In a Dream, I am Really Famous

do not walk in teeming Africa. I don't pass through the bus stations of East Asia or South America. I don't shop in the marketplaces of China. I don't queue in the supermarkets of commuter-belt suburbia, in middle America, provincial Britain, or anywhere else. 

You will not find me in any of those places, even although I thrive on the attention of the people there. 

Mass migration and death upset me, so I try not to linger on them. I don't think much about the dereliction of the post-industrial age, the crumbling Arctic ice, the tar sands, or the rafts of plastic drifting in the Pacific. I fly, high, over all that. It's not that I don't care about it, but thinking about it serves no useful purpose, and it's important for me to stay positive. 

Social media enable me to keep in touch with so many different kinds of people and share my concern for the world to a degree that I'm comfortable with and can accomodate within my schedule. 

Here's a photo of me in metallic swimwear. 

I live in beautiful properties in different locations around the world, each maintained by the best housekeepers and landscape gardeners available. Everything is very tasteful. I don't tolerate naffness.

The daily views, Facebook likes, click-throughs and retweets of my followers, wherever they live: all sustain me. I make sure that I acknowledge the personal realities of my followers in the posts and comments made by my assistant, on my behalf. These gestures are my way of showing that I am no different to my viewers and listeners, likers and retweeters. That's why they relate to me so much. 

My relationship status is somewhere between "single" and "it's complicated". My followers love to share about that, and it's no accident that they have enough information to be able to do so. 

My thoughts are not "joined up", except in the sense that they come one after the other. I read that somewhere. 

Although I am really famous, hardly anyone knows of my private delights. Hardly anyone knows about the special services arranged for me when I'm in London, or the unique establishment in Singapore. Hardly anyone knows about the thing in the safe in my New York apartment (every visit, I go straight to it). 

Telling more about those things would serve no useful purpose. Not in the way that my comments on the thrills and disappointments of MY ART serve a purpose; or my thoughts about other famous people, or about the tragedy of poor, sick children...

 ...and just as the narrative threatens to become an amalgam of every cynical social commentary I ever heard or saw, the dream is over, and I wake up. Soon I'm slurping real orange juice from somewhere or other and getting online, posting a beautiful photograph of some soup I had yesterday. I hope you Liked it.

Dyspeptic in Dystopia: concerning the Blade Runner sequel

friend quipped online that he was excited to hear that the Blade Runner sequel would involve both the director of the original and one of its stars. I said I wasn't. He asked me why. My reply became too long for the comments box...

Legend has it that Blade Runner (Dir. Ridley Scott, 1982) is a work of individual obsession.[1] Director Scott insisted on shooting both in real places and on complicated sets, production was riven with disagreements, executives imposed changes that Scott resisted and later redressed in the Director's Cut (1992), and again the Final Cut (2007). Etcetera. Scott's insistence on doing things a certain way is what guaranteed Blade Runner its special aesthetic, which in turn is the reason many today call it classic.

One complaint about Blade Runner is that the movie is thin in terms of story and conceptual content. This is entirely consistent with the director striving to make the most of what he was good at: aesthetics; especially aesthetics with real-world groundings in the post-industrial city.

Scott's career began (and continues) with moving-image advertising. In advertising, the director can be almost completely concerned with aesthetics, since the object of any narrative (the product) is provided by the client, and additional content consists of cultural signs chosen primarily to enhance the impact of the product. Grand claims are made for Blade Runner as a radical reworking of the noir and science-fiction genres, but perhaps its historical significance is as an exemplar of a kind of film making in which bravura aesthetics stand in for the totality of a movie.

But I do like it. Mostly.


Today, Scott is the executive; the producer overseeing the sequel to his masterpiece. Fans are excited, but the rainy smog of a dystopian metropolis must conceal pitfalls.

Will the sequel be tailored to the demographic who are loyal to the original Blade Runner, or the demographic for sci-fi today (16-30 years old; mainly male?)? "Sci-fi" today tends to mean "sci-fi-action", for a generation reared in the matrix, tube-fed computer games and celebrity culture.[2] The Blade Runner sequel must therefore negotiate the twin threats of celebrity "buzz", and mind-numbing CGI.[3] To dodge either hazard, the new director will have to have reasons as powerful as Scott's were to go against the grain, and a contrariness and bloody-mindedness to match.

Perhaps the new director will take the sequel in the direction of complex, multi-dimensional characters, and stripped-down sets. Or explore the existential themes in a more Beckett-ian fashion. It would be interesting to know where Scott himself, as executive producer, figures in those judgements.


For me, Blade Runner is spoiled by misogynistic violence, although it's hardly unique in this, and any critique along these lines is usually drowned out by critics who are also fans. As far as the sequel goes, taking licence from an uncritical view of the sexualised female could mean that the misogynistic aspects become more pronounced, especially in our era of porn-norms.

The issue here is not (for me) more explicit sex or kinkiness, but the perverse strictures of American moviedom. These dictate that unless you want to be seen to be making an erotic film (and have your audience age-restricted accordingly) sex has to be combined with violence. For the widest possible demographic to be allowed to watch it, sex must be punished, especially if it's enjoyed by women.

(It doesn't matter if the females are replicants "in the story". Actual women are performing, and that's what the audience is watching.)


It's been announced that in the sequel Harrison Ford will reprise his role from the original Blade Runner. I speculate that in 1982 Ford may still have been swallowing down hard on the excess of cheese ingested for the role of Han Solo in Star Wars (Dir. George Lucas, 1977). Luckily, the dyspeptic "witheld" quality of his Blade Runner performance could also be interpreted as being "Eastwood-esque". Should he today become obsessed with a beautiful replicant (or whatever) it will be like John Nettles playing a man with a crush on a sex doll. This is neither dramatically nor erotically appealing. 

To me. 

...but that's just, like, er, my opinion, man (is more or less what I actually said).


[1] Ordinary legend has it, not "that" Legend (Dir. Ridley Scott, 1985)
[2] I'm joking, youngsters. I know the matrix is really a front for the Occupy movement.
[3] Why and how is CGI 'mind-numbing'? Another time; I want to keep this post snappy.

Seeking Life in the Mediated World: an accidental TV and newspaper review.

ne weekend, I watch Freeview TV and read a broadsheet...

Is TV today actually targetted at connoisseurs of formats, ads and idents? More radically, is it an exercise in contentless form; a way to keep tele-forms alive, in their shimmering, ersatz state, until the arrival of the saviour entities who will reinvest them with purpose?

Even in Britain, where TV "isn't as bad as in America", the conceptual integrity of any TV programme is more and more limited to fitting in with a given format. Viewers are faced with a palette of variations in which producers push and pull, mildly, at the limits of whatever format they've banked on to get some sort of project past gatekeeper executives. I presume.

To the average programme maker, I am a demographically awkward, unrewarding viewer: a fifty-something, financially non-viable middle-class male, living in The North. I'm not interested in buying, selling or altering my home; building a dream-home; elaborate meals; or anything that requires middle-class amounts of money. But because I have a smattering of middle-class education I'm not interested in the top-feeder approach to ideas, either. I'm a snob, with no spending power, and, to make matters worse, an artist.

To me, TV reflects a popular culture that has become even more exclusionary than it already was, even more fiercely limited to orthodoxies, especially around corporatised entertainment, and a self-serving media/celebrity culture: the stock in trade of all the formats in which TV and entertainment people talk among themselves. Released from the sofas, the same actors and personalities fan out in squads across TV-land, emoting for talent shows; scowling, weeping and wailing for overwrought soaps and crime tales, huffing and puffing through nostalgic costume dramas: many of these being formats with interchangeable narratives and roles.

I might be interested in not seeing the invisible reality programme 'I'm a Celebrity: Please Ignore Me from Now On' (copyright © me, 2015). For this, a very large number of celebrities are taken to a rudimentary camp in, say, the Gobi Desert, under false pretences. They're left there without any camera crews, satellite or Internet connections, never to be seen or heard from again (especially if they make it back home: this to be a clause in the contract that the celebs cannot be allowed to see, in order to ensure their participation). 

The Freeview experience is maddening. On the one hand, programme makers seem terrified that the viewer might not be able to follow a train of thought for more than two minutes. On the other, the viewer's interest is constantly frustrated by repetitious advertising and padding. Inside, I'm screaming: I can remember what happened in this oversimplified narrative, and what the consequences were, because, you know, the programme itself explained those very things not ten minutes ago.

The experience is made worse by the tendency of non-commercial programming to imitate the breathless flow of commercial channels. The noisiness of commercial broadcasting makes sense as a sensory fog intended to induce a dream-like state in which viewers might spend more money. In the non-commercial realm the viewer is constantly nudged and prodded for no other reason than the channel declaring its own presence, its qualities, etc., ever more explicitly, even though the viewer, by definition, has already elected to watch the channel.


Of course, it's possible to find thoughtful programmes about politics and economics, arts and sciences (albeit with a strong metropolitan bias), and even one or two films that don't involve Steven Seagal. That is, as long as the BBC manages to maintain its autonomy as a nest of lefty-liberals, or right-wing reactionaries, depending on your analysis of the BBC. [1] And as long as Channel 4 isn't totally consumed by brain-eating controversialitis.

As guest editor-curator of  BBC's Artsnight, Maxine Peake affects to arrive in Salford in a White Van, all bleached-out like a white knight, or the saviour who will reinvest the arts magazine format with new purpose. I enjoy the sections on women in television and on Shelagh Delaney. And I think I know what Peake means when, in another item, she says that the post-punk post-hip-hop duo Sleaford Mods have come to 'save us' (from conventionalised pop music). But I don't like the Mods that much, musically, and I don't know what Peake means by 'the working class'. [2]

The White Van is no doubt returned to Media City, Salford; and Peake to London.

I do appreciate Adam Curtis's film Bitter Lake (BBC iPlayer only). It's about Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism, and the playing out of Saudi and British interests throughout the Middle East, as far as Afghanistan. The film is much too complex to synopsise here, which is a reflection of the fact that it does not oversimplify its subject matter. There is some ambiguity about the "voice" behind the film, and the purpose of certain sequences in it, but I prefer coping with that to fighting the sense that I'm wasting my time, and being patronised for it. [3]

I also like The Great European Disaster Movie, by Annalisa Piras (apart from the acted bits featuring Angus Deayton as a future "archaeologist" of old Europe, on board a repeatedly re-routed airliner). I find a German woman talking about her forbears particularly moving. Whenever I see German people engaging critically with their past I despair of the idiocies of self-satisfied Britishness. The film features few exemplars of that quality, too. [4]

I find a programme about owls. I like to think that this and my enjoyment of it are exemplary of an altogether different kind of Britishness. [5]


After a struggle with TV, I need to reconnect with my roots in free-thinking, radical contemporary art.

It's International Women's Day, and the editors of the Observer newspaper have put contemporary art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist on the cover of their arts section, under the heading 'Is this Britain's Most Original Thinker?' [6]

Predictably, the bait question on the cover is not addressed in the article. Coincidentally, though, Obrist is shown in a position analogous to that of Deayton's character in the Piras film. We're told in detail of his long-standing obsession with travelling the world, engaging with artists (a back-story that will be familiar to anyone who knows a little bit about Obrist, or looks him up online). As far as the curator's thinking goes, it seems to be that of the classic aggregator; here gleaning ideas piecemeal from the artists he meets, formalising them, post hoc, into something which acquires quasi-philosophical, academic or historical merit.

Neither Obrist nor his interlocutor, Rachel Cooke, choose to discuss how much this perceived merit has to do with the dedication, energy and original thought of the curator, and how much to do with his acquired power in a relatively exclusive art world. Nor do they connect non-artworld issues with what art could or should be doing today. In terms of addressing the vitality of contemporary art, these are significant omissions, made more noticeable when Obrist's global reach is invoked as if it were a professional qualification. Lacking much interrogative drive, the article reinforces the familiar impression that important art and its curators are defined primarily by their ineffable metropolitan-ness: a quality of being, rather than a quality of thought.


...overall, the weekend is educative, informative, slightly entertaining, and a little depressing.

T'wit, t'woo.


[1] "One of the most bizarre myths about the corporation, recycled ceaselessly in the conservative press, is that the BBC has a left wing bias [but] the opposite is the case. From the coverage of wars to economics, it has a pro-government, elite and corporate anchor. The BBC is full of Conservatives and former New Labour apparatchiks with almost identical views about politics, business and the world. Executives have stuffed their pockets with public money. And far from programme outsourcing increasing independent creativity, it has simply turned some former employees into wealthy “entrepreneurs”, while enforcing a safety-first editorial regime."
Seamus Milne: 'Pinkoes and Traitors: The BBC and the Nation 1974-1987 by Jean Seaton review'
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/01/pinkoes-and-traitors-bbc-and-nation-1974-1987-jean-seaton-review

[2] Artsnight., BBC Two: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0551jtq

[3] Adam Curtis: Bitter Lake (2015)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4393514/

[4] The Great European Disaster Movie (2015, Dir. Annalisa Piras)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4288614/

[5]  Natural Word: Super Powered Owls.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b054fn09/natural-world-20152016-2-super-powered-owls

[6] Rachel Cooke, 'Hans Ulrich Obrist: "Everything I do is somehow connected to velocity"'
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/08/hans-ulrich-obrist-everything-i-do-connected-velocity-interview

Borrowing from Art: Aesthetic Cultures of Science

uardian art critic Jonathan Jones's short article 'Across the Universe. Is science now more beautiful than contemporary art?'[1] is surely designed to provoke; and it barely recognises the important questions it raises.

In 1930 Sigmund Freud wrote:
The science of aesthetics investigates the conditions under which the beautiful is apprehended; it has not been able to clarify the nature and origin of beauty; as commonly happens, the absence of results is shrouded in a wealth of high-sounding, empty verbiage. Unfortunately psychoanalysis too has scarcely anything to say about beauty.[2]

Freud admitted elsewhere that psychoanalysis might be only an early phase of a coming science of mind. Many today would say that the human mind is "brain in action", and that it's via this action that the brain makes what a human subject calls experience. Every brain has plasticity, and so the patterns of its action can be reinforced or altered by the circumstances of a person's life, over time.

Even within such a materialist account of mind, a subjective experience of beauty probably relates to aesthetic qualities for which a subject has what we could call an "affinity". Affinities may be partly inherited, or the result of conditioning; I don't think the balance of probabiliies here is settled. What seems more certain is that some of us follow a course in life impelled by affinities expressed early on, and that those affinities are then socially channelled. This is especially noticeable with selectivist disciplines, where what's called talent or aptitude is augmented by knowledge acquired through training, and further reinforced through working and becoming socialised within a particular socio-professional grouping. It's well known that the coherence of some professional fields is reinforced like a circle of belief, through the disavowal of other ways of knowing and being in the world.

Notwithstanding all this, there are bound to be similarities in the experiences we can categorise as viscerally pleasurable or painful (for example) if all derive from organs, chemicals and circumstances which are generically similar. In a society of differently selective fields we will therefore find mathematically-fluent physicists for whom formulae are beautiful, and connoisseurs of art who will say the same of nineteeth-century paintings. But a similarity of response at this level tells us nothing about the more intricate contents of physics or art.

Jonathan Jones asks us to consider the relative merits of artists' images and images produced by scientists and their instruments, in terms of how beautiful they are. Unsurprisingly, many online responses draw on the subjective (personal) experience of beauty, about which there can be no more absolute consensus than in Freud's time. Further, many will vigorously defend anything perceived as an attack on the reliability (the "rightness") of what their own experience seems to tell them, bringing much heat into this kind of discussion.

Jones is playing a game, ritually breaking the rule of his own field by declaring an interest in another. This is meant to be all the more shocking because the other (science) has co-opted what is supposed to be one of the definitive qualities of art: beauty. As readers of Jones will know, even he does not believe that the production of beauty is art's sole purpose. He did not seem to think so in 2007, for instance, when he declared Damien Hirst's stunt with a diamond-encrusted skull to be "the birth of 21st century art".[3]

But the situation Jones has broached now is more complex and interesting. Not only is beauty not the sole purpose of art, but the converse is also true: no disciplinary field has a proprietary claim over beauty. Beauty is a potential residing in a variety of things, contingent on the subjective response and judgment of individuals apprehending those things. But subjective experience isn't everything, even in art, and especially in what I would call a culture. This brings us to the most interesting omission in Jones's article: the emergence of aesthetic cultures of science.

The question I would ask about the images to which Jones refers is not whether or not they are beautiful, but whether or not they are scientific. In my view they are, first and foremost, scientistic. They bear the aura of scientific inquiry, but offer little in terms of scientific knowledge. They are the kind of image often favoured as the cultural proxies of scientific disciplines, because of their strongly aesthetic powers of affect. (We know that Jones has previously found such scientistic images beguiling: in the 2007 article cited above he praises Hirst works which rely almost entirely upon them.)

Obviously, the creators of aesthetic cultures of science have noticed that the social world can be addressed as an audience, and that it can be expected to respond positively when it finds beauty in something. They have noticed, too, that the techniques for eliciting the "beauty response" are not too hard to acquire: they can be tracked down via a long history of pictorialism channelled through the art of recent centuries. It's no accident that those Hubble telescope images look more like paintings than raw data-sets (the kind of result probably required in the scientific disciplines using the Space Telescope).

Aesthetic cultures of science provide the opportunity of responding to the scientific without necessarily understanding any science. Although inaugurated in the name of scientific "literacy" it can be argued that their purpose is also to maintain a comfort zone - through of aesthetic enjoyment - around hard-to-understand and potentially troubling scientific work.

The question of beauty in an image can never be settled, and this may not matter very much. Beauty is just one of the qualities found in the things both arts and sciences put into the public domain, of which we might also ask: is this important; is it worth attending to; is it real?

For me, Jones's article raises (but doesn't address) these two questions:
'Should artists be concerned solely with beauty?' and:
'What do we want from our sciences: beautiful things or knowledges whose utility we can evaluate?'

[1] Jonathan Jones, 'Across the Universe. Is Science Now More Beautiful Than Contemporary Art?', Guardian section G2, 23 September 2012, p.18. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/sep/19/science-more-beautiful-than-art?
[2] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2004) (first published 1930), p. 25.
[3] Jonathan Jones, 'Is This the Birth of 21St Century Art?', Guardian section G2, 5 June 2007, pp. 23-26.

Careless about Culture

istorian David Starkey has told BBC's Newsnight ''the whites have become black'' in a discussion on the England riots with author and broadcaster Dreda Say Mitchell and the author of Chavs, Owen Jones. He also hit out at what he called the ''destructive, nihilistic gangster culture'' which he said ''has become the fashion.'' [1] Here's my two-penneth:

Corporatised culture of all kinds (whether 'Hollywood' or 'Street') restricts participation to the sanctioned route of possessing (buying) its marketised iconic objects. Rappers, movie stars, footballers (for eg) may perform messages of inclusion, but they also constantly show how they differ from their followers, especially economically. The 'culture' they promulgate is exclusionary, especially to the poor, because it is economistic.

If 'culture' is the concern, let's question the habit which equates the possession of proxy objects (either by purchase or theft) with a kind of cultural inclusion. Starkey does not differentiate between affnities, attitudes and objects, and thus reinforces a reactionary idea of a person's agency inside and outside "their" culture.

All cultures of identification can become false consciousness, can't they, especially when monetised?

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14513517