Tag Archives: Art and Culture

[embedded content] The Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Oxford University, kindly invited me to deliver the 2019 Taylor Lecture on 12th February 2019. I chose the topic of  Realistic Utopias versus Dystopic Realities – my aim being to highlight the manner in which really-existing capitalism is marketed as a utopian science fiction that has nothing to do with… really-existing...

A culture war is underway in Europe – not between the ‘anywheres’ and the ‘nowheres’, but between those who use culture to divide – by class, by race, by nation – and those who use it to connect and include. This war is not based in Parliament – but on the street, in our homes, and across the web. If these conflicts present real dangers, they also present opportunities to reach people that have disconnected from...

The news that “documenta 14 Cancels ‘Auschwitz on the Beach’ Performance Amid Intense Criticism” should worry us all. Censorship is the coward’s way out of controversy. Dialogue, fierce disagreement and, hopefully eventual synthesis, is the hard road that democrats dare to tread. Back in early July Franco Bifo Berardi wrote an open letter, addressed to myself and to DiEM25, explaining why he is resigning from...

“We Come Bearing Gifts”—iLiana Fokianaki and Yanis Varoufakis on Documenta 14 Athens  Created in 1955 by artist and curator Arnold Bode, Documenta sought to advance the cultural reconstruction of Germany within the postwar European order. Reoccurring every five years, it has since unfolded into a periodic forum for contemporary art. When Adam Szymczyk was appointed artistic director of Documenta 14 in...

Sir, One often hears that people on the left of the political spectrum tend to be more intelligent, more articulate, better read and generally more fun to be with. Every so often, one sees a study in some psychology journal, trying to prove this hypothesis in a scientific manner. Virtually all these studies are deeply flawed as they invariably fail to account for immeasurable and innumerable variables. And then one comes across the article “Out of office” on the front page...

The FT’s silly season Q&A edition had some questions for several of us. Here are my answers: How are you spending the summer? Like every summer: accumulating sensations that, when the depths of winter arrive, will allow me to, still, feel that — in Albert Camus’ wonderful words — “within me there lay an invincible summer”. Who would be your ideal travel companion (real or fictional, dead or alive)? Danae, my partner, for her astonishing capacity to belong in strange places. And the...

The complete pdf of the Keynote with which I closed the 6th Moscow Biennale on 1st October 2015 is now available:. Click here (And for an audio file, click here)