The Critical Commentator

                                                     Bankers Mammon , George Frederick Watts (1817-1904) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND]   The world’s most powerful banker has attacked socialism, saying it produces “stagnation, corruption and often worse.” Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan’s chief executive, took aim at socialism in his annual letter to shareholders and warned that it would be “a disaster for our country.” The remarks from Dinon, who was paid $31m (£24m) last year as the head of America’s largest bank, and who is estimated by Forbes to be worth $1.3bn, were made amid an emerging new wave of left politics in the US. Democratic socialism has been embraced by a new generation of politicians including the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and by supporters of Senator Bernie Saunders, a long-time socialist now ma...

                              Luxury Goods for Children Mrs Elizabeth Young Mitchell and her Baby , Alfred George Stevens (1817-1875) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] From an £86,000 diamond-and-gold dummy to a $1,000 Gucci baby tracksuit, you are seemingly never too young to enjoy a little luxury. …Personalised cots, cashmere cardigans and traditional rocking horses are among luxury items on offer for youngsters, with an array of brands seeking to capitalise on affluent parents’ demand for such items. “It’s grown into a huge market. It’s been hugely helped by the Royals because it gives a lot of these brands an international platform,” says Kate Freud, editor at large of luxury parenting magazines Baby and Little London. “You can be looking at anything from a simple cotton baby-grow that’s £90…to a Burberry changing bag which is £850, and beyond. Some of the prices are really eye-watering but...

                                      Art Gobbledygook Two Pairs of Complementaries of Equal Amount Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham (1912-2004) Photo Credit: Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham Trust [CC BY-NC-ND] Can you imagine a space which serves for nothing and relates to nothing? A durational performance taking inspiration from George Perec’s conception of a space without use. This performance work creates a space for reflection without purpose – a function without use – in response to the goal-driven context of the University. (Flyer for an event at University of Brighton Galleries, Private Eye, No 1497) Food and Drink: A Mishap to Market Eggs, Thomas Barker (1769-1847)  Photo Credit: The Holburne Museum [CC BY-NC-ND] Britons are throwing away 720m eggs every year – three times more than in 2008 and at a cost of £139m – according to new research. The scale of waste has...

                                                 Behaviour The Incorrigible , J ohn Burr (1831-1893) Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND] The next time you find your patience tested by a badly-behaved child, consider this: they may not be entirely to blame for their behaviour. New research shows that children with a condition called conduct disorder, characterised by severe anti-social behaviour, have differences in the wiring connecting the brains’ emotional centres. Scientists from the University of Birmingham said that the findings could open the door to better diagnosis or new treatments because the hallmarks of the condition, such as aggression, vandalism or harming others, are often put down to a lack of discipline at home. …Researchers scanned the brains of 124 nine to 18-year olds with conduct disorder and 174 without. The sca...

                                                Books White – Brett Easton Ellis Lucian Pissarro , James Bolivar Manson (1879-1945) Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]  … “I never wanted,” he writes in it, “to be the old geezer complaining about the next wave of offspring.” Whether he intended the line to be funny isn’t clear but it certainly is, because White could just as easily have been titled Why I Hate Absolutely Everything About Millennials. …I suspect Ellis went out of his way to sound unlikeable in White in order to defy what he calls the “cult of likeability”, one of the book’s chief complaints about modern culture. He thinks social media has turned us all into shiny actors, promoting our personal brands with an online performance of relentless positivity, and he is certain a book as dark as American Psycho would not ge...

                                                          People The Past, Walter Langley (1852-1922)  Photo Credit: Penlee House Gallery & Museum [CC BY-ND] … “We achieved considerable economic success from the 1980s, 1990s onward, which hugely advantaged the young, the educated and the entrepreneurial. We neglected that bulk of the population left behind and living in post-industrial towns where their living standards were static or falling. And the new globalised economy, the rules-based order, the digital revolution meant nothing to them. …Now I blame the political class to which I belong – the establishment, of which I was undoubtedly a member – for failing to see this coming.” So, he does include himself in this failure? “Yes, he says, “I did not see it coming.” He represents “the prosperous part” of Notting...

                                Education and Politics Michael Wilshaw, erstwhile chief inspector at Ofsted…in an interview on Sunday with Sophy Ridge of Sky News, dropped a number of small, explosive statements which will have rocked Damian Hinds, Secretary of State for Education. Wilshaw warned that progress has been squandered and that the government is not listening: “Talk to head teachers, as I do all the time, and they will say funding is an issue…Not one youngster on free school meals got into Oxbridge from the whole of the North East of England, Yorkshire and Humberside.” So how has this been allowed to happen? The answer is really simple. And deplorable. The Tory Government and the previous coalition government are, and were, dominated by men and women who come from hideously over-advantaged backgrounds. They lack the imagination, capacity or empathy to understand how ordinary people live. ...

                                Fashionable Clergy John Wesley , William Hamilton (1751-1801) Photo Credit: National Portrait Gallery, London [CC BY-NC-ND] …Since [Justin] Bieber embraced evangelical Christianity a few years ago, celebrity-connected pastors have entered the mainstream. These include Chad Veach …Carl Lentz…and Rich Wilkerson…They amass huge audiences and Instagram followings and rock Bieber-inspired wardrobes. Scrutinising the pictures of pastors at work has reaped rich rewards. Rather literally, the most expensive spot being a pair of Air Yeezy 2 ‘Red Octobers’ worn by pastor John Gray, with a resale value of $5,611. …Under fire over his $1,980 Gucci backpack and $794 Traxedos track pants, Veach is the only man of (expensive) cloth to attempt a comeback so far, posting that he didn’t pay for his outfit. He quickly thought better of it and deleted it. (The Observer, 14.4.201...

                                            People It is said that you can tell a man by his shoes. Bobby Misner, 23, is wearing a pair of scuffed $545 Yves Saint Laurent trainers with words such as “rich misfits”, “St Tropez” and euro currency signs scrawled over them. “They come wrecked,” he explains. “And then I draw all over them.” The Peacock Feather , Antonio Mancini (1852-1930) Photo Credit: The Henry Barber Trust The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham [CC BY-NC-ND] If you were to judge Misner by his shoes alone, you might conclude that he is just another absurdly entitled out-of-touch rich kid who defines himself by his money – or rather his father’s money. In November last year he released a YouTube video, Life of a Billionaire’s Son, showing off his father’s private jet, superyacht and mansions, and it went viral. To date it has ...