Author Archives: duncombe
Power needs culture
from Terry Eagleton’s new book: Reason, Faith and Revolution (Yale: 2009) p. 150 “Culture is what beds power down, interweaving it with our lived experience and thus tightening its grip upon us. An authority which fails to do this will loom up as too abstract and aloof, and thus fail to secure its citizens’ unqualified [...]
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Gihan Perera: Internal Efficacy
Gihan Perera: Grounding our Inner Leadership Spirit & Sustainability Profile “In so much of my political work, the benchmark of that was external. It was intellectual, and I mentally related it to my impact on objective conditions. However, so much of what I felt about my larger purpose was so non-related to those benchmarks. What [...]
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“Entertainment- Education and Social Change”
“Entertainment- Education and Social Change” M.J. Papa, et al, Journal of Communication, 50, 2000, pp. 31-55 This seems to be the ur article for most recent research in this field. Again, what’s useful here is that these folks are taking efficacy seriously, relating it to culture, and are looking for demonstrable effects. entertainment-education
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The Efficacy of Soap Operas
“Increase in Calls to the CDC National STD and AIDS Hotline Following AIDS-Related Episodes in a Soap Opera” by May. G. Kennedy, Ann O’Leary, Vicki Beck, Katrina Pollard, and Penny Simpson An article tracking material audience response to the inclusion of AIDS related themes in a soap opera. Now if art ever had a national [...]
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Jacques Ranciere on political art
[A]n aesthetic politics always defines itself by a certain recasting of the distribution of the sensible, a reconfiguration of the given perceptual forms….The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of [...]
Artists are Now Taking the Lead the Politicians Have Failed to Give (2007)
Madeleine Bunting “Artists are Now Taking the Lead the Politicians Have Failed to Give” The Live Art Almanac Live Art UK, 2008 pp. 51-53 Originally published in the Guardian, 21 May 2007 “Artists now get lumbered with expectations that in other cultures might fall to shamans, preachers or prophets – or once fell to politicians. [...]
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Letter from Oaxaca (2006)
Guilermo Gómez-Peña “Letter from Oaxaca: Performing the Flames” The Live Art Almanac Live Art UK, 2008 pp. 47-50 Originally published as an e-mail, August 20, 2006 “Opening day arrived, and while we we were setting up in the Museum, 50,000 citizens had gatherd outside to support the teachers. The sound of their loudspeakers intertwined with [...]
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“Proximity to Politics” 3 Book Review
via: Miscellaneous Projects Originally Written for Boot Print Volume #2 (St. Louis, USA) Proximity to Politics: A Review of Three Recent Published Dialogues on Contemporary Art and Activism By Daniel Tucker In an attempt to broadly survey the current terrain of contemporary art in relationship to politics, I am turning to three invaluable new resources [...]
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We Ask Your Attention (1938)
British Surrealist Group (1938) We Ask Your Attention From a pamphlet issued by the British Surrealist Group, designed by Henry Moore, London,1938 (reprinted in Art and Social Change, Will Bradley and Charles Esche, eds., London: Tate, 2007, pp. 110-114) [From a pamphlet arguing for intervention in the Spanish Civil War, but has larger ramifications I [...]
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Politics of Surrealism