Damien Hirst excoriated

Damien Hirst is perhaps one of the most well known post-modernist artists, who would have remained obscure had Charles Saatchi not bought his work. He's known for creations such as "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living", basically a shark in formaldehyde. He devised diamond encrusted skulls ("For the Love of God"), preserved and dissected a cow and calf and even commented on the 9/11 attack as such "You've got to hand it to them on some level because they've achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America. So on one level they kind of need congratulating" before apologising to the families and friends of the victims.

I find it all quite vile. Hirst appears to worship death, so perhaps the irony of his latest works is that they have lent themselves to the death of his career. Perhaps art critics were waiting for the day to excoriate Hirst, for having little more than imagination and the patronage of those with the aesthetic values of rats. Hirst handed them the day, and they went for it like sharks.

Jonathan Jones in the Guardian says it beautifully as follows:

"Hirst's exhibition is a stupefying admission of defeat, a self-obliterating homage, that reveals the most successful artist of our time to be a tiny talent, with less to offer than even the most obscure Victorian painter in the Wallace Collection"

You see Hirst has painted, it has been exhibited, and it shows he cannot paint. Many have said so in damning terms:

Peter Conrad in the Observer: "Bumptiously confronting Titian, Poussin and other venerable elders at the Wallace Collection, Hirst is enjoying his temporary ownership of the trampled, desecrated earth. But he's not a legitimate heir and the Wallace Collection is playing host to a jumped-up pretender."

Mark Hudson in the Daily Telegraph: "Hirst's presumption in comparison with the technical inadequacy of the work was simply unforgiveable. For once, chutzpah wasn't enough."

Tom Lubbock in The Independent: "Hirst, as a painter, is at about the level of a not-very-promising, first-year art student" and how about why there is attention at all given to Hirst? "A few quick questions. 1. Are these new paintings, painted by Damien Hirst himself, any good? No, not at all, they are not worth looking at. 2. So why are you writing about them at such length? Because he is very famous. 3. And why has the Wallace Collection decided to exhibit them? Because he is very famous. 4. And why did Damien Hirst even paint them in the first place? Because he is very famous."

The Times "The paintings are dreadful. Think Francis Bacon meets Adrian Mole."


Jones concludes that Hirst himself has now shown this age of art to be a fraud:

Hirst has said: I want to be compared directly with the old masters, on their own turf, in their own visual language. In his eyes, it would seem that all the readymades, all the vitrines – all the ideas that have made him rich – are not real art at all. They are substitutes for the art he wishes he could make. The one truly great art, in his eyes, is the high western tradition of oil painting.

He can't do that at all; can't paint his way out of a paper bag. But don't kid yourselves. It is not just Hirst who is implicated in this exposure. It is an entire idea of art that triumphed in the 1990s and still dominates our culture – an entire age of the readymade stands accused by its own creator of being a charade.

Ouch. So well deserved, may the charade be well and truly over. Do I see Tracey Emin hiding looking confused as to what to do next?

Green brainwashing knows no ends

Australia's Daily Telegraph writes "Tots as young as three have sent letters to Kevin Rudd about their passion for green living and asked companies to reduce their packaging"

At one time the secular left would damn Christians for frightening children with the awful scary stories from the Bible, teaching them that if they sinned they'd go to hell. Now small children are being taught the world is coming to an end, and one of their key responsibilities is to "do something" about it, not unlike the Leninist form of brainwashing of children at schools to support the socialist state and fight the "imperialists".

Young children should NOT be worrying about the world, their chief concerns should be their own life, about school, family, friends and their possessions. To get small children to write to a Prime Minister about the environment is grotesque propagandising.

Imagine if a school got young children to write to the Prime Minister demanding taxes be cut, or that the government expand the armed forces or cut spending so they don't face a huge debt when they start working. The green left would be outraged, but its own scaremongering and politics are treated as "fact".

The Green Party in NZ embraces this as its education policy explicitly states:

"Incorporate environmental education (including energy efficiency and conservation) into the core curriculum at all levels and ensure that teacher education and training programmes allocate significant time for environmental education." and

"# Establish permanent environmental education regional advisory positions and encourage the further development of national resources to develop ecological thinking across the curriculum.
# Expand ERO reporting to include environmental education."

Of course if you want your children to be taught about this, then good luck to you. I'd let schools teach as they see fit, but it should NOT be part of the curriculum of every school. I'd argue strongly it would be far preferable to teach children personal autonomy, so they respect each others' rights to control their property and bodies - something children should learn in relation to each other. Frightening little children to think the world is going to end serves only one purpose, and it isn't the interests of the children.

(Hat Tip: Tim Blair)

Helen Clark is still an MP!

So says the Labour Party website today

(I have a screenshot for when this is fixed)

Remember you trusted the leadership of this organisation to spend around half your money.

Of course given she is more popular than Phil Goff as leader, it might not be surprising.

(Hat Tip WhaleOil)

National adopts Alliance local government policy

With the NZ Herald reporting Local Government Minister Rodney Hide unable to get National Party support to constrain the powers of local authorities, and unwilling to push it further, it seems like New Zealand is now stuck with a policy on local government driven by Sandra Lee when she was Minister of Local Government in 2001.

In the Local Government Act 2002, pushed by Lee and supported by Labour, local authorities were given the "power of general competence" to pursue the "economic, social, environmental and cultural well-being" of their communities. In other words, they not only could do whatever they wished, within the bounds of other laws, but they had a "duty" to consider those four "dimensions" of community development. It implied that councils not only could, but should be involved in economic development, promoting arts and culture and having a social welfare role of sorts.

National and ACT voted against this when it was in Parliament, but just to show "Plus ça change", it means nothing. The concerns expressed at the time have evaporated.

National has effectively adopted the local government policy promulgated by Labour and the Alliance. None of ACT's local government policy looks like coming to pass.

What does this mean for the supercity? Well my warnings that the supercity does not look constrained are right.

Auckland will have a mega city, with mega powers, and no constraints on its power. Even Rodney Hide now believes the majority can pillage the minority by saying:

"If a community want something and are prepared to pay for it, that's fine".

Rodney, if the community are so willing to pay for it, why the hell is the council making them pay? What does local government have to do with choice?

Mildly tinkering with transparency doesn't ratchet things back.

No. On local government the left has won, the ACT enthusiasts who think an Auckland mega city will vote to the "right" and constrain council spending (presumably with downtown railway tunnel enthusiast John Banks as Mayor), are deluding themselves. They have at least surrendered the rest of the country for their rose coloured view of the mega city. Frankly, it's a view that I could understand from National, which is as embedded in local government as the Labour Party, but that's it.

Rodney Hide and John Key are essentially adopting a legal framework and policy of the Alliance and Labour parties on local government.

Is this what you voted for?

British government funds Islamist schools

So whilst the Police chase up grandmothers who don't like gay pride marches, £113,411 was paid by taxpayers to an education foundation run by Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir according to the Sunday Telegraph.

Hizb ut-Tahrir believes democracy is corrupt, that Muslims should be separate from non-believers and promotes a global Islamist state. It presents several faces to the public. It condemned the July 2005 bombings, but has published anti-semitic literature, and been banned in Germany as a result.

The schools teach Arabic from age three, and promote a strictly Islamist view of history and education.

Whilst it is all very well promoting diversity in education, the Islamic Shaksiyah Foundation runs three schools and it is not exactly teaching respect for the constitutional arrangements or fundamental freedoms of British society:

"At least three of the four trustees are Hizb members or activists, including Farah Ahmed, the head teacher of the Slough school, who has written in a Hizb journal condemning the "corrupt Western concepts of materialism and freedom".

On their website, the schools say their "ultimate goal" and "foremost work" is the creation of an "Islamic personality" in children The creation of an "Islamic personality" is a key tenet of Hizb's ideology."

The Centre for Social Cohesion is concerned, indeed whilst much attention is paid to the destructive nature of the BNP, Hizb ut-Tahrir should be at least as disconcerting. It is releasing a report next week outlining its concerns.

"Hizb is a fringe group but it is being given a public platform, legitimacy and funding by the very institutions it wishes to destroy," said Houriya Ahmed, one of the authors of the report.

Whilst most British Muslims do not align themselves with Hizb ut-Tahrir's views, this sort of direct state support for an organisation that is completely contrary to the British political system, effectively producing recruits to hate liberal democratic capitalist free society SHOULD frighten.

For it is exactly this sort of activity, and mainstream political absence of criticism, that leaves the BNP room for a constituency. Indeed, both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats do not deserve their respective names if they wont raise questions about this.