The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones has been busy enthusing about the new mascot for Partick Thistle Football Club, created by Turner Prize nominee David Shrigley. The mascot, funded privately and described by Mr Jones as the creation of “a tough and honest artist” and “art at its best,” can be seen and studied here, no doubt at great length. However, in championing Mr Shrigley’s handiwork, the Guardian’s art critic inadvertently makes an argument for ending taxpayer subsidy of so-called “public” art: 

Populism and good art are incompatible… Good artists… don’t please crowds… That is why most public art in modern Britain is awful… Good artists cannot and will not provide what the public wants. They need to be edgy, challenging, otherwise they will become sell-outs.

Note Mr Jones’ unironic use of the word edgy. 

An example of Mr Jones’ idea of that rare thing – great, edgy public art – i.e., paid for coercively by extorting the taxpayer, in this case to the tune of £95,000 – can be found here. Mr Jones described said object as “a very elegant work… redemptive, joyous, liberating.”

Katherine Timpf on a “white privilege” conference for teachers and school administrators: 

“Many white people in Oregon have no idea that our schools and state are immersed in white culture and are uncomfortable and harmful to our students of colour, while also reinforcing the dominant nature of white culture in our white students and families,” one of the conference documents explains. The manual defines this “white culture” with a list of values, such as “promoting independence, self-expression, personal choice, individual thinking and achievement,” because apparently those are strictly “white” concepts and not emphasised in black communities.

Educators of pallor are being told, at public expense, that in order to become “anti-racist white allies,” they must first embrace the conceit that “All white people are racist. [Therefore] I am racist.” If that sounds not only absurd but a little sinister, practically Maoist, that’s because it is.

Here’s one of the many reasons why the leftist website Salon gets laughed at quite a lot. 

And Fraser Nelson agrees with Charlotte Church and Polly Toynbee, perhaps more than they would like: 

At the end of our tax returns, we declare how much tax we owe. [George] Osborne can introduce a new line in the tax return saying: if you think this isn’t enough, how much extra would you like to pay? People like Ms Toynbee and Ms Church can then fill in the extra so they can pay 50 per cent, or even 70 per cent, if they like. This ‘nudge’ tax reform would be consistent with the liberal principles of a Conservative government while allowing left-wingers to act along with their conscience and hand over more of their income to the government. So next time, rather than complain that they would be happy to pay 70 per cent tax, such people can proudly claim that they do pay 70 per cent tax. And they will have the tax return to prove it.

However, as we’ve seen, Polly is much more troubled by what you earn and keep than by what she earns and keeps – which, given her six-figure Guardian income, plus appearance fees, royalties and property portfolio, is quite a feat. Like many of her peers, Ms Toynbee thinks that voting for the state to confiscate even more of other people’s earnings is somehow an act of altruism. It’s also, conveniently, presented as an excuse for not using her own considerable resources personally, directly, to help those she deems deserving. And if a well-heeled leftist bangs on week after week about how terrible unequal incomes are and how something must be done urgently – and then says she won’t do what she insists is morally imperative unless the state forces her to do it – this isn’t a resounding affirmation of her professed principles.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for. 

And then you notice the pigtails. (h/t, Mr Eugenides) // Sexed-up grand piano. // At last, stain-repelling shirts. “Discover what living stain-free feels like.” // Eruption. // The Samsung safety truck. It seems obvious now. // Man with some old vinyl and an electron microscope. // Free Hayek. // Customer feedback of note. (h/t, PootBlog) // Arrive refreshed with this in-flight posture apparatus. Works on any desk top surface. // Assorted gifs and photos from an organic chemistry lab. // He brings greetings from his home world. // Owl café, Ikebukuro, Japan. // Wooden keyboard of note. // Test your colour vision. // All six Star Wars films superimposed. // Four-year-old girl copes quite well with dad’s stunt flying. // And finally, office chair plus leaf blower equals good times.  

Meanwhile, in the Guardian:

[Arts Council] grants aren’t won down the pub by a dart competition where the bullseye’s a picture of the taxpayer’s face. Of course, I wish they were, because that would save the hours of work it takes to write a grant application. And I’m pretty good at darts.

So writes Zoë Coombs Marr, a writer, comedian and “theatre maker,” and a woman of profound humility, in a piece complaining about the “devastating effects” of modest alterations in taxpayer subsidy for Australia’s commercially unviable artists. Artists who, while unloved by the general public, are nonetheless deserving of money they haven’t earned. “I’m here to bust a few myths,” says Ms Marr. And so begins a sorrowful tale of how bloody hard it is to be an artist whose work is of little interest to the public, and how hard it is to screw other people’s earnings out of other people:

Grant applications are comprehensive proposals that take multiple people and sometimes months to complete. They’re assessed by a panel of professionals (not your mates) employed to pick your application apart, assess it for financial viability and community relevance.

At this point, rather bafflingly, Ms Marr links to an article – this one here, by Tim Blair – which is part of a series of pieces by Blair and Andrew Bolt on arts funding cronyism and the ludicrous misspending of public money. A series that actually reveals her claim of funding integrity and aesthetic high-mindedness as – how shall I put this? – less than convincing. Not your mates, indeed. 

Undaunted, or perhaps oblivious, our unhappy artist continues,

Grant money is pumped back into the economy and employs numerous people. 

How much and how many is, sadly, left unspecified. But apparently Australia’s economy will be rendered turgid and engorged by throwing $21,000 that someone else had to earn at “rainforest basketry training programmes,” and another $20,000 at “dance theatre work devised by participants who identify as fat/large/bigger-bodied.” And by surrendering a further $12,000 of taxpayers’ money to “enrich the sensory theatre practice” of one person “with master classes and mentoring in Body Mind Centring praxis.” Yes, you can hear that economy boom from half a world away. These examples, by the way, are among the many cited in the article by Tim Blair, and to which Ms Marr links as somehow helping her case.

Readers unswayed by Ms Marr’s article - in which she says, “I could try to explain to you why we should fund the arts” but doesn’t bother doing so - should note that she is the winner of Australia’s taxpayer-subsidised 2006 National Poetry Slam Championships. So there’s that. A more recent poetic work by Ms Marr can be savoured here. [ Added: ] And thanks to Nikw211 in the comments, Ms Marr’s comedic stylings – the fruits of her “training, skill and hard work” – can be experienced at length here. I should point out it’s quite a slog and you may want a stiff drink to hand. Or a canister of nitrous oxide.

Eugene Volokh on the now-official “microaggression” of criticising leftist assumptions:  

I’m happy to say that I’m just going to keep on microaggressing. I like to think that I’m generally polite, so I won’t express these views rudely. And I try not to inject my own irrelevant opinions into classes I teach, so there are many situations in which I won’t bring up these views simply because it’s not my job to express my views in those contexts. But the document that I quote isn’t about keeping classes on-topic or preventing personal insults — it’s about suppressing particular viewpoints. And what’s tenure for, if not to resist these attempts to stop the expression of unpopular views?

If, for example, you don’t regard a person’s melanin level as both a fascinating detail of their being and an inexhaustible license to invoke victimhood and deference, then you’re probably committing a microaggression. And the publicly-funded University of California thinks you may be “sending denigrating messages” and “creating a hostile learning environment” because you aren’t awed and enthralled by how brown a person is.

Charles C W Cooke finds a modern echo of an old George Orwell quote: 

“We don’t want to hear about these bourgeois writers like Shakespeare,” says [Californian school teacher, Dana] Disbiber. “Worry not, teaching him helps the progressive cause,” replies [New Republic columnist, Elizabeth Stoker] Bruenig… When politics is everything and everything is politics, nothing escapes the commissar’s judgment. It is one thing to analyse art for its political content — critically necessary even – but it is quite another to subjugate one’s view of that art to one’s politics.

Of course Orwell, like Shakespeare, is – to use Disbiber’s parlance – a dead white male, and worse, a critic of piously narrow attitudes like those of Dana Disbiber. We must therefore regard both authors as insufficiently progressive and entirely devoid of relevance.  

And in other thrilling academic news: 

Utah Valley University, with an enrolment of about 34,000 students, is trying out a staircase with lanes. Lane one is for walkers, two for runners and three for texters.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets below. It’s what these posts are for.