Japanese pop star shaves head in apology – for night with boyfriend

As pop star misdemeanours go, Minami Minegishi's was tame in the extreme – breaking her group's strict dating ban to spend a night with her boyfriend.

Yet hours after a magazine published photographs of her leaving his home last month, Minegishi, a member of the wildly popular girl band AKB48, went on to YouTube to issue a tearful apology.

"As a senior member of the group, it is my responsibility to be a role model for younger members," she said, before ending the four-minute mea culpa with a deep, lingering bow.

The most striking thing about her apology, however, was her appearance. She had shaved her head, a traditional act of contrition inJapan, but perhaps a step too far for a 20-year-old woman whose "crime" was to have found herself a boyfriend – 19-year-old Alan Shirahama, a dancer in a boyband.

Minegishi explained she had decided to cut off her long hair immediately after seeing her photograph, her face hidden behind a surgical mask and a baseball cap, in the weekly tabloid Shukan Bunshun on Thursday.

Her dramatic gesture underlined the strict rules to which Japan's young pop stars must adhere to project an image of unimpeachable morals.

In the YouTube video, which has been viewed more than 3m times, Minegishi said the assignation has been "thoughtless and immature".

"If it is possible, I wish from the bottom of my heart to stay in the band," she said. "Everything I did is entirely my fault. I am so sorry.

"I don't believe just doing this means I can be forgiven for what I did, but the first thing I thought was that I don't want to quit AKB48."

AKB48's management agency demoted her to "trainee level" starting on Friday, according to the band's official blog.

Full story here

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

Guardian Readers recommend: songs about teenagers – results

Youth is wasted on the young, as jealous old George Bernard Shaw once said. But that didn't seem true of the subjects of many songs you suggested last week. Anyway, with grownups hurling so many brickbats at them, who can blame teenagers for throwing the odd strop?

"It's only teenage wasteland." So sang the Who on Baba O'Riley. Though as RR commenter treefrogdemon says, "Why is it a teenage wasteland? Dunno." But incoherence is part of the teenager's lot, and anyone who's been 15 will feel the uncontained rage in the song, happily rescued from Pete Townshend's abandoned concept album Lifehouse (abandoned because only Townshend understood the concept).

Rock'n'roll began life as music for teenagers, and progenitor Eddie Cochran knew his audience. Teenage Heaven consists of a list of demands that will strike a chord with all disaffected teens: "I want to stay up all night … Just give me some time on my hands/ I want to make my own private plans."

Punk, like rock'n'roll, was to a large extent teenagers making music for teenagers. Hence Teenage Treats by the Wasps, east London youths whose musical career was on the skids before they were old enough to vote.

You've got to hand it to Atari Teenage Riot, whose eponymous debut single gleefully imbued the thrills of rave with the snottiest punk attitude. Rave plays a role too in the Killers' When You Were Young: it's half stadium rock anthem, with a Bruce Springsteen-esque nostalgia for mythical youth, and half house euphoria. And Dire Straits' Romeo and Juliet may be self-consciously "classic", but recasts the age-old tale of star-crossed teen lovers to the rock era in a way even Springsteen must have envied.

The Beach Boys' hymn to teenage solitude, In My Room, was an early attempt by Brian Wilson to create music he described as "teenage symphonies to God". The Beach Boys also recorded So Young, a cover of a 1958 hit by doowoppers the Students. The Ronettes' version is right up there, Ronnie Spector's voice full of not-quite-innocent heartbreak, Phil Spector's production all heavenly strings and choirs of angels.

The Teenagers' F*ck Nicole ("so teenage, so French" as RR regular Japanther says) is full of surprises: backwards verses, superfluous swearing and a Gallic Lou Reed detailing an adolescent career off the rails. But hang on. Japanese popstrels Scandal were nominated by Hoshino Sakura, who says Beauteen's about "being a teenager, pretty and love … the perfect antidote to all the teenage angst from the Smiths!"

No Smiths in this week's playist, but the Flamin' Groovies are in garage rock mode on Teenage Head, focusing on sexual frustration and aggression. First line: "I'm a monster!" And there's more cartoon parent-worrying from the Ramones in Teenage Lobotomy: "Now I guess I'll have to tell 'em/ that I got no cerebellum." A contender, surely, for the best lyric ever. And I loved RR commenter llamalpaca's description of adolescence as portrayed in the Regents' skinny-tie classic 7-Teen: "Knocking on the door of adulthood but not getting in."

Here's the playlist:

Baba O'Riley – The Who

Teenage Heaven – Eddie Cochran

Teenage Treats – The Wasps

ATR – Atari Teenage Riot

When You Were Young (Lindbergh Palace remix) – The Killers

Romeo and Juliet – Dire Straits

In My Room – The Beach Boys

So Young – The Ronettes

F*ck Nicole – The Teenagers

Beauteen – Scandal

Teenage Head – Flamin' Groovies

Teenage Lobotomy – Ramones

7-Teen – The Regents

* Listen to these songs on a YouTube playlist

* Read all the readers' recommendations on last week's blog, from which the songs above are selected

* Here's a Spotify playlist containing readers' recommendations on this theme

• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 April 2012

Facebook's 'dark side': study finds link to socially aggressive narcissism

Researchers have established a direct link between the number of friends you have on Facebook and the degree to which you are a "socially disruptive" narcissist, confirming the conclusions of many social media sceptics.

People who score highly on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory questionnaire had more friends on Facebook, tagged themselves more often and updated their newsfeeds more regularly.

The research comes amid increasing evidence that young people are becoming increasingly narcissistic, and obsessed with self-image and shallow friendships.

The latest study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, also found that narcissists responded more aggressively to derogatory comments made about them on the social networking site's public walls and changed their profile pictures more often.

A number of previous studies have linked narcissism with Facebook use, but this is some of the first evidence of a direct relationship between Facebook friends and the most "toxic" elements of narcissistic personality disorder.

Full article: guardian.co.uk, 17 March 2012 

Andy Warhol's legacy lives on in the factory of fame

15 minutes of fame? The artist whose radical ideas galvanised the 1960s art world continues to dominate the market and permeate popular culture – 25 years after his death.


On 22 February 1987, Andy Warhol died unexpectedly in a New York hospital after a routine operation on his gallbladder. Yet 25 years on, the artist described by Truman Capote, quoting Wilde, as "a sphinx without a secret" has never gone away. Not only does Warhol dominate the art market, with his work accounting for one-sixth of contemporary art sales, his influence permeates both high art and popular culture.

Warhol's work is rarely out of circulation in galleries. A show at the De La Warr Pavilion in east Sussex closes this week, but another, of his portfolio prints, starts at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London this summer. The artists he influenced are even more visible. Next month, artist Gillian Wearing, who once photographed herself dressed as Warhol, will show a retrospective of her work at the Whitechapel, while Jeremy Deller, who hung out at Warhol's studio, the Factory, in the summer of 1986, is just about to launch a retrospective at London's Hayward.Yet it is the sheer range of Warhol's work which has made his influence all-pervasive. As Wearing puts it: "Warhol left his mark in many more ways than his actual work". As well as the paintings, and the films he made of acolytes of the Factory sleeping, taking drugs or, in the case of the self-explanatory Blow Job, receiving oral sex, Warhol created a celebrity magazine, Interview; produced the Velvet Underground's first album; wrote (or dictated) voluminous diaries, and was impresario and mentor to a host of "superstars" – followers who came to find fame, or soak up the atmosphere, and became the subjects of his work.
Read more @ The Guardian

Being PC in this day and age

Jeremy Clarkson, Ricky Gervais and Andy Gray have all paid the price for causing offence. But are their comments any different from the merciless banter heard on the street every day?

In 2011, political correctness finally went mad. Really mad. It got angry with Ricky Gervais for using the word "mong"; it shouted at Jeremy Clarkson for saying that strikers should be shot; it had Andy Gray and Richard Keys sacked from Sky for being sexist about female match officials; it forced Ofcom to censure Frankie Boyle for his jokes about Jordan's disabled son. Maybe mad is the wrong word. PC got hardcore.

Berating people for revealing private prejudices in public, for picking on someone less than their own size, for making out-of-order gags… PC became so central to the nation's conversation with itself that I started collecting articles. Such as: "White officers sue Met for 'racism'" (they were charged, then cleared of race-related offences, and sued the Met for compensation). Lots of pieces on how Christianity is under threat from PC, or whether a comedian's joke is "bad taste". Blogs and counter blogs about how women are represented in computer games, whether on-pitch slagging between football players should be legally monitored. Many articles linked the BBC with political correctness – the furore about the Beeb proposing to stop the use of BC and AD (overly PC); the fuss about the lack of females on the shortlist for Sports Personality of the Year (not PC enough).

Read the full Guardian article here.

Mystery Chinese blogger scores a hit with Cultural Revolution novel

Under The Hawthorn Tree has already sold more than a million copies in China alone.

A novel by an anonymous Chinese author living in America, which started life as a blog, has become a worldwide publishing sensation. It has been snapped up by publishers in 15 countries who have been impressed by the fact that it has sold more than a million copies in China and inspired a film by an Oscar-winning Chinese director. Some publishers even bought it before reading a translation. Yet none of the publishers, translators or editors knows the author's identity.

Under the Hawthorn Tree, a tragic love story set during the Cultural Revolution, is written under the pen name of Ai Mi. All that is known about the author is that she leads a reclusive life in Florida, having gone there to study. She is thought to be in her fifties or sixties, if only because her insight into the Cultural Revolution suggests someone who experienced first hand the political and social persecution of Mao Zedong's last decade. She tells her readers that it was inspired by a true story. Her central character – a young woman from a "politically questionable family" who falls in love with the son of a general – is based on a real person with names and places disguised.

The film version, directed by Zhang Yimou, the director of 'House of Flying Daggers', will be released in Britain at a later date.

Read the full article here.

Simon Armitage: 'poetry is a form of dissent'

Poet and novelist Simon Armitage has been writing about Britain for decades now. In the latest in The Guardians National Conversations series of interviews, Armitage talks to John Harris about the obstinate nature of poetry and the culture of violence in Britain that he believes precipitated the UK riots.

Overzealous cleaner ruins £690,000 artwork that she thought was dirty

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 November 2011

An overzealous cleaner in Germany has ruined a piece of modern art worth £690,000 after mistaking it for an eyesore that needed a good scrub.

The sculpture by the German artist Martin Kippenberger, widely regarded as one of the most talented artists of his generation until his death in 1997, had been on loan to the Ostwall Museum in Dortmund when it fell prey to the cleaner's scouring pad.

The work, called When It Starts Dripping From the Ceiling (Wenn's anfängt durch die Decke zu tropfen), comprised a rubber trough placed underneath a rickety wooden tower made from slats. Inside the trough, Kippenberger had spread a layer of paint representing dried rainwater. He thought it was art: the cleaner saw it as a challenge, and set about making the bucket look like new.

A spokeswoman for the museum told German media that the female cleaner "removed the patina from the four walls of the trough".

"It is now impossible to return it to its original state," she said, adding that it had been on loan to the museum from a private collector and was valued by insurers at €800,000 (£690,000).

She said that cleaning crews had been told to keep 20cm (8in) away from artworks, but it was unclear if the woman – who worked for a company to which cleaning had been outsourced – had received the memo.

If Kippenberger is now turning in his grave, he may find solace in the fact that he is not the only artist to have his works ruined by cleaners. In 1986, a "grease stain" by Joseph Beuys valued at about €400,000 was mopped away at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf.

At least the artwork didn't end up in a skip. In 2004, a cleaner at Tate Britain in London threw away part of a work by another German artist, Gustav Metzger, after mistaking it for rubbish. The cleaner failed to realise that a plastic bag containing discarded paper and cardboard was an integral part of Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art, and not just some litter. The bag was later recovered, but it was too damaged to display, so Metzger replaced it with another bag.

Germans are not the only victims. In 2001, Damien Hirst lost a pile of beer bottles, ashtrays and coffee cups, meant to represent the life of an artist, when a caretaker at the Eyestorm Gallery in London cleared it away.

Lauren Laverne: 'I take a no-brow approach to culture'

Indie girl turned cultural bigshot Lauren Laverne talks to John Harris in the latest of his National Conversations series of interviews. In a wide-ranging and candid conversation, they discuss sexism on TV, the break-up of her band Kenickie, nostalgia, and her once calling the Spice Girls 'Tory scum'.

Back in her native north-east, Lauren Laverne's father's an academic and her mother's a Labour councillor. While still in her teens, she moved south to launch her band Kenickie at the tail-end of the Britpop era.

When Kenickie fizzled out, she deftly moved into television presenting, and then writing. She's now got her own radio show on BBC 6Music; she's the face of the BBC's Glastonbury coverage; she's a published novelist; she has a column in Grazia magazine; as well as two small children.

In a wide-ranging and candid conversation, John and Lauren unpick no end of issues: sexism on TV, whether radio is also one big boys' club, what to do when you realise your pop career is over, whether or not you should go public with your politics, and much, much more.

Youth groups in the UK: 'We're about really doing it'

Where do artists first discover they're artists? In school, almost always – stumbling across the instrument they end up playing like a virtuoso, picking up the paintbrush that will eventually lead them to the Turner prize. But government cuts and curriculum changes have placed a question mark over arts in schools. Creative Partnerships, a scheme that saw musicians, actors and artists visit 2,500 schools every year, has been scrapped. And last December, the coalition announced that schools were to be assessed on subjects collectively known as "the English baccalaureate". This doesn't include music, art or drama.

So, if not in school, where will tomorrow's musicians, actors, dancers, directors and artists learn their craft? Step forward extracurricular arts groups. Three – the National Youth Choir, the National Youth Orchestra, and the National Youth Theatre – have been training young talent for decades. How do they do it? Who attends? And what do they get out of spending their holidays immersed in the arts? The Guardian's Laura Barnett spent a day with each to find out.

Read her observations here.

A worrying gulf

What struck me most about these youth groups? Two things: the enthusiasm of the teachers and the joy of the kids – joy in their subjects, joy in meeting others who feel the same way. It is especially stirring to see this at a time when so much is being said about the disaffection of the "lost generation". And these aren't stage-school brats. While private-school pupils still dominate, all three groups (especially NYT) are making a real effort to attract a wider range. What's also clear is that there is a gulf between arts opportunities at the average state school and those at an independent school like Shrewsbury, with its music wing stuffed with instruments. If that gulf continues to grow, we could see fewer state-school pupils even thinking of applying for groups like these. And that's a sad and worrying thought.

Blur '13': Songs That Saved My Life

Guardian writers are picking their favourite albums. Here, Miranda Sawyer relates how Blur's '13' helped her through the breakdown of a relationship.

"It pin-points that awful desperation in trying be happy when you're not, that desire to be out of the house and out of your mind when you're all messed up. And it shows that, if you really work, beauty can come out of chaos. It aims high – musically and emotionally – and, for me, it's an inspiration." Miranda Sawyer

Beyoncé v De Keersmaeker: can you copyright a dance move?

Works of art often reference other works of art, so is the Belgian choreographer right to accuse the R&B star of plagiarism in her new music video?

Initially, De Keersmaeker was pretty acid about the whole thing, saying that she'd seen local school kids perform her work better, and expressing amazement at the Beyoncé team's effrontery. "I'm not mad, but this is plagiarism. This is stealing," she told Studio Brussel. And up to a point you have to sympathise with her; the notion of the artist ripped off by the corporate machine is not an edifying one. Petty's attitude is certainly high-handed. "I brought Beyoncé a number of references and we picked some out together. Most were German modern-dance references, believe it or not," she told MTV, possibly under the impression that she was referencing the work of the late Pina Bausch, rather than that of the Belgian (and very much alive) De Keersmaeker.

Read more here.

And she may well be right. Watch Beyoncé's new Countdown video, directed by Adria Petty , and watch Thierry De Mey's 1997 film Rosas Danst Rosas (named after De Keersmaeker's company) and you can see remarkably similar moves in the two works. They're a tiny part of the whole, but they're there.

'Exit Through the Gift Shop' Reviews

Read these reviews of the Banksy film from The Guardian and Telegraph.

Street Art at The Tate

Here are two articles written at the time of Tate Modern's Street Art exhibition in 2008. Francesca Gavin asks if there is an element of hypocrisy behind our attitudes. Alice Fisher comments on how an anti-establishment movement has taken over The Tate.

More Graffitti Wars

Another Banksy piece in Bristol has been defaced. This article from the Guardian tells the continuing story of 'war' between the followers of Banksy and King Robbo.

TV review: Fry's Planet Word

Watch Fry's Planet Word (BBC2, Sunday) an examination of language and its evolution which can support your knowledge of NVC and other aspects of Communication & Culture. For instance it's interesting that when Fry is talking to a deaf German woman, he slows down slightly, spells it out, adopts the tiniest hint of an accent in that way we do with people who have a different first language, meeting them halfway. But he's talking to her though an interpreter, who's American! Read a review of this current programme on The Guardian site here or go to BBCiplayer to see last Sundays' show.

Warhol's images of women

In this article, Jonathan Jones argues that, far from being commercially driven and intellectually shallow, Andy Warhol's images of women are the result of his life long religious belief.

Is our culture too much in thrall to the glories of the past?

Are our most popular films, books and TV shows too entrenched in nostalgia? Read Robert McCrum and Boyd Hilton debate the state of British culture in The Guardian here.

Tattoos - are they art?

To coincide with The London Tattoo Convention being held this weekend, this article in the Guardian discusses why having a tattoo has become mainstream. Jonathan Jones asks if it reflects our need to escape into a fantasy world.