I don't know why I put BBC breakfast on in the morning. Perhaps I should switch to Mexican radio? ICT let's you nowadays.
Millennium 10. They are square as it causes compositional novelty and also because I was once asked to design a record cover. I think this'd work, but perhaps I am being naïve?
The pandemic and now sexual behaviour in schools are being paraded as crucial issues. They may well be, but there is an inevitability that the reporting will be glib and overly simplistic when an item has to be slotted in between the weather and the sport? And the situation is worse on social media in that the commentary needs to be aphoristically short. I myself will not read anything on Facebook if it reaches the 'see more' point. I will show interest in art competitions because I click and follow the links. But the flip side of all this chatter and twitter is that everyone has become an expert and all opinions are worth voicing.
Interestingly enough, all the labels we now take for granted about the greatest leaps forward in Modern art history all started out as flippant criticism in newspapers: Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism. It meant that the professional and amateur alike now had to persuade a chin-clasping sagacity in front of the direst travesties of the current scene. When I take my blue-collar American cousins to galleries in the States, I get them to line up in front of works and decis=de if they are 'Art or rubbish?' and once decided we do a little dedicatory dance in front of the pieces that pass. There are 13 of us in the party and the docents and other visitors can have a bit of a twitch when we stand before Kiefer's brickworks in the DIA, for example, and do a sort of little up and down Twist. But it's a truism that modern museums have lots of things that are in fashion now but will be relegated to the basement or the warehouse forever in a couple of decades. Even MOMA deaccessions some of its holdings, and they sell like hot cakes.
There is a book called 'Male Trouble' in the Interplay series by T&H. Probably out of print, but get it if you can. It talks about the elision of the 'masculine' during the period either side of the French Revolution. In a far less connected time, Society - whatever that is - reacted against tropes of thinking about gender roles. Paradoxically, images of the naked male body are partly de rigeur in some circles, but imbalance seems to be the order of the day, or at least the singing in and out of focus impinges on many other aspects of the daily round.
Teens have so many obstacles to negotiate that I and my peers maybe didn't have, but the main thing is to teach critical thinking, and we do not. Distinguishing fact from fiction has never been so hard. But without that ability a moral stand is difficult to engender. I have no idea what the solution is, but the world becomes ever more unequal.
Appropriate therefore that I am posting pictures about bringing forth images and thoughts into the confusing world (and the pictures themselves illustrate a fluidity and contradiction inherent in thinking).