by Whitney Kimball on March 23, 2012
Things were looking dire on Tuesday morning at Sotheby's during the Chinese fine art auction. A battered troop of about thirty art handlers—accompanied again by the inflatable fat cat crushing a union worker—marched a long semi-circle inside the partitioned protest zone, chanting “No contract, no work, no peace.”
It’s been eight months since these 43 hardworking men and women were put out of their jobs for demanding fair pay and benefits. AFC thinks that’s more than enough. Let’s fix this.
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by Paddy Johnson on March 15, 2012
Back in 1995, Brian Eno’s opening speech at Turner Prize award ceremony caused all kinds of clamor. The speech lampooned the arts community for its lack of intellectual rigor, comparing the openness and public knowledge of scientific debates with the often-impenetrable discourse around art.
Eno, in his diary, recounts that at the ceremony, “various people looked at me like I was Satan, or with obvious pity.” The next day, he notes that he was stopped in the street and congratulated. When read today, however, the words sound as fresh and exciting as ever, and demand everything I often feel the fine art world lacks. As such, I’m reproducing the text in its entirety for readers below.
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