Latest thinking

The significance of a plastic bag

Blog

13 Feb 2009

One of this week’s pleasures – pleasure with a big kick in its tail – was opening the October Gallery’s exhibition of work by Chinese artist Huang Xu, entitled Fragments. Big photographic works featuring plastic bags, tattered and torn and beautiful and fragile. For me these are warnings - plastic bags as a collective memento mori and curiously reminiscent of Dutch seventeenth century paintings of flowers. I’ll never look at a plastic bag in quite the same way. I know they were banned many years ago in Rwanda. How shameful is that? A country recently torn apart and they can think about the environment. And we seem to find that so terribly difficult.

It does what it says on the label

Blog

13 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

Reading Jonathan Haidt’s excellent book ‘The Happiness Hypothesis’ I came across a reference to James Hunter’s ‘The death of character’, published in 2000. Haidt describes Hunter’s thesis: as America moved in the twentieth century from being a nation of producers to being a nation of consumers it replaced the intrinsically moral idea of ‘character’ in favour of the amoral term ‘personality’.

The importance of judgement

Blog

12 Feb 2009

My leg is somewhat like the chair I sit in: they are both constituted by atomic particles; they both occupy space-time; they are both to the East of Ireland. How interesting are these similarities? Not very.

One step at a time to saving the planet

Blog

12 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

If we want people to help save the planet we need to start giving them clearer signals and incentives. But the biggest obstacle might be the green movement itself.

Bankers apology - the verdict

Blog

11 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

My friend and blog advisor Matt Cain has come up with a visual representation of apologies scorecard. We can use this again for the current bankers being grilled by the Select Committee.

7 ways of looking at Altermodernism

Blog

10 Feb 2009

WILLIAM SHAW: Taking a jaunt around some of the discussions thrown up by Nicolas Bourriaud's Altermodern manifesto and exhibition at Tate Britain I found myself constructing a kind of Beaufort Scale of critical responses:

Sorry bankers - a scorecard

Blog

10 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

As befits a time of victimhood and self doubt, the demand for an apology from someone in a prominent position has become a routine news story. Today it is the turn of the bankers appearing at the Treasury Select Committee.

The fires in Australia - what they say to us

Blog

09 Feb 2009

Matthew Taylor

Early on a January afternoon several years ago, I set out with some friends for an ill-advised walk up Scafell Pike in the Lake District. The weather was cold, with snow on the ground. To say we weren’t well equipped is an understatement (as I recall, one of our party was wearing brogues!) but it was clear and sunny, we could see where we were going and a couple of us were determined the make the peak.

Altermodernism at Tate Britain

Blog

07 Feb 2009

Off Voice Fly Tip by Bob and Roberta Smith 2009