in Culture Digest | 01 DEC 17

Weekend Reading List

The sandwich industrial complex, dating Knight Landesman, Bjork's 'Tinder record' and royal bodies: what to read this weekend

in Culture Digest | 01 DEC 17

The royal family of France, 1781, by an unknown painter. Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

  • 'Late capitalism has created a cavalcade of young people searching for a way out, and YouTube provides a temporary shelter’: Kaila Philo writes in the Baffler on the strange politics of Youtube stars – bubbles of consumption and participation that float above real world issues.
     
  • How can we reclaim the idea of utopia in the 21st century? On the uses and abuses of utopianism and dystopianism.
     
  • 'Knight groomed me and countless other women after me to accept his will and his view of the world. He tried to strip a series of young women of their confidence and dignity when they were professionally, emotionally, and economically vulnerable as I once was.’ Catherine Liu’s powerful and poignant piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books reflecting on her year-long relationship, 1988-1989, with the now-disgraced Artforum publisher Knight Landesman.
     
  • Afrofuturism, game aesthetics and Frantz Fanon converge in the films of Larry Achiampong – our profile of the British-Ghanian artist and the importance of ‘turning the gaze around’.
     
  • Back in the mid ’90s, Björk's music 'was never paranoid about change. It had a sense of optimism, even then, about the future.' On the Icelandic artist's new 'Tinder record'.
     
  • Don’t miss Sam Knight on the history of the chilled packaged sandwich, and how it conquered Britain – the invention of a food that proved itself uniquely (and depressingly) adaptable to today's confines and time pressures.
     
  • Are they healthy, are they sick, can they breed? It’s a good time to revisit Hilary Mantel’s 2013 essay for the London Review of Books on royal women, and our relationship to them, across history: 'Royal persons are both gods and beasts. They are persons but they are supra-personal, carriers of a blood line: at the most basic, they are breeding stock, collections of organs.'
SHARE THIS