Art critic, editor at @ArtReview_ magazine. Anthropocentrist. Words for ArtReview, Telegraph, spiked and others. Sometimes political, sometimes aesthetic.
Oct 1, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The tedious 'Bond-should-be-a-woman' debate shows what's really at stake is who gets to police culture. It's not enough to argue for a different female superagent character & let audiences decide./ telegraph.co.uk/films/0/keir-s…
Bond is the authority figure & has to be captured to be controlled by the orthodoxy. But this really amounts to a contempt for engaging with the public. If we were given the choice, which would we choose? Would we choose the 'wrong' character?
Sep 4, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
As the JCVI debacle shows, the push to vaccinate everyone isn't some sinister plot by all-powerful hidden interests. It's how shell-shocked governments have latched onto vaccines because they're the *only* successful policy of the last year/
Because all other policies - lockdown, social distancing, mask mandates, school bubbles, online learning, furlough, track & trace etc. - have been *abject failures* - by any pragmatic measure of their sustainable social cost.
Apr 8, 2021 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
[Adam Curtis voice:] Politicians, who had never faced a major civil emergency before, panicked. But then they discovered that the state, which had been broken up and hollowed out by the same neoliberal policies they themselves had supported, no longer worked.
So the politicians tried to get back control by seizing power over every aspect of society, by making emergency laws. But this caused things to go more out of control.
