITMENT 3    TALK JUST ENOUGH 4    FLOW 5    TURN INTO CASH 6    DON'T SMILE 7    PRETEND TO BE MORE STUPID 8    KEEP YOUR WORD 9    SHOW YOUR FACE 10   GIVE PRESENTS 1.- The BBC produced a programme hosted by John Cleese in which the aim was to discover the factors behind physical attraction. They called on numerous experts who put forward their hypotheses.  A group of young singles served as the study group. The young people had to interact and try to chat each other up successfully.  Once the men and girls who were taking part in the experiment had been introduced, the experts, who included scientists and a group of specialists in self-help, had to predict which pairs would get in touch after the programme. The experts based their predictions on different criteria.  Those with a background in the empirical sciences thought young people whose faces had some morphological affinity or those with very marked masculine or feminine traits would be the ones to make a match. The sociologist thought the air of self-assurance that goes with a higher social status would be a key factor. The group of self-help specialists believed self-reliance and salesmanship would be decisive. For two days the young people interacted in one-to-one meetings and group encounters The professionals voiced their conclusions. Each of the young people wrote a note saying who they wanted to meet after the programme. All the professionals had guessed wrong. Not one of their predictions about which would find partners or which individual would be the most sought after came true.  To round off the experiment, John Cleese wickedly revealed the key to the mystery.  One characteristic alone was sufficient to guarantee success: you had to be tall. We can't decide for ourselves how tall we'll be, but we can look for solutions to the problem. A person's public image is based on visual documents. Many more people will see a photograph in a newspaper than you could ever actually meet. It's a good idea to consult a stylist about the colour and cut of your clothes, but paying careful attention to Sarkozy's public image will give you two crucial pieces of advice. And let me stress, with all due modesty, that I support this advice and recommend you to put it into practice, regardless of whether you're tall or short. First an elementary trick: on sloping ground, always stand on the highest spot. If you're strolling along the beach, for instance, it's vital to walk on the side farthest away from the water. And now some more sophisticated advice. Photographs flatten perspective, they lack depth. And we all know that perspective makes things in the foreground seem bigger. So what you should do is make sure you're always one step in front, a few centimetres nearer the camera. 2.- Bruce Nauman claimed that everything an artist did in his studio was art.  Even painting his balls black. It was a way out of the debate about what art is and allowed him to distance himself from the type of artist who claims to produce art twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. That way art wasn't everything artists did: it was only what they did when they intended to produce art. Shutting themselves into their studios was an reasonable indication that they'd decided to produce art at that particular time. So I decided to regulate my own artistic activity. In those days I really wasn't very busy and I had plenty of time available to spend in my studio. It was a semi-basement, so it was neither hot nor cold, and I felt relatively comfortable there, except that I'd made it a rule to work in a suit I'd bought in a second-hand shop and the suit was a bit small for me. When I was wearing my suit, I looked like Joan Miró, or I thought I did. My friends agreed with me. I planted a potato in a pot and stood it in the middle of my studio. I installed an automatic drip watering system. I replaced the fluorescent lights by blue-spectrum lights, following the advice I'd been given in a flower shop. Every time I went into the studio I switched the light on, and when I left I switched it off. The potato sprouted and grew tall and leggy. When plants are deprived of light, they think there's something up there that's casting a shadow on them, so they concentrate all their energy on growing a long stem to get past the obstacle and reach the light. The potato plant grew fast. It had a white stem and stunted leaves that tried desperately to escape from the gloom. I felt responsible for my potato plant and sometimes I'd go into my studio specially to switch the light on. I'd take a book along, and play squash with myself using the tennis balls that fell from the sports centre next door, and I'd imagine what my studio would look like if I could afford to remodel it. Then one day the stem of the potato plant could support its own weight no longer and it flopped onto the table, which was made of white Formica. Having given up hope of reaching the light, the potato resigned itself to a long period of semi-darkness. The stem, probably thinking it was under the soil, decided to become a tuber.  The underground part of a potato plant branches out into two kinds of structures:  the roots, which take in food, and the tubers, which develop into new potatoes. Nearly four months after the project began, all trace of the incipient leaves had vanished.  A potato, about  tree centimetres in diameter, grew at the tip of a tuber one hundred fourteen centimetres long that had once been a stem. I pulled the plant up: no more potatoes had formed under the soil.  Remember that a long, leggy stem uses up all the plant's energy just growing. I photographed the result. By not overexerting myself, I'd created a rarity. 3.- I once listened to an enlightening conversation in a film.  A married woman was saying that people got married because they were looking for someone to bear witness to their lives. The idea was that you need somebody else to give testimony about your life to prove you've really existed. She convinced me.  It reminded me of an old friend of mine. Nobody wanted to play billiards with him because he totally ignored his opponent's shots. He'd pass the time chatting or smoking and he'd even wander over to the bar and when he got back he'd ask if you'd scored a carom, and if you said yes, you'd pulled off a fantastic, incredibly difficult shot, he didn't even listen, and so your fantastic shot was lost for ever, for lack of witnesses... So what was the point? We have to accept the fact that only a very few witnesses will remember what we do, instead of thinking it's our obligation to keep everyone up to date with our affairs, or making it our duty to reel off our CVs the whole time, as though whoever we're talking to was interested. There's nothing more pathetic than answering those rhetorical questions people ask you out of politeness. Like the old joke about the man who was so boring that when you asked how he was, he actually told you. Sometimes it's the dream of going down to posterity that makes us talk too much. We forget that providing information in dribs and drabs has an enormous potential for arousing true interest. There are purely practical reasons too. Visualizing some chore you have to tackle has a paralysing effect. I often find that. For instance, if I have to do some job about the house, like changing a halogen bulb in a lamp fixture on the ceiling, since I can't remember what kind of bulb it is, first I have to climb up a ladder and remove the old bulb so that I can buy another one like it.  Then before I go out I'll have to put the ladder away gain, and then I'll have to track down to the shop, and get the ladder out again, and insert the bulb, and put the ladder away again. So when I see a bulb has fused, I visualize all these steps... and a month goes by So if we not only think about a project but talk about it, time and again, it makes it seem even more tedious and discouraging! Not only will it put us off carrying it out, but we may well be content to relegate it to the world of unfulfilled ideas. 4.- We all know people who, to put it politely, seem to have a slight time-management problem. I mean those people who are always late, and who make you late too if you run into them when you're on your way somewhere, and they're always in a rush and have lots to do, but from the way they behave you'd think they had all the time in the world. In my own private ranking of such people, Pedro comes top. I used to see a lot of him in the days before cell phones. When being stood up felt utterly agonizing, as it should do. Pedro's a man of ideals, with a deep sense of duty to society. So whenever there was a demonstration about this, that, or the other, he'd tell his wife she'd have to manage without him that afternoon because he was off to demonstrate. Some time after the demonstration had moved off, Pedro turned up at home with a couple of sticks. He wanted to make a banner.  He looked round for a piece of cloth, got out his spray cans and brushes, and thought up a slogan. While he was busy writing it, his wife pointed out that he'd better get going or the demonstration would be over. Pedro hadn't quite finished the last letter of the first word of his sentence − it was the “K” of “FUCK” − but off he rushed with his banner. He raced along a street that led straight into the heart of the demonstration and, sweating profusely, unfolded his banner with its two sticks and its one word, listing visibly to one side, and marched along bearing his unmistakable "FUCK". Nobody noticed the banner wasn't finished and Pedro kept it for the next occasion because he was sure it would be suitable for other causes. Apparently his decision aimed at cost-effectiveness. It enabled the public to extrapolate the ultimate meaning, so that the banner took on different connotations and thus was suitable for a variety of purposes. Allow me to tell you about an enlightening event I witnessed. An artist was staging an exhibition that was to open the following day.  It was eight o'clock in the evening and the fitters knocked off at six, unless there was work to be finished. But there wasn't. The job of setting the exhibition up had gone ahead smoothly, and there was no need for haste, or overtime.  One of the installations was a room that had been built of wood inside the exhibition hall, with walls and a ceiling and furniture and pictures. A lamp hung from the ceiling in the centre of this wooden box representing a room. The artist had scoured a flea-market in search of the ideal lamp, and found it, and hung it in her installation. It had a stem in the middle from which six arms with white lampshades branched out. It wasn't an antique: it was old, but in very good condition. At eight o' clock the artist rushed in.  She'd reached a sudden decision: she wanted the lamp to hang three or four inches lower. The man in charge of setting up exhibitions said OK, first thing in the morning, before the press conference, they'd hang it where the artist wanted; after all it was just a matter of unscrewing it from the ceiling to make it hang a bit lower. So the artist concluded it was easy to put right, and perhaps that was why she decided it wasn't worth waiting, and she could do it herself. She grabbed a ladder and climbed up to the ceiling.  As she loosened the light fitting, she asked the man in charge if the lamp was going down. She said would he please tell her when it was three or four inches lower, because that was how she wanted it. The lamp went down ... and down ... until at last it fell. The artist leapt off the ladder, looked at the lamp, walked round it several times, flung her arms open wide, touched her face, and finally announced: That's it, I'll leave it like that, it's a work of art!! 5.- A friend of mine has a friend, and I know his friend as well. So that we don't get mixed up, I'll call my friend my friend, and his friend my acquaintance. My friend told me that my acquaintance had once discovered an old Maserati in a flea market. It was parked in an adjoining garage; it wasn't even for sale.  My acquaintance bought it at rock-bottom price and had it overhauled. Once it was repaired and spruced up, he sold it in just one day. My acquaintance has plenty of influential contacts, but my friend rounded off his story by saying that if ever he saw some old wreck abandoned in a garage, and if he found out it was a model that was in demand, and if he had enough money to buy it, and if he was good at driving a hard bargain, the only thing he could do would be to phone my acquaintance so that he could cash in on it. Discovery brings no added value in itself, you have to be able to make money out of it. If you drive out of Reus along the T11 and continue along the N420, it's only two miles to Riudoms. Reus is the regional capital and has twenty times more inhabitants than Riudoms. Both are set in the same kind of surroundings: vineyards, hazelnut and olive groves, and flourishing industrial estates.  But there's a dispute between them. They both claim to be the birthplace of the illustrious architect Antoni Gaudí, and both have commemorative plaques to prove it. I know an artist who could turn this information into money. He'd only need to make a brochure showing the pictures of the two plaques. I do wish I'd told him... 6.- Smiling is the first clue that tells people you want something. My friend Jean pointed out to me that there are no pictures of any of the four great 20th century artists smiling: none of Picasso, or Duchamp, or  Warhol, or Beuys. I liked the story but, just as people who enjoy magic don't go to all lengths to find out how it's done, I wasn't interested in finding out if it was 100% true. As time went by I realized that there were in fact pictures of Picasso smiling. But since he sometimes smiled with his eyes, and sometimes with his lips, but never with his eyes and lips at the same time, frankly it was more frightening than reassuring. Joseph Beuys was different. I stumbled across a picture where he really was smiling. He was with Mrs Beuys and the little Beuys children at Dusseldorf station, about to set off for Kassel, the first time he took part in Documenta. The smile was a smirk of enthusiasm. It's extremely difficult to alter our reflex gestures deliberately.  That's basically how lie-detectors work, by analysing our grimaces and other types of information we emit involuntarily. Regularly practising facial gymnastics isn't waste of time; but having an agent is much more effective. There are different aspects to an agent, so I'll define his main job,  regardless of whether he's a professional under contract or, perhaps, just somebody who happened to be passing. An agent's job has always been to resist the temptation to laugh when he quotes the price you want to charge the customer for your work; he's also an arbitrator and go-between who avoids unpleasant personal confrontations. An agent is a gambler who plays your cards. A few minutes before taking part in the world poker championship in Las Vegas, a professional player expressed his views on television. This was his lesson: “If you haven't worked out in half an hour which of the people round the table is the fool, then you're the fool”. By engaging a trustworthy professional you can avoid adverse situations. But the agent − or possibly someone who just happened to be passing − has another mission too:   to speak well of you.  It's foolish to do it yourself. On film posters you see descriptions like “masterpiece!” or “breathtaking mystery!” but of course they weren't written by the film director himself, however convinced he may be that they're true. 7.- It doesn't mean not being stupid at all and just pretending to be stupid: the point to stress is that, however stupid you may be to start with, you should appear to be even more so. And the idea I want to develop is concerned with art by projection. You could define it like this: artistic manifestations to which greater value is attributed than the artist intended. Van Gogh for instance. From what I know of the history of art, and in the absence of information to the contrary, Van Gogh was not aware of the potential influence of his work, or even how novel his style was.  You could argue that artists are never aware of these things when producing their work. It's like Woody Allen's fictitious story about how he went for a coffee with Picasso just as he was about to embark on his Blue Period, so Picasso had to put it off till the next day. But Van Gogh's is a particularly bloody case. He took a naif view of his work, he wanted to paint like all those exciting painters he'd met in Paris. Of course he wasn't as naif as Rousseau, who once told Picasso that they two were the best artists in the world, he (Rousseau) in Realist style and Picasso in Egyptian style. But if our friend Vincent had lived longer, he would have finished up like Giorgio De Chirico, no doubt about it. Just take a look at his last work, in which he considered himself a Renaissance painter. Though legal experts say ignorance of the law is no excuse for the offence, I believe that lack of intentionality diminishes the artist's merit. That doesn't mean the work's not fantastic anyway, but it's fantastic because of the value we project upon it, not because of the artist's own talent. And this value is projected onto different aspects of a work of art. There are hundreds of significant aspects: they range from being captivated by the artist's life story, which is much to the taste of mythomaniacs, to fascination with the evocative power of the work. I prefer intelligent artists to artists who have suffered a lot. Maybe because being an artist myself, I don't want to suffer all my life in order to be appreciated. It's a subjective choice, but a reasonable one. 8.- My last name is Ortega and it has gipsy overtones.  I don't know of any ancestor who was a gypsy; in fact I don't think any relative of mine even accepts that our name sounds like a gypsy name. I discovered the gypsy connotations on Google. If I search for “Antonio Ortega artist” I find myself surrounded by toreros and flamenco cantaores. Maybe that's why I share the gipsy conviction that a promise is sacred.  Everyone knows that when a gypsy shakes your hand after a making a deal, he's sealing the agreement. Not only will he respect the agreement, but he'll stand by it, come hell or high water. There's a fundamental difference between respecting an agreement and standing by it. Standing by it adds a mortifying dimension, a tendency to dramatize, to take pleasure in suffering. In short, it means the promise will be kept, even if it's part of a bad bargain. Perhaps it's because of this distant kinship that for me the sacredness of a promise has something mystical about it. I wear a ring I bought in Istanbul. While I was there I didn't fancy buying anything much, but I couldn't leave Istanbul without experiencing the excitement of bartering, any more than I could have left Paris the first time I went there without going to the top of the Eiffel tower. So on the last day I went to the bazaar and chose a ring on a stall that sold jewellery.  I bartered with the stallholder for quite a while, until ultimately we agreed on a price I found satisfactory. I paid with a bank note and waited for the change. He made me a reduction on the price we'd agreed on. 9.- I was living in South Wimbledon and I had a lot of time and not much money. One of the few things I could do was visit the local City Farm. It was government run and offered jobs to people on the fringes of society and provided education for families. I soon realized I was making a nuisance of myself by going so often so I decided to look for an excuse. I was preparing an exhibition for la Sala Montcada de la  Fundació la Caixa (a catalan bank), and la City Farm has animal sponsoring programmes.  I used the money for the exhibition to sponsor Lucy, una Gloucester Old Spot sow, and they gave me a certificate made out in the name of “la Caixa”. Now I had an official document and an excuse for spending more time at the farm. Lucy was pregnant, and when I came back after staging my exhibition in Barcelona she'd given birth to a litter of ten piglets. One was very puny and had a hard job competing with his siblings for milk. So they separated him from the others and raised him on a bottle. They called him Alan. Alan was free to roam anywhere he wanted, he wasn't shy with people and he rubbed himself against the visitors' legs like a cat. He seemed smart, and he had a fringe like Babe, the one in the film "Babe, the Gallant Pig". Alan's nine brothers and sisters were taken off to a pig farm to be turned into sausages, or ham. But who could eat a pig with a name? As David G Torres said in the exhibition catalogue, it's very difficult to eat Alan with tarragon potatoes. So it's useful to have a name, even if only to arouse pity (...) 10.- I don't know if you've ever wondered how they recruit spies. In the year 2000 I met a spy. After the scandal over the fraudulent use of "reserved funds" to combat terrorism, and the so-called "Anti Terrorist Liberation Groups case", the Spanish government had abandoned the members of the CESID to their fate. One of them fancied himself as a writer. His alias was “César Blasco” and he was in London under the protection of MI5 because he'd done British intelligence a few favours. César lived in an apartment hotel in the wealthy Knightsbridge district. I met him in the only café where you could get a cup of tea for a pound. I was with my wife and I'd gone to investigate whether they sold turrón (Spanish nougat) at Harrods and if it was considered a luxury item. Then we went for a snack. César was sitting at another table with a mobile phone. He was in a wheelchair. One thing led to another and we got chatting: he liked to boast, he seldom had the chance to talk, and he had an audience that was all ears. Because I must admit we were keen to listen to his stories and that loosened his tongue. So we met a few times in his room.  I was an artist and he was a writer.  I gave him a catalogue and he gave me a manuscript entitled “Spies have hearts too”. It was a novel about the life of a spy.  The second day he admitted that he was the main character. In the book he told about how he came to become a spy, and that's the story I want to share with you. Paesa's a strange fellow. Sao Tomé and Príncipe is a tiny country in the Gulf of Guinea, a country that couldn't afford the expense of having a consul at the United Nations in Geneva. So Spain paid for the consul, and the consul was Paesa. Quite a character. Paesa faked his own death to escape from the mess he'd landed himself in. Everybody knows he's alive and he doesn't take much trouble to hide but nobody's looking for him. César had been a late immigrant to Geneva. He took whatever job turned up, and what turned up was work in the construction industry. And there he was, up on a roof trying to repair it when he had an argument over something with the owner of the house. Paesa was walking past. That little Spaniard with his sharp temper and his fighting spirit seemed like a blessing from heaven and he invited him to have a cup of coffee.  Paesa got César a job in the United Nations, and met him regularly, and asked him questions about journalists and about his friends and the people he saw outside work. One day he gave him a magnificent watch, another day a car. César felt indebted to him and was very keen to repay his generosity.