Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

"You should care more about cats stuck in trees in Tamworth, Staffordshire and less about cats stuck in trees in Tamworth, New South Wales."

lol my kids hate Tamworth

But mate, it has The Big Golden Guitar and the Country Music Festiv...oh wait.

Tamworth, Staffs is not a bad little town but the only bit my kids have seen is the station, where we sometimes have to change trains. it's like something the East German government wd've rejected for being too soul-crushing and it's stuck out in the arse-end of an industrial estate/suburban desert

you can read my full article on post-war architecture in Tamworth and why no great indie bands have come from there in the Graun all next week

Cracking play area in the grounds of the castle iirc

haven't been there for 30+ years but it used to be, yeah

My abiding memory of Tamworth is of looking out of a window during a boring meeting and seeing a couple shagging in the gym across the street.

Didn't Julian Cope have some bizarre theory about how Tamworth was the mystical centre of England or something? Probably.

The slag heap on the cover of "Fried" is near Tamworth.

There's a whole chapter in Head On or Repossessed all about Tamworth being the mystical centre of England but I'm not about to dig it out to quote it...

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jan/06/simon-hoggart-guardian-observer-journalist-dies-67

I think we can definitely say that the Guardian is now worse than it used to be

:(

ah man that's a bastard. think he was the paper's first quote-unquote personality writer that kept my attention when I read it as a pre-internet teen

yeah, him and another dude whose name i'm forgetting who did a heroically abstruse diary.. i want to say he was called "sotweed" but that's not quite it

Smallweed?

YES

RIP. like Mencap i go way back with Hoggart

i never liked the way that hoggart belittled john prescott, which bordered on bullying, but i suppose it was in a well-entrenched public school style of #bantz that i am simply allergic to in toto, but he was a very entertaining writer and it's was a service to be shown the stubborn, human fallibility of policitians

Oh no! I briefly worked as his temp secretary in Portcullis House. He was about the most miserable person I ever worked for, but enjoyable company. He spent most of his time on the phone yelling at people from the BBC.

jeez i never realised Richard Hoggart was his dad, another of my cultural household idols

I am currently sat in the Richard Hoggart Building so sending my respects fully.

have they got a hotline

Independent rather than Guardian but dislike this headline a lot:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/wife-of-pc-david-rathband-officer-shot-and-left-blind-by-gunman-raoul-moat-had-affair-with-77-survivor-lisa-french-9041633.html

also, that weblink: She did not have the affair...

When I saw this thread had been bumped, I assumed it was over this....

http://jimromenesko.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/guardian.jpg

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/06/12-years-a-slave-john-patterson

"I found myself oppressed by McQueen's film-making...I learned no more about the dynamics of slavery, its tendency to deprave both slave and master"

why is this still on the front page with a picture of a turkey?

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/10/noel-clarke-storage-24-lowest-grossing-us-film
• This article was amended on Friday 10 January 2014. The original piece failed to mention Storage 24's distribution pattern in the US, which plays into its box office take. This has been amended.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/jan/21/racist-chair-bjarne-melgaard-dasha-zhukova#_

"Why there's nothing racist about the 'racist chair'"

Not sure who this Jonathan Jones is but I'm pretty sure he's a shithead.

That's a possibility but which bits of the article led you to that conclusion? The bit about the "common touch" was the only bit which really made me wince (although I'm not sure I agree with the thrust of the article either).

i was just gonna quote the hilarious "common touch" bit, but let's start there and look at the rest of the article's smug dismissiveness about the politics of race

tell you what was edifying, seeing a bunch of men pompously declare "I AGREE WITH JONATHAN JONES" on twitter yesterday

http://www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl/JJones2.gif

Jones is usually pretty good. His blog pieces often seem dashed off and contrarian but he's one of the better accessible art writers around.

The writing here seems careless and there are plenty of better ways of suggesting that conceptual art shorn of context is open to misinterpretation but i'm not sure he's entirely wrong.

Well, he is showing a piece of conceptual work in the context its owner created for it! Which is UGH. A perfect visual representation of the problem black feminists have with White Feminism, accompanied by a whole bunch of white people explaining why it isn't racist for a billionaire's pretentious girlfriend to park her bony ass on a lame Allan Jones knock-off on MLK day. People with dodgy new money will always try to launder it in the art market, but this woman with her magazine and her fake ICA in Moscow and a mega-yacht moored off the Venice Biennale is beyond gross - and now everyone who doesn't follow contemporary art has just taken delivery of a heads-up about who this wretched person is.

Complex's take on it seems reasonable:

As a stand-alone work of art, the chair becomes a satire on art history. As a piece of furniture, it means something entirely different—something much more offensive.

It's difficult to say whether she's using it as furniture or whether it was just a terribly misguided prop in a photo shoot.

Aside from this incident, she's more adept as an art-world player than a lot of people would expect her to be, i think.

so it was ok until someone sat on it? 8)

it's the sitting that gets people angry, that's why it's called sat ire

^ needs work

new money vs old money fite

i think it works the other way too - that urinal wasn't art until people stopped pissing in it.

This is where the party ends
I cant stand here when I could be sitting
on your racist chair

I honestly don't understand how anyone can look at that picture and think "this image is in favor of racism". Everything about it screams satirical to me.

I do understand how someone can look at that picture and find it upsetting; I think that was the point.

That may well have been the point - a satire of racism, I don't know and tbh I doubt it. But the issue here is more Jones' explanation - that *this* piece is a "critique" of the misogyny of older piece - ok, but why does the artist need to use black women as a prop (instrumentalisation of bodies of WoC, etc) to make this point? And why does Jones, a white art bro, think it's ok? As NV says above, his approach is smug and dismissive.

oh I didn't read the Jones piece past the first few paragraphs, I decided life was too short

sorry, that's probably not helpful

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/jan/22/noel-gallager-hates-oasis-videos

"Is he trying to get to the CD player?"

this is off topic, but has anyone else seen the documentary about Allen Jones that included interviews with people who own one of his sculptures and have it on display in their homes?

so was that chair article mansplaining or whitesplaining?

The headline for the Jonathan Jones article in the print edition is 'A pastiche that begged to be misunderstood', which seems a better/more measured title than 'Why there's nothing racist about the 'racist chair'', is the online headline just there to be more click-baity?