Omer Fast’s film installation Nostalgia is a good example of how material is formatted to fit the institution of art. This is not a criticism of Fast or his work; everyone has to survive in a capitalist society, and in doing so we all reproduce our own alienation. It should go without saying that the creation of a society where all distinctions between high and low culture are abolished in favour of a truly human world is a pressing task – but in the meantime, where I’m forced to choose between art and popular culture, I’d opt for the latter most of the time.

I reported on an earlier YouTube banning of my work in a blog I posted in September, and shortly after I’d written that YouTube pulled another video of mine, Nude In Melbourne. The point of the second piece, which was clearly lost on YouTube’s half-wit censors, is that I may or may not be nude in this short: you can’t tell because anything that might break the YouTube rules is hidden by a camera… but that didn’t stop the platform from banning it. However, the video is now available again via Vimeo: «a href=“https://www.vimeo.com/7103351" target="_blank” rel=“noopener noreferrer”>http://www.vimeo.com/7103351> Due to the hassles I’ve been getting from YouTube, I decided to post my recent video Two Strippers straight to Vimeo:

Shortly after I’d settled into my seat at BFI Screen 1 for the Flipside Halloween shindig, a ‘real-life witch’ came and sat next to me. I figured this woman was a Wiccan because she looked completely out of place among hordes of trash film fans. A few minutes later Geraldine Beskin from the Atlantis Bookshop joined her. Among many other things, I overheard the pagan immediately to my left make the following observation to her occult book dealing friend: “A lot of people said they would have come any other night of the year but not tonight because they need to be alone to communicate with the spirits.

Flying around the world, attending art biennials and eating expensive meals puts us in touch with the wretched of the earth – by underlining exactly what it is that peasants and workers are missing out on. Like the lumpen-proletariat, the left-bourgeoisie is a distinct class fraction and cannot be conflated with its bourgeois and lumpen enemies. Since the proletariat has failed to act as a class for itself, we have no choice but to lead it to taste and discernment via our elevated aesthetic principles (viz, if you liked Damien Hirst, you’ll love Takashi Murakami – and don’t forget that the current Tate show featuring both of them takes its name from the 1991 album Pop Life by Bananarama!

Last night I went to the celebration of the life and work of Tamara Krikorian and Tony Sinden at Tate Modern’s Starr Auditorium. The event was a tribute to two pioneering UK based video artists who died earlier this year; among other things, Krikorian also played a major role in setting up London Video Arts. Unfortunately, I find Krikorian’s work boring, and neither the talks about her nor the screening of her 1977 video Vanitas did much for me. In Vanitas, Krikorian stands in front of a mirror with a TV and many other objects reflected in it, the audio cuts between the artist talking about art and TV news reports.