Tokyo at night. 

The only power we have as authors is if we unionise and go on strike.

Amanda Craig, novelist, mouthing what I fear may be another classic sentence for our series.

Via Tim Worstall, who has more.

Update:

Spotted by Chester in the comments – Fintan O’Toole, literary editor of the Irish Times, calls for a “national arts strike” to extort further cash from the taxpayer. “The public has to be reminded that it really does care,” says he. And until more wallets land on the bonfire of publicly funded art, the nation’s creative titans should “close the arts centres” and “hold no poetry readings.”

As it’s Monday, I thought I’d cheer you with another chance to marvel at the mind-shattering talents of Ms Sandrine Schaefer, a performance artist whose adventures with lettuce and underwear have previously entertained us. Being as she is so fearless and uncompromising, her latest work entails,

A series of research based actions in public spaces that explore automated systems that are triggered by human movement.

Specifically, Ms Schaefer is filmed walking past automatic doors, repeatedly and radically, and much to the indifference of passers-by:

Says she:

Through this enquiry, I hope to discover new possibilities for collaborations with these everyday machines.

So there’s that to look forward to.

This just in:

An artist has been given thousands of pounds of public money to simply live in Glasgow for a year.

Oh come on. There’s at least one joke in there.

Scottish Government quango Creative Scotland is giving £15,000 to Ellie Harrison after she vowed not to leave the city limits for all of 2016. The 36-year-old believes this will allow her to “increase her sense of belonging, by encouraging her to seek out and create ‘local opportunities’ – testing what becomes possible when she invests all her ideas, time and energy within the city where she lives.”

All her ideas.

It is understood that the project will see her maintain an internet blog and that her whole life here will be a “work of art.”

How staggeringly convenient.

Harrison was born in London but has already lived in Glasgow for a number of years.

There we go.

Update, via the comments:

Yes, dear readers. It’s time to revisit the mental dumpster fire that is performance art. Specifically, the unliftable talents of Ms Sandrine Schaefer, whose piece Wandering with the Horizon – No. 1, Acclimating to Horizontal Movement was created for the 2015 Foster Prize Exhibition at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art and performed in April of this year. During this six-hour performance, Ms Schaefer “investigates notions of liminality, human scale, and the impact that the external environment has on the body.” As I’m sure will become clear in this, sadly brief, video of edited highlights.

Readers left craving more of Ms Schaefer’s insights can here behold the artist standing inside some tyres, thereby inspiring deep thought on many, many levels. And here we see Ms Schaefer celebrating her weight loss (and her artistic immensity) by attempting to squeeze through a cat flap. Those with a yearning for art of an even higher intellectual gear can marvel at a piece from 2014, in which our fearless transgressor of norms “questions the role memory plays within experiential art mediums, how actions are read on different bodies, and current discource [sic] around documentation, re-performance, and authorship.” By gnawing at a lettuce while sprawling in her underpants. 

Ms Schaefer’s prize-winning artistic innovations have of course thrilled us previously.