Ever wondered what’s going on in the world, behind the smokescreen of endless COVID19 scare stories? Yes, COVID is a nasty disease, but the mainstream press is covering it to the exclusion of all other news. As context: COVID19 has claimed 37,000 lives in the UK. The 2017/18 winter claimed 49,000 ‘excess deaths’ (additional to…
At last – an article that explains how postmodernism relates to neoliberalism … it helps explain the ‘pointlessness’ of contemporary culture… also, this is a link to great alternative news website “Off-Guardian”: https://off-guardian.org/2019/08/11/postmodernism-the-ideological-embellishment-of-neoliberalism/ I’ve chosen to illustrate this story with a portrait of David Bowie, because Bowie is emblematic of our society’s abandonment of the…
AM: Liberation struggle? Really? Which? A economic catastrophe already unfolded in Zimbabwe with power cuts at 15 hours per day? What planet are you living on mate? Have you any idea of the problems Zimbabweans face? Appears not. Please spare us this leftist nonsense. If any of you had any morality you’d go back to the…
4bJuly 2019. Last week, Russian premiere Vladimir Putin said the era of liberalism is over. He’s referring to the global culture which appears to demand everyone can do what whatever they want. There’s a whole lot to unpack there – its about freedom, individualism, the right to make dreams of riches come true. From free…
For practitioners of Social Art there is an important assembly happening later in April, at Tate Exchange. It’s sold out, but I’m intending to get a report on the story for these pages. Here is transcript from the Tate website: Thursday, April 25, 2019 10:00 AM 6:00 PM Tate Modern London SE1 9TG (map) Google…
Award winning Brighton social artist Elizabeth Eade will give a talk, and show her prize winning work about migrant deaths, Die Liste, at the opening of The Spectre of the Real Exhibition, at Brighton’s BMECP Centre, 4pm, 13 April 2019. Elizabeth Eade’s artwork Die Liste is a 10m-long, hand written list documenting the names and…
Here is the essay I wrote in support of my MA Fine Art, in August 2018. It tries to describe art in the biggest sense, as a philosophy without words – a way of seeing and understanding the world in an intuitive way. The essay suggests that art practice might provide us with an alternative…
Jan 2019. Ouzai, a once neglected neighbourhood near Beirut, is being transformed by passionate painters. The project, named Ouzville, began when creator Ayyad Nasser and his team saw that too many areas of Lebanon had fallen into disrepair and crime since the end of the civil war. The idea was to bring the sense of…
From the 80s onwards, the borderlands were rife with paramilitary cruelty and racism. But the president’s rhetoric has thrown fuel on the fire. By Greg Grandin Thu 28 Feb 2019 No myth in American history has been more powerful, more invoked by more presidents, than that of pioneers advancing across the frontier – a word…
The Great War is often depicted as an unexpected catastrophe. But for millions who had been living under imperialist rule, terror and degradation were nothing new. By Pankaj Mishra. Fri 10 Nov 2017 ‘Today on the Western Front,” the German sociologist Max Weber wrote in September 1917, there “stands a dross of African and Asiatic…
5 October 2018. Below, I’ve included a link to the Daily Mail article of today’s date, about statues and memorials being defaced in South Africa. The photo above is particularly poignant, as it highlights the British colonial philosophy that the colonisers were humane people, bringing civilised values to a dark continent, here exemplified by concern…
A saddening portrayal of America’s policy toward the rest of the world. Most saddening is that there are no good guys.
Raphael by the Sea 