I’d been looking forward to Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series and this first episode, The National Anthem, didn’t disappoint. Some brief notes, with plot spoilers:
Filed under Arts & Entertainment …
Open response to ‘Blogging & tweeting as second-class art forms’
Early this morning – very early – Amanda Palmer posted an interesting blog on blogging itself and tweeting as secondary art forms and went into really good detail about why. It’s a really good read and if you have ten minutes spare you should do so. Actually, do it now. I can wait…
Done? Ace.
I tweeted her earlier this afternoon:
I got a reply:
So here I am, blogging a response to another blog.
Archive Musical Chairs
A few weeks ago I decided to radically change The Musical Chairs, the music blog I’ve been operating since 2008. The older version had actual articles with actual words in them and some of those articles were rather fine. Most of those fine articles, however, appeared when I was angry with something. Therefore, I’ve decided to upload a few of them as artefacts of the old version of the site, even if those artefacts are as valued as floppy discs.
The first one, which you can read in a fancy PDF format, is about the time I saw 30 Seconds To Mars in Bilbao and, subsequently, how I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me whole. Read it and never see this band in your lifetime, possible.
Pop Art, offender art and photographic art
Over the last week I’ve managed to find myself at three different art exhibitions – one at the Lightbox in Woking plus one at both the Royal Festival Hall and Tate Modern in London.
Snap, Crackle and Pop: British Pop Art meets the High Street in the Swinging Sixties
Pop Art is something that me and my girlfriend are quite fond of so this was always going to be an interesting exhibition for us. It brings together art from the 60s and early 70s to showcase how art and popular culture mixed together, which at the time was a radical new direction in Post-War Britain. It had a wide range of material from traditional pieces to a collection of items from that time including clothing and memorabilia. It’s truly amazing to see what tat fans of Elvis and The Beatles would buy.
As an aside it was also my first trip to the Lightbox and I was really impressed by it. This is definitely an arts venue that the people of Woking should be proud of and that they continue to support it.
Art by Offenders
Don’t be put off by the name, which gives the impression that you’re going to be subjected to depression and misery. The Koestler Trust are the curators of this wonderful exhibition that showcases the extraordinary talent and flair of prisoners in Britain – many of whom use art as an escapist activity. This year is apparently its biggest year with about 150 pieces set to be displayed at the Royal Festival Hall.
There are all kinds of beautiful artwork that range from a gorgeous painting of the Taj Mahal basked in sunrise to a all-too-vivid portrait of a man screaming out of desperation. I’d say that these two pieces sum up the principal themes that were running throughout the exhibition – escapism and anxiety.
Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters
Without doubt this was the most challenging exhibition of the three. It felt like more of a test of stamina: how long could you spend before your eyes became strained by seeing the same thing over and over and/or how many difficult subject matters could you take before conceding defeat? Taryn Simon’s past work has seen her deal with subject matters in her own native USA. This new project, which took her four years and is being premiered at Tate Modern, is incredibly complex. Here’s a description from her website:
A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters was produced over a four-year period (2008-11), during which Simon travelled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen ‘chapters’that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects documented by Simon include feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the body double of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate.
It’s a tough collection of work but some of them are extremely fascinating and it might be worth going more than once to take it all in.
