The Sleepwalk of the West

The BBC’s moral relativism is epitomised by this joke on Radio 4′s The Now Show (iPlayler, 12:23): “What’s the difference between nuclear proliferation in Iran, and nuclear proliferation in the US?” (Prolonged silence.) “Exactly!” Oh, isn’t that good. Ha. Unbridled hilarity aside, what is the difference? Let’s see… one wants to use military might to [...]

Coventry Cathedral is one of those rare examples of successful Modernism, whose appeal transcends architectural fashion. Like another successful example – the Barbican Estate – it rose from the devastation of the German Luftwaffe, and now overlooks its previous incarnation, a crumbling, unrestored symbol of 20th Century cataclysm. As a result of this traumatic history, [...]

According to the Pop Life exhibition at Tate Modern: Andy Warhol claimed “Good business is the best art.” Tate Modern brings together artists from the 1980s onwards who have embraced commerce and the mass media to build their own ‘brands’. Hmm. I was under the misconception that “good business” was Coke, Microsoft, De Beers, Haliburton, [...]

I cracked. I just had to do it. Desperate, to cling to something tangible, to some proof that it hadn’t been a demonic prank, or glimpse into the echoing abyss… I bought the catalogue for the Voids exhibition. Now the 500 page black hole sits there on my table, inert, ignoring me. Gingerly approaching the [...]

I haven’t paid attention to Camille Paglia for about fifteen years. I suppose I had the impression she was a cultural-theory loud-mouth that one could ignore without peril. Mind you, I don’t really watch television. Anyway, I’m wrong. These three short clips of her speaking on the degradation of academic literary studies spurred me to [...]

The cost of liberal democracy/capitalism is that there are economic losers. “Old” Labour was about tackling class, i.e. the injustice of grossly unequal income distributions. Even if Socialism’s not your thing, there’s still no reason why capitalism can’t be forced to accept corrective or attenuating measures such as social safety nets, meaningful regulation, exponentially progressive [...]

If you haven’t done so already, the latest article at Communications from Elsewhere is a must-read. Dense, but worth the effort: “Truth is part of the stasis of reality,” says Baudrillard; however, according to Buxton, it is not so much truth that is part of the stasis of reality, but rather the absurdity, and eventually [...]

The attendants of ‘cafés philo’ in Paris – I can only assume – offer a representative sample of how people think, at least there. I can’t help noticing some disturbingly popular ‘memes’ (I don’t like the word but admit it is useful, especially the connotation that it refers to ideas whose value lies in their [...]

From the exhibition Vides (Voids) at the Pompidou Centre, Paris: A quite exceptional event, “Vides” (Voids) is a retrospective of empty exhibitions since that of Yves Klein in 1958. In almost a dozen rooms of the National Museum of Modern Art, it assembles in a totally original manner exhibitions that showed absolutely nothing… Despair besets [...]