It is a misconception that no good art is being created in the
contemporary age. Very little is being created in the mainstream, that is true, but there are
still those who persevere in spite of being starved of publicity, or
even, as in the case of ceramicist Charles Krafft,
receiving negative publicity. Even though his website has not been updated recently, I am pleased to report that Charles is still going strong despite recent illness and simultaneously celebrated and ridiculed the life of Charles Manson in his usual Delftware style:
But what about others who, while not politically aware or conscious, are creating good works of art that are implicitly white, by dint of their aesthetics and subject matters?
David Bellamy died on Wednesday at the ripe old age of 86. Anyone in Britain of my age will have grown up watching him on television as he explained and explored the natural world in his typically exhuberant style that very much appealed to kids. According to the Express, Bellamy died of dementia, although this may be paper talk; Bellamy, after all, did not endear himself to the media in recent years. Bellamy was often outspoken, showing his disdain for wind turbines on BBC flagship children's programme Blue Peter back in 1996; but it was his heresy on climate change that really made the establishment turn against him, which Bellamy referred to as a scam. That said, many on the Right have again been all too hasty to hold him up as #ourguy, for Bellamy, despite his dissent from the establishment line on certain subjects, has always been very much left of centre.
According to early reports, Yesterday's Black Friday broke all sales figures records, up 14.5% on last year. A festival that started in the USA, coming as it does the day after Thanksgiving, it is now consuming Europe. And that is indeed the nature of the beast: consumption. It is perhaps the first festival that was founded on the religion of consumerism. Such a quasi-religious festival had to have been born in the Anglosphere, where capitalism is bound to the Reformation and the ensuing Puritan tradition that gave birth to economic and social liberalism. Was it not that theologian beloved of the American descendants of Scotsmen and Northern Englishmen, John Calvin who said, 'Greed is good, greed works'? Something like that anyway. I'm glad we got shut of them after the Restoration. Anyway, Black Friday is now being exported. Even in the usually anti-capitalist France, Black Friday has been promoted relentlessly this year. The French term for this is 'vendredi fou', although it tends to be kept in English in line with the European Union's attempt to reduce all European languages to dialects of English, although the Wikipedia site claims this is translated as 'vendredi noir', showing again how that site is written by spergy but dim sixth formers.
