Love is Enough: Jeremy Deller in Oxford
An interview with Jeremy Deller and a review of his Modern Art Oxford show ‘Love is Enough’ Since Jeremy Deller generates his own work through what can and has been called a curatorial process, I approached the Modern Art Oxford show with the impression that it was, in its entirety, one
How to Read a ‘Freak’: A Psychobiography of Diane Arbus
“What I do in the Arbus book is what a lot of biographers do, a lot less explicitly: I try making sense of the reasons why Arbus took the kinds of pictures she did. So, I examine the subjective—emotional, psychological—origins of her art,” William Todd Schultz, author of a new book on th
Screening the Unscreenable: Atrocity on Film
Tracking shots, noted the French director Jean-Luc Godard, are a matter of morality. Jacques Rivette, one of Godard’s contemporaries, used this ruling to dismiss Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1960 film, Kapo. The story of a young girl attempting to escape the concentration camp, it was one of the earliest
Death Café
Death Café began in 2011, in a living room in Hackney. Since then over 800 Death Cafés have cropped up worldwide. ‘At a Death Café people, often strangers, gather to eat cake, drink tea and discuss death,’ their website declares. A waitress led the way to a dingy upper room at Bill’s Café
Acid House: The Bolshoi Ballet
Until recently, Pavel Dmitrichenko was a top dancer in the Bolshoi ballet, Moscow’s most prestigious company. He has now confessed to ordering a man to throw sulphuric acid in the face of the ballet’s artistic director, Sergei Filin, in January 2013. Even more shockingly, 35% of Russians polled
Behind Closed Doors: The Truth About Oxfordshire’s Detention Centre
Six miles from Oxford, in Kidlington, a motley band of radicals get together every month to protest outside Campsfield House, an ‘immigration removal centre’. This bland, bureaucratic terminology obscures the building’s malign purpose: keeping detainees against their will. Unlike the inmates o
Julia Kristeva: An Intellectual Rebirth
In a recent talk on the subject of French Intellectuals, Noam Chomsky asserted that “France is an extremely insular culture… everything is in France; nothing is anywhere else”. He noted the particular status accorded to the French intelligentsia: “French intellectuals tend to be media st
Flesh-Eating and Fetishes: Doing Justice to the Reasonableness of Cannibalism
It sounds like the beginning of a distasteful joke. What do a petty criminal, a Swedish professor, a porn star, and a room full of auctioneers all have in common? The truth, however, is far from humorous: all of them have consumed human flesh. The subject of cannibalism rose to renewed prominence th