'Dark Knight Rises' - Graffiti Mural

The video was shot and edited by the London Vandal. The art work, by Graffiti Life artists, took four hours to complete and was on a 20ft X 9ft wall located in East London.

Generation of children could lose vital cultural skills, says Nicholas Serota

An entire generation of children could lose the cultural skills both they and the UK need if the government goes ahead with its English Baccalaureate plans without the arts as a core subject, the Tate director,Nicholas Serota, said on Thursday.

Serota used the launch of his organisation's annual report to urge ministers to rethink their plans for the EBacc certificates, which will replace GCSEs.

He said the arts should be a fourth "R" alongside reading, writing and arithmetic. "The proposals do not provide for the arts as being one of the core subjects and the way in which the proposals have been formulated makes it very clear that art, design, music, drama and dance will be pushed to the margin with very little time in the curriculum for those subjects.

"We regard cultural learning as being more important than ever and we think that the arts have a primary role to play in a world that is dependent on literacy of all kinds, including visual."

Serota said it was a more important matter than even the debate about public cuts to arts spending because it affected every child in the country and "it is about the kind of society that we want to have in 20 years' time".

He added: "There is a real risk that fewer and fewer schools will provide learning opportunities in the arts. The UK's leading edge in creativity may be lost. We cannot deprive an entire generation of children of the cultural skills that they will need."

Serota is the latest of many to express concern at the proposals as they stand. Among the many voices Deborah Annetts, the chief executive of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, said: "It is as if the Olympics never happened. Design – gone, technology – gone, music – gone. This shortsighted, wholesale attack on secondary music education will emasculate not only our world class music education system but also our entire creative economy."

Earlier this year Darren Henley published a well received report into cultural learning after which the government said it would publish a national plan by early autumn.

That plan is still awaited. Serota said: "Everyone recognises there have been many things on the plate of the DCMS [Department for Culture, Media and Sport] over the summer of the Olympics, but we earnestly hope that the national plan will be published before Christmas."

Tate's annual report highlighted some of its 516 acquisitions to the collection over the past year. They include works gifted by artists, such as Martin Creed giving a neon work with the words "DON'T WORRY", and works purchased, such as nearly 10 cubic metres of Ai Weiwei's sunflower seeds and 58 photographs by Lewis Baltz, which make up a series called San Quentin Point 1982.

The chairman of trustees, Lord Browne, said Tate now got the majority of its funding, 61%, from private and not public sources. "Over the past five years Tate has increased its self-generated income by 15%, compared to the 5% increase in grant-in-aid."

It was also announced that it has raised three-quarters of the capital costs for its ongoing £215m extension while all the money was raised for the £45m Tate Britain redevelopment that will, among other things, allow the first floor to be opened to the public for the first time since 1928.

Guardian.co.uk

RETROMANIA: Pop Culture's Addiction To Its Own Past By Simon Reynolds

Dummy magazine's "The 10 Best Modern Music Books": #1. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction To Its Own Past "There’s no doubting technology’s ability to reproduce and discover art and artists of the past has had an impact on the retrogressive eye of contemporary culture and music. Whether you agree with his polemical tract, Simon Reynolds’s era-defining book is as essential as it gets."

"The best book I read recently is Retromania by Simon Reynolds. It's fantastic. Reading Simon Reynolds is like getting in a warm bath"--Jason Schwartzman, GQ Style

Visit Simon Reynolds Blog

http://retromaniabysimonreynolds.blogspot.co.uk/

Google Art Project Expands, Bringing 30,000 Works of Art from 151 Museums to the Web

Last February, Google launched Art Project, which lets users take a virtual tour of 1,000 works of art from 17 great museums — from the MoMA and Met in New York City, to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, to the Van Gogh Museum and Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Now comes news that Art Project has greatly expanded its coverage, giving users access to 30,000 high-resolution artworks appearing in 151 museums across 40 countries. The virtual tour includes paintings but also sculpture, street art and photographs. And you can now explore collections (see all) from the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, the Museu De Arte Moderna De São Paulo in Brazil, and the Tokyo National Museum.

This is all part of Google’s effort to bring cultural artifacts to the broadest possible audience. Just last week, Googleplex helped launch the Nelson Mandela Digital Archive and, before that, a high resolution version of The Dead Sea Scrolls.

via Google Blog

Peter Blake's Cultural Icons

Sir Peter Blake, best known as the 'godfather' of British Pop Art and creator of the cover for the Beatles' Sgt Pepper Album, is celebrating his 80th birthday this year. He has been asked to recreate his most famous work, but this time fill it with British cultural figures that he most admires. People included are J.K. Rowling, Noel Gallagher, Grayson Perry, Amy Winehouse, Danny Boyle and David Attenborough. Paul McCartney and his daughter Stella are also there.
The new version has been created for a special birthday celebration of Blake's life at the Vintage Festival hosted by Wayne Hemmingway at Boughton House, Northamptonshire, in July. Go to their website to read more and see the full list of people included. The original artwork is pictured below.

Off Book: Book Art

Books are in a conflicted state. Should they still exist in a digital era? Will they all be replaced by Kindles and Nooks? These questions dominate the discussion of books in our time. A select group of artists, who use books as their medium, engage this discussion from another angle. From pop culture pop-ups, to surreal sculptural stories, to reformations of antique sacred texts, these creators re-envision what the experience of a book can be. At times playful, and other times profound, this episode explores the boundaries of one of the most important human creations.