For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Dissident Academic Feels the Warmth of Social Justice. 

Or, “If you expose our student indoctrination policy we will punish you.”

According to numerous students, the course’s instructor demanded that they recognise “white English” as the “oppressors’ language.” Without explanation, the class spent its session before Election Day screening Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. When several students complained to the professor about the course’s politicised content, they were informed that their previous education had left them “brainwashed” on matters relating to race and social justice.

Crotch Funk as Art. 

In which I hammer culture into your tiny minds.

Sweat is a performance piece by Peter De Cupere, choreographed by fellow Belgian Jan Fabre, in which five dancers spend fourteen minutes rolling about and jumping up and down – naked, obviously – while attempting to fill their transparent plastic overalls with all manner of body odour. “The intention,” we’re told, “is to catch the sweat from the dancers and to distil it. The concrete of the sweat is sprayed on a wall of the dance lab and protected by a glass box. In the glass is a small hole where visitors can smell the sweat.” Yes, you can smell the sweat. If that’s not a good night out, I don’t know what is.

The Sound of Wringing. 

To show how virtuous they are, and therefore superior, Guardian columnists stick pins into their eyes.

One needn’t be a cartoon Tory to marvel at Decca Aitkenhead’s classic piece, Their Homophobia is Our Fault, in which she insisted that the “precarious, over-exaggerated masculinity” and murderous homophobia of some Jamaican reggae stars are products of the “sodomy of male slaves by their white owners.” And that the “vilification of Jamaican homophobia implies… a failure to accept post-colonial politics.” Thus, sympathetic readers could feel guilty not only for “vilifying” the homicidal sentiments of some Jamaican musicians, but also for the culpability of their own collective ancestors. One wonders how those gripped by this fiendish dilemma could even begin to resolve their twofold feelings of shame.

There’s more, should you want it, in the updated greatest hits. 

And so we turn our attention to Santa Barbara City College, where creatively-inclined students have been “exploring issues and practices of… interactive and chance-derived work.” Specifically, 

Students harnessed complicated architectural designs and intricate woodworking to create an artistic teepee, which they set up on one of the quad’s grassy knolls earlier this month. As the student newspaper reports, the four art students who built the teepee saw it as “a place of positive vibes and community engagement.”

See? Positive vibes.

Assembled from “upcycled and reclaimed material from an old farm house,” and “lined with pillows and rugs,” the students’ vibe-enhancing structure “provides a comfy, squishy environment” for music and conversation. Also included in the experience is “a shelf of blank books for people to express themselves in written word.” Engorged with positivity, the students posted an invitation for others to partake in their creation: 

Join us to support the opening day of an amazing art event and large scale installation… The piece harks back to ways of the past in American history while juxtaposing current counter culture with futuristic elements that bring it to life.  

It even glows in the dark. 

We want to provide you with an experience out of the mundane – right here on campus! Celebrate our labour of love with live music, refreshments and a trading post! That’s right, bring something to trade and become part of the installation.

Oh, come on. Who could resist so much switched-on grooviness? Surely what followed was a day of vibrant self-expression and communal hugging?

Alas, no. 

Good news, dear reader. You too can learn to be a performance artist and thereby make the world tremble. You could, for instance, attend Sandrine Schaefer’s course in Durational Performance Art, which is run by the Studio for Interrelated Media at the Massachusetts College of Art. The ripened fruits of this intense and demanding study can be witnessed in the video below. Among its gems are the vigorous crayoning works of Nicole Dube, complete with off-camera grunting and sounds of exertion; a 90-minute display of marker pen misuse and poorly choreographed wrestling by Ambar Janual and Luke Ryba; and Darien Stankowski’s haphazard scraping of a wooden door, the purpose of which remains stubbornly unobvious and hard to care about.

However, the video begins with the colossal radicalism of Elaine Thap, a woman who refers to herself as “they,” “their” and “them,” and whose talents are described thusly, if only by herself – sorry, themself:

Elaine Thap uses identity in their work to convey layers of being and relationships… Taking the form of social constructs and the irony of it, they are asking for critical communication and concocting the politics of identity. Performance allows them to fabricate situations of childhood trauma and adult responsibility. They seek intersectional meaning and memory in others by the act of othering.

Ah yes, the politics of identity, intersectional meaning and of course othering. How terribly non-conformist. Now brace yourselves, people. I don’t want anyone fainting from the daring of it all: 

Polly Toynbee, that is:

There is an instinctive bond between Guardian readers – we almost nod to one another as we read the paper on a train.

Yes, I bet you do, Polly. I bet you do.

Update:

In the comments we’re also discussing this, spotted by Robert. Apparently, artists and writers are being “ignored to death”:

The artist in America is being starved, systemically and without shame. In this land of untold bounty… the American creative class has been forced to brook a historic economic burden while also being sunk into sunless irrelevancy.

You see, it’s simply ghastly that craftsmen and labourers can have nicer cars than “the makers and chroniclers of our culture.”

A Western Screech-Owl. One of these. Photographed by Brad Wilson. Via PootBlog.