Thanks to the towering talents of Mr Claude Boudeau, whose performance piece Cascade is featured below.

As you’ve doubtless already discerned, Mr Boudeau’s “main questioning is about the states of insurrection that exist in people and can be revealed through performance art.”

Performance artist Angeliki Chiado Tsoli is, we’re told, “interested in… contributing her knowledge as an artistic and pedagogical tool.” Her work, we learn, “explores the political, poetic and displaced body through actions in the public space, photography, video, sound, installation and experimental writing.” Further exploration is done “through a visual and mental poetic space.” If the magnitude of her labours is somehow unclear, we’re also informed,

Angeliki aims to… challenge the existence of social, economic, cultural, and class-based inequalities.

Do bear these things in mind as you thrill to the video embedded below, in which Ms Tsoli unleashes a fearless, selfless and terribly radical “intervention” at a crossing on Michigan Avenue, Chicago. Said intervention, titled Attempting to Reach Equilibrium in Times of Dystopia, is of course crammed with aesthetic value. A particular highlight occurs around 2:30 when a passing police car stops, resulting in a need to explain that what is happening is actually art. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

You Look Like You Need Some Art. 

In which we thrill to the creative eruptions of Ms Sandrine Schaefer.

The pretence of intellectual heft and critical discernment is quite funny, given the unspoken rules of pretend artists and their pretend art. Like practically all of her fellow hustlers, Ms Schaefer tells us that she “investigates” and “questions” things, and presumably interrogates them; but despite this allegedly relentless curiosity, I doubt that any specific insight or profundity is ever conveyed to her audience, such as it is, via the art, such as it is. And of course, we’re not supposed to notice this, or notice the comical mismatch of arch rhetoric and inept flummery. And so, in order to feign discernment, one has to not discern any number of really obvious things.

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Big Hooped Earrings. 

On the woes of radical accessorising at Pitzer College, Claremont, California.

It does, I think, take a particular chutzpah to publicly claim to be oppressed - by other people’s earrings – while spending more than the median household income at a glorified holiday resort.

Fashionable Malice. 

Woke educators attempt to inculcate dishonesty, bemoan pockets of resistance. 

“White fragility” is the unremarkable fact that people by and large don’t like being slandered as racists and then assigned with some pretentious collective guilt, the supposed atonement for which requires deference to actual racists and predatory hokum merchants.

Swollen with anticipation, we turn our attention to the self-refuting world of Ms Sandrine Schaefer. This time, our inexplicably underfunded performance artist has taken her talents to the streets of Belfast, where her attempts to disconcert the natives with mind-shattering concepts can be witnessed below. The featured work, Pace Investigations No. 9, reveals “tensions between mechanical, cyclical, and felt time, shared in a site of historic trauma.” Tensions that are, we’re assured, “palpable.”

Writing in the Guardian, Hannah Jane Parkinson bemoans a modest reduction of the Arts Council’s budget:

This philistine government is betraying the arts. 

It goes without saying that the 6% budget trim, £39m of a total £622m budget, is presented in the most ominous possible terms, using a four-year figure, presumably to induce gasps of outrage. We also get the line, wheeled out repeatedly by the Guardian, that,

The creative industries contribute £90bn net to the UK economy.

A framing that not only jars with demands for further public subsidy, but which slyly conflates actual, self-supporting businesses, including TV production companies, designers and games developers, with the kind of fare more likely to be subsidised by the Arts Council. 

So far, so Guardian. And then there’s this:

There seems to be no recognition of how powerful the arts can be in educating audiences, reflecting current events, exploring different views and opening up dialogue. In the past year alone, I have enjoyed Nicholas Hytner’s version of Julius Caesar at The Bridge, influenced by Trump’s America; The Jungle’s tale of life in the Calais refugee camp; Alan Bennett’s Allelujah!, a celebration of the NHS. 

Readers will note that the artistic projects deemed exemplary are somewhat uniform in their default politics, which seem unlikely to differ much, if at all, from those of the typical Guardian columnist, or the typical Arts Council employee, or indeed the typical beneficiary of Arts Council largesse. Perhaps, then, we can hazard a guess as to Ms Parkinson’s definitions of “opening up dialogue” and “exploring different views.”