The BBC's Live Sites 2012 program is set to roll out 60 big screens in urban centres around the UK by 2012. Considering the vague agenda currently guiding their use, Richard Wright asks whether these big screens will ever open themselves to creative use or simply remain giant TVs controlled by giants
 

The problem with critiques of curatorship is that they usually end up reinforcing the central importance of the curator. Alberto Duman contemplates a recent addition to the field and suggests ways to break the cycle of self-affirmation

The Few and the Many

Culture as the social outcome of tensions between the few and the many obviously has a firm political component. This component has various meanings; one of them is the ability to generate change. This changing or generating component can be misused as a repressing tool in the hands of power, whether this power is applied to the benefits or the destruction of society. Not any human alien order is able to protect or to govern individual independence; this is in strong contrast with the obligations and promises contemporary governments and industries are demanding from 'their' citizens and employees.

A magnificent destruction of creative industries hype by someone who has been on the money about this for 10 years. [It's so good, I can't help but write a micro-review.]

The productivist vein running through his analysis is problematic (who wants a truly productive capitalism instead of a decadent one?) but don't let it put you off, the basic economic arguments are rock solid. Briefly: industry contracts, 'creative' sector, parasitic on finance, in turn parasitic on the world's industrial producers, expands, but not for long, indeed it seems already to have reversed... exploitation overseas and at home are the secrets of the creative economy, but it is not the exploitation of creatives and the financial mediators whom they serve.

With £112.5 million of Arts Council England’s Lottery share now earmarked to help pay for the Olympics overspend, it’s the arts sector, not just the athletes, who’ll be feeling the burn. James Heartfield surveys the results of New Labour’s ten year arts funding spree and wonders, should we care if it’s over? And will James get paid if it is?

The diversion of funds from Arts Council England to the Olympics has provoked an elitist championing of art over sport when, argues Dave Beech, the point is to refuse such a choice

The idea of diverting state funds away from art to a spectacle of sport sounds like a fantastic futurist demand. Demolish museums! Worship the beauty of speed! It still reads as a refreshing inversion of what Bourdieu called ‘pleasure devoid of pleasure’ – the aesthetic love of art.