Uncategorized – Page 2 – criticismism ii

July 31, 2020

Be a rambler

In the late 90s, Diesel ran an ad campaign promoting tourism. It was the age of cultural missions in advertising, and the fashion brand encouraged you to â€œBe a touristâ€. Dieselâ€™s target audience were taking gap years and backpacking in the Far East with a dog eared copy of Alex…

June 22, 2020June 23, 2020

Why is the Indian government locking up students?

For the last two and a half years Iâ€™ve been pursuing a PhD in Art History at the University of Sussex. In the last month, the fate of another Sussex alumni, Devangana Kalita, and several other students in India, has come to my notice, hence this blog post. Student protest:…

September 11, 2019

Back to the future in Liverpool

Liverpool doesn’t have a prehistoric cave, but it does have a historic Cavern. So it might prove not too much of a distraction from writing on paleolithic art.Â Beyond the Beatles heritage trail and the football, it had become a centre for visual arts in the UK. It is also, one…

July 24, 2019July 24, 2019

Visiting Lascaux II

[author’s photo] In my last post I promised to note the lighting arrangements in Lascaux II. Well, I went to inspect them today, and, as it happens, I was not disappointed. The tour began with a couple of gloomy exhibition spaces. But already it was clear that the caveâ€™s original…

July 11, 2019

How authentic is cave painting?

I have been reading a correspondence between Spanish academic JosÃ© DÃaz CuyÃ¡s and Dean MacCannell. MacCannell is a former soixante-huitard who lost faith in a 1960s style Revolution. But as he observes, some fifty years later: â€œâ€˜The revolutionâ€™ and especially the romantic figure of the revolutionary is a myth that…

June 27, 2019

How French is Lascaux?

In a hypothetical word association game, I predict that food, the Eiffel Tower and the Mona Lisa would all get a mention long before Lascaux. The cave at Montignac seems French only insofar as a specimen of moon rock appears to be American. Today I was reading about the heritage…

May 22, 2018

General Data Protection Regulation: GDPR

Just a note to prompt you to unsubscribe if you no longer want to get updates from my site. I cannot ask you to opt in because my subscriber list is lost in the ether somewhere. I genuinely can’t find it. Apologies…

April 5, 2017

Entangled: Threads and Making

There are two major subsets of the art world which have grown in visibility in recent years: â€˜women in artâ€™ and â€˜contemporary craftsâ€™. For reasons below, a venn diagram of their relation would be heavy on theÂ overlap. Add another circle labelled â€˜domestic productionâ€™ and you might find textiles in the…

March 17, 2017

Where culture sinks in: a look at Hull 2017

At time of visit, the city of culture franchise was barely a monthÂ old and already the statistics were out in force. In the run up to 2017, Hull attracted Â£1 billion in terms of investment, with Â£100 million spent on cultural infrastructure. Job creation is up 12 percent since 2012.…

February 22, 2017February 22, 2017

Jean Tinguely, Study for an End of the World No.2 (1962)

In these end times, it is worth remembering we have been here before. We have had more than 70 years to get used to the idea of nuclear weapons. In 1962 the psychic shock was fairly raw. As in rock music, fast food and situation comedies, the USA led the…