in Culture Digest | 02 MAR 18

Weekend Reading List: Does Blockchain Change How We Value Digital Art?

What to read this weekend: in praise of the negative review, food and authenticity, and the desires of the Tory Brexiteers

in Culture Digest | 02 MAR 18

Sarah Meyohas, BITCHCOIN, 2015. Courtesy: the artist

  • Enforcing intellectual property with blockchain technology is merely a return to ideas of art as an asset – but does the technology also contain the potential for institutional critique? Rob Arcand on digital art on the blockchain.
     
  • Are book reviewers these days merely ‘copywriters whose task it is to arrange the book in a bouquet of Wikipedia-blooming literary references’? Rafia Zakaria appeals for the revival of the negative review.
     
  • ‘Who is more at fault for the failure of the Democratic Party to anticipate – let alone manage – the stagnation of the white male working class over the last four decades? Is it Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler – or Lawrence Summers?’ Samuel Moyn takes a critical look at political scientist and commentator Mark Lilla.
     
  • Chef David Chang’s new Netflix food show Ugly Delicious is really an interrogation of notions of authenticity, writes Helen Rosner.
     
  • Don’t miss Olivia Laing on ageing bodies, sexuality and Francis Bacon.
     
  • ‘Wonder is a woman whose brush travels from palette to painting despite every attempt to elbow her from the easel.’ Sarah McColl writes on Jo Hopper.
     
  • Tom Overton pays tribute to the impact, intelligence and convictions of the writer and translator Anya Berger (1923-2018).
     
  • ‘When historians examine Britain’s departure from the European Union, one of the things that will puzzle them is the behaviour of the Conservative Party.’ Will Davies on what the Tory Brexiteers want.
     
  • And finally, Gerry Canavan asks whether the restrictions of comic-book narratives and the demands of ‘franchise time’ will prove fatal to the radical, Afrofuturist politics of Black Panther.
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