Art in the DPRK

Socialist Realism is alive and well in the North Korean art scene.

Abstract painting does not exist as it is deemed bourgeois and anti-revolutionary, and if some representational art can be purely aesthetic without political overtones, many landscapes do portray places of the revolution or of political significance.

Anonymity is a hallmark of North Korean art because all artists must work out of state-run studio complexes. Artists are ranked A, B, or C, depending on skill level. About fifty top-ranked artists are further designated “Merited Artists” and a more elite group of 20 are designated “People’s Artists.”

Tiny fish developed its own set of dracula fangs

A newly designated species of transparent fish native to a stream in Burma has recently been introduced to my nightmares.

Guantánamo for kids

Anna Perera’s book Guantánamo Boy is the fictional account of a teenager from the UK who is abducted from his relatives’ house in Karachi and sent to the detention camp.

It sounds unlikely but, according to Perera, it is well-established that juveniles have been held at Guantánamo, although the numbers are disputed. Reprieve, the charity for prisoners from death row to Guantánamo, has recorded that 22 under-16s have been held at the camp. The youngest juvenile still in custody is Mohammed el Gharani, who was 14 when picked up in a random raid on a mosque by Pakistani bounty-hunters and “sold” to the American authorities for $5,000.

It was stories like these that Guantánamo Boy is based on, although the book itself emerged out of just one line delivered by the human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith at a benefit event for Reprieve in 2006.

“At that gig Clive Stafford Smith simply said ‘children are also held in Guantánamo Bay’ and that one statement inspired this novel,” says Perera.

The book is available at Amazon UK.

VAT cut as court rules that video and light art is sculpture

The UK’s VAT and Duties Tribunal recently ruled that works by electric-light installation artist Dan Flavin and video artist Bill Viola are not subject to the same customs duties as ordinary “image projectors [or] photographic enlargers and reducers” or “chandeliers and electrical ceiling or wall light fittings.”

It’s a good ruling. The article points out the American precedent: in 1928 a US court ruled that Brancusi’s Bird in Space was not actually a kitchen utensil.

we-make-money-not-art's Flickr photos tagged 'altermodern'

Yeah, I’d been wondering what it looked like, too.