Events around the country are celebrating the bi-centenary of John Ruskin’s birth on 8 February – #Ruskin200. Thinker, campaigner, artist, scientist, educator and social critic John Ruskin was one of the most contradictory of all the famous Victorians.
He was […]
It’s the shock doctrine in action.
The major focus of neo-liberalism has been to destroy workers’ rights and drive down wages by creating self-employed precarious workers – or oppressed workers with no […]
Identity, ideology & culture in a neoliberal world
Presentation at Wigan Teach-In, 24 November 2018
Is culture only a tool for the 1%? What does a cultural strategy for an emancipatory movement look like? Beyond divide and rule – privileging and […]
Elegantly attired staff adorned with BP logos greeted journalists at the entrance to the British Museum’s big winter show, I am Ashurbanipal: king of the world, king of Assyria.
We’re so used to corporate sponsors having pride of place at […]
That we’ve broken their statues
That we’ve driven them out of their temples
doesn’t mean at all that the gods are dead.
Ionia, CP Cavafy
Oceania at London’s Royal Academy has opened at a time when efforts by indigenous, native and first peoples to […]
As London grows and grows and grows, once familiar nooks and crannies in the centre where poetry could flourish have been ousted by property developers. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that talented and enterprising individuals like the […]
If you thought global corporations just sold stuff like trainers or phones, think again. China-based Tencent is the world’s biggest Internet-related products company with a market value of US$850 billion, making it the largest enterprise in Asia. The phenomenon […]
This summer, Malmö’s Moderna Museet, along with its partner, the Sztuki museum in Łódź, Poland is staging a must-see show about Modernism. It brings to life two little-known Polish artists whose ideas and life were shaped by revolution and […]
Frances Aviva Blane has been included in 60 out of 2,700 applicants as an exhibiting artist in this year’s John Moores Painting Prize, the UK’s best-known painting competition. The exhibition, a key strand of the Liverpool Biennial, will be […]
This is the story not just about the artefacts of a revolution, but about one man’s dedicated struggle to restore the truth of what happened in the Soviet Union during and after 1917.
David King, who died last year, was […]
On the Woodstock Road into Oxford lies one of the most renowned of England’s public schools – St Edward’s (or Teddies). Its Victorian quadrangle and chapel exude privilege and establishment values.
But here’s a surprise. Celebrating its tenth anniversary – […]
If only the curators had given Impressionists in London a different name: “How some artists crossed the channel to escape from war-torn Paris with some sculptures and stunning riverscapes by Monet and Derain thrown in at the end”.
If only […]
