Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/06/12-years-a-slave-john-patterson

"I found myself oppressed by McQueen's film-making...I learned no more about the dynamics of slavery, its tendency to deprave both slave and master"

why is this still on the front page with a picture of a turkey?

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/10/noel-clarke-storage-24-lowest-grossing-us-film
• This article was amended on Friday 10 January 2014. The original piece failed to mention Storage 24's distribution pattern in the US, which plays into its box office take. This has been amended.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/jan/21/racist-chair-bjarne-melgaard-dasha-zhukova#_

"Why there's nothing racist about the 'racist chair'"

Not sure who this Jonathan Jones is but I'm pretty sure he's a shithead.

That's a possibility but which bits of the article led you to that conclusion? The bit about the "common touch" was the only bit which really made me wince (although I'm not sure I agree with the thrust of the article either).

i was just gonna quote the hilarious "common touch" bit, but let's start there and look at the rest of the article's smug dismissiveness about the politics of race

tell you what was edifying, seeing a bunch of men pompously declare "I AGREE WITH JONATHAN JONES" on twitter yesterday

http://www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl/JJones2.gif

Jones is usually pretty good. His blog pieces often seem dashed off and contrarian but he's one of the better accessible art writers around.

The writing here seems careless and there are plenty of better ways of suggesting that conceptual art shorn of context is open to misinterpretation but i'm not sure he's entirely wrong.

Well, he is showing a piece of conceptual work in the context its owner created for it! Which is UGH. A perfect visual representation of the problem black feminists have with White Feminism, accompanied by a whole bunch of white people explaining why it isn't racist for a billionaire's pretentious girlfriend to park her bony ass on a lame Allan Jones knock-off on MLK day. People with dodgy new money will always try to launder it in the art market, but this woman with her magazine and her fake ICA in Moscow and a mega-yacht moored off the Venice Biennale is beyond gross - and now everyone who doesn't follow contemporary art has just taken delivery of a heads-up about who this wretched person is.

Complex's take on it seems reasonable:

As a stand-alone work of art, the chair becomes a satire on art history. As a piece of furniture, it means something entirely different—something much more offensive.

It's difficult to say whether she's using it as furniture or whether it was just a terribly misguided prop in a photo shoot.

Aside from this incident, she's more adept as an art-world player than a lot of people would expect her to be, i think.

so it was ok until someone sat on it? 8)

it's the sitting that gets people angry, that's why it's called sat ire

^ needs work

new money vs old money fite

i think it works the other way too - that urinal wasn't art until people stopped pissing in it.

This is where the party ends
I cant stand here when I could be sitting
on your racist chair

I honestly don't understand how anyone can look at that picture and think "this image is in favor of racism". Everything about it screams satirical to me.

I do understand how someone can look at that picture and find it upsetting; I think that was the point.

That may well have been the point - a satire of racism, I don't know and tbh I doubt it. But the issue here is more Jones' explanation - that *this* piece is a "critique" of the misogyny of older piece - ok, but why does the artist need to use black women as a prop (instrumentalisation of bodies of WoC, etc) to make this point? And why does Jones, a white art bro, think it's ok? As NV says above, his approach is smug and dismissive.

oh I didn't read the Jones piece past the first few paragraphs, I decided life was too short

sorry, that's probably not helpful

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/jan/22/noel-gallager-hates-oasis-videos

"Is he trying to get to the CD player?"

this is off topic, but has anyone else seen the documentary about Allen Jones that included interviews with people who own one of his sculptures and have it on display in their homes?

so was that chair article mansplaining or whitesplaining?

The headline for the Jonathan Jones article in the print edition is 'A pastiche that begged to be misunderstood', which seems a better/more measured title than 'Why there's nothing racist about the 'racist chair'', is the online headline just there to be more click-baity?

though as said above Jones's article itself is not particularly measured or sensitive

I would not buy that chair to sit on.

She's sort of making the thing the artwork suggests come true - it seems to be saying 'We're such horrible people that we'd tie someone up and use them as a chair', or 'Somewhere, it is not unlikely that a chair like this would be for sale'. So actually using it as a chair, I mean

xpost Headlines online and print are almost always different. In print you can still have nuance, because the reader has the context of the whole page or article in front of them. Online headlines have to have all the key terms in, otherwise Google's alogorithms don't pick them up, which is why they all read so baldly. You could say that's clickbaity, but it's not actually trying to get to the reader so much as the search engine

I am just going to quote this particular review in the singles column, word for word:

Sheryl Crow - One (by Joe Bish). Sheryl Crow is the unequivocal queen of dad boners. If your old man is having trouble in the sack then just show him a picture of First Cut is the Deepest-era Crow and the blood will slowly march to his phallus like a stream of dutiful pallbearers on a busy Friday.

I especially want Dorian to read this. And to reflect that this is an actual review, which was printed in a national broadsheet, not the gutter press, not some fanzine, not the "would smash" threads of ILX, but a quality newspaper with national distribution, and presumably, the reviewer in question was paid to produce those words.

Now I want you to go back and read the comments about Ezra K and a few jibes about his eyelashes or his haircut or the cut of his casual slacks, and tell me, again, that the discussion between Alfred and I was problematic, or out of order, or even excessive, when compared to what is written up there above, in your own newspaper.

I mean, can you imagine someone reviewing the new Vampire Weekend single, saying "Ezra is the unequivocal king of mum boners. If your old lady is having trouble in the sack then just show her a picture of Vampire Weekend and the juices will start to flow until she's as lubed up and ready to rumble as a West Country holiday resort in flood season."

For real, that review is too stupid and too eye-rolly to get in any way upset over, but I just want to remind you the world that we live in, and what's problematic, and the environment in which mine and Alfred's comments take place.

Disclaimer: I'm friends with Joe irl. This is his schtick, he's a bratty 20yr old who takes the piss out of everything. It's a tossed-off sentence in a singles review...

Except it isn't. It is the entire culture in which women are judged (as artists, as musicians, as politicians) by their effect on male members.

if your "bratty piss-taking" is indistinguishable from the thing it's taking the piss out of, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Why does this dude get a free pass on it for "piss-taking" but Alfred and I equally making jokes and having fun gets out the pearl-clutchers of ILM?

I'm not pearl-clutching at this review, it's too fucking dumb to waste time on. But I do want to say that this is the environment and the context in which *my* remarks get problematised? Really?

amazing how bratty kidz just taking the piss are so often indistinguishable from sexist clichés that have been trotted out since time immemorial

lol xp

until she's as lubed up and ready to rumble as a West Country holiday resort in flood season

lolled a bit too hard at my desk tbh

I'd be FPd if I took that as a display name, wouldn't I? ;-)

did smirk, u shd tbh. start with 'as' for maximum effect

i think the consequences will be depressingly predictable

http://cdn.hitfix.com/photos/408221/vampire-weekend-holiday_article_story_main.jpg

can someone add the caption 'king of mum boners' to this pic of Ezra, thx

What happens on fridays?

OK, that’s it. The world doesn’t need any more “bratty 20yr olds who take the piss out of everything.” It needs proper writers who are capable of writing.

But I have to remind myself that this is the same paper which, over the last month, has run “thinkpieces” saying that Uk*p have a point and mass immigration does not, that Rachel Reeves cravenly copying Government policy on migrants is a refreshing addition to the debate, that it’s all right for male politicians to be “a bit creepy” (and that was the paper’s Chief Political Writer talking about the Rennard affair) and that old people are burdens on humanity who need to have their retirement toys taken away.

Also this is the paper which, despite their Christmas Eve letters page being entirely given over to angry readers threatening to take their business away unless the columnist who wrote the last article mentioned above was removed, continue to publish the columnist in question every Monday. What a great advertisement for young wannabe journalists; you want a column in the Guardian? Just break the law, lie to the police, get put in jail and have your old pals at the paper take you back when you come out. Why even bother with going through journalistic training when all the paper clearly wants is not good journalism but what Charlie Brooker correctly termed “yelpy clickbait”?

Then again, if you pay peanuts, you get bratty 20yr olds who take the piss out of everything.

I think it was just a pastiche that begged to be misunderstood, guys. Chill

I think "Proper writers" would be wasted on a review of Sheryl Crow - One.

I think broadsheet newspapers have a duty to inform, educate and entertain the highest common denominator of their readership rather than continually pandering to the lowest. Yes, it's elitist - but so is smugly assuming that your readers are so easily and stupidly pleased if you run nothing but hit-gathering clickbait.

xp Yeah obviously I don't like that review. I wasn't "problematising" your comments though. I made one comment, which was that Ezra's looks were being discussed in that thread more, and more negatively, than Warpaint's were. It's not like I was angry - someone else brought it up.

Now I want you to go back and read the comments about Ezra K and a few jibes about his eyelashes or his haircut or the cut of his casual slacks, and tell me, again, that the discussion between Alfred and I was problematic, or out of order, or even excessive, when compared to what is written up there above, in your own newspaper.

idk 2 wrongs don't make a right, the guardian is terrible but ilx doesn't need to sink to its level

nobody gets paid to post on ilx tbf

*keeps shtum about sponsorship deals*

I know this is getting off the point, but I would have thought Sheryl Crow was too young for 'someone your dad has the hots for' jokes, but then it occurred to me that if this guy is 20yrs old then All I Wanna Do came out within a year of his birth, and now I feel old

depends how old your dad is i suppose?

tbf i have no idea what specific quality one needs to become a queen of dad boners

The guest-writer-reviews-the-singles bit of The Guardian has been consistently terrible for years. I don't know whether it's down to the brevity of the reviews or a reflection on the declining importance of the single as a format but, more often than not, it's just a vehicle for lower-rung bloggers to throw out some lazy, unpleasant zings. Thankfully, the rest of the music section is different.

Not wishing to get into the meat of the complaint but if a good poster has outlined why they're uncomfortable with a particular line being taken in a thread, that's usually a decent reason to think twice - irrespective of how many times worse some clown who writes for Vice may be.