Mr Jopling is an art dealer who was educated at Eton and Harvard, studying film, and the history of art and architecture.He was reputedly a skilled ...
If you're an artist then entering an art competition is the equivalent of sleeping with the enemy or selling your soul to the devil.
You can't judge art. There is no such thing as good or bad art.It's not a measurable thing, but by entering a competition you are helping to perpetuate the myth that you can. You are just adding fuel to the...
There are many reasons you might think cinema is going the way of the dinosaurs. With the popularity of long-play TV series booming, are films “too short” now to allow the kind of plot and character development that we have become used to? In our changing world of media, does the distinction between “TV series” and “film” even make sense?
In a recent class, when I asked my film studies students who had watched the set film for the week only a few hands went up – and my heart sank. Searching for an explanation, I asked who had watched the latest episode of the popular Netflix show Stranger Things. Nearly every hand went up.
What does this anecdote reveal about changing viewing habits? Does the fact that even film students prefer the latest streaming series to the classic films set as coursework serve to illustrate the point that cinema is dying?
There is no doubt of the enormous appeal of the many long-form series readily available to subscribers of streamed content providers such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, HULU, iTunes, Google Play, and NowTV. Viewers can binge-watch or pace their way through their favourite show before algorithms point them to their next favourite show, in an endless addictive cycle of entertainment and sleep deprivation.
Screen companions and virtual friends
There are many reasons for the global popularity of streamed series. For one, their characters are often more diverse and interesting than many of those in mainstream Hollywood filmic fare. This is exemplified so well by shows such as Orange is the New Black, with a nearly all-female cast playing characters with diverse sexual orientations and ethnic and class backgrounds.
Over the many hours of screen time, spanning many years in some cases, audiences become emotionally invested in characters’ stories. They become our screen companions and virtual friends. This has seen global fan bases emerge. These fans find kinship and a new kind of collective mourning when providers cancel their favourite show as seen with the devotees of the The OA. The size and influence of these groups has helped the success of campaigns like that of Sense8 fans, who fought for and won a finale of their cancelled show. Similarly, the fans of One Day at a Time helped it find its new home at cable network “Pop”.
The ultra long-play format of streamed series also allows time for extreme character development. The best known character evolution is perhaps that of Breaking Bad’s Walter White who makes a dramatic moral transformation from school teacher to conflicted drug kingpin over the show’s 62-hour run-time.
Hollywood cinema refuses to die
But traditional Hollywood cinema refuses to die – as evidenced by the boom in franchise event cinema. A recent report from the Motion Picture Association of America reveals rising worldwide cinema ticket sales. The total takings at the box office topped US$41 billion – and the number of cinema screens worldwide increased by 7% (to 190,000 screens). The report states that “there is no question that in this ever complex world of media, theatres are vital to overall entertainment industry success”.
But cinema still has its place. It allows a fantasy-filled retreat for family and friend entertainment – an immersive experience without the distraction of mobile phones, knocks on the door or family members talking over important bits. Cinemas, film societies, or open-air screenings become spaces where we can put our political divisions aside and cheer collectively for heroes overcoming odds to save screen worlds.
Blockbuster films may be thriving, but poetic art cinema has a more precarious place in the market and needs nurturing by cinephiles. Film director Alejandro G. Iñárritu (of The Revenant, Birdman, and Babel fame) recently spoke to Variety about how our worlds are being closed in by streaming services managed by “algorithms designed to keep feeding people what they like”. He added: “the problem is that the algorithms are very smart but they are not creative, and they don’t know what people don’t know they like.”
We are in a golden age of streaming content and at-the-cinema-film. We just need to be guided by more than algorithms to see the treasures hiding away in this new era of excess and neglect.
TV or film – what’s the difference?
To complicate the arguments about the relative merits of TV series and film, distinctions between film and television are less clear than they ever have been. Many films (particularly those involving superheroes) are no longer stand alone, but form part of a serial cinematic “Universe”.
Many TV series now consist of feature-length episodes. With a run-time of 151 minutes, we could ask whether the Sense8 finale was actually a Netflix film, rather than a single episode. And, does it even matter to viewers what we call it?
In a world where visual media is being increasingly viewed on tablets, mobile phones and laptops rather than in actual cinemas or on television sets perhaps the terms “cinema” and “television” no longer even make sense. This is an argument my co-editors and I make in a recent editorial for the journal Transnational Screens.
A key point is that streaming platforms such as Amazon and Netflix do not stand in opposition to cinema. Instead they have consumed cinema, repackaged it and made it available to global audiences. Powerful voices rail against the power of such platforms, but they do enhance screen culture and make cinema more available to global audiences.
Great news: "Jack Peñate has returned with his first official release in a decade.
It comes after the singer shared a new 20-minute mixtape called ‘A Thousand Faces’ early last year...
...‘Prayer’, which comes with its own video, follows the singer’s 2009 LP ‘Everything Is New’.
The term “big data” may bring to mind swaths of private information held by tech companies. But lots of big data is, in fact, visible to all – we just may not think of it as “data”.
If you’ve been to the movies recently, you will have seen a dataset of credits – listing the cast and crew members alongside their roles. While the credits from any one film may not be that useful, the credits from every film can form a big dataset. At Nesta and the PEC (a new policy and evidence centre for the creative industries), we have been exploring how these types of non-confidential big datasets can shine new light on gender representation in the creative industries.
Gender representation has traditionally been gauged using surveys of workers. But most surveys haven’t been going for that long and it can take several years (after launching a new survey) before we can tell how the gender mix is changing. Also, surveys often don’t go beyond counting the number of women and men – and so can’t shed light on how prominent each group was in the creative process, or how they were portrayed in a particular art form.
Digging deep
We looked recently at the media’s reporting of women in the creative industries using more than half a million articles from The Guardian newspaper, published between 2000 and 2018, from sections of the paper relating to the creative industries (such as Books, Film, Fashion and Games).
In the past five years, there has been a large increase in references to women. From 2000 to 2013, less than one-third of gendered pronouns within articles (for example, “he” and “she”) referred to women. But this began to change in 2014 – and by 2018 the percentage of gendered pronouns that were female had reached 40%. By contrast, the gender mix among workers in the UK’s creative industries has remained flat in recent years, and sits at around 37%.
We also studied the words that followed the pronouns “he” and “she”, to gain insight into the media’s portrayal of creative workers. This led us to discover that, compared to men, there was greater focus on particular sounds made by women, such as “laughs”, “cries”, “giggles”, and “coos”, and non-verbal reactions, such as “smiles”, “grins” and “nods”. These words were never used frequently, but when they were used, they were more likely to be referring to women than men (compared to other words).
In contrast, words relating to past creative achievements and leadership activities more frequently referred to men. For example, you’re much more likely to see “he directed” than “she directed”, and similarly “he performed”, “he designed”, “he managed” and “he founded”. This finding is consistent with the long-running gender imbalances in the creative industries.
Big data from The Guardian offers a valuable insight into gender equality in the media. Shutterstock
In another study, we used a dataset from the British Film Institute (BFI) that contained the credits from every UK feature-length film released to cinema.
After the BFI inferred people’s gender from their first names, we found that the on-screen gender mix hasn’t changed meaningfully since the end of World War II – and in 2017 women still only made up around 30% of cast members and 34% of crew members.
This dataset also showed gender-based differences in the jobs of on-screen characters. Since 2005, for example, only 16% of on-screen “doctors” (in unnamed roles) have been played by women, which jars with the fact that women make up 46% of doctors in the UK.
Creative fairness
We are by no means the only researchers showing the potential of non-confidential sources of big data to inform gender metrics in the creative industries. Researchers at Google, in collaboration with the Geena Davis Institute, used facial and speech recognition technology to show that in the 100 highest-grossing live-action films in the US, in each year from 2014 to 2016, women occupied just 36% of screen time and 35% of the speaking time.
While big data studies can enrich diversity measures, there are two important sources of potential bias. First, we’re almost always inferring gender – from a face, a first name or a single pronoun – and so we may get a person’s gender wrong. Second, these inference methods typically only detect “male” and “female”, excluding or misclassifying anyone who identifies with a non-binary gender. For these reasons, big data methods are not a replacement for surveys – as surveys allow people to self-identify and opt out entirely.
Even bearing in mind these potential biases, there are still many big data sources that could shed new light on gender imbalances, if only they were made available to researchers. For example, access to the stills and subtitles of films and television programmes could be used to evaluate diversity schemes, while access to the content of more newspapers would enable a broader study on the media’s reporting of creative workers.
To realise the potential of these new methods, we need to encourage and support creative organisations to securely share their non-confidential data. That will hopefully allow researchers to get a little more creative about measuring gender equality in the UK’s creative industries.
"In recent years, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” has become a rallying cry for immigrants."
"But not everyone sees the song as an anthem for inclusion."
In this article about Woody Guthrie's iconic song the rights and wrongs of the lyrics are discussed and some valid points are made both for and against. My own personal feeling is that Woody was singing about his world to people that mostly only knew about the world in terms of America. I don't doubt that as a socialist he would have been against the concept of isolated countries, preferring to accept all of humankind as one nation. We can't own land as individuals. Land is a common treasury for all.
In recent years, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” has become a rallying cry for immigrants. And in July, after President Donald Trump tweeted that four Democratic congresswomen of color needed to “go back where they came from,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the four targeted, responded with a tweet quoting Guthrie’s lyrics.
But not everyone sees the song as an anthem for inclusion.
In June, the Smithsonian’s online magazine, Folklife, published a piece that lambasted the song for its omissions.
The article, titled “This Land Is Whose Land?,” was written by folk musician Mali Obomsawin, a member of the Native American Abenaki tribe. She wrote of being shaken up “like a soda can” every time she heard the song’s lyrics:
“In the context of America, a nation-state built by settler colonialism, Woody Guthrie’s protest anthem exemplifies the particular blind spot that Americans have in regard to Natives: American patriotism erases us, even if it comes in the form of a leftist protest song. Why? Because this land ‘was’ our land. Through genocide, broken treaties and a legal system created by and for the colonial interest, this land ‘became’ American land.”
Obomsawin’s article immediately generated a flurry of responses from conservative media outlets.
But Obomsawin and her conservative critics might be surprised to learn that some of Guthrie’s greatest champions have also had difficulties with the song.
As the author of three books on Guthrie, I sometimes wonder how the folksinger would respond to the criticism of “This Land Is Your Land” for its omissions.
While we can’t know for sure, a glance at some of his unpublished writings and recently discovered recordings can offer some clues.
Seeger sings a different tune
Pete Seeger, Woody’s colleague and protégé, was perhaps the most responsible for lodging “This Land Is Your Land” in the public consciousness. After Guthrie died in 1967, Seeger continued to perform the song all around the world.
At the same time, Seeger made it clear that he was sensitive to the theft of Native American lands.
“Jimmy Collier, a great young black singer from the Midwest, was asked to lead [‘This Land Is Your Land.’] Henry Crowdog [sic] of the Sioux Indian delegation came up and punched his finger in Jimmy’s chest. ‘Hey, you’re both wrong. It belongs to me.’ Jimmy stopped and added seriously, ‘Should we not sing this song?’ Then a big grin came over Henry Crowdog’s face. 'No, it’s okay. Go ahead and sing it. As long as we are all down here together to get something done.’”
Sometimes, in an attempt to ease his conscience when performing “This Land,” Seeger would add a verse penned by the singer and activist Carolyn “Cappy” Israel to acknowledge the theft of Native land:
This land is your land, but it once was my land
Before we sold you Manhattan Island
You pushed my nation to the reservation,
This land was stole by you from me.
Woody wasn’t oblivious
Was Guthrie himself uncomfortable with the song’s glaring failure to acknowledge the facts of settler colonialism?
There’s no record of his views on the issue. But we do know that he was very aware of – and concerned with – the history of Native American dispossession.
For example, he was angry enough with his cousin, the country singer “Oklahoma Jack” Guthrie, for claiming credit for a song that Woody had written, titled “Oklahoma Hills.” But as Woody wrote in an unpublished annotation to the lyrics, Jack had also left out “the best parts of the whole song” – the names of “the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek and Seminole” who had prior claim to the lands of Oklahoma.
“They used dope, they used opium, they used every kind of a trick to get these Indians to sign over their lands,” Guthrie says to the crowd.
One of these real estate tricksters was actually Woody’s own father, Charley Guthrie. As biographer and journalist Joe Klein writes in “Woody Guthrie: A Life,” “Because he was able to speak both Creek and Cherokee, Charley became known as especially adept at relieving Indians of their property.”
How did Charley learn these Native tongues? Was it possible that the Guthries had Native ancestors?
In a tantalizingly vague 1950 letter to activist Stetson Kennedy, Woody notes “the rainbow blends” of his own bloodline, including “pure virgin island negro” and unnamed “Indian tribelines.”
And in an unpublished poem entitled “Sweety Black Girl,” written the same year, Guthrie writes:
my
blood beats Spanish and my breath burns Indian and my
soul boils negro.
Guthrie admitted that he was ashamed of his father’s disreputable real estate practices. And while he may have idealized his own genealogy, there’s no doubt that he was fully aware of “whose land was whose.”
Native Americans see Guthrie as an ally
Interestingly, not all Native Americans view the song in the same light as Obomsawin.
The song has proved adaptable and malleable enough to enable some Native American artists to work with it.
In 2007, the Anishinaabe songwriter and musician Keith Secola sang his Ojibwa-language version of “This Land” on the album “Native Americana — A Coup Stick.”
Secola said in an interview that his version “reflects a worldview, of being a part of the world and not detached from it. Woody was into people creating their own stories. … That’s what I got from him – how to apply this strategy, this procedure of songwriting, to the topics that affect American Indians.”
A few years before Secola’s cover, two of Guthrie’s previously unpublished songs – “Indian Corn Song” and “Mean Things Happenin’ in This World” – were recorded by the Navajo siblings, Klee, Clayson and Jeneda Benally.
“We wanted to keep the spirit of Woody Guthrie alive,” Clayton said in a 2012 interview. “He wrote songs about the Dust Bowl and unions, but he also wrote about American Indian issues.”
Clayson noted that “Indian Corn Song” was one of his favorite songs to play, because in it Guthrie “talks about wastefulness and how Indigenous people are … living off the planet in a balanced way.”
Mali Obomsawin might take heart from Secola, the Benally siblings and the otherartist-activists who have adopted and adapted “This Land Is Your Land.”
Woody Guthrie might not have been perfect, they say, but we don’t need to “cancel” him.
'In this short video, the iconic multimedia artist Laurie Anderson speaks her mind about our changeable world today, and why we should stop panicking and being so territorial:' “You cannot close your doors anymore, everyone’s banging on them and you’d better figure out what to do"
The Welsh musician keeps her distance but enthrals her audience with a gently staccato voice and unsettling new music.
With one hand on her heart and the other reaching out like a sleepwalker... CONTINUE READING
Grande is nominated for Video of the Year, Artist of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Pop, Best Hip Hop, Best Direction, Best Visual Effects, Best Editing ...
VALIE EXPORT is an Austrian avant-garde feminist artist best known for her photography and radical performances that raise discussions around the female body and the male gaze.
Some of the local artists who will be bringing their work to Norwich Market. From left: Ken Hurst, Gary Rayner (kneeling), Lisa Mann, Jo Rice, Kirstie ...
The Artist's Way: A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron provides a twelve-week course that guides you through the process of recovering your creative self. It aims to dispel the 'I'm not talented enough' conditioning that holds many people back and helps you to unleash your own inner artist. Its step-by-step approach enables you to transform your life, overcome any artistic blocks you may suffer from, including limiting beliefs, fear, sabotage, jealousy and guilt, and replace them with self confidence and productivity. The Artist's Way will demystify the creative process by making it a part of your daily life.
18.00 – 22.00 (with the Terrace Bar staying open until 23:00)
Admission free
On 30 August, Tate Modern will host an evening celebrating the vibrant creative culture of South London. This month’s Uniqlo Tate Late will provide an exciting opportunity to experience this part of the city anew through the eyes of artists living and working the area. The evening’s programme will consist of an eclectic programme of music, art, discussion, film and workshops.
The Turbine Hall will become a gigantic collage studio, with a series of hands-on workshops and drop-in sessions reimagining the landscape of South London. Visitors will be able to participate in a collective collage exercise to transform the existing landscape and realise their utopian visions of the area. Another workshop will look more closely at building materials and is inspired by images of the Brutalist architecture of iconic South London landmarks including Southbank’s National Theatre and Vauxhall’s Keybridge House. Illustrator Kazvare Made It will host an activity that pays homage to South London institution Morley’s where participants will be able to create and decorate their own bespoke takeaway boxes. The evening will also feature an immersive digital display created by Girls About Peckham that will celebrate style, attitude and power.
A number of talks inspired by communities in South London will take place throughout the evening. Resident Advisor will host a series of conversations with artists, labels and promoters shaping the electronic music landscape in South London, an area which is home to many independent record labels. NTS Radio DJS Severin Glance, Wu Lu and Marshmello will be taking over the Level 1 Bridge and DJs MO.MAYA, Junior XL and m.kwas will play sets in the Terrace Bar. There will be a screening of Cutting It, followed by a talk by Jonny from Peckham Cuts, Peckham’s walk-in dubplate cutting service which cuts vinyl for some of South London’s finest DJs and producers. A series of short films by South London based directors – Duncan Loudon, CC Wade, and Deepa Keshvala – will be screened in the Starr Cinema. Following the screenings, the directors will discuss how the city has influenced their work moderated by Hannah Turnbull-Walter, as well as and a Q&A session.
A discussion on food production in South London focusing on urban growing, beekeeping, foraging and farming will be held in the Terrace Bar where Bermondsey Street Bees’ founder Dale Gibson, urban gardener Carole Wright and Alexandro Rizzo of AN25 will discuss the idea of ‘edible cities’, chaired by broadcaster and activist Joel ‘Jay Brave’ Bravette. Tate Modern’s riverside terrace will host pop up-bars serving the new ‘Elemental brew’ made in Bermondsey, street food stalls and a pizza oven. A 2-4-1 cocktail offer will be available throughout the evening. Uniqlo Tate Lates have introduced several new, long-term sustainability initiatives including a deposit scheme for long lasting cups in bars and cafes. These afterhours events are now completely paper free with all programmes accessible digitally and through QR codes on the website.
The evening is a fantastic opportunity to experience the Tate Modern collection displays after hours and will coincide with current exhibitions Olafur Eliasson: In real life, Natalia Goncharova, Takis and the newly opened ARTIST ROOMS: Ed Ruscha free display in the Blavatnik Building. Tickets to all exhibitions are available for only £10 on the night.
The full programme is available to view on Tate’s website
Carey Young’s selection for the 2019 Bow Open Show reflects on our “current political moment”, with works exploring migration, gender, climate change and new technologies.
Exhibition: 27 September – 15 December 2019
Private view: Thursday 26 September, 6-9pm
Artist Carey Young has chosen 19 emerging artists for Bow Arts’ annual Open Show, with a call for works that respond to “our current political moment”. Choosing from some of the charity’s near 500 studio holders, many of whom are showing new pieces, the result is a selection of artistic works which engage with varied political themes including politics, migration, gender identity, borders and climate change; poignantly and critically addressing some of today’s most pressing cultural conversations.
Young has made a selection that explores these themes in varied and often witty ways. For example, Lindsey Maclean’s painting ‘Salome on the Underground’ (2017) presents a seated, nonchalant young woman on the Tube, her plastic bag holding the head of a man, while Marcus Orlandi’s papier-mache sculpture ‘Man Sandwich’ wittily presents a ham sandwich as if also, somehow, a codpiece – sending up male vulnerability.
In ‘Insulae’ (2019), an innovative new video work investigating the idea of an ‘island mentality’ by Nye Thompson, Google Earth has been repurposed to create a video artwork in which we fly over the waters just off the British mainland. In contrast, ‘Performing Identities’ (2017-18) by Almudena Romero uses an archaic tintype photographic process associated with the Victorian era to photograph people who consider themselves immigrants.
Victoria Burgher’s ceramic installation ‘Surviving’ (2019) has been laminated with golden survival blankets, and displayed like an archaeological find, as if re-examining this symbol of migration so familiar from recent news. Tai Tran also considers his own identity as an immigrant in his collage ‘The Golden Thread 1’, using torn imagery of the Statue of Liberty to consider relations between myth and reality. Additionally, Bernie Clarkson’s witty painting ‘A cry for something to be done’ (2010) is a faux-naïve, colourful portrait of an older woman, head in hands, as if totally exhausted by the current state of the world.
Young, whose own practice has developed from a cross-fertilisation of disciplines including law, business and politics, says of her selection:
“East London is rich in its diversity of population and culture. This exhibition, with its talented and insightful artists, feeds into this inspiring atmosphere of change.”
The Bow Open Show is the only exhibition in the Nunnery’s programme to present Bow Arts studio artists exclusively, and is highly anticipated for presenting some of London’s most exciting recent artwork.
Exhibiting artists: Miraj Ahmed, Helen Bermingham, Victoria Burgher, Bernie Clarkson, Hun Kyu Kim, Minjoo Kim, Robyn Litchfield, Anita McCullough, Lindsey McLean, Melitta Nemeth, Marcus Orlandi, Kaveh Ossia, Sam Parsons, Lorna Pridmore, Almudena Romero, Nye Thompson, Antonietta Torsiello, Tai Tran and Fleur Yearsley.
I’ve written on this blog a number of times about nothing ever being black and white. I’m convinced that the western world is in the state that it is because of lazy thinking. Fundamentalism, political or religious, is the greatest philosophical danger to humankind; there are no one-word answers to the problems that beset our world. There are rarely simple solutions. Life is much more complicated than a tabloid headline. Unfortunately ‘public debate’ all too often sinks into polarised, lowest common denominator, narrow mindedness. Creating the Promised Land is not as easy as a political sound-bite or any religious teaching might suggest. Economics and indeed life itself are complicated webs. We are in the state that we are in because too many people think in black and white instead of all the colours of the rainbow.
Every week 11 million items of clothing end up in landfill. Throwaway fashion is putting increasing pressure on our planet and its people - it’s unsustainable. Now there's something you can do to help. Join Second Hand September and pledge to say no to new clothes for 30 days.
Get ready for Second Hand September
We’ll give you all the shopping tips, styling tricks and inspiration you need to make your month of no new a breeze. Saying yes to second hand stops great clothes from going to landfill – giving them a longer life. And when you shop at Oxfam, every item helps people beat poverty too.
CONGRATULATIONS to Poetry Society Members Lizzie Holden (second for From the Bottom of the Wishing Well) and Pam Thompson (third for Hireling) in the Paper Swans Press Poetry Pamphlet Prize – won by Jared A Carnie for his pamphlet Lyme.
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Troutbeck's activity coordinator has also been leading a variety of creative activities, such as art, and making displays to showcase the residents' work.
