LSBU Critical Reading 2017 - James Pinkney

“Somehow, in the few years that I have been living here and travelling out of here, this most un homelike of cities has become to function for me as a kind of moral bottom-line… - as a home, in other words.” Within the first paragraph I can already feel alienated to Hickey’s views. ‘The moral bottom-line’ is not a description I would ever attribute to a home. Whilst he talks of refuge and the references to sanctuary and reassurances chime, a suggestion of the concept of home is you at your worst is troubling. I would describe a true home as an extension to the physical structure. A world full of memory and sentiment, almost a shrine to your ideas, history and aspiration. The place where ‘you’ are at your most ‘you’. A home should be a place where you can leave the darkness at the door, leave elements of your life which challenge the bottom line of your morality. However, in Hickey’s world as he writes as an art critic in the ‘super virtuous high culture of the nineteen nineties’ ...

Things are too perfect? Is it the small imperfections in items which give them an unquantifiable sentimental value to us? If you were to fully align one’s self with the views and ideas of Matthew Crawford, one could well arrive at an answer of yes to both questions. Many have before. Most famously, one of the art world’s favourite sons, John Ruskin in his comparison between the gothic and renaissance architecture of Venice. Ruskin felt the ordered geometry of the renaissance Piazza San Marco was soulless when compared to the crafted individualism of the gothic Doges Palace. As an argument purely based on the desire for, and appreciation, of buildings, products or even artworks made with either single craft or as mass produced in factory it could always boil down to basic human preference. This is why Crawford focuses more on the argument that the falling use of craft and ‘working with your hands’ is driven upon us by a political system. He uses the phrase ‘alienated labour’ to...

“Technology will make everything free”. Bold. Mason’s claim, whilst seemingly outrageous to the senses, is based in solid precedent of economics, with declines in real world income and massive shortfalls in the planet’s pension pots, as well as existing business models of social media with Facebook and Twitter completely free at the point of consumption. A post capitalist society then? A society where technology has allowed objects to become economically valueless. However when was the last time you purchased an object based on its worth to you? The fundamental principle of capitalism is that a product’s, or a service’s, value is set by what the market deems it to be worth. For example, is the iPhone sat on the desk to my right worth its monthly dent in my wallet? I know there are other phone’s that can achieve the limited functions I actually use better or quicker, or phone’s that can do slightly less for considerably cheaper or even a phone, such as the Google Pixel which can do ...