A couple of quick points about the elections: while I’m disappointed by the AV result (made inevitable by a campaign run by liberal leftists who took the ‘progressive majority’ as axiomatic and spoke only to other liberal leftists who were going to vote for it anyway), I am pleased about three things in particular. First: the overdue collapse of the arrogant, cynical Tammany Hall machine that was the Scottish Labour Party. Second: the failure of George Galloway to get elected (which has gone a long way towards restoring my faith in my home town). Third: the collapse, even greater than the Lib Dems’, of the BNP in English local authorities. Would it be opportunistic to suggest this is a welcome result of Cameron’s more populist stance on immigration and multiculturalism?
Naturally, if perhaps hypocritically, I will celebrate all of the above by stocking up on cheap booze while I still can. That is one issue on which I hope moral conservatism will eventually trump big business conservatism.
I turn rather awkwardly to an unrelated issue which sort of fits that description: graffiti and its role in contemporary art. Before I do so, have a read of these two pieces in City Journal which skewer a cruel form of decadence very eloquently.
The articles remind me of Orwell’s piece pondering why ‘if you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back’. The difference is that rich people can throw whatever expensive crap they want at each other, but this new form of ‘art’ is an obviously hypocritical celebration of a destructive selfishness that exclusively harms the non-rich.
I have to confess to being slightly pleased that the Greens’ Martha Wardrop failed to get herself elected to the Scottish Parliament: purely because, as a councillor (see blogs passim on why multi-member single transferable voting is so great) she has been helpful and responsive in pestering the Council to clean up our own various neighbourhood works of low art, as well as other quotidia like litter.
What is it about graffiti that annoys me? Perhaps the same things that make decadent people enjoy it: that it is a rejection of the rule of law. A moment’s thought — and clearly the graffiti artists and their novelty-seeking propagandists have wasted very few moments on thinking — shows why this is a bad thing. Leave aside the debate over the broken windows theory, and the practical problems of having street signs and public information notices covered in writing or paint. The graffitist explicitly says: I don’t care about your private property, therefore I don’t care about your economic wellbeing. From this it seems logical to infer that he is also saying, more subtly: I don’t care about your physical wellbeing, your safety or your health either. In sum, the graffiti artist says: I don’t care about other people.
I make one or two exceptions for warranted and clever political statements: the enormous ‘ONE NATION UNDER CCTV’ painted on the side of a tall building in central London was impressive; but for every one example like this (and for every community mural, which are a far better use of young people’s artistic talent and of which there are several good examples, like the one beside Kelvinbridge Underground) there are a million annoying and disfiguring tags and scrawls.
I say private property, but more often than not the vandalism targets public property (usually postboxes, bins, etc) and has to be cleaned up at public expense, if it is at all. Am I autistically out-of-touch, or do other people find it as incredible as I do that it needs to be explained to otherwise intelligent and educated people — the mainstream of the contemporary art world — why destruction of both public space and private property, and a general disrespect towards other people, and especially towards people in more deprived communities, is bad?
Perhaps the best response — an explicitly petty-bourgeois Marxist one — to the barbaric-decadent underclass-overclass axis, buggering those of us in between who still aspire to something better, would be to graffiti-bomb the museum, or the homes of its directors, and see how they like it. I think it would be legitimate, in the spirit and tradition of situationist direct action against powerful elites, to call such an action a subversive work of art in itself.
It’s tempting to blame the excuse-making, poverty-blaming, bed-wetting liberal left for this, or perhaps that section of the left (these days best represented by Laurie Penny, who may or may not be a rightwing satirist) that romanticises violence and disorder on the streets (the right generally only romanticise violence in or against other countries). But I suspect the egoism, and denial of delayed gratification, inherent in consumerism also have quite a lot to do with it. The confluence of the two, I suggest, is at the heart of our modern anomie; hence my sympathy for the emerging Blue Labour school of thought that addresses both.
If the new SNP majority government can give minor offenders (eg those who do graffiti) community sentences that actually involve their removing this damage, that will probably be a better bet than sending them to prison. Whether these community sentences actually do that, or become like ASBOs a laughable and easily ignored stunt, remains to be seen.
Finally, you may have noticed a while ago that, while Brown presented Obama with “an ornamental pen holder made from the timbers of the Victorian anti-slave ship HMS Gannet” (and got a set of region 1 DVDs in return!), Cameron, when it was his turn, gave Obama “a painting by a graffiti artist with three convictions for criminal damage”. This suggests to me, unfortunately, that our prime minister has rather more in common with the curators of the LA Museum of Contemporary Art than with most of the rest of us.
In my (not very salubrious) area in Cardiff there’s a large network of back alleys that people use to get around the one way system. There’s 2 lanes just round the corner where a few large walls have been given over as a sort of graffiti armistice, and I actually quite like it. There’s usually something new appearing there every couple of weeks, ranging from political stuff to cartoons, artistic portraits and some really strange things . I’ve noticed that the rest of the lanes are generally not graffitied any more (there is some obviously ancient stuff still around). I once walked down the alley past a group of hooded youths in the process of painting. Instead of fleeing or harassing me, they clocked me watching them and asked if I liked it. As it says at the top of the wall in an illegible scrawl, “For the good of the community!”
(Here’s an example: http://nerveart.com/wp-content/gallery/graffiti/eye_goblin_web.png)
That sounds a pretty sensible way of dealing with it. Whoever did that picture obviously has some talent; does it minimise or localise those who do little more than scrawl their names though? If so it’s perhaps not a bad idea.
Speaking of weird graffiti, the painting pictured in this story made me laugh – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13316627 – judging from the size of the building it must have taken hours to complete. Do you reckon the writing on the left is the last part of something derogatory about the Lib Dems?
Attempting to use a different log-in to answer the question you posed on Lallands_Peat_Worrier:
The genesis of the current system for release of prisoners is found in the Prisoners and Criminal Proceedings (Scotland) Act 1993, introduced by then Conservative S of S for S Michael Forsyth to give effect to the recommendations of the Kincraig Committee. If you can access the Current Law Statutes annotated version, the introduction br Dr J J McManus sets out the thinking behind the Act, which was partly anticipatory of the growing case law that the imposition of additional days of lost remission by prison governors without a formal court hearing could not stand.
Under the 1993 system, those serving less than four years are released at the halfway stage, subject to the proviso that in the event of their committing a further imprisonable offence before the expiry of the full sentence, it is open to the court to order them to serve the unexpired portion of the previous sentence by virtue of Section 16.
Long-term prisoners serving four years and more (and since June 2005 sex offenders seerving over six months) are released subject to licence conditions, failure to comply with which may, and increasingly often does, result in revocation of licence and a return to custody in terms of Section 17; it is not at all rare for prisoners still to be in jail until the last calendar day of their sentence. The thinking here is based upon decades of research that shows that those least likely to reoffend are those with secure accommodation, employment and family support; thus, the more supervision and support is available to those who need it, the more likely it is that they will not revert to past habits.
Every government since the early 20th century has supported some form of conditional release, and no present political party is proposing a system that abolishes post-release supervision with sanctions for non-compliance: even the Labour Party’s Custodial Sentences and Weapons (Scotland) Act 2007, which will now be quietly forgotten and unlamented, provided for compulsory supervision in the community.