This image was originally posted to Flickr as BK Stacker

After an enforced hiatus from my musings on the state of British culture, you may or may not welcome my return to the keyboard. Either way, get used to it.

I am sure you are familiar with the famous illustration of probability which suggests that if you put enough monkeys in a room with enough typewriters, and leave them for long enough, one of them will eventually write the works of Shakespeare.

Ever wondered what that room would sound like? Well, look no further than Radiohead’s rehearsal room. I’m sure they had much more of the beautiful, tear-jerking pathos of Green Plastic Trees (1998) or Street Spirit (1995) in them, and they could have made a mint out of über-ballads as an accompaniment for awkward, bullied teenagers to contemplate suicide to, but no! Instead we have to have album after album of the irritating pops and clicks that is the sound of primates clutching at straws, serenaded by Thom Yorke’s doleful squawking.

Their latest album, King of Limbs (2011), made my heart send out a great disturbance in The Force, as if millions of fans suddenly cried out in disappointment, and were suddenly silenced by boredom. I have to say that since Kid A (2000), I have had a very uneven relationship with their music.

http://www.thekingoflimbs.com/

Even The Guardian agrees with me. Their review is as polite as it can be, but they take 500 words to say “Haven’t I already got this album?”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/feb/18/radiohead-king-limbs-first-review

It sounds like all the offcuts and leftovers swept up from the studio floor. I wonder if the band got an intern to knock it out, or maybe it’s a completely manufactured pastiche. Either way, you really don’t need to hear it, although you’ll probably buy it.

I bought the cheapest downloadable version at £6 for a meagre eight high quality MP3s and felt cheated after the first listen. There are several other package variations of the album including a £33 “newspaper” version including the usual random collection of tat that we have come to expect from any Radiohead album.

This is, of course, just another example of franchise art. When artists or musicians hit on a winning formula they repeat it over and over again in the knowledge that people with more disposable income than sense will endlessly subscribe to the diminishing return afforded by the fading glory of a once great talent, terrified by the thought of seeming off-message. Radiohead have been doling out this quirky, too-cool-for-school shite for ten years and no-body dares criticize.

Status Quo produced dozens of albums of more or less the same songs, but that’s okay, and why? Because they are not pretentious nob-heads. They’re just nob-heads.

And it’s the pretentiousness of it that really palls. The promo video Lotus Blossom has cool written all over it. “Choreographed by Wayne McGregor” (Royal Ballet & Random Dance theatre), Director of Photography Nick Wood, who has worked on music videos for Dizzee Rascal, Calvin Harris and Bloc Party, amongst others. Produced and Directed by Garth Jennings (Rambow (2007) & Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005)). The credits are so self-assuredly smug it makes me want to vomit in VariCam slowmo, but despite McGregor’s choreography, all I could see in this music promo was Thom Yorke’s characteristic twitching. The towering frisson of its anticipated coolness is only exceeded by the crushing disappointment of actually watching it.

On BBC Radio 4′s Today programme (28/2/11) Alex Poots, Director of the Manchester International Festival, does his best to make excuses for Radiohead but the stink of uneasy, liberal apologist snobbery was almost palpable.

And this is the real crux of the issue. The reason Radiohead have been making the same album for a decade is because no-one says no to them. Most bands have a long lead-in time of critical indifference, which either kills or cures them, but once successful, they can do no wrong. After the astonishing artistic achievement of OK Computer (1997), and its critical and commercial success, the hangers-on do not want to rock the boat and the critics are too anxious about maintaining their own position that they sit on the fence.

That is, apart from BBC Radio 3 DJ Andy Kershaw, who seems to be the only music pundit who has the balls to stand up for quality in music and have a go at the normally unimpeachable monuments of rock tedium that are Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart and Lou Reed. Please download the podcast while you can. It made me squeal with pleasure.

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/today/today_20110228-1115a.mp3

However, I have to ask myself, what kind of dimwit asks Liam Gallagher for a critical opinion? He is the artistic equivalent of chewing gum, with the intellectual insight of candy floss. His biggest criticism seems to be about the title, although that is the most interesting thing about the album.

http://www.myspace.com/music/blog/2011/2/28/liam-gallagher-criticizes-radiohead

Thank you for waiting.

Originally published in Now Then Sheffield 29, August 2010.

The so-called Robin Hood Tax (RHT) is a proposed tax on transactions within financial institutions. It does not include transactions by individuals and is estimated to be able to raise up to £200 billion per year based upon levies of between 0.005% to 0.05%. There is an extremely coherent explanatory video on the website.

http://robinhoodtax.org.uk/

This is an example of accumulating many tiny amounts of money into a much more significant whole. I remember hearing the term “micro payment” for the first time in 2001 although it was nothing new. Like many people, I was introduced to the concept of “salami slicing” by the movie  “Superman III” (1983, dir Richard Lester). The salami metaphor can be applied in either direction. A large sum can be made up of lots of small pieces, or small amounts can be shaved off a large amount without being noticed. The proposed RHT would accumulate an enormous amount of tax revenue whilst being an insignificant burden on its target.

The term “Smurfing” was coined in the 1980′s and refers to the practice of dividing large transactions into several smaller ones in order to avoid being noticed by regulatory or statutory bodies who might want to tax or investigate them.

In “SuperMan III” the character Gus Gorman discovers how to collect all the fractions of cents left over due to the rounding down of computer-based calculations. He writes a computer program that gathers them all together and pays himself a fat salary cheque of $90k. Back in the real world, the only people earning that kind of monthly bonus are bankers. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Gorman foolishly buys a sports car and drives it to work at the same employer that he has just embezzled, apparently not familiar with that whole Smurf concept.

In this country tax is a dirty word and most people resent having to pay a single penny. It does not take a genius to understand that without taxation there would be no public services, but the resentment is so ingrained that political campaigns are often based upon promises of lower taxes. In practice each incoming government changes so may rules, regulations and allowances that it is impossible to work out if you are better or worse off. Is this just a subtle, salami-slice of intended confusion or simply the lone Smurf of incompetence? Taxation is inevitable in a developed and urban society, so let’s get used to the idea.

Our newly elected government has just issued a new budget but has not implemented the RHT although it is widely supported and easily implemented in a system which is universally computerized.

Despite the rhetoric of Tweedle Cameron and Tweedle Clegg, who talk about a fairer Britain, the Conservative Party (despite the conjoined, facile LibDem idiot-child) has never been shy of favouring the haves at the expense of the have-nots. By increasing Value Added Tax (VAT) to 20% they have put extra tax on almost everything we buy, and it even taxes the homeless, the unemployed, and those without a bank account. If the price of everything goes up then they can penalise the most vulnerable, directly and indirectly. We’ll call it the General Belgrano Tax and it will sink everyone, regardless of status.

On the other hand, the National Lottery is a voluntary tax, some say a tax on the poor. Well I say it is a tax on people who want something for nothing, and if that’s their motivation then they deserve being parted from their money. It’s actually giving most people nothing for something. However, the National Lottery has one saving grace, despite having no say in what it’s spent on, at least you can choose not to contribute. Let’s call it the Peter Stringfellow Tax and it’s just another form of gambling.

Does no-one else find the thought of government-endorsed gambling repellent? The democratically-elected, holier-than-thou, busy-bodies who believe that they know best for the British people by progressively denying us the pleasures of smoking and drinking, are the same morally corrupt manipulators who are directly and indirectly promoting the extremely destructive and addictive obsession that is gambling. Gambling is the most invidious of vices and these days it’s everywhere thanks to government relaxing its regulation and advertising restrictions.

Having said all this, I have a few a suggestion for a new, voluntary tax initiative that our current government could implement, given that they have already demonstrated their lack of scruples by not implementing the RHT in their emergency budget.

One of the truly astounding phenomena of social gaming is the puzzlingly successful FaceBook game, FarmVille. Pundits criticized its developers when they decided to “monetize” it. For the uninitiated, the word means adding options in the game that need to be paid for with real money. The Guardian published a story about a 12-year-old boy who blew £900 on FarmVille, buying virtual nothings. He squandered his own savings then hit his mother’s credit card without her knowledge. Many of these games are highly addictive, but merely exercises in resource management that promote nothing educational nor lasting, just unfounded aspiration, excessive consumption and a limitless horizon of frustration. The developers, Zynga, have effectively discovered a legal way of stealing pennies from children. Maybe we should called it the Fagin Tax.

Governments could learn from this, and why stop at pennies? This kind of pervasive, chewing-gum, self-subjugation is ripe for exploitation. Which more malleable, easily identified and vulnerable market is there than children? Zynga have found a way of inspiring the same desperate, clutching-at-straws that is gambling, whilst appealing to an extremely impressionable and irrationally addictive demographic. And it’s legal. According to the Guardian, FarmVille has 63 million players. That’s more than the population of the United Kingdom. They are not all children, of course, but if we could shave a penny from each player, every day, we could have that £200 billion of funny-money that the Bank of England has “quantitatively eased” into the economy paid off in a year, and the poor suckers would hardly notice it.

We’d call it TaxVille and it would be a resource management game where you have to balance the nation’s budget. It would, of course, be endless and ultimately impossible but success would be vaguely promised by the buying of optional fantasy add-ons such as Quantitative Easing, Public Borrowing and Proportional Representation.

I am joking, of course, although nothing I have written is untrue.

I believe the Robin Hood Tax is one of the few universally justifiable taxes and should be implemented forthwith, although I have a suggested extension to it that might be implemented:

What the hell, let’s levy micro-payments on every single electronic transaction for every product, service or financial exchange including any transactions that move money offshore! Go ahead, put your money in a Jersey bank and we’ll tax it on the way out and tax it again on the way back in. Every payment into, out of, or within any bank, building society, insurance company, or any commercial organization whatsoever. Neither salami-slicing, penny shaving nor smurfing will enable you to avoid it and it would be a percentage, a very small percentage, which would make it a proportional tax, so the rich pay more. It would trivial, annoying and unavoidable and we’ll call it the Russell Brand Tax. Simples!

EEx

My ongoing response to The Great British Art Debate. Dear readers, have patience, the end is nigh.

Does the art of the past have anything to say about the world of today?

One of the most impressive shows I saw seen in recent years was during a visit to New York, USA in 2007, and was a privately funded exhibition of German, wood-carved memento mori from the 16th Century. I was stunned by its graphic intelligence and technical mastery. It’s a shame they wouldn’t let me photograph it and it is also a pity that death has become so unpopular.

On the contrary, one of the worst shows I have seen in recent years is the Altermodern show at Tate Britain  in 2009. The only three pieces of work in that sprawling mess that seemed interesting at the time were by Mike Nelson, Lindsay Seers and Olivia Plender.

Previous to this trip I had witnessed a dismal talk by Plender and her work about the “Kindred of the Kibbo Kift” which was actually much more interesting in the flesh than she made out in her talk. At the time, Lindsay Seer’s work seemed strange, enigmatic and quite fascinating. What a disappointment to hear her talk about it. I was recently at an artist’s talk where she mumbled and bumbled and jumbled about and managed to bore the pants off us, rambling from one apparently unrelated matter to another, for a whole hour and then had the cheek to accuse some of the audience at the back for falling asleep. Sorry, love, but if you are the one giving the talk, and you can’t keep the audience awake, then I think the blame for any social faux-pas lies closer to the stage.

Neither of these artists would win a personality contest and it is plain to see how Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin stepped over them. I pray that I will never be present to hear Mike Nelson talking about his work or the remaining piece of apparently interesting work in Altermodern may be ruined for me too. Most of these artists’ work would not represent them favourably in five years, never mind another five-hundred years, whereas the masterworks of unnamed 16th century craftsmen are still inspiring, humbling and communicate ideas more sophisticated and intelligent than the knee-jerk primitivism of the spiralling reductive altermodernism.

Strangely, I identify with the “constellation” idea that Nicholas Bourriaud, the über-curator of Altermodern suggests for that which comes after post-modernism. It’s just a shame he chose to show the most random “constellation” of shit that I have wasted money on in a long time. Whilst writing this I looked for the catalogue but I am fairly sure that I binned it. Hardly a loss.

I often ask myself these questions about contemporary fine art. Did you notice it? Can you remember it? Would you pay for it? Would you miss it?

Try it. It’s very revealing.

I remember the Turner Prize 1999 exhibition and being extremely depressed by the random nonsense of the winning artist, Steve McQueen. On the plus side, Tracey Emin’s work rewarded me for the time and money wasted elsewhere. Her “My bed” (1998) is a truly enlightening journey into a troubled mind and a connection with the fragility and ultimate futility of life, but without cynicism. Photographs in tabloid newspapers did not do justice to the tragic density of its details and it is a modern memento mori.

“Thinkers” such as Bourriaud seem to entertain an idea that art has a progression of improvement. Given the barely evident work of artists such as Martin Creed the if this progressions is linear then we are at the end of a very short and narrow cul-de-sac. If it is a detour then we have merely been taken on a diversion.

According to Bourriaud: “Artists are responding to a new globalised perception. They traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs and create new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.”

Oh dear.

What he is referring to here is nothing more than the random “shopping” of post-modernism, actually. These idiots have no idea what a disservice they have done to art with this incoherent drivel, and how unfortunate that the little cartoon explanation on the website of what alter-modern means reveals nothing more than the fact that art has become an emulsion of tedious cultural simulcra, repeated endlessly across the globe, rather like the Starbucks on every corner or the Gap on every high street or the iPhone in every pocket. Art has become an atomized and homogenous continuum of cultural approximations that are less than the sum of their constituent parts.

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/cartoon.shtm

In opposition to Bourriard I propose a new term, “con-modernism” (no irony intended), meaning “with modernism“. Not post-modernism, not pre-modernism and certainly not alter-fucking-modernism. Maybe Bourriard is mistakenly using the word “constellation” (meaning: a group or cluster of related things – source Latin constellatio ‘group of stars’) instead of the word “confusion” (meaning: lack of understanding or uncertainty – source Latin confundere ‘mingle together’). The prefix “con” is from Latin meaning with. This persists as a word in Italian and Spanish (as in “con leche” – with milk) and in English as a prefix. The English slang term “con” is short for “confidence” as in confidence trick, and is from (you guessed it) the Latin word “confidere” ‘with faith’ .

The word modern also comes from a Latin word meaning “just now”. The English term “modern” means the recent as opposed to the historic. Arguably, we will never be post-modern, and by extension never post-anything. We are successively standing on the shoulders of giants who are standing on the shoulders of other giants. To talk of post-anything is an artificial distinction already redundant because of our inability to separate ourselves from what precedes. Once we are aware of a new influence we are never free of it even if we reject it.

The art of the past, particularly the death-obsessed work of the middle-ages, tells me that the world of today is a corrupt, cynical and status-obsessed world that is desperately trying to reach an imagined Emerald City in search of progress, immortality and salvation.

We are on the brink of the multiple imminent disasters of global warming, nano-technology, nuclear power and genetic engineering and it is time to re-connect with the fatalistic values of past, rather than kidding ourselves that we have surpassed them. The concept of con-modernism does not deny the past but entertains the idea that art can continue the traditions of the past whilst taking the ideas of modernism with us.

We have come too far down the yellow brick road to turn back now but let’s hope there is still room in this ruined world for courage, intelligence and compassion. The present is our home and there’s no other place like it.

EEx

I don’t think you can possibly imagine how much I have longed to see the words “Beyoncé”, “lesbian” and “girlfight” appear in the same press-release. However, it’s a shame that they have been attached to one of most tedious and ugly wastes-of-YouTube-space that I have ever witnessed, and believe me, I have seen some shit in my time. Lady Ga Ga & Beyoncé’s “Telephone” video is one of the worst music promos that I have seen for a long time. And some people are calling it “art”. It’s I shame I didn’t get to work on it. You are probably not aware just how much of any budget that I could squander on cocaine, prostitutes and PVC bondage-wear whilst wearing the moniker of “artistic director”. And let’s face it, none of it got spent in that direction. It’s extended version is 9 minutes and 32 seconds of lazy rip-offs, poor humour and cynical product placement. If you don’t mind contributing to the 16 million (and climbing) views of this expensive turd, it is online here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ95z6ywcBY&feature=player_embedded

I tried to look at one of the other related “viral” videos and was stopped with this message: “This video contains content from UMG, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.” – LMFAO!

I am still unsure if the product placement in the video is ironic but its grotesque lack of subtlety illustrates how we are now so decadent and cynical that I am unsure. Post-modernism has a lot to answer for.

Popular music used to have some credibility. The Beatles, Elvis, Pink Floyd. Even if you didn’t like them at least you could appreciate them as artists with a certain amount of integrity and talent. These days the music industry, from top to bottom, is a corrupt travesty of bad taste with no more content than the inside of a Malteser.

My wife tells me I should get a job writing an opinion column for a newspaper or magazine. “They love really opinionated people” she tells me (any offers?). If I had ever realised that there is commercial potential in being an ignorant, opinionated, gobshite then I would have applied for a job at BBC Radio 1 years ago. Unfortunately I feel disenfranchised. Sarah Cox, Chris Moyles (“the saviour of Radio 1″) and Chris Evans have moved popular radio culture so far downhill that I cannot listen to it without telling the radio to fuck off. It’s not fair to blame a transistor radio for the sins of culture-indifferent, brain-dead, thug-chic dimwits, but it has become such an ingrained response to the endless vomitus and imbecilic chatter of popular radio DJ’s that, for me, it is now a reflex.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/

The only pit deeper than that stupefying, spiral road-to-hell, trod daily by the professional idiots of popular DJ culture, is the talent-free, plastic-fantastic, fast-food muzik producers that crank out such hear-today, gone-tomorrow excrescent buboes that are The Black-Eyed Peas, Dizzee Rascal and Riverside.

It is, of course, all the fault of technology. In the 1990′s, with miniaturization, economies of scale and mass-production, music and computing technology became downright cheap. Whereas in the 70′s synthesizers and sequencers were the exclusive privilege of the rich, the successful or the highly committed, so-called “instant-music” technology became available to just about anyone.

Nowadays anyone can make music. Which sounds like a good thing. But the problem is; anyone can make music. Instant-music software and hardware has allowed anyone with a few bucks or a few light fingers to set up a tiny studio in a bedroom and crank out identi-kit, join-the-dots pastiches of music, based upon what they think music should sound like. This technology allows them to bypass any of the sophistication, experience and craft that is necessary to produce the dense subtlety of jazz, the emotional trajectory of blues, or the even the exhilarating thrill of trance.

The worst of the currently successful bands is The Black-Eyed Peas. Their tracks are all comprised of a-little-bit-of-this and a-little-bit-of-that and shoved together, lego-brick-style, to make something that seems to provide all of the structural necessities of music but without containing any of the art that makes it worth the disk space it occupies. Audio? Tick! Rhythm? Tick! Chorus? Tick!

Tick, tick, tick all the boxes and then AutoTune the fuck out of it. Kerching!

Popular music is dead and its corpse is being fucked in the arse by Jay-Z, Pete Waterman and Simon Cowell.

Lady Ga Ga and the The Black-Eyed Peas are perfecting the bump-n-grind song-o-matic used so extensively by Britney Spears. They just grunt through a bit that resembles a verse, only because that’s where a verse usually goes, filling up the bars with syllables (like they used to, used to, used to, used to, used to do) in order to reach a usually quite melodic chorus, so that drunken single women can sing along whilst falling off there platform porn-shoes.

We’ve seen all this before, I guess, but how can you out-Madonna Madonna? Well, you’re gonna need a lot less taste and a lot more trash. Sounds impossible, right?

This leads us directly back to Lady GaGa. It’s a shame to see a genuinely talented performing artist like Beyoncé Knowles being stripped bare by the vampires of the music industry and dressed in the bloody ball gown of tomorrow’s humiliation and failures yet-to-come, preserved in wax, next to Britney, Whitney, Florence and Terrence.

I’d like to melt every last bit of nylon, polyester and vinyl, clinging provocatively to Lady Gaga’s athletic proportions, and throw it on the mounting scrap-heap of trash-culture for the rag-pickers of television-awards-shows to scavenge and assemble into some insane wicker-man of “musical genius”.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a genius. Elvis Costello is a genius. Philip Glass is a genius. Lady GaGa is a blow-up doll who has been manufactured, engineered and promoted by life-sucking parasites, more frightening, more virulent and less moral than any cut-and-shut monster made from discarded limbs and given life by the terrifying majesty of nature. The only electricity being produced by Lady GaGa’s presence is the annoying static of plastic soles on corporate-contract carpet.

All we hear is Lady Ga Ga
Ba ba ba na na na
Ya ba da ba bah bah
Ooooh la la ha ha ha! 

EEx

Should the public have a say in what goes into museums? Part 2

Arthur C. Clark wrote a short story “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953) about a reclusive religious order who believed they were required to document all of the possible names of God using a specially derived alphabet. They had been working diligently for 300 years and expected to take another 15,000 to complete the task. That is, until they employed a computer firm to finish off the hard work.

Spoiler alert!

It is well-written, short and online, so if you don’t want it ruining I recommend you read it before continuing:

http://lucis.net/stuff/clarke/9billion_clarke.html

In 1953 the numbers no doubt seemed astronomical, but no longer. To keep things simple the calculations are in Base 10. It’s not a lesson in computer maths.

9,000,000,000 names x 9 characters (if 1 byte = 1 character) = 81,000,000,000 characters or approximately 80 Gigabytes. I have just bought an external hard drive that has a capacity of 1 terabyte. That is 1,000 Gigabytes = approx. 1,000,000,000,000 bytes / characters. So, we don’t need to worry about storage, and with currently available distributed-computing and print-on-demand services they could probably have uploaded files to blurb.com and had the whole thing computed, printed, published and the world ended in a weekend. Phew!

If there is a “problem” to be identified here it is not the problem of deciding what to put into our museums but why? I spend a lot of time in galleries and museums but mostly alone. The “problem” with consulting the British people is the British people themselves. Why would you consult the British public on what goes into museums when the vast majority of those people never set foot inside a museum, gallery or library.

The permanent collections of museums and galleries across the country are crammed full of stuff that no-one ever looks at. The same cannot be said of the flagship galleries and museums in London, of course, which are always full to bursting. And why is that? Well, because they are full of foreigners. I have visited galleries in France, Austria, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Spain and the US and the experience is very different. Everyone goes to the art galleries and museums. On the continent you see a very broad demographic visiting these institutions, even the contemporary exhibitions.

When I joined the Facebook group of The Great British Art Debate there were only 90 members. The British people are largely a bunch of ignorant Philistines who think that culture is celebrity, television and shopping. British people don’t care about art or culture, just drinking, humiliation and fame, and not necessarily in that order. I was at an event billed as a Culture Debate in the Memorial Hall at Sheffield City Hall on 21st February 2010. This was an event organized by Off The Shelf, the festival of reading and writing, held yearly in Sheffield, UK, and was organized in support of Sheffield’s bid for the quangoid status of City of Culture 2013, which I accept is probably “a good thing” for the city.

http://www.sheffieldcityhall.co.uk/events/culture_debate/

I’m sure the the earnest liberals on the discussion panel would consider the venue to be half full, I am am afraid I would accuse the people of Sheffield (population 534,500) of leaving the venue (capacity 280 in the stalls) half empty. If this mediocre showing is all we can muster then maybe Sheffield does not deserve to be a city of culture.

I recently spent a few days in New York, and despite spending most of the time walking around the city alone, the only time I felt threatened that week was on the evening of my return to Britain. walking along Division Street in Sheffield, UK, as I tried to avoid the over-fed chavs, lurching about between the 2-4-1 horror-bars, revved up on double-vodkas and Red Bull.

I would not be interested in what any of these numbskulls would want to preserve for posterity because I suspect it would girls, sport and funny stuff. There is a British men’s magazine called “Nuts”. (I don’t recommend picking up one of its come-stained copies but you can get the picture by looking at their website.) On the Nuts.tv website there is an enlightening reference to the mentality represented here. One link is tagged “Fighting: Men punching, kicking and hurting each other, sometimes in self-defence”. Have a look, it’s an education although not one you would want to pay for.

It might be better to spend our time working on storage solutions for the waste that will be created by the forthcoming push back into nuclear energy. The British government has started to slip out references to that dead-end again, preparing the way for new power stations. Fission fuels have already proven to be far more dangerous than ever imagined and the problem of waste-disposal has never been solved, not even postponed, just ignored. Some idiots think we should blast it off into space but I’m glad that was not the payload on the Challenger or we’d already have a chip of depleted Uranium on every shoulder.

Even if the monks in Arthur C. Clark’s story went back to their original method of hand-writing the names of God and took another 15,000 years over it, they would still be able to bring about the end of the world before we have made safe our nuclear waste. Maybe that was why they were so keen to accelerate the process and put out the stars, one by one, without any fuss, so their thunder was not stolen by our impending secular disaster. Was it religious fervor or just professional jealousy?

It’s pointless to be wondering what should be preserved in our museums when we should really be getting on with the problem of protecting our species from the now permanent threat of nuclear waste. Weapons-grade Plutonium (Pu239) has a half-life of 24,100 years. That does not mean that it becomes safe in that time, it means it is half as radioactive. Pu244 is the most stable of its isotopes and has a half-life of more than eighty million years. Human history is only 10,000 years old but we can be proud of the fact that, even if the human race were to be terminated immediately, our legacy will last, for all intents and purposes, forever. With our technology we have made agents of poison that will outlive us longer than a geological age. I think we will not miss Grandad’s long-case clock as much as the skin off our backs.

We have already had a nuclear war but in a truly British tradition, no-one liked to mention it.

However, I realise this train of thought has taken us a long way from Kansas. All the way to Nevada, USA.

The US Government has been building a huge underground “deep geological repository” beneath Yucca Mountain, Nevada, USA, to store nuclear waste. It’s next door to the US Military nuclear test site and its development has been subject to enormous public protest. According to internet sources, it has been costing up to $500 million per year to build and support, although the Obama administration has pulled the plug on the project.

So, where is all that glow-in-the-dark shit going to go now? It’s about 80 miles from Las Vegas so maybe it could be used by one of the casinos to make a visitor-attraction so bright that it can be seen from Mars. That’ll give SETI a run for their money and might even bring in some income by getting extraterrestrials to land in the middle of the most cynical and rapacious, money-grabbing community in the world. (Starbucks, geddit?).

Maybe we should let the public put every last bit of Grandma’s tat in museums. There is a Big Yellowcake Storage just become vacant under Yucca Mountain.

But I digress. Although I am a stalwart supporter of the traditional values of culture, where I do identify with Britain’s illiterate peasants, violence-obsessed thugs and village-idiots, spaced-out on alco-pops and monosodium-glutamate, is their lust for life rather than a desire for status. The people who are fetishizing about what to put into museums are the same stuck-up, middle-class, control-freaks who have misguided political ambitions and an arrogant desire for influence over others. The apparently squeaky-clean, girls-school, do-gooders, accumulating worthy roles on their resumés by volunteering for board memberships of non-profit-making organizations, are the same patronizing, status-obsessed, political vampires that are trying to get nuclear power back onto the agenda. These social pariahs would suck the very life-breath from you in their desperate attempt to appear to be in control, having no more certainty of their “status” than I do of living for 1,000 years.

The agenda-with-no-name in antique-collecting, museum-fetishization and object-conservatism is a manifestation of the class-obsession that is alive and well in Britain, now just as markedly as it was in the middle-ages. Those who consider themselves to be the  upper-classes believe that if they can hold onto their heritage in the form of precious things, then maybe they can still distinguish themselves from what they see to be the lower-classes, whose conspicuous consumption is expressed in the culturally diametrically-opposed, disposable status-symbols of big-screen TVs, sports-utility-vehicles and foreign holidays.

But there is hope.

The one thing that reassures me about the powerlessness I feel against the class-predefined political agents is that their children will burn in the undiscriminating furnace of nuclear fire just as brightly as my own. I hope their Damien Hirsts are insured against “war and other risks”. Go Compare.

“Time not important. Only life important.” – The Fifth Element (1997 dir Luc Besson)

EEx

My ongoing response to the Great British Art Debate. I apologize that these are getting longer. In fact, so long that I have had to split this one into two parts…

Should the public have a say in what goes into museums? Part 1

Hal Draper wrote a short story call “Ms fnd n a lbry” (1961) or Manuscript Found in a Library. He writes of a an ancient, highly technologically-advanced civilization that accumulates so much knowledge that it simply cannot be accommodated without resorting to subatomic storage methods. The story describes how the master index is lost and the pan-galactic civilization is ruined by the loss of its knowledge. It is humorous and only short so I recommend reading it. The complete text is online here:

http://home.comcast.net/~bcleere/texts/draper.html

Our own reality is actually much more hopeful although with a slight tinge of cynicism. Where Draper’s story differs from observation is in that most of what we know and most of what we store is not worth preserving at all. Would civilization crumble if you lost your Facebook photos from a friend’s birthday? Or if you forgot your YouTube password and couldn’t retrieve your cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine”? Or if your blog of polemical rantings and juvenile cartoons was erased forever?

I can get a YouTube account and a Vimeo account and a Dailymotion account and a Google Video account (I think they get the point, Ed) but I can’t upload video fast enough to reach my limit. In fact, I can’t even shoot video fast enough to exceed my limit even if I could upload in real time. And video of what? My dog? Your dog? Our dogs doing the silliest things together?

I have about 200 cable TV channels (I’ve never counted them and generally stop flipping after about 140) but most of them show repeats of other stations and what I do watch is almost entirely forgettable. The irony is that technology has far surpassed our needs and there is no danger of losing the master index when Google has sorted that out for us. It does not reside in a single drawer, in a single room, in a single building, as in Draper’s story, but is duplicated and backed up several times over in different geographical locations. In computing terms this is called “redundancy” (no irony intended), where duplication of equipment and data provides a fail-safe condition. What’s more, that master index is available on every desktop, laptop or palmtop across the first and second worlds. Actually we have too much information, too much storage and too much access to it.

I am currently using 1% of the 7.4 Gigabytes of my free Google Mail storage and am using 3.6 Mb of the 3.0 Gb (0.2%) of my free WordPress account. I could pay to upgrade and get more storage but I can’t imagine what I would put in it. These essays are mostly about a thousand words in length and I can manage no more than two per week. That’s about 5,000 characters x 2 essays x 52 weeks x 25 years (if I live to be 70) = 13 Megabytes of uncompressed text. Images, however, are far more data hungry although if you perform a Google image search 90% of the results are duplicates.

Storage is not going to be a problem.

The fact is we have more capacity than we could ever use and most of what we might choose to save is not worth saving anyway. Cataloguing every detail is not the same as recording knowledge but it looks like we are not going to be short of space, so why bother asking the public if it should go into a museum. What the hell, If it’s digitally recordable, let’s save it all!

A superb application of digital media storage and access to more traditional museum-based work is available on Google Earth where you can examine masterpieces in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain in minute detail. You can examine Hieronymous Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthy Delights” (circa 1500) closer and in more detail than you would ever be able to even if you were there in the flesh. This begs the obvious questions of why preserve the original and what is it worth now that everyone has access to it?

There is a very interesting discussion around the concepts of price, cost, value and worth.

It’s interesting to look at the pricing of works for sale by the White Cube Gallery. The White Cube famously represents Damien Hirst and here are some details I found on their website of his prints for sale:

“For the Love of God, Believe” (2007), edition of 1,700 at £ 900.00 + VAT.

“For the Love of God, Laugh” (2007), edition of 250 at £ 15,000.00 + VAT.

“For the Love of God, The Diamond Skull” (2007), edition of 250 at £ 12,500.00 + VAT.

Do the math.

Well, don’t bother, I’ve done it for you. This total of 2,300 silk-screen prints on paper comes in at a total book value of £8,405,000 + VAT. The two more expensive prints are coated with diamond dust, not as romantic as it might sound as it’s an industrial abrasive. They are mass-produced photographic screen-prints and probably cost a tenner each in materials.

Why sell a single screen-print on paper (with glazes and diamond dust) when you can knock out hundreds of them at £15k each? I believe Hirst is perpetrating a daring joke here and taking both the piss and the cash from a lot of dimwitted art “connoisseurs” who have more money than sense and no more idea of the valuelessness of the work than they do of the inevitability of death.

Ho-ho-ho.

I am an admirer of Hirst’s work and I wonder when this little prank will be uncovered. It’s not as if he hasn’t given enough clues. If the entire prints of the 3 editions were burned the world would not be eight million pounds poorer and neither would the White Cube. However, they do have some cultural value, not in their manifestation but in the idea of their existence and I truly would not like to have missed such a spectacularly grotesque, but beautifully realized, conceptualization of decadence.

Printing money this way is a notoriously dangerous economic folly and simply attaching a price tag to an object does not establish it as having any value or any worth. When Hirst’s actual diamond-encrusted skull “For the Love of God” (2007) went to auction it sold to a consortium of buyers including the White Cube’s owner, Jay Jopling, and Hirst himself, simply to maintain its auction price. Not its value. Not its worth. This kind of insider trading is illegal in the financial sector but quite normal in the corrupt art market. Not that the bona fide fiscal institutions are beyond reproach. The world is suffering from an disastrous recession caused by incompetent banks and governments who have allowed people to borrow more money than they can afford to pay back and hence pushing the price of houses up, not because they are worth more, but because people can afford to pay more for them. The Bank of England is perpetrating the same scam as the White Cube but they call it “Quantitative Easing” to the tune of a cool £200 billion. However, there is no printing involved, they simply move the decimal point and hope for the best. Even Hirst and his army of interns would be hard pushed to knock out enough to ease that much Monopoly money into the world.

In 1999 I sold a one-off inkjet printed artwork for £45 framed. I think I still have the original file on disk. Maybe I should print a few thousand more and use them as collateral on a house. Or maybe I could upload it to Flickr, flood the market and bankrupt the art market. If only.

Would the world be any less rich if my own petulant scribblings were to be lost? It is arguable that any individual unit of culture is a loss but the world’s lack of my polemical essays would hardly bring down our civilization. A different concept is of cultural value. Artist James Price has suggested that the smallest constituent unit of culture is the gift. If this is so, my series of essays is of a much greater cultural value than any number of Hirst’s prints because I give it away on the internet. You can read my work for nothing and I approve all comments without editing. Also, because it is online, it is potentially infinitely reproducible, simultaneously valueless and invaluable. What a gift! Stick that in formaldehyde and cut it half!

However, I still maintain that it really doesn’t matter if mine or Damien Hirst’s work is lost. Although, if our civilization were to collapse, digitally published work would not make a bonfire to huddle around to keep us warm in the long, post-apocalyptic nights, but 2,300 screen-prints on paper (with glazes) would.

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To give my regular readers a rest from the cul-de-sac that is art criticism, here is a little discussion of the moral and ethical issues around the censorship of sex. You may or may not be relieved to know that I will be returning to my critical response to The Great British Art Debate soon. In the meantime….

It’s such a shame that Apple has decided to remove sex-related apps from its app store. I had a few ideas myself for apps that might bring in a buck or two, and if I’d known that the app “Wobble iBoobs” was not a joke I would have had it installed faster than you can say “post-feminism”.

Recently, I was at a very interesting presentation by Diarmid Scrimshaw (corr) of Warp Films who told us about two of their many projects, then currently in production. One is a 90 minute live action feature film and the other a 90 second animated intro for the recent “DJ Hero” game (2009 Activision Publishing). The budget for both projects was the same – half a million pounds. It is an often repeated cliché that the video game industry is now bigger than the movie industry and here it is laid bare.

http://warp.net

The only other medium that still seems to be making money is pornography. I have often considered getting into that industry and, rather like video gaming, it is one of the few industries where you can make the same thing over and over again and sell it to the same people over and over and over again. With any broadband connection you can get hold of more pornography than your tired member can handle but there is no limit in the commercial potential of the diminishing return that is sex entertainment. Whereas I could watch Bladerunner (1980, dir Ridley Scott) every day for the rest of my life and still find it satisfying, the same cannot be said for “Debbie Does Dallas” (1978, dir Jim Clark) or any one of a thousand videos of the strikingly-beautiful Aria Giovanni jiggling her perfectly-formed breasts.

http://www.ariagiovanni.com/

It always strikes me as strange that British and US censors will pass a movie or a video game as being ok to be seen by minors, that contains graphic and bloody violence but the use of the word “fuck” or the portrayal of sexual acts will render it suitable only for adults. What’s more, I cannot see a movie of penetrative sex between consenting adults in a mainstream cinema, but I can see movies whose central theme is torture. It even has its own movie genre. Some of the casual violence and the amorality exhibited in current video games seems strangely at odds with the west’s prudishness about sex. Though not exactly shocked by it, I was surprised by the bloodiness of Quake III: Arena when I first saw it in 2000. It seems quite tame now but the bloodlust seemed excessive at the time. This hypocrisy allows me to depict, to a 15-year-old, a woman being decapitated but not penetrated, or a man being shot but not fellated. I can show her losing her head but not giving head. I can show him being blown away but not being blown off.

Virtual sex games are nothing new, “Virtual Valerie” (1995, Mike Saenz) being an early example, but I would really like to see this kind of entertainment move into the mainstream and take advantage of new technologies. Sex-based video games and sex toys have both been around for a long time although sold as separate items, but I think it would have great commercial potential to marry the worlds more intimately. Imagine what kind of superior interaction you could implement with the gestural control available on a Wii, for example, or the swinging potential of the iPhone’s location services, or the market penetration of XBox Live.

Now that the internet has killed off the music and film industries it’s only the closed platforms such as Sony’s PlayStation, Apple’s iPhone and Nintendo’s Wii etc that allow any control of content distribution and, hence, maintain an income stream.

There are already games that can be customised so that you can simulate banging your school French teacher but their imagination is a little limited, and the aesthetic never gets any further than mainstream porn-star chic.

http://www.virtualhottie.com/

Also, be warned, this kind of customization can have unfortunate consequences. One of the most repellent, misanthropic travesties of taste that I have ever witnessed is the Evian baby advert. Which set of twisted minds thought that this superbly-realized nightmare is nothing short of disgusting? Paedos take note, it can be viewed online here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQcVllWpwGs

Rather like Apple and it’s new category of mobile device, I am hoping to establish a new category of game platform for full-immersion, massively-multi-partner, interactive sex games. If we could get around the strange embarrassment of sex, we could achieve the mainstream credibility that the Nintendo DS has. Their TV ads depict healthy pensioners, well-groomed professional women or nuclear couples sharing their gaming experiences in a whiter-than-white, facile pseudo-world of happiness and fulfillment. Wouldn’t it be great to move the world on from our current shamefulness about sex into a world that would see granny recommending her favourite variable-speed, force-feeback, self-lubing Jack Rabbit vibrator.

We could pioneer a whole new range of interactive, location-aware, muilt-stimulatory devices that can be simultaneously strapped-on or inserted into every erogenous zone or orifice on your body. How about the iAutoEroticAsphixiator that simultaneously masturbates and strangulates you? Using a built-in accelerometer it could monitor your heart rate and release the tournique before you expire, thus avoiding the embarrassing press surrounding accidental garotting. Also, I like the idea of a mouth-controlled fellation add-on for men so you can blow your own trumpet without resorting to yoga lessons.

You can plug yourself into which ever vibrating, sucking or stroking attachments work for you, choose your online partner/s whose motion-captured movement you like, and skin them with whatever eye-candy appeals (fat chicks, black guys, school girls, grannies, whatever). Then just wiggle your joystick until it pops your cork.

I’ll call it EllBox iNXS and it will be available with a large array of optional peripherals to cater for every peccadillo.

What’s more this market could appeal to a very broad demographic. Every woman has a vibrator in a drawer somewhere, and every man has a few porn videos stashed. Let’s get them together. Most straight people have gay fantasies that they might not want to actually perform in real life. Which straight man hasn’t fantasized about being fucked in the arse by another man whilst jerked off by their best friend’s mother and simultaneously licking Marmite off the breasts of Chinese lesbians? Or is that just me?

On EllBox iNXS there’s an app for that.

And it’s safe. No exchanging of bodily fluids and no embarrassing hang-overs with some loser who seemed a lot more attractive the night before through the bottom of a glass of Stella Artois.

Imagine the creative potential in the game titles alone. Obvious ones are “iPoke” / “iPhuck” / “iMoan”, or “PlayWithYouselfStation”, and my personal favourite, “Wii Watersports”, although I was gutted to find out that there is already a cutesy racing game with that name. I would not recommend watching the video trailer for it now that I have suggested another interpretation.

However, the most exciting prospect is the extreme fantasy sex game that allows you to indulge in practices either socially unacceptable, physically impossible or else taboo. Want to fuck your sister? Well, you can on EllBox iNXS, and no fear of any difficult-to-cover-up idiot-children with 3 arms that need to be kept in a cellar. Want to have sex with a minor? On EllBox iNXS you can skin any participant as a Japanese schoolgirl or an ambitious, under-age Russian immigrant. Want to indulge in snuff sex? Well, there ain’t no app for that, so just send me your address and I’ll come over and stab you through the heart myself.

And as for the paedophiles, with micro-payments and relying on the diminishing return of porn, we can keep selling them new versions of the same games, and raise tax revenue on the dirty bastards at the same time. This would have the triple benefits of keeping track of the perps, regulating the practice and making them pay for their own rehabilitation. It’s a win-win-win situation.

EEx

My ongoing response to the Great British Art Debate

http://greatbritishartdebate.tate.org.uk/

Is art too popular?

The BBC’s recent “School of Saatchi” TV series is a new milestone in the downward spiral of trash, with the added bonus of it trying to violate the near-dead body of fine art. However I must admit to enjoying it with the same voyeuristic spite that I have previously reserved for those humiliation-chic talent shows. However, this time the invisible element is the very Emperor himself, and Charles Saatchi does not appear in the program bearing his famous moniker. Maybe he is shy, or maybe he doesn’t want his own personality to dominate the program or maybe he is, indeed, just a cipher, like Keyser Soze in “The Usual Suspects” (1995 dir. Bryan Singer), who exists no more in reality than than I do.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00p71qk

I am truly ambivalent about the credibility of Charles Saatchi. My own hope is for the end of the public art-purse and a return to the commercial model and/or the patron-artist relationship. This is exactly what he is doing, putting his hand in his pocket and putting his money where his mouth is (Eh?). The counter-argument is against the influence that he exerts by establishing the value of art simply by being able to think of a number and afford to pay it. Maybe I would be more complimentary if he was buying my work.

If I were to be critical of the approach of this series, it is the “school” part of it. His school is rooted in a very traditional idea of the artist working in a studio and creating discrete works of art. This methodology originates from when artists were artisans, served an apprenticeship and spent many years mastering their craft. This approach does not work with contemporary fine artists because they have no craft, no discipline and not enough maturity to deliver anything but some random droppings. This is demonstrated very clearly by Saad Qureshi who struggles to come up with anything at all. It is not productive to shove some nobody in a studio, provide them with all the trappings and expect them to be brilliant, just because they claim to be an artist. Saatchi is going to need a lot more typewriters and a lot more monkeys. The traditional model of the studio / gallery is not valid for a generation that does not know, and is not taught, how to work in a traditional way. It’s no wonder they struggle so much and it’s no wonder they come up with such childish excretions as Eugenie Scrase’s foam grappling hook (snigger) or Saad’s piles of chapatis (snigger).

Some of the other artists were much less prominently featured in the series and we all know why. They are far less embarrassing. I shrieked with joy as Saad repeatedly claims to be a “perfectionist” whilst he has a hissy fit during the erection of his “Ghost House”. The arrogance of an artist who criticizes the work of the technicians when he clearly does not understand the medium makes me want to post mouldy fish and chips through his letterbox. Perfect that!

I almost choked when I saw Sam Zealey’s idiotic attempt to make an oversized Van de Graaf generator with a wig on it (snigger). He needs to give up his paper round get a proper job instead of trying to convince us that a drunken joke should have any life beyond the varsity bar. This charlatan should not be given even 20 seconds of the attention of anyone over the age of 11. How demeaning for him to have it enclosed in a cage (health and safety, innit) to prevent the public being shocked.

Snigger.

The question is not so much “Is art too popular?” but “is popularity art?”.

It is almost impossible to avoid David Shrigley’s excrescent scribblings in bookshops, greetings card shops, and now in fine art galleries. Even the Saatchi Gallery is selling his dismal dawbings. I saw an exhibition of his at the Baltic, Gateshead, UK in 2008 and his work, amongst many others,  is a prominent contributing factor in my assertion that art is dead. I am sure he is sniggering all the way to the bank, seeing as his less than adequate talent has garnered a credibility denied to a million much more talented artists. Would the world be any less rich without the work of David Shrigley? Ask a seven-year-old. His cartoons are embarrassingly stupid and belong on the same bonfire that would consume Graham Rawle’s excruciatingly awful and similarly puerile “Lost Consonants”.

He can’t even draw.

http://davidshrigley.com/

http://www.grahamrawle.com/

If the popularity of art is to be compared with the popularity of television then the answer to the proposed question would be yes. Just as every one of the the peak 3 million people watching Big Brother can be wrong, so can everyone else.

To return to the School of Saatchi, the art, of course, is actually irrelevant. Although Saatchi himself might be genuinely looking for new talent, the television producers are looking for new personalities. We live in an age of celebrity-obsessed, personality-cult, disposable trash-culture where the manifestation of art, of actual culture, needs have no more substance than the body of Kaiser Soze, when the idea of him, the cult of him, is far more potent and will have us micro-paying for KS ring-tones, Kobayashi mugs and YouSual Suspects iPhone apps.

Where Saatchi is completely misguided is thinking that he can find another crop of Young British Artists (YBA’s) from an open call. The first round of YBAs was a blip and setting up an X Factor-style audition process will only produce a similar result. Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst are both talented and charismatic figures but I saw nothing of their presence in the School of Saatchi’s current batch of hopefuls. There is a vast gulf between a group of people who have the balls to get off their arses (eh?) and organize their own shows or shops, and some desperate wannabes who want all the trappings of success with none of the required dedication, insight and sheer bloody-mindedness.

Matthew Collings and the rest of the earnest liberals that make up the critical panel did the best they could to find “something interesting” in the artists’ work. God help them. I wonder how long I would last on that panel. Maybe 10 weeks of professional fees would help. 

Although the celebrity artist is nothing new. What is new is the saturation of media coverage, the lack of sophistication of the candidates and the emptiness of the result. I have seen many high-profile fine art shows in major galleries that are merely comprised of juvenilia. The Chapman Brothers have a very uneven relationship with adulthood and Gilbert & George’s later work, although increasingly well-executed comprises mostly pictures of shit (really). And of course Jeff Koons has an extensive back-catalogue of gilded turds.

However, I like to think Charles Saatchi’s non-appearance in the show bearing his name is neither modesty, embarrassment nor enigma. Let’s face it, he is successful, wealthy and has plenty to keep him at home. If I was married to Nigella Lawson, I would not be wasting my time looking at some crap down at the art gallery either, I’d be at home feasting on her succulent gravy and perfectly risen dumplings.

EEx