CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

This section's Estimated Time of Procrastination is: 22'

            Cyprien Gaillard, Artefacts, 2011, film still. Courtesy: the artist and Sprüth Magers, Berlin, Bugada & Cargnel, Paris, and Laura Bartlett Gallery, London. Via Frieze Magazine.

Taking as starting point Euphoria (2014) a fiction story book based on the amorous entanglements of Margaret Mead, while "stumbling through the swamps of the Sepik River, in New Guinea, in the lull between the 20th-century’s two devastating world wars;" Kaelen Wilson-Goldie explores the relationship between art and anthropology; how the so-called "soft science" started to separate from colonialism to get closer to cultural relativism; how anthropology is considered by some as a failed discourse within a politically correct framework that contemporary art in the look for new frontiers is now somehow looking to disrupt and make radical again, and, of course, the role of the anthropologist as an artist and storyteller... and the other way around.

"What drives the plot and undoes everyone in the book is not the trauma of first contact but the desire for good art. All of the main characters are searching, whether respectfully or rapaciously, for the work of potters, painters and mask-makers; for the rituals and ceremonies that smuggle the stories of a people’s origins into live performance; for the code-like evidence of tribal artisans; and for the objects of study that support the creation of language or the transmission of knowledge." Interesting long read. Read full article in Frieze Magazine. E.T.P. 13'

Photo via The Guardian.

"From a few minutes’ five minutes’ research, I can tell you that we live in Orwellian times, America is waging Orwellian wars, that TV is Orwellian, that the police are Orwellian, that Amazon is Orwellian, that publishers are Orwellian too, that Amazon withdrew copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was Orwellian (although Orwell wouldn’t like it), that Vladimir Putin, George W Bush, David Cameron, Ed Milliband, Kim Jong-un and all his relatives are Orwellian, that the TV programme Big Brother is both Orwellian and not as Orwellian as it claims to be, that Obama engages in Obamathink, that climate-change deniers and climate change scientists are Orwellian, that neoclassical economics employs Orwellian language. That, in fact, everything is Orwellian." But do we really know what Orwellian means? Read full article in The Guardian. E.T.P. 4'

Photo via Rolling Stone

Gavin Edwards while reporting his recent Rolling Stone feature on Bill Murray, spent a weekend in Toronto, attending the world premiere of St. Vincent, going to a screening of Ghostbusters at the official "Bill Murray Day," talking to his friends and collaborators, partying with the star at a Toronto nightclub, and conducting an interview with him the next morning. In this article he share with us 10 things he learned about Bill Murray. The one I like best was said by Melissa McCarthy: "Thank you, Bill Murray, for making me choose randomly and not practically." Read full article in Rolling Stone. E.T.P. 5'