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*Amateur Hour, a showcase at Self Interest and Sympathy for new learning, knowledge, skill or entertainment* Submissions welcome to selfinterestandsympathy [at] gmail.com
Arthur C. Brooks has written a great series of posts over at Freakonomics about personal happiness, according to politics, religion and the relative extremes of these beliefs. He’s recently published a book on Gross National Happiness.
Among his findings/ conjectures are that Conservatives Are Happier than Liberals.
A commenter says:
One possibility that springs to mind: Perhaps people who label themselves as “extremely” liberal or “extremely” conservative are also more likely to call themselves “very” happy. That is, someone who uses immoderate terms to describe his political views might also use immoderate terms to describe his degree of personal happiness — and that might reflect a difference in rhetorical style rather than a difference in life satisfaction.
There’s a correlation here between happiness and faith, it seems.
Earlier in the year I was at a seminar for utopian studies where the issue of religion and utopian thinking arose (this was specifically in relation to science fiction literature, and ‘religion’ seemed a relatively disparaging term in the way it was used).
This led me to wonder, could being an atheist - or at least lacking a belief in the afterlife - lead to an inability to imagine the future?
This is a version of an article recently published in the Visual Artist’s Newsheet. It’s a response to a roundtable discussion titled ‘Creativity versus Commodity’, organised for Colin Darke’s exhibition at Temple Bar Galleries, Dublin, written about here. [February 8th 2008]
The Capital Paintings evolved from Darke’s earlier work, Capital, where the artist transcribed the entire text of Marx’s three volumes of ‘Das Capital’ onto 480 2D objects, all mounted in A4 laminates. With The Capital Paintings, Darke has returned to the previous work, reconsidering and re-presenting every piece in the earlier work as a to-scale oil painting on canvas, though removing the layer of text previously written over each object. Thus, ‘Darke flips the previous process, the ready made becomes the ‘unique’ art object, the banal commodity further commodified and rarified via its display in the gallery context’. (1) The format of Darke’s work replicates the Christmas ‘selling show’ it immediately followed, and promotes this obvious slippage.
Where Capital was perhaps a distant cousin of Marx’s text, the Capital Paintings are a familial relation at another remove from the initial work, and a further remove still from Marx. Nevertheless, he hovers as the invisible referent.
Sarah Pierce chaired the discussion, which, titled ‘Creativity versus Commodity’, set up from the very beginning a problematic polarity of these two terms. Pierce opened with remarks that questioned the usefulness of this supposed opposition, proposing the notion of a ‘circular economy’ that we are all implicated in, but it proved a difficult opposition to shift.
Sunny day at IMMA*:
Wheelchair ramp to crappy bookshop
None to ladies’ toilets
*Irish Museum of Modern Art
The curatorial premise of Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filopovic was of a ‘diurnal’ biennale, with an exhibition on show during the day, and different programmed events to happen every night. With four different venues, little or no information available on artists outside of the mediation programme, or labels on works, this strategy acknowledged and emphasised the partiality of the exhibition experience.
This was to be welcomed in some respects, as I found that I tried harder to engage with the work than I might normally do, especially considering that many of the artists were unknown to me. However, the flipside of this was that when you did get really interested in an artist or a given piece of work, it was difficult to find out more, or even to remember their name. Participating artists are not foregrounded on the biennale website which results of course in a presentation that is much more curator-centric than artist-centred. Which I suppose is not bad in itself, but I know what side my bread is buttered on.
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