The Critical Commentator

                                          People “The majority of great actresses met tragic ends. When I said goodbye to this job, to this life of opulence and glitter, images and adoration, the quest to be desired, I was saving my life. This worship of celebrity …suffocated me…I don’t know what it means to sit quietly in a bistro, on a terrace, or in the theatre without being approached by someone.” (Bridget Bardot, in Tears of Battle: An Animals Rights Memoir.) Gobbledygook in Art The Sleepless Alliance resists the parasomniac dystopias of current political genealogies, as an exercise of non-fiction. Taking the position of the tangible dreamer, invited artists experiment with producing concrete future imaginaries, through fabulation, improvisation and resilient commonality…Inciting alliances and proposed wakefulness, the exhibition agitates for radical re-composition o...

                                           Fasting? Hv gvn p vwls fr Lnt. Landowners Landscape, James Torrance (1859-1916)  Photo Credit: Russel-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum [CC BY-NC-ND] Half of England is owned by less than 1% of its population, according to new data shared with the Guardian that seeks to penetrate the secrecy surrounding land ownership. The findings, described as “astonishingly unequal” mean about 25,000 landowners – typically members of the aristocracy and corporations – have control of half the country. Major owners include the Duke of Buccleuch, the Queen, several grouse moor estates and the entrepreneur James Dyson. Jon Trickett, a Labour MP and shadow minister for the Cabinet Office, hailed the findings and called for a full debate on the issue, adding: “The dramatic concentration of land ownership is an inescapable reminder that ...

                                 Debate and Education Students , Cherith McKinstry (1928-2004) Photo Credit: Queen's University Belfast [CC BY-NC-ND] The psychology professor and bestselling author Jordan Peterson has, in the way of things, had an offer of a visiting fellowship at Cambridge University withdrawn after the usual protests against his opinions, which are centre-Right to far-Right depending on your own opinions. …What has Peterson done, beyond being angry and weird and selling lobster-themed leggings and self-help books on his website? In a liberal democracy…you debate, and you either win or lose that debate. It isn’t painless, listening to people who misunderstand or, or even hate you, but it is necessary…Abolish the debate and, eventually, you abolish the democracy and summon a short road to hell. …Free speech is a universal gift. You give it to your enemy, and he gives it...

                                       Punishment in Schools …A survey a few years ago of 17,000 eight year olds in 16 countries showed British children coming almost bottom in terms of helping out with household chores. …My posh boarding school made junior boys do tasks called “sweats”. These included sorting out clean socks, clearing tables and emptying bins…If everyone has to do some chores, then it discourages anti-social behaviour. You are less likely to make a mess if you and your friends are going to be clearing it up later anyway. Kept In ,   Erskine Nicol (1825-1904) Photo Credit . Leicester Arts and Museums Service [CC BY-NC-SA] …Chores also make good punishments. In a commendable move in 2014, Michael Gove, then the education secretary, issued new guidelines explicitly allowing schools to use cleaning and tidying tasks as penalties for bad behaviour. This h...

  Oxbridge … My worst August was the one when my son, who had neglected to work for his A levels, lost a conditional place at Oxford. I was devastated: he had within his grasp the most prestigious of educational prizes, the name that opens all doors, the key to a prosperous future, the source of innumerable metaphors, gesturing towards a life full of opportunity, money, satisfaction and status – and, through his teenage fecklessness had thrown it away. Grief, Josef Israels (1824-1911) Photo Credit Glasgow Museums [CC BY-NC-ND] I am now faintly embarrassed by my hysteria but I think it was par for the course. Middle-class Brits obsess about Oxbridge. The effort of getting our children into those two universities consumes startling amounts of money, time and emotion in leafy suburbs and Georgian terraces. … Why wouldn’t British parents obsess about getting their children, for no more money than it costs to go to a rubbish institution, into the best university...

                                 Cultural Appropriation Othello and Desdemona , William Powell Frith (1819-1909) Photo Credit: The Fitzwilliam Museum [CC BY-NC-ND] An actor’s automatic license to fake an accent is now increasingly in doubt. Casting agents are under growing pressure to find talent that matches the background of a character if they want to avoid accusations of cultural appropriation, or even, in some cases the charge of outright mockery. “I feel the days when English-speaking actors put on accents and told the world they were Russian or German or Swedish or Italian – those days are gone,” Ralph Fiennes (pictured) said, explaining why he had largely cast Russian actors in The White Crow . “One has read quite a lot of critical responses to films that are still doing that. The landscape has shifted.” Fiennes defensive position follows fresh demands for greater authenticity on...

    People Tartar Robbers Dividing Spoil, William Allan (1782-1850) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] He was the lookout man in the Hatton Garden £14m safe deposit burglary. But on Thursday he was told that, for the foreseeable future, he will be looking out of the windows of one of HM’s prisons because little of the stolen loot has been returned. Kenny Collins, who is 78, was jailed for 2,309 days – just over six years. …Collins has already served his time for the 2015 burglary, and this additional “default” sentence comes because neither he nor his fellow burglars have paid back all of the £7.6m demanded of them by the court. …While awaiting the hearing Collins told The Observer why…he got involved in the robbery, rather than, as the judge suggested, enjoying a quiet retirement. “I didn’t want to miss out. I was 74. I thought f**k it. You’re talking about 10 years maximum and you don’t think you’re going to get caught. The job had been a...

  People An heiress to the Disney family fortune has excoriated the media giant’s treatment of its workers after she made an undercover visit to Disneyland and found misery in the self-styled “happiest place on earth”. Abigail Disney, 59, is hoping that her intervention will shame the Walt Disney Company and its well-rewarded chief executive, Robert Iger, 68, into improving conditions for staff who earn, on average, less than a thousandth of his pay package. Despair ,  Eric Harald Macbeth Robertson (1887-1941) Photo Credit: Glasgow Museums [CC BY-NC-ND] Her trip to the theme park in Anaheim, southern California, was prompted by a despairing Facebook message from an employee there and came after a survey last year by a group of unions, which revealed that nearly three quarters of workers did not earn enough to pay for basic expenses and more than half feared eviction from their homes. Ms Disney left the park angry at what she regarded as a betrayal ...

                                             Effortless Fashion                                                Effortlessness, that’s a key word these days, I think. A woman wearing several thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds said to me only the other day that “effortless” more than anything was what she wanted people to think when they looked at her. And because those diamonds were myriad and minute, and worn with relaxed one-mile-wear kind of garb, effortless was what she looked like, albeit stratospherically so. What was clear was that her one mile was in a different postcode, literal and metaphorical, from mine. Would that mine might encompass so much stealth-bling. (Anna Murphy, The Times, 2019) You poor thing. The Royals Balmora...