Immersion and Self-Consciousness
June 15, 2014
Schopenhauer claimed that the function of art was to release the individual from their constant restless striving. We have selfish desires that we look to satisfy, desires which seem beyond our control and not always admirable. But in aesthetic contemplation we can lose our sense of self if we become immersed in the object and …
Football is for Losers
June 11, 2014
The day before my first birthday, England won the World Cup. England’s greatest footballing triumph passed me by. I grew up never seeing them as a World Cup team as they failed to qualify for the ’74 and ’78 finals. In 1982, I finally saw England kick their first ball in the tournament: and what …
The Seventies
June 7, 2014
If obliged to live my whole life perpetually in a single decade, I hope it would be the 1970s. Some think of it, with all its excesses, as the decade that taste forgot. But it was a time of extremes and never boring. Starting more or less with the first manned moon landing, there was …
History and Politics
October 24, 2012
Earlier this month I attended the inaugural lecture of Celeste-Marie Bernier, a new professor at Nottingham’s Department of American and Canadian Studies. The lecture explored images of slavery, showing how the masters depicted their slaves one way while slaves and former slaves tried to tell a different story when they had the rare opportunity to be …
Riefenstahl’s Olympia
July 5, 2012
Can art be beautiful even though it’s wrong or would its wrongness destroy its beauty? This rather abstract question of contemporary aesthetics is made concrete in the example of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s work. Riefenstahl was revolutionary, pioneering in the 1930s a number of cinematographic innovations. She used unusual angles on her subjects; she distorted the …
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