The splendid arts and culture blog, Hyperallergic, has a weekly feature called Crimes of the Art, documenting offenses ranging from harmless vandalism, forgery to censorship and grand and daring daylight museum heists. Here are the latest cases on the docket but one can browse an extensive archive of past wrongdoings.
Wednesday, 8 June 2016
from the blotter
best-boy or no small parts
In order to illustrate the wage- distribution various acting roles and stagehands can expect for their role in producing a Hollywood blockbuster, Vanity Fair crafted this nifty credits-crawl. Having one’s name immortalized and associated with a grand project—involving more individuals seemingly than the top-level government of a moderately sized nation—is probably reward enough on its own but it would be a little disheartening to know that one’s contribution was less valuable that the play-or-pay contract of a feline extra.
trรผmmerfrau
The secretive Bilderberg Group will be meeting at an undisclosed location in Dresden, as Quartz reports, this week, and although proceedings are not subject to public-scrutiny in any sense, apparently one item of their agenda will be the so-called precariat.
Coined by economist Guy Standing, the term refers to the working-class suspended in a precarious situation—not rightly any longer called the proletariat since they were afforded more protections and securities—unsure whether they can enjoy continued employment or face redundancy, replaced by immigrants or robots. Siding with the author’s take on this anxiety-causing arrangement in the labour-force, I agree that the lizard-people who rule the world will be rather aghast with what their underlings are facing and what kind of toll this takes on society.
shangri-la or public-burden
Although with very different issues at stake, a series of referenda (plebiscites) put to the people have been returned, I think, with a degree of timidity—like Switzerland’s recent rejection of a basic income for all, the cession of Scotland or of Catalonia, and I wonder what this bodes, bold or dull, for up-coming votes, like for the US electorate or the potential UK withdrawal from the EU.
Of course, sometimes a departure is a foolhardy thing that fortune does not necessarily favour and there’s little leverage for polemics and convincing in defeat—but, as hackneyed and exhausting as being told votes are historic and come with a mandate can be (I doubt that anything so momentous would be left in the hands of the public) maybe our conservative posture is indicative of what meaning we attribute to democracy and how much personal liability we are willing to accept. What do you think?
