Donald Jenkins

Formalism in art in no way implies conservatism. In fact, quite the reverse: only by freeing the beholder to like or dislike a work of art on its aesthetic merits alone can he escape the dictates of fashion or, indeed, the dictatorship of censorship or of official art. My innate eclecticism attracts me to abstract art just as much, if not more, as it does to strictly figurative work. Yet I resent attempts by anyone, whether so-called structuralists, art critics or, more likely, society bores, to imprison the works of Picasso, Matisse or Paul Klee in a model conjured up by them for reasons that often have nothing to do either with the artist’s motives or in the reasons for which people enjoy seeing them.

Structuralism, in particular, by implying that the mental processes and social preconceptions an individual brings to art are more important than its so-called “essential” qualities, is a reason that I have always found incomprehensible at best and, at worst, that I have resented. It strikes me, without wanting to provoke anyone, that this as just as sure a road to artistic serfdom as its distant cousin, centralized planning, is a path to economic serfdom.

Social networking, which was in its infancy when I started using it in 2006, has matured. Three years ago, a vast number of start-ups were competing in the field, and few people other than geeks actually bothered to use them. Today the sector is much more concentrated, meaning it makes sense not to use every social network in existence. I believe social networks have now consolidated sufficiently that—outside of this blog, of course— I mainly rely on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr for my web presence.

Facebook doesn’t seem to understand, though, what makes it special—the fact it is the only mainstream social network where you can share content with friends that you don’t necessarily want to share with everyone. This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop using it if the constraints on my privacy and the new closed-shop type approach—both of which, in my opinion, go against Facebook’s own interests by reducing its usefulness, go no further. But now that the consolidation of the social networking sector is finally upon us, I hope the convenience it has brought us isn’t going to be wrecked by misunderstanding of privacy issues and a step back into an oligopolistic closed-shop system.

I woke up on January 1 with my eyes blinking in the Parisian sunlight and the pain from the acute calcific tendinitis in my right shoulder permeating all the way down to my hand and up to the nape of my neck.
This inexplicable ailment had suddenly appeared in the early hours of New Year’s eve [...]