A Joyous Summer in Neoliberal Britain

here we have to wait years to assess the "impact" of no-brand cigarette packets in Australia, but can't wait at all to see whether fracking for shale gas in the United States pollutes the water table.

Just to stress: that's CIGARETTES, about which everyone has personal choice anyway, and THE WATER TABLE, which, if screwed, will be screw a sizeable part of the population with it, whether or not they chose to go the way of fracking. Ideas about where the water will come from if the water table is polluted? Here, the wizened captains of industry are silent.[1]

Of course, they'll be dead, the short-term profits from fracking having been salted away offshore in their family accounts, and why would they care anyway about the children of the lumpen consumerati, the milch cows of trickle-up capitalism, of whom they know little and care less?

 For guidance in this weird logic, follow the money.[2]

The inventor of fracking, George Mitchell died at 94 in July 2013. According to his granddaughter, and others interviewed for BBC Radio 4's 'Last Word'  he was very concerned about the roll-out of possibly imperfect extraction technologies. [3]

In the UK, we've had a decade or two of whinging about wind turbines, often from folk who happen to be used to having a nice view, whose electricity and gas nevertheless originates in places where other people live with the filthy air and the shitty view resulting from energy production. That whinging has affected the complexion of debate; limited what's deemed possible. Perhaps communities who prefer their nice view (so to speak) should propose means of meeting their energy needs which don't impact on other communities... or initiate a wider move towards a post-industrial living, whatever that may mean.

Personally, I love the "natural" environment, to the extent that I find needless despoilment quite painful, but I also think that we're now in a balance-of-evils situation. If it's a choice between having wind farms in my favourite places and possibly damaging a basic resource (clean water), I'll go for the wind farms; thousands of them, please.

Fracking obviously seems easy to politicians habituated to short-termism, and an easy way to create  a bit of capital churn. This explains why other arguments for it - officially at least - are so weakly made.

[1] http://fracfocus.org/chemical-use/what-chemicals-are-used 

[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/revealed-fracking-industry-bosses-at-heart-of-coalition-8707589.html


[3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/lastword (Friday, 9 August 2013)
 

As Good as Gods: Progress Dreamed as Shitstorm

o (to borrow the scientists' favourite opener) we'd barely got past avoiding being eaten and building shelters before we got into all the shamanistic, mystical and religious shit. Then, before we were really done with that (although probably because we were done with it) we started with the rational scientific shit. We let that become really quite complicated and detailed, so that quite soon, as with God and all the rest, we were no longer running it but it was running us. And we seemed to like it that way. But simultaneously, after barely a moment engaging with the wonders of nature (within us and without us), we were beguiled by all kinds of industrial and if-you-like-it-you-can-own-it shit, and rolled over by the socio-economic bamboozlement that came with it.

Notice that we were never fully done with any particular kind of shit before our gaze wandered on to the next kind, and so it's not surprising that after barely a few centuries we reinvent it all – even though it's all still there in its original form – so that we can enjoy all the same shit all over again in digital form, along with all the new shit that's happening. Forget that shit, look at this shit. No, don't forget it, but access it this way now. Please complete your profile, enter a mobile phone number, state your date of birth, log on to online banking. Please contribute to the knowledge base whilst clicking on the brightly coloured ads in the sidebar. And shit.

Meanwhile, back in the dreaming mind of the concerned citizen: stop worrying about clean drinking water and social inequality and ripping the guts out of the planet for short-term gratification. Please, everyone, cooperate as a species so that one day we can terraform Mars and everyone can go into space and live to be a thousand years old, enjoying all the shit we did and can do whether or not we've settled the existence of any god or the rightness of bioengineering creatures that are all meat and no motion so that we can keep eating some shit that we got used to and can't give up because we're still big babies even though some of us think we are as good as gods.

Death-Cult Britain: Thatcher, Nostalgia and Indulgences

fter recent heavy snow, Britain is again paralysed: this time by a Westminster wonkfest, a new Zombie Britain horror in which the political commentariat have risen en masse for an orgy of fat-chewing...

For some, Margaret Thatcher (recently deceased) legitimises a worldview in which power self-evidently belongs to a certain type of person: the commercial entrepreneur; the chauvinist; the monetarist. This iconification of Thatcher goes along with a denial that the energies unleashed by monetarism have been narrowly focused by those seeking to increase the socio-economic differential between themselves and "the rest".

Monetarism could never be universally beneficial.  A couple of decades on, the wave of privatisations begun under Thatcher looks like a masquerade; a cover for those already assured enough to play the markets to  own a little more of what everyone needs. The interests of a few new players may have been more closely aligned with those of the most ambitious capitalists, but how many citizens today part-own a gas company, an electricity company, a water company? How many have greater control over the capital entities which constrain their every move?

Much is made of Thatcher's shopkeeper roots, as if it were a given that society is best organised according to the logic of the bean counter. The shopkeeper's way has been supercharged via new communications technologies, which are ever-more closely interwoven with everyone's personal stake in the financial system. This plays out as an all-pervasive tyranny, in which the consumer-citizen is kept in perpetually reactive mode: poked, nudged and prompted at every possible juncture. Some may own houses who wouldn't have were it not for Thatcher. But the house - like the car, the iPad or the mobile phone - has been transformed into a capital device which ties its possessor in to paying never-endingly for all the things that make possessing it worthwhile. It's a reductive, banal and frustrating way to live.

In today's neo-liberal Britain neither the labour nor the intelligence of a citizen seem to be of value. People are "free" to work and think if they want to; but their most vital function is to provide a constant stream of cash payments to private agents, for things they can't do without (and some they can do without). Trickle-down capitalism has become trickle-up capitalism. Those with the greatest financial heft have inherited the freedom to prompt social changes, for profit, shielded by a mythos which infers an incontrovertible normalcy and - yes - morality, in the logic of markets.

This, in my view, is a significant part of the legacy of Thatcherism.

...Jagger to release blue butterflies from Hyde Park stage in memory of ex-PM...'Thatcher death premium' pushes ticket prices past two hundred pounds...Watts, Richards 'not bothered' about 'hijacking of counter-culture'...footwear website crashes as Elvis Costello attempts massive "tramping boots" order...I saw...in my dream news-stream...

Did Thatcherism 'make Britain great (again)'? Is it even a good idea to want to be great as Britain was, say, in the nineteeth century?

If Thatcherism is to be credited for the society we now enjoy in Britain, it must also bear some responsibility for the ongoing, stupefying struggles between citizen, state and markets. Britain today is part of a great global capital churn, in which the economically disempowered are churned up. And you become disempowered, in effect, just for not being interested enough in being an active capitalist. All other values are in abeyance.

Thatcherism led in time to the topsy-turvy era of financial crisis and serial recession. In this, the state has been cornered into upholding the freedom to privatise any and all economic gain, whilst subsidising the losses of the most voracious capitalists when their schemes fail. It's a wonderland in which "debt" is transformed into "credit" for anyone seeking to become a more active capitalist; yet the resources required by the state to keep society on an even keel are still called "debt" or "deficit", and deemed a national shame.

I believe it's foolish for any political faction to claim Thatcher's legacy as an unambiguous triumph, or to assume that Thatcher's favoured ideology marks a "year zero" after which every other way of being is forgotten. To date, the era of financial crisis has been one of stasis and delusion. But from it, hopefully, future changes will be impelled. It seems as though none of Britain's current political leaders want to speculate publicly about such changes. Like rival kids in a playground, they have to appear sure of themselves if they are to inspire their respective gangs. Their old gangs.

All the posturing is a little silly, and insulting to the intelligence of anyone not belonging to any particular gang; any free thinker. Democratic representation via the old political camps is in crisis anyway, to the extent that in 2010 coalition was the nearest-to-honest settlement available. At that time Britain was repeatedly told that this was a good thing: 'the end of yah-boo politics'. I wonder now if this was just to hide the gang leaders' embarrassment at not winning an election outright.

David Cameron's sudden valorisation of Thatcher's life and personal qualities, his espousal of an otherwise contentious British greatness, certainly suggests a mind easily overwhelmed by any opportunity to acquire outright power.

...Arthur Scargill to launch comeback via guest spot on new Chumbawamba release...Mark E. Smith unimpressed...

Whilst some monotonously trumpet the defeat of socialism, opposition to privately monetised power has become personalised, vicious and intellectually ad-hoc. Leftish vitriol aimed at Thatcher goes along with attempts to personify certain socio-economic values in Thatcher herself, and sanctify them via a Thatcher death cult. It also shows how impoverished the left's project is. It reveals a nostalgia for a time when all that was required to guarantee block votes was to invoke ironclad ideological constructs from the early twentieth century, and shout about the wronged worker and the privileges of the rich.

What a task Blair (Thatcherite-in-effect) and the ineffectual Brown have bequethed to their successors, by leaving so much unchallenged in the name of their own moment of power. Who will represent the citizen who is  interested less in the homilies and simplistic oppositions of the past, more in wanting to follow their times and make the complex present a more livable one?

...artist Jeremy Deller plans 'inflatable state funeral'...

Thatched out. Over and out.

You, Me, Contemporary Art, Yeah! (Tribal Artspeak vs. the Language of Research)

ames Elkins has used a statement from the 2012 Documenta(13) exhibition in Kassel to raise the question: 'does art research make sense?'[1] Elkins means art "as" research; as something that can be evaluated as a knowledge pursuit in the academy (I'll use 'art-as-research' here). I am not sure the Documenta(13) statement is typical of writing associated with art-as-research, although it might be. Here I respond to Elkins's question by considering the likely purpose of the Documenta(13) statement, and what it might show about the place of one kind of art writing, in particular, among all writing that aspires to 'make sense'.


I'm generally a fan of the Documenta approach to art and its uses, so the statement cited by Elkins is a test of my faith. In form, it hovers ambiguously between research brief, public relations script, and tribal credo. It reads as though it might have been written by a committee (or a cult) over a well-lubricated dinner. I speculate that at least two stages of translation are involved: from the disciplinary language of a particular part of the art world into "public" language, and from one or more national languages into English. Sense could be a casualty at any of these junctures.

Elkins asks why some find it necessary to write in the manner of the Documenta statement. I suggest that it's an example of "authenticatory" writing. It declares allegiance with a set of ambiguously-defined commitments or beliefs (e.g. about art) in the expectation that others will signal agreement. The text functions as a kind of intellectual "high five" gesture; or an opportunity for the mutual authentication of both writer and reader. Its sense content to those outside a particular circle of belief is of secondary importance.

This is different from saying that such "artspeak" is used simply to show off, or to browbeat those who don't understand what's being said. Alix Rule and David Levine have made a thorough study of 'International Art English'.[2] One of its characteristics, they say, is that it 'demand[s] to be recognized'. I'm saying that such language is one part of an ongoing performance around art; a device via which some protagonists recognise each other.


One contributor to the Elkins thread, Andrei Molotiu, argues that authenticatory writing is quite new, and should be critiqued. Were this to be done, it might be interesting to consider how a broad spectrum of writings have been used on behalf of art. I mean 'used' operationally, around art in its various realms of reception: for example, when leveraging art's conceptual value in an "educated" art market, or legitimating art in a wider public realm. I think we would find an emerging mutuality between the art world and certain kinds of philosopher or intellectual (whose ideas find mobility through attachment to suitably ambiguous objects or practices in the world).

Under the terms of this mutuality, artists can "get on with practice", placing coolly ambiguous objects into their close realm of reception whilst passing questions about the intellectual aspect of art to agreed mediators. The arrangement plays out in the form of an intellectual culture of art, in which we find a variety of more or less literary products which are not art itself, but are deemed supportive or affirmative of art. The contents of this culture are selectively taken to heart or dismissed by artists, perhaps depending on levels of confidence in what art can be with or without its intellectual culture.

There is, however, a widespread acceptance that art can be written about in terms of ideas which impinge on it tangentially, strengthening the license under which artists need not be explicit about ideas or thinking in their work.

Not only is this license not universally adopted, but settlements under it are a matter of degree. There are conceptual artists who don't want formularised aesthetics; curators and critics who want historical groundings but not current theory; Marxians who need to explain why they don't want spectacle; artists who want academic theory but don't want history to show that their latest idea was already worked through in the 1960s. A particularly striking contrast exists between makers of strongly aesthetic art with market potential, and artists (like me) who have barely ever sold an art object. The latter probably work in parts of the art world where something other than self-justifying capital legitimates their practice.

(The ascription of tasks to different agents in the art world is not quite as straightforward as I have implied. Artists also adopt the role of intellectual mediator, although in doing so they often try to adapt bodies of theory and types of language less familiar to them than the art-making part of their practice. Conversely, some theorists, tired of 'writing after art' are attempting to frame their writing as artistic practice.[3])


When artists cede to others the task of locating, teasing out, or mediating truth claims or knowledge gains present in art, they also cede a degree of power to speak of their own practice. Higher degrees in art (such as doctorates) might present an opportunity to challenge this distribution of power. However, another question now presents itself: given the opportunistic use of various kinds of thinking (logical, scientific) in response to operational contingencies around art practice, how far can the intellectual currency the art world be trusted as a body of knowledge? Is it the task of art in the academy to rebuild its intellectual frameworks? Where might it seek models for this work?

In a multidisciplinary academy, where arts and sciences are subject to common administrative scrutiny, there's an implicit requirement for art to be able to account for itself as a discipline (one of its legitimatory trump cards in the social world - the financial success of art in the art market - cannot, generally, be played[4]). In this context, higher degrees in art, and art-as-research, bring out some general, foundational questions about art, especially around the balance of its intellectual and aesthetic aspects.

Further operational contingencies are in play, too. These include a lack of time, and limited training in framing ideas in writing. Most of all, though, there is an overriding necessity to facilitate what, for many art students, is a strongly practical, aesthetic activity, associated with an exceptional period of personal growth. In an environment where all these conditions prevail, rewards are few for questioning the terms on which bodies of academic theory are habitually co-opted on behalf of art.

I wonder if artspeak has become supercharged with extra complexity via the academy, where art has been beset by the tangle of contingencies sketched above. Some of them are to do with changes in the relationship between art and society; others are just to do with maintaining art as the intellectual equal of other disciplines in a latterday, intricately managed academy.


Arts and sciences all seek institutional assurances in a competitive academy, and cultural heft in a contested social world. Scientific disciplines have an ideal - the objectivisation of the laws of nature - at their very origins, and this both guides scientific practice and serves as a source of legitimation. Artistic disciplines have no equivalent ideal.

Art's uneven relationship with intellectuality is partly to do with its constant search, in the present, for ways of saying what it might be about (in addition to aesthetic affect). These explicatory turns are offered as sources of legitimation for as long as any marriage of convenience between art and theory remains strong. However, given the intractable nature of some art writing it is arguable that legitimacy is the last thing it brings to art.

The main thing I notice about the Documenta(13) text is that it struggles to infer a certain depth or multiplicity of ideas in art, without reference to too many specifics. Of course, if its primary purpose is the kind of mutual authentication described above, then it's not surprising that it demonstrates a weird set of standards for making sense. In the public context in which the statement is exposed, though, this is a gift to critics intolerant of any kind of rationality that is not conventionally scientific, and it reinforces perceptions of pretentiousness in and around art.

I find myself now resisting two temptations: to embrace an anti-intellectual notion of what art is (revel in the practice, follow the aesthetic, etc.), or to adopt any fashionable meta-logic of the moment (even if I can't quite figure out what its gains are).

The comments thread following Elkins's post points to a lecture text by Simon Critchley.[5] Crtichley says that 'we should never underestimate the vanity of artists or their desperate need for legitimation from philosophers and theorists', but also that 'art needs a theory that needs art'. Well, the presumption of artists' vanity may be a little one-sided, for surely philosophers and theorists can also be vain. Critchley's second remark, though, elegantly sums up the difficulties facing artists driven by a mixture of affinity and desire, aesthetic sensibility, and intellectual reflexivity.

[1] http://d13.documenta.de/
[2] Alix Rule & David Levine 'International Art English. On the rise—and the space—of the art-world press release'
http://canopycanopycanopy.com/16/international_art_english
[3] Irit Rogoff, 'What is a Theorist?', in On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, ed. by Maria Hlavajova, Jill Winder and Binna Choi (Utrecht: BAK, c2008.), pp. 132-158.
[4] Art schools whose ex-students do well in the art market can play the "market" card. It's often done by sleight of hand, via lists of alumni who, as all insiders know, have enjoyed commercial as well as other kinds of success.
[5] Simon Critchley 'The Infinite Demand of Art'
http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v3n2/critchley.php

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.

Inspector Montalbano's Mediterranean Midsomer Homeland

y resistance to televison's harmful rays was temporarily weakened recently by Moaning Man flu. I became ensnared in the terrorism/bipolar yarn of Homeland (Series 2), and enthralled by the weird charms of Inspector Montalbano. Here's my report. 

Homeland. 

I expect overheated, clench-jawed realism. My confidence is shaken by early, glaring plot flaws. Why would the well-organised terrorist group waste their most fabulous asset (Brody) just to move the much less important Bassel 'The Tailor' to a new safehouse? (Not that it turns out well, or anything, what with the gouged-abdomen-and-neck-snapping incident in the dark muddy forest.) 

Elsewhere, agent Carrie dresses to kill (herself - in a neat inversion). She glugs the pills, but changes her mind later, regurgitates it all very tidily (CIA training?) and has a nap instead. This is just what her Dad had suggested, earlier, as she packed her overnight bag with clench-jawed determination. 

Having sneaked Brody's suicide video through Lebanese security, Saul brings it to agent Carrie and signals a readiness to die soon in the name of a plot development, by relaxing his jaw. A relaxed jaw in Homeland is like a red tunic in an early Star Trek landing party: a mantle of doom. Remember how loose-jawed The Tailor was; the one Brody buried in the woods?

There are lots of monstrously huge cars with black windows, arriving and leaving. There's quite a bit of dressing up (evening dresses, uniforms) but no sexual congress, in fact 'no intimacy of any kind' according to Brody's wife. 

Escape verdict: spooks on steroids, with family issues. 

Montalbano. 

With Montalbano one must have no expectation whatsoever of logical consistency. My episode starts with M's dream of his own funeral, a scene never referred to again in the whole long tale. The coffin is dropped to dream-thunder which becomes real thunder (perhaps). 

M is now stuck in a queue of traffic, in a downpour. He collects a woman from the lead car (held up by an unconvincing-looking landslide) and gives her a lift. 

I'm more sure now that we're out of the dream, but things remain quite dream-like. It's as if all the outdoor scenes were shot on the day of a televised World Cup Final. M seems perpetually puzzled, although I don't know why: no one is present in the town who isn't in the plot; there are no boats in the harbour not involved in the plot (except at the end, when the coastguard suddenly have two massive boats to block the harbour). He's an Inspector. It shouldn't be that hard to work out, whatever it is.

Day after day, M's underlings burst into his office wearing exactly the same clothes as the day before, gabbling. Several, similar-looking women pass in and out of the plot, often via M's office. In case the viewer gets lost, characters regularly describe what's happening, as in: 'there's a landslide across the road' or 'I'm going to wash my hands'. In one scene, though, the English subtitle contains the amazing phrase: 'It's a case of homophony'. 

A romantic sequence between M and a female coastguard in an evening dress is punctuated by the image of tinfoil peeled back from a baking tin. A row of pre-cooked, dry-looking red snappers is revealed. Meanwhile, an underling sent to infiltrate a boat crew engages some energetic in-berth bonking (an ironic counterpoint to M's platonic entanglements?). 

A lissom female agent appears three-quarters of the way through to explain to M that it's all to do with 'blood diamonds'. It's a great relief, plot-wise. Now the coastguard from the red snapper scene is shot and killed. On the stone steps of a convent hospital M scrunches up his face in existential agony. 

I'm still worried about how the queue of cars got around the empty car left behind by M and the woman he rescued at the beginning. I'm unsure what she had to do with the story, or if I ever saw her again. Maybe she was the homophony.

Escape verdict: post-modernist cop procedural; Cocteau on holiday; Lynch hits the marina; Fellini does Midsomer.

Why Claire Bishop's 'Digital Divide' is a Storm in a Teacup

response to Claire Bishop's Artforum article, which asks why mainstream contemporary artists have, in general, ignored the impact of the digital in contemporary life.[1]

I also address the annoying habit in journalism of titling an article 'Why...' and then not answering the question anywhere in the article. Here, I'll say nothing at all that's not a direct response to the question in my title, making the bulk of my article a matter of inference:

- Because Bishop never unambiguously states her own position in relation to the proper - or authentic - concerns of art, making it hard to understand her central point;
- Because it's harder for Bishop to say what "the mainstream" is than what "the digital" is;
- and that's weird;
- Because if Bishop's mainstream is the art world legitimised through trade, then it is obvious that it is no more capable of assimilating (capitalising) the digital than are the music, film or publishing industries;
- so there's no mystery;
- Because, if mainstream contemporary artists are those interested in selling objects, then... (see previous two points);
- Because artistic practitioners of many kinds have acknowledged and worked with the digital ever since the emergence of the digital;
- Because the social world has already assimilated the digital in more complex terms than those that would inform any mainstream artist's perspective on it.

[1] Digital Divide: Claire Bishop on contemporary art and new media http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201207&id=31944