I spent a few hours at the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at Tate Modern this afternoon. The area just south of Tate modern seems to be an area in transition. In some ways it is very old London yet there are massive apartments blocks going up. Not many people about so presumably none of them are sold yet.
Inside Tate Modern it was the usual story of queuing for the ticket then queueing for the exhibition to be let in at a given time then trying to get past the people who think they have to queue for every exhibit. I recall prior to Tate Modern, if one wanted to see some modern art, one was forced to visit The Tate (now Tate Britain) and endure a lot of dusty old fashioned art first. To be honest all art can be good and bad and I can well remember being extremely impressed when I discovered a futurist sculpture created in 1913 named ‘Unique Forms Of Continuity In Space’ by Umberto Boccioni.
These days the art establishment like to claim that they are brining art to the masses but I think they may merely have succumbed to the obsession with profit which seems to have driven the start of the 21st century. I’m not sure that having Anne Robinson ask “Name a modern art museum in London” on The Weakest Link counts as art appreciation and justifies the congestion. …however, I digress……
Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist who lives in a mental institution so it says here. The first exhibits I found fairly mundane and was soon presented with what appeared to be painting from the Bollocks school of art. i.e. Since anything can be art, therefore any old bollocks I create must also be art. Monochrome canvasses with squiggles and texturing. I began to feel a little cynical. Chairs and shoes filled with what appeared to be large white turds. Thank you Ms. Kusama, we’ll be in touch.
Boat
However, things livened up a bit and the dark room with the white boat full of turds was quite striking. Later the punters were paying great attention to a video with a large sign stating that there were scenes of an “explicit nature”. So many people were paying so much attention that I never did get into that room.
I entered another dark room decorated somewhat like an ordinary living dining room with chairs and a table laid for dinner. The only light in the room came from Ultra Violet strip lights around the ceiling. What made the room impressive was thousands of dots of primary colour dabbed all the over the floors, walls, ceilings and objects. Sounds daft but I felt like I had entered an Alice in Wonderland novel. Following swift on the heals of this was another room full of coloured lights and mirrors which was also very impressive and by the time I was presented with her latest large vitally colourful paintings I had become a Kusama fan.
Obliteration Room
The Kusama exhibition runs to the 5th June 2012 and tickets are £10 with a request for a £1 donation to charity. Worth a visit.
Recently The Guardian ran an article reporting that India is to crackdown on what are termed “human safaris” where comparatively rich tourists visit the Jarawa tribe people of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.
The Jarawa people have long been isolated from the rest of the world and are now being affected by a major road built across their land by the Indian government. A video accompanied the report showing Indian tourists getting the tribes people to dance for food.
Of course we sympathise with the Jarawar and abhor the idea that tourists casually throw them food in order to capture a few second of video footage.
But are we so very different? As a keen photographer I keep an eye on Flickr and, today, I came across this picture which appealed to me. The picture shows a couple of Ugandan children walking down a dirt road carrying baggage on their heads. The girl also carries a large container probably for water. It’s a nice shot. The colours are subtly beautiful and the girl’s expression is interesting.
But take a step back here. How would we feel if tourists wandered around poor areas of America with expensive cameras, capturing images of people struggling with bags and then drove back to their hotels in the evening to eat and drink too much?
I am in no way condemning the photographer of this shot. I have taken similar pictures and have to defend photography as an art form and state that, while the streets of western countries are fantastic subjects for photography the scale is less and less human. The beauty of pictures such as The Long Way Home may be related to their simplicity and humanity.
I guess there have always been disparities in wealth and power between the haves and have nots but these days cheap air travel seems to allow we who live in the rich world to objectify people from the “developing world” without a thought.
I bought a Calvin & Hobbes book over Christmas. “Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat” it was called. My present to myself. I adore this one…..it epitomises living in the western world in the 21st century in four simple frames.
Earlier this month I watched Newsnight Review on BBC2 and saw Kirsty Wark and Paul Morley discussing the recent death of Christopher Hitchens. One comment of Mr. Morley’s rankled with me. He said “5000 bloggers are not worth one Christopher Hitchens”. “Hmph!”, I grunted and tweeted “…True, neither are 5000 TV critics in black polo neck sweaters”.
It is commonplace for the mainstream media to denigrate bloggers and attention is usually drawn to the mediums very real failings: Blogs can be abusive, poorly thought through, dreadfully worded, awfully spelt and the facts are rarely checked. Many blogs have all these failings and more but professional journalists whining about bloggers are a little like aristocrats sneering at working class speech.
If we invert the failings attributed to blogs we get the strengths of the mainstream media. Like all large organisations, newspapers divide work into specialisations. They have specialist proof readers, specialists fact checkers and specialist editors. Given this production line approach it is not surprising that the BBC scores higher than most amateurs when it comes to “production values”.
Should we, then, ignore blogs? Should we limit our reading to the mainstream press? We may as well ask if we should ignore Rock and Roll. Like Hollywood the mainstream news media are very adept at the techniques of their profession but the industrial approach can produced results which seem contrived and predictable. If blogging has any advantage it is authenticity.
Prior to the printing press most people would have been unable to read and public discourse would have been dependent on numerous personal interactions. A discerning individual would have given less credence to the boor and more to the wit but the onus on differentiating would be down to the individual.
With the arrival of newspapers in the 17th century the news began to coalesce around a standard version of the truth. In the 19th century wire services such as Reuters further accelerated standardisation by providing identical information to its customers. The style or opinions became what differentiated one publication from another.
For as long as I can remember The News Of The World had been full of gossip to be taken with a pinch of salt while broadsheets cultivated a reputation for more accurate reporting. As readers we learned the difference but though the style varied the agenda remained broadly the same.
As with much of our corporate 21st Century, the mainstream news media has come to resemble a cartel. If we visit the web sites of the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, BBC News we see that the agenda is very similar. While they report different viewpoints, they still represent a bottleneck for ideas and information and are effectively setting a standard news agenda at least at a national level.
The Internet is challenging this status quo as was shown dramatically with The Arab Spring and the Occupy Protests. Ordinary people are setting their own agenda and even have their own news wire in the form of twitter. As events unfold in real time the mainstream media are forced to play catch up. It’s messy and difficult but there are as many opinions as there are individuals and the blogosphere merely reflects this reality.
An article in The Economist (December 31st 2011) stated “..it is hard to argue that the internet has cheapened the global conversation about economics. On the contrary, it has improved it.” and went on to say “…blogs have brought experts … out of the shadows.”
The mainstream news media have become a vested interest and, as with lawyers or gas fitters, they scorn the idea that anybody else could do their job. They do this by raising themselves up as gurus and denigrating those who threaten to replace them as incompetent. The mainstream media still provide better standards of quality control but, if all they do is package news and disseminate it through web sites and apps then they are not much different from a blog. The difference is further burred by sites such as The Huffington Post or the Guardian’s Comment Is Free which feed articles written by bloggers into a more professional looking framework.
Certainly the writings of Christpher Hitchens were superior to most amateur blogs but then Mr. Hitchens did not have the encumbrance of earning a living in a different field. One reason that mainstream journalists are competent is that they have spent their professional lives honing their competence. Some, like Mr. Hitchens, may rise further by dint of personal attributes such as individualism, iconoclasm and determination. Others cling to the technical paraphernalia of their profession to distinguish themselves from the amateur. As the mediocre artist relies on dressing in black and a well groomed 5 O’clock shadow so the mediocre journalist relies on grammatical pedantry.
Like any other profession the real threat to journalists lies, not with amateurs, but with industrialisation. Companies are now emerging such as Wordsofworth and Vivatic which outsource article writing and proof reading to individuals via The Internet. Their business model is to source articles from competent but cheap writers and flog them on to multiple sites which use them to pad out advertising. These sites are not looking for inspiration or controversy, they are looking for “content” and they effectively reduce the value of articles to that of filler.
The hope is that new media will provide greater access to public debate and challenge entrenched opinions though this is by no means certain. As some bloggers gain credibility, some journalists will find themselves paid peanuts to write 500 words on cup cakes. Sean Parker, founder of Napster and Facebook’s founding president has said “What we don’t have are good organising tools so that institutions, which have hierarchy which have management, can actually leverage the power of social media to get things done in a consistent and sustainable way”. Presumably Mr. Parker is now developing tools to enable power to be leveraged by consistent and hierarchical management.
We may be living through an interregnum. The Internet is a disruptive technology but its long term effect on public discourse may be to just shake out the chaff. If the mainstream media want to remain relevant they need to focus on nurturing thoughtful journalists who produce pungent and insightful articles. In this respect the blogosphere may be a much needed kick up the arse.
Having followed the career of Diane Abbott MP for some years I consider her to be a great benefit to the House of Commons. While she is not as technically learned as some, she has a common sense approach that slices through bullshit like a knife through butter and, most of all, I believe that her heart is in the right place.
Personally, I’m getting a feeling of Déjà vu. Back in March last year TV producer Brian True-May was suspended after being accused of racist comments relating to the ITV series Midsummer Murders. When speaking in an informal situation, he was asked if his Ms Marple style/chocolate box program should have ethnic minorities. He answered no and added that “..it wouldn’t be the English village with them”. A friend of mine told me that suspension was not enough and that Mr. True-May should be imprisoned!
The comments of Mr. True-May and Dianne Abbot do nothing to show racism. If we held ourselves to the same standard as we hold other people we would all be behind bars. On the face of it both comments ARE racist but only an idiot would depend on these words in isolation to judge a persons character and the calls for the resignation of Ms. Abbott are merely political opportunism.
As a white man, I understand Dianne’s comments while welcoming her clarification. In truth the baying mobs who chant RACIST have more in common with real racist than do the, usually innocent, people who stumble into these mine fields laid by the mean spirited and the lame witted.
This is not to say that all who utter remarks such as these are not racist, just that the judging of people by a handful of isolated remarks shows a bigotry and prejudice more in keeping with the likes of the BNP. The accusations come from a “them and us” mentality. They are supported by the simplistic idea that racism is a simple yes/no analysis. That anyone whose commitment to anti-racism is called into question must be immediately rejected as evil. Often, I suspect, this attitude is propelled by the fear of the finger of racism being pointed at anyone who dares defend such people.
This week real racism was in the news in the form of the conviction of Gary Dobson and David Norris for the murder of Stephen Larwence. When confronted with events such as this, we may be forgiven for wondering whether hypocrisy in the racism debate really matters? While Brian True-May might have lost a few weeks pay and Dianne Abbot a few voters this is nothing when compared to the horrendous suffering by many black people in this country as demonstrated by the murder of Stephen Lawrence..
I believe that hypocrisy in the racism debate does matter. While not knowing anything about Brian True-May I am not willing to brand him as racist for the handful of comments I have been fed during a media frenzy. Similarly nobody with any intelligence or sincerity who follows politics can seriously consider Dianne Abbott a racist.
If we continue to turn on each other every time one of us is accused of racism then we will all learn to disguise our opinions and this will not be a good thing. I am told by English friends who work in America that it is almost impossible to have an intelligent conversation at work. Nobody even tries as they are all afraid of tripping up over racism, sexism, agism or any other bloody ism. Yet do we consider America to be the least racist of countries? The election of President Obama would suggest that they are yet the disgraceful attacks on Mr. Obama indicate otherwise.
The debate on racism has become stilted and the two extremes monopolise debate. The outright racists at one end and the bigoted anti-racist at the other. Each side can be recognised by their obsession with hate. Their insistance on dividing humanity into absolute good and absolute bad. This leaves the rest of us walking on eggshells.
The intermittent witch hunts betray a society desperate to prove it’s anti-racist credentials while neglecting some very real forms of racism which exist in the world today. For example the monopolising of racist victimhood by Israel allows it to settle fundamentalist Jews on Palestinian land while simultaneously throwing the accusation of racist at anyone who dares to criticise. While the Israelis carry out ethnic cleansing Newt Gingrich refers to families who may have lived in Palestine for longer than America has existed as “so-called Palestinians”.
Dianne Abbot has done us all a favour by showing that ANYONE can be caught out saying something stupid which, when one is too lazy to pay attention, can be branded as racist. We should all, therefore, calm down and stop flinging accusation of racism about in such an indiscriminate manner.
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build’em up with worn-out tools;
…..Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
………daughter…I mean man..woman……..person….human…oh bollocks!
Last Sunday (11th December 2011) I watched the second program in the series Black Mirror on Channel 4. I’d seen a bit of a buzz about Black Mirror on Twitter but refused to get lured in. Partly this may have been because it was created by Charlie Brooker and I have ambivalent opinions of Mr. Brooker. Yes, he is funny and can be quite sharp but I’ve sometimes thought his antics a bit contrived.
Sunday’s episode was entitled 15 Million Merits and portrayed a society where people are doomed to spend their lives either sitting in cubicles playing dumb video games, watching dumb TV and cycling on treadmills to produce electricity to run the videos and TV.
In this world, nothing is physical. The screens cover entire walls, floors and ceilings. People who are overweight occupy a lower class and wander around cleaning up after the game players. Each player gains credits and may use these to dismiss advertisements or collect their credits for a chance to audition for a X-factor style show and potentiality become famous and escape the treadmill. One guy decides to try and make a difference and, by threatening suicide at an audition, is allowed to rage against the machine on prime time TV. The inevitable result is that he impresses the panel with his passion and is employed to rage away twice a week on a video channel.
A pretty obvious reflection of western society as it is today. Overdone for effect but nonetheless fairly literal. Even the rebel who is absorbed into the system is a well understood phenomena and we’ve seen this again and again from Mick Jagger’s knighthood to Bryan Ferry’s adverts for Marks and Spencer.
However, I was impressed with Black Mirror, not so much for it’s originality, but because it restated the ideas in stark and contemporary terms. It’s storyline was tight and without needless decoration. It is all too easy in consumerist society to be drawn in by the hype. We consider we are being ironic but slowly slowly we start to believe the hype. Slowly we think we really NEED a 4 by 4. Slowly we start to doubt our ideals. Perhaps we’re just out of touch. Perhaps the winners of X-Factor are real artists? Perhaps Deal or No Deal is an engaging game show.
The prediction of Science Fiction are never true but what good Science Fiction does is to hold up a mirror to our civilisation and show us the absurdity of our lives. The world of Black Mirror is not in our immediate future yet it is close enough in many respects to remind us that we are all being duped. Mr. Brooker has produced a fantastic piece of television, in this episode at least, and I look froward to next Sunday’s program.
A front page article in the Financial Times (FT) on the 21st November reported that a bunch of “leading economists” had written a letter to the British Chancellor, George Osbourne, urging him to rethink his plans to curb immigration. Mr. Osbourne is planning to limit economic migrants entering the UK from outside the EU and the economists believe that this would be “deeply damaging to the competitiveness of our science and research sectors and the wider economy”.
The UK had 13 years of New Labour during which immigration was used to provide cheap skilled workers to business mitigating the need to properly educate the indigenous workforce. This is obviously not a sustainable policy and will merely store up trouble for the future as British people sit on their arses and let Johnny Foreigner do all the work.
The restrictions to be brought in are for non-EU citizens so British business would still have the entire population of the EU from which to draw its workers. That means the economists believe that the educated percentage of a total population of around 500 million people is not sufficient for the British economy!
What utter tosh!
If 500 million are not enough then why should we believe that a world of 7 billion people is? Perhaps, if we looked hard, we could find an even dafter set of economists who believe that UK business needs the educated population of 10 Earth size planets.
The truth is that large corporations are driven by the need for profit and this means limiting costs. Land and labour are major costs and so it is most efficient for corporations to build mega office complexes and have the entire planet as a pool of potential employees. It’s even more profitable if the workforce are educated at someone else’s expense.
I’m sure the economists are all clever gentlemen but my experience is that bean counters only count beans. By this I mean they only count that which can be counted. However, some resources cannot be quantified and the top of my list is housing. House prices in London have more than tripled in 14 years and are still way over priced as discussed in an article in The Economist in 26th November.
Since a basic tenet of capitalism is that increased demand and fixed supply drives up the price of an asset. The deliberate importing of people into the UK may support corporate profits but it will also provide upward pressure on housing.
Corporations push the idea that capitalism creates wealth for the population and this can sometimes be true. At the moment, in China, capitalism is helping raise many people out of poverty. But read a book like The People Of The Abyss by Jack London and you realise that, at the height of the British Empire, which was powered by capitalism, the lives of the people living in the east end of London were worse than Australian aboriginals on the other side of the world living as hunter-gatherers.
The People Of The Abys shows capitalism at its rawest, un-tempered by socialism or the fears of socialism. It shows that the welfare of a population is not directly related to the profits of business.
Over the past decade or so, while businesses earned fat profits, ordinary people had to endure costs which did not appear on the balance sheets of any businessmen or politician. Unaffordable housing is just one example but the ordinary worker must also endure standing like tinned sardines on Bakerloo Line trains from London Bridge on a Saturday evening. We must sit in traffic jams. We must stand in rush hour queues, not to get on the train, not to get on the platform, not to get on to the escalator but to get into the bloody station!
All this boils down to supply of land and it is possible to argue that the UK should release more land for building to ease congestion and prices. This would be fine were the UK the size of the United States. It isn’t. Open up Google Earth and have a fly over the UK. Most of the land is either farm land or already built upon. There are very few patches of wilderness. Scotland is more thinly populated and we could just shrug and decide that we will give over the entire UK to human needs. The UK could become the first concrete country.
In 1951 Isaac Asimov published the first of his Foundation series of Science Fiction novels which portrayed a world known as Trantor which was completely covered in metal. The whole planet had been taken up by humans for homes or factories or offices. Food and raw materials were shipped in from other worlds.
I don’t want to live in a country without wilderness. I do not want to live on Trantor!
The pro-immigration lobby scoff and say that it will be centuries before we even approach a situation resembling the planet Trantor. True but then can they give us an indication of when we are going to stop building?
A couple of hundred years ago England was covered in forest and someone argued that we should chop down just this little bit more wilderness and give it over to some landowner to farm. They probably said “…but England is covered in forest, it will be centuries before it is all chopped down….”. They were right; it did take centuries.
But HELLO! here we are centuries later and the forests are gone.
On the 24 November 2011 the BBC reported that annual net migration to the UK hit a record high in 2010 at 252,000 though the figure may have now fallen to something more like 245,000. Growth is often expressed as a percentage but a more enlightening indicator of growth is “doubling period”. i.e. The time it takes for a population to double in size? The UK’s current population stands at about 62 million. If the current population carried on at replacement level and if the population only grew by the current immigration rate then the population would double in about 255 years.
That’s about nine generations if we take a generation as 28 years. By 2265 the UK would have a population of 124,500,000 and our descendants (that’s the grandchildren of our grandchildren’s grandchildren) will look back and wonder what the hell we thought we were doing.
One by one the trees are cut down. Little by little our forests were destroyed. Little by little forest becomes farm. Little by little farms become houses and offices. Little by little we accept smaller seats on buses and no leg room on trains. Little by little we trade space for gadgets. Little by little we are squeezed into chickens runs and little by little the UK becomes grossly overpopulated.
I’m sure that it’s true that adding 10% more workers to London and letting them live like factory hens would make London’s corporations more profitable. Londoners may even acquire more tablet computers and smart phones. Yet our lives would be worse! Already the definition of a kitchen in a flat in Hackney is a line of cupboards down the side of the living room. Just how many times can they divide up these beautiful old houses into smaller and smaller boxes?
The mistake that these economists make is to become totally business centric. Their analysis stops at the profits of business and they fail to follow the process through to ensure that it benefits the population as a whole.
It is notable that the venerable economists who wrote the letter to Mr. Osbourne uttered not a squeak about the corporate profits which are being filched away overseas to avoid paying tax as was reported in the same edition of the FT. Surely that too is “deeply damaging to the competitiveness of our science and research sectors and the wider economy”.
Big Think have identified a couple of guys named Mike McCandless and Eric Fischer who, between them, have created maps of the world showing in which locations people are tweeting in which languages. Very interesting though it seems to have set off something of an argument about Catalan on, what I assume, is the initial Flickr post.
The languages broadly follow state boundaries as far as I can see though German tweeting does seem to extend down through the Czech Republic and Slovakia but th least said about that the better.
It could be, of course, that this map will cause horrendous war throughout Europe as each states seeks to include all their nationals within their borders. It’s an interesting idea. As far as I know, the Nation State only really came about in the 20th century. By this I mean the concept that a state should be made up of the land where one specific national people live. Prior to that it was all empires and most people didn’t really get much choice in who ruled them.
I wonder if, armed with maps such as this, states may try to fine tune their borders as the Germans so famously did in 1939. If so then it might be a recipe for continuous warfare as borders would need to change every time a person left their home.
In case any politicians are leaning in this direction I already have a solution. Given the power of information technology, it should be possible to have virtual nation states which exist on the land currently occupied by all citizens of that nation. Each would have a zone around them extending perhaps one metre which would be ruled under the laws of their nation state. It would mean everybody would need to be tracked by GPS but this should be no problem – If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear – I jest of course. I’m sure that Moslems would love such as idea as it would mean that they could enforce Sharia Law though I do see complications when people of different nations interact. Perhaps there could be some kind of default law which governed public spaces or some kind of weighted precedents based on power and status as there is today with fucking bankers and politicians!!!! – ahem…excuse the outburst.
Photography
Kusama at Tate Modern – Wonderland despite the faded white turds
Tags: Art, boat, infinity mirrored room, obliteration room, painting, Tate Modern, Yayoi Kusama
Inside Tate Modern it was the usual story of queuing for the ticket then queueing for the exhibition to be let in at a given time then trying to get past the people who think they have to queue for every exhibit. I recall prior to Tate Modern, if one wanted to see some modern art, one was forced to visit The Tate (now Tate Britain) and endure a lot of dusty old fashioned art first. To be honest all art can be good and bad and I can well remember being extremely impressed when I discovered a futurist sculpture created in 1913 named ‘Unique Forms Of Continuity In Space’ by Umberto Boccioni.
These days the art establishment like to claim that they are brining art to the masses but I think they may merely have succumbed to the obsession with profit which seems to have driven the start of the 21st century. I’m not sure that having Anne Robinson ask “Name a modern art museum in London” on The Weakest Link counts as art appreciation and justifies the congestion. …however, I digress……
Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist who lives in a mental institution so it says here. The first exhibits I found fairly mundane and was soon presented with what appeared to be painting from the Bollocks school of art. i.e. Since anything can be art, therefore any old bollocks I create must also be art. Monochrome canvasses with squiggles and texturing. I began to feel a little cynical. Chairs and shoes filled with what appeared to be large white turds. Thank you Ms. Kusama, we’ll be in touch.
Boat
However, things livened up a bit and the dark room with the white boat full of turds was quite striking. Later the punters were paying great attention to a video with a large sign stating that there were scenes of an “explicit nature”. So many people were paying so much attention that I never did get into that room.
I entered another dark room decorated somewhat like an ordinary living dining room with chairs and a table laid for dinner. The only light in the room came from Ultra Violet strip lights around the ceiling. What made the room impressive was thousands of dots of primary colour dabbed all the over the floors, walls, ceilings and objects. Sounds daft but I felt like I had entered an Alice in Wonderland novel. Following swift on the heals of this was another room full of coloured lights and mirrors which was also very impressive and by the time I was presented with her latest large vitally colourful paintings I had become a Kusama fan.
Obliteration Room
The Kusama exhibition runs to the 5th June 2012 and tickets are £10 with a request for a £1 donation to charity. Worth a visit.
Buy Art Photography by Nigel Chaloner