This just in:  

A woman has been charged with attempted murder after stabbing another woman at the biggest art fair in the US, in an attack that was wrongly interpreted by onlookers as performance art.

No. Don’t. Bad dog.

Siyuan Zhao, from New York, was arrested after stabbing the victim’s arms and neck with an X-Acto craft knife during a fight at the Art Basel event in Miami Beach on Friday. The victim, who has not been identified, was taken to Jackson Memorial hospital with non-life-threatening injuries… While she was being patted down, Zhao spontaneously stated: “I had to kill her and two more.” She is also alleged to have said: “I had to watch her bleed!”

Both ladies are believed to have been patrons of the art fair, not rival exhibitors.

Other witnesses later thought the police tape cordoning the area was an art installation.

Via Julia and Chester.

For newcomers, three more items from the archives.

No Ego Whatsoever, Just an Urge to Control. 

Ken Loach is selfless, heroic and countercultural. And so the state should force you to give him money.

Loach has said that he wants to make the British “confront their imperialist past” and in 1977 he famously rejected the offer of an OBE, supposedly on principle, denouncing the honour as “despicable… deferring to the monarchy and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest.” However, this principled adamance did not inhibit the director’s 2003 acceptance of the Praemium Imperiale – the World Culture Prize in Memory of His Imperial Highness Prince Takamatsu. His Imperial Highness was of course the brother of the 124th Emperor of Japan, Hirohito, whose activities and ambitions were, it seems, altogether more moral and glorious. 

Postmodernism Unpeeled. 

A discussion with Stephen Hicks.

Writing in Innovations of Antiquity, Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden dismissed “transparent prose” as merely “the approved mode of expression for the society and values of the newly empowered middle class.” In the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh denounced “unproblematic prose and clarity of presentation” as “the conceptual tools of conservatism.” The rejection of transparency as “conservative” is particularly odd, since transparency makes a claim amenable to broad critical enquiry, and thus to public correction. Presumably, if you prefer arguments that are comprehensible and open to scrutiny, this signals some reactionary tendency and deep moral failing. On the other hand, if you sneer at such bourgeois trifles, you’re radical, clever and very, very sexy.

When Scolding is the Payoff for All That Piety and Angst. 

A Guardian journalist dares to send her daughter to a private school. Socialist vindictiveness promptly ensues.

Has Ms Murray not heard the sermon of Arabella Weir, whose definition of a “good, responsible citizen” still rings in our ears and swells our hearts? And who tells us that state schools are virtuous because they teach children “who to be wary of, who to avoid” and “how to keep their heads down,” (though how these things will be learned is oddly unexplored). And what of Kevin McKenna, a man no less pious, who tells us that parents who view the comprehensive system as inadequate – perhaps because of their own first-hand experiences – are by implication wicked and that such parental waywardness is intolerable and should be banned? Has Ms Murray not been told by those who know better that children aren’t special and should be sacrificed for society and the glories of socialism? Perhaps she’s been reading those surveys of state school teaching staff in which respondents report “a climate of violence,” “malicious disruption” and damage to personal property as “part of the routine working environment.”

Now stock up on canned goods and liquor and explore the greatest hits. 

Your host has an article posted over at Minding the Campus. It expands on a few themes that may be familiar to regulars here.

Natural variations in cognitive ability, unlike those in musicality or athleticism, are a thorn in the paw of devout egalitarians. Avid readers of the Guardian’s arts and music pages would no doubt feel free to delight in the prowess of, say, Helen Mirren or Pinchas Zukerman without believing that everyone they passed on the street could with training do the same. It seems that only intelligence attracts contrarian manoeuvring.

The latest example of which comes via Fabian Tassano, author of Mediocracy: Inversions and Deceptions in an Egalitarian Culture. Tassano steers us to the claims of senior philosophy lecturer and Guardian contributor Dr Nina Power, who insists, apparently based on nothing, that “everyone has the potential to understand everything,” and that equality of intelligence is “something to be presupposed” because – well, just because  - “everyone is equally intelligent.”

Dr Power’s assertions are bold and her reasoning unobvious, indeed difficult to detect – thus meeting the key criteria of Very Deep Thought. She refers to the French postmodernist Jacques Rancière, whose “axiomatic assertion of the equality of intelligence” is, we’re told, “one of the most important ideas of the past decade.” On what basis Rancière felt entitled to make such claims – and why Dr Power sees fit to agree with them – remains somewhat mysterious. Dr Power does, however, cite fellow philosopher Peter Hallward, who tells us, “Everyone has the same intelligence, and differences in knowledge are simply a matter of opportunity and motivation. On the basis of this assumption, superior knowledge ceases to be a necessary qualification of the teacher, just as the process of explanation… ceases to be an integral part of teaching.”  

On this, Dr Power elaborates, highlighting another benefit of the egalitarian ideal: “In principle then, there is no reason why a teacher is smarter than his or her student, or why educators shouldn’t be able to learn alongside pupils in a shared ignorance.” 

Knowledge, competence and the ability to explain – none of these things will be needed in our socialist utopia. Children will simply inhale education or absorb it through osmosis. On reflection, a couple of the teachers at my old comprehensive were particularly unskilled at explaining their thinking and struggled to remember facts. At the time I had no idea this would soon be regarded as a cutting-edge educational strategy.

Andrew Withers on the totalitarian roots of the Fabian Society:  

These ‘intellectuals’ regarded the working classes as something akin to livestock.

Further to this epic thread, Ann Althouse talks with Glenn Loury and notes how concern for “harsh language” and “violent metaphors” is not without class implications: 

I think that if we go too far in the direction of this civility and etiquette, we’re kind of privileging some people over others. We’re privileging people who are more educated, people who come from a background where politeness and niceness is the cultural style, and delegitimising people who come from a different sort of culture, where maybe exaggeration and harsh speech is the thing.

Greg Lukianoff on free speech and “dangerous speech”:

Any system that allows for censorship must place an actual, flawed human being in charge of deciding what can and cannot be said. Once the power to censor has been granted, it follows like night follows day that those in charge will be more likely to use this power to punish people with points of view that they simply dislike than those with points of view they favour.

And Jonathan Rauch, author of Kindly Inquisitors, on the same: 

[Postmodernists] say… you should put in place the political system that most advantages the weak and minorities. I think that’s the wrong answer because what happens in practice when you do that is someone’s going to have to decide who’s the weak and who’s the minority, and who isn’t. And that means the Dean of Students or whoever it is at the university is going to have to be in charge of policing the boundaries of criticism and therefore policing the boundaries of thought… The University of Illinois system, to the extent that it fires people for offending someone, says the boundary of criticism in debate is wherever the most offended student can persuade the university to put it. And of course the next thing that happens is you have a campus offendedness sweepstakes to see who can get offended the most and thus become the gatekeeper for speech. 

 By all means add your own.

Omar Kholeif, whose plea for racial favouritism in the arts recently entertained us, is enthused by a project named Unrealised Potential.

The project features,

An expansive collection of proposals from a breadth of contemporary artists, writers, musicians and curators.

And how does it work?

The unproduced ideas are lined up in the first gallery, alongside a set of terms and conditions, whereby visitors are invited to purchase the artist proposals for ‘realisation.’ The setting adopts a similar structure to an auction space, where a red sticker is placed on each idea sold, with the purchasing ‘producer’ being offered two years to realise the project, before it returns to the marketplace.

Isn’t it just wonderful? And so terribly clever. Visitors to the exhibition get, 

The opportunity to purchase the right to interpret and realise an artist’s idea.

An artist’s idea. Oh fortune, she smiles upon us. Think of it as a remix, but with no original recording, or demo, or evidence of talent. Apparently, this constitutes,

Critical and, at times, contradictory commentary about the commercialisation of the arts.

And not a cheap and derivative hustle. Why, the very idea.

Some readers may recall the ICA’s Publicness exhibition of 2003, which – in ways never quite specified – “interrogated globalisation” and “notions of the public realm.” The exhibition’s four-page press release promised the thrill of “proposals for projects that may never be realised.” In other words, the artists were so heady in their conceptualism they could short-circuit the tiresome business of actually making or finishing anything, and could instead be acclaimed – and paid – simply for airing “proposals.” One almost had to admire the efficiency. After all, it saved everyone – especially the artists – a great deal of time and trouble. Though you can’t help wondering how the artists would have felt had the audience adopted a similar approach to visiting the ICA: “Let’s not bother going and just pretend we did…”

And lets not forget the non-existent giant flying art banana, a theoretical masterpiece that cost Canadian taxpayers over $130,000 and which, had it materialised, would have said something unflattering about the previous incumbent of the White House. Because, hey, artists are just so goddamned edgy.

But back to Mr Kholeif and his keen curatorial insights:

The very act of potentially encouraging complete ‘amateurs’ to consider the delivery parameters of such creative output offers audiences an insight into the graft and expertise required to produce a successful creative project, while simultaneously reminding them of the risk involved… What is worthy here is this notion of process: audiences are granted the privilege of witnessing the multifarious facets of an artist’s psyche.

You heard the man. It’s a privilege. Well, having climbed the heights of Mount Vanity, let’s bask in the glow of that creative lava stream, shall we?