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Variant, issue
34, Spring 2009
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Front cover & centre pages: 'Every action will be judged on the particular
circumstances' by Seamus Nolan
cover pdf
centre pages pdf
www.peaceontrial.com
counterpunch.org
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Letters
Open Letter to Mike Russell MSP (Minister for Culture, External
Affairs and the Constitution) and call for
signatories, re. Promotional
Culture versus Democratic Culture: The Case of Creative Scotland.
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Also see: http://creativescotland.blogspot.com
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| The Creativity Fix
Jamie Peck
Cogent critique of architect and popilariser of the 'creative
class' thesis, Richard Florida's best selling primers on the
'creative economy'. Peck lays bare that
Florida's creativity
script facilitates revamped forms of civic boosterism alongside
the gratification of middle-class consumption desires; lubricates
flexible labour markets and gentrifying housing markets; and
relegitimizes regressive social redistributions within the city.
text pdf
www.eurozine.com
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Tyranny of the Ad Hoc
John Barker
"In a period of massively unequal globalization, formal
institutions with at least nominal accountability have been sidelined
or become expendable. Power has shifted to a raft of ad hoc outfits
with grandiose names and a lack of even nominal accountability.
Their effect is often diffuse, and not immediately visible. Capitalism’s
protectorate demands unhindered freedom of action, happy to impose
rules on others while dodging any on itself; slippery to its
core. All this matters and especially now when in the economic
sphere voluntary agreements, ad hoc oversight, and a lack of
accountability has come to the fore."
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illustrations by Paul Bommer
www.paulbommer.com |
‘Glasgow’s
Merchant City: An Artist Led Property Strategy’
Neil Gray
The potential of ‘the arts’ to rehabilitate ‘unproductive’ urban
space and stimulate the property market has long been established
by gimlet-eyed developers. However, rather than submit to boosterist
overstatement it's more useful to contextualise the competitive
creative economy mantra as the afterbirth of a wave of self-defeating
entrepreneurial urban strategies which preceded it. Yet, despite
increasing skepticism around hyperbolic 'creativity' claims,
the creative city policy framework is still being applied by
countless slow-learning cities worldwide. Despite the austere
and worsening fiscal climate and the collapse of commercial property
markets, and the strong correlation between inequality and 'creativity',
Glasgow City Council continue to act oblivious or unconcerned...
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Artists & Art
Schools: For or against innovation? A reply to NESTA
Angela McRobbie & Kirsten Forkert
The recently published report from NESTA, ‘The Art of
Innovation: How Fine Arts Graduates Contribute to Innovation’,
provides an opportunity to offer a series of reflections on
links between the art schools and the ‘creative economy’;
the nature of cultural policy and the role of consultancy research;
the rise of creative labour and its social consequences.
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Hunting,
Fishing, & Shooting
the Working Classes
Tom Jennings
With the prospect of mass unemployment again looming – in
addition to the working poor of increasingly casualised, insecure
work patterns and impoverishment of substantial swaths of the
population in the meantime – it's pertinent to take
stock of the social-realist tradition that continues to provide
visual narratives which take seriously the problems and possibilities
of the everyday lives of ordinary working-class people based
on purportedly accurate accounts of lived experience. Jennings
sketches the patchy tradition of UK social-realism before considering
a particularly consistent exponent, the Amber film collective,
whose 40th anniversary is this year.
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http://www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
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The Toughest Man in
Cairo vs The Zionist Vegetable
Anand Balakrishnan
Anand Balakrishnan provides a thrilling pastiche of pulp non-non-fictions
in this his most honest and exaggerated 'Bidoun' treatment.
text pdf
Bidoun
Magazine - Art & Culture from the MIddle East
http://www.bidoun.com
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Shoreditch and the creative destruction of
the inner city
Benedict Seymour
In areas like London's Shoreditch and its peers around the globe,
the cosmetic renewal of a portion of the crumbling urban core
coincides with continued – or intensified – infrastructural
decline. Rather than an unfortunate side effect of the real estate
market, gentrification is an openly pursued policy objective
where 'creative entrepreneurialism’ is identified as key
to reviving inner cities. Gentrification takes from the poor
and gives to the rich; anything residually ‘public’ will
either be reclaimed for the middle class or left to rot. The
question remains, is the current crisis a reprieve or a new assault,
and who will win this time?
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thelondonparticular.org
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The End of
Israel’s Impunity?
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
For the second time in two years Israel's colonial ambition has
floundered. It is losing both legitimacy and power. Support for
it is dwindling in Washington; its friends are alarmed. Citizens
are acting where governments have failed; the movement for boycott,
divestment and sanctions is snowballing. Apologists are finding
it more difficult to justify its persistent criminality. This leviathan
may yet be tamed, accountability restored; but what part, if any,
will international law have played in this?
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pulsemedia.org
spinwatch.org
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