After shock
On 4 July, a little under six months into Donald Trump’s presidency, I joined a packed audience of over 2,000 at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall for an engaging and impressive keynote speech by Naomi Klein based around her latest book No Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics. Klein equates Trump’s election...
That sinking feeling
If art’s mission is to change public perceptions or to transcend established practices, it can no longer be apolitical, unaware of social or economic currents. The creators of an exhibit that examines the “cultural afterlife” of taxidermised polar bears, nanoq: flat out and bluesome, by Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, sum up a rather recent...
The global thermostat
For the globe as a whole, the ocean is the great regulator, the great stabiliser of temperatures. It has been described as “a savings bank for solar energy, receiving deposits in seasons of excessive insolation and paying them back in seasons of want.” Without the ocean, our world would be visited by unthinkably harsh extremes...
