Weekend Reading
Writing worth reading - 24th/25th August 2024
Banksy, the guerrilla street artist loved by the market by Jan Dalley
“What really sets Banksy apart is his brilliant gamesmanship. He regularly devises highly inventive stunts: some are marketing gimmicks, such as his first London exhibition Turf War, which contained live farm animals brilliantly painted; others, such as placing a life-size figure of a Guantánamo Bay prisoner in Disneyland, are political protest. Many are designed to lampoon the idiocies of the art market and the art-going public. He has hung works of his own inside the world’s great museums: some were not noticed for days. In New York in 2014, when his announcement that he would make a painting a day for a whole month launched a frenzied treasure hunt among hundreds of eager New Yorkers, a shabby figure in an outdoor booth beside Central Park was selling what were actually original Banksy paintings for $60 each. There were very few takers….”
American Vulcan by Jeremy Stern
“It took me several hours of trailing Luckey—hours filled with air and sea drones, autonomous air vehicles, surveillance and electronic warfare systems currently deployed in Ukraine, a 1966 Mark V Disney Autopia, a 1,600-pound, 670-horsepower, augmented reality headset-operated Autozam AZ-1, which is wrapped in an anime decal of the character LLENN (“In the real world she is very, very tall and nobody thinks she’s cute,” he explained, “so she spends all her time in virtual reality where she can play as a very cute small girl, because that’s what she in her heart wants to be”)—to understand that my monomania for the exposed toilet was just the normal person’s relief at the sight of something ordinary in the fulminating life-world of Palmer Luckey. Aside from having a family and liking Taco Bell, toilet-use might be the only other thing we have in common.…”
The Right Kind of Stubborn by Paul Graham
“That was my initial theory, but on examination it doesn't hold up. If being obstinate were simply a consequence of being in over one's head, you could make persistent people become obstinate by making them solve harder problems. But that's not what happens. If you handed the Collisons an extremely hard problem to solve, they wouldn't become obstinate. If anything they'd become less obstinate. They'd know they had to be open to anything.…”
Upcoming meals with 9others
Thursday 19th September — Manchester — details and signup here.
Wednesday 25 September — London — details and signup here.
Wednesday 30 October — London — details and signup here