Whose idea of beauty is it? Thoughts on why new homes don't look great.

My friend and former colleague, Huw Jones is your go to man for knowing about back-to-back housing and, in particular, the plethora of such housing in Leeds. It looks like this:



Most of these homes were thrown up to house the poor in Leeds and over 20,000 of them remain. Outside West Yorkshire (Bradford, Calderdale and Kirklees all retain them albeit not so many as in Leeds and stone not brick) all the back-to-backs have gone except for a few specially preserved historical relics in Liverpool and Birmingham. Leeds, however, is the only place to have back-to-back housing built after 1909 (indeed the most recent of Leeds' back-to-backs date from 1937). There's a reason for this, of course, because the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909 prohibited the building of back-to-backs. Leeds found a loophole by claiming that the homes already had approval at the time of the Act.

When we look at these homes and especially those built, as in the picture above, in long streets, we see the classic image of England's inner city slums - narrow streets, homes opening straight onto the pavement, shared middens and little fire safety. But as Huw Jones was wont to observe, as a built form, these homes use land efficiently, were built well enough to last longer than many homes built more recently, and provided a not unattractive street scene.

This isn't an argument for us building back-to-backs again but rather a chance to raise a question as to what constitutes beauty in housing and to ask further why so many of the homes built today by mass house-builders are at best boring and at worst downright ugly. Here's some built, unlike the back-to-backs in Leeds, to house people well enough off to afford to live hard by the RHS gardens at Harlow Carr on the edge of Harrogate:



When I posted this image and asked these questions on Twitter, I received a variety of responses pointing to potential causes - greedy developers, planners and the planning system, the clunkiness of building regulations and that consumers care little about beauty preferring functionality. The thing for me is that, for all that these things might be causes, there is a depressing similarity between cheap homes for the poor built using a loophole in regulations and new homes for the middle classes in North Yorkshire.

Just as some people look immediately to the supposed greed of these developers, my instinct is to look at our planning and land supply systems. Builders cut corners (my Twitter question produced a lot of 'forget what they look like, look at how badly they're built' responses), use cheaper materials and have 'cookie-cutter' designs because it's the only way they can build the homes at a low enough price. Most of the development cost is sunk into buying the land, getting planning permission, paying exceptional costs demanded by planners or regulations and coughing up for the new development tax, Community Infrastructure Levy.

But there's another thing here - what we're told is beautiful (or great architecture or brilliant design) is what we believe is beautiful. And beauty matters because, as Richard Florida says, beautiful cities are more successful. But what is beautiful?

I go on to explain that they’ve been so propagandized to see it as the quintessential work of art that they never really look at it. “Do you know what ‘sfumato’ is? What makes La Gioconda (what its called in Spain) better than this (I toss up a portrait by El Greco) to you?” The classroom usually breaks out, mildly, into chaos, as students actually begin to think about what they are seeing.

Our aesthetic judgements are, like so much else, guided by received wisdom. And the received wisdom for the design of cities isn't the anonymous developers who built Parkside Terrace in Cullingworth:



No, our urban aesthetic is set by architects and those who write about architecture. Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and the Smithsons - advocates of pragmatic, functional, utilitarian buildings. This approach - most obvious in America's ubiquitous 'prairie style' housing - is what we're seeing in those houses built in Harrogate: functionality, utility, value. To return to our example, it's not that the Mona Lisa is objectively the greatest painting but rather that we've all be told (over and over again) that it is the greatest painting.

The article with that Mona Lisa comment goes on to argue that places (Rational Urbanism uses is Springfield, Massachusetts) need to argue for their own beauty not simply try to copy the received idea of beauty. We're told that New York is more beautiful and that the weather's better in Florida but never step back and ask if this is really the case.

So perhaps the reason for those Harrogate homes is that design guides, the architects and planners beliefs - that received wisdom - lead us to this look: pragmatic, functional, utilitarian homes intended to meet the needs of middle-class homeowners in terms of parking, storage, heating, room layout and garden space. The consumer is not buying frills and don't worry about there being no chimneys, no bay widows and a more-or-less eaves free (and therefore sparrow and swallow free) roofline.

The way in which building design evolved in the 20th century led us to this place. It is driven by the manner in which Le Corbusier and others took an entirely functional view of humanity - folk to be stored, moved smoothly from workspace to homespace. The aesthetic wasn't scaled at a personal level but with reference to masses - how do we house millions efficiently, how do we make workplaces for thousands, not how do we make great homes for Mr & Mrs Smith. The result of this is our obsession - straight from Le Corbusier's soulless authoritarianism - with density and the sacredness of the countryside. Even when, as is the case with those homes in Harrogate, we take a small part of that sacred green belt, it's done as a minimum and as densely as possible to meet the dominant aesthetic yet cater to actual human desires.

The irony in all this - and the failure of the utilitarian approach - is that, given a choice and the opportunity, most people don't want to live in dense, crowded, impersonal spaces:

...the main finding of nearly every survey on the subject is that millennials mostly want to live in suburbs, and as they grow older that preference increases. There’s hardly any evidence at all suggesting that there’s a huge pent-up demand for city living that’s going unmet.

To better meet human needs and to repersonalise housing and development, we need to look again at the dominant aesthetic and perhaps to step away from the internationalist, skyscraper style that dominates our ideas of urban goodness. We need to stop speaking about sprawl and ask again how we build suburbs - you can call them garden cities if you wish - that work with the natural environment as well as with most folk's desire for a house with a garden somewhere nice. And that somewhere nice will, in our minds, look and feel more like those Leeds back-to-backs or Cullingworth terrace (for all their lack of outside private space) than it will resemble the great modernist towers that are their modern equivalent.

If you've to consider beaty in the built form, does it have to look like this?

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More on rural decline - Japanese style

Pop-up City report on the efforts of Japanese governments to respond to the challenge of rural depopulation (Japan has a declining population made worse my accelerating migration to the big cities - Tokyo is still getting bigger):

It’s nothing new that Japan’s rural areas are experiencing steady population decline. But the Japanese government’s new measure to fight this trend is as innovative as it is rigorous: giving away houses for ¥0.00.

Whether this will work rather depends on whether the people taking up this offer (and picking up the cost of renovation) are able to sustain their life away from the job (and culture) magnet of the city.

The article also reports on this, very Japanese and decidedly spooky, initiative:

Nagoro is a slowly shrinking village located in the valleys of Shikoku, Japan. Populated by creepy dolls, it might make you question the reality. Its inhabitants left the village in a search of employment or died. Eleven years ago, Tsukimi Ayano returned home to Nagoro. Faced with loneliness, she has populated the village with dolls, each representing a former resident. About 350 life-size dolls currently reside in the village.

Burning art - the latest Progressive initiative

I'm one of those people whose response to art is to say 'I know what I like' so don't take what follows as a piece of art criticism.

The painting in question is called 'Open Casket' and is by an artist called Dana Schutz. Here's one review:

The painting is based on a photograph of African American Emmett Till, laid in a coffin. The 14 year old young man was brutally murdered in 1955 for flirting with a white woman, his face horrifically disfigured in process. Earlier this year, it came out that the accuser, Carolyn Bryant, had lied and made the story up. The painting in question is a marvel to look at and currently on view at the Whitney Biennial. Schutz layers and builds paint in such a way that it appears economical even though she’s literally built a swollen lip out of paint.

So far, so good - and ever so right on. The problem is that Dana Schutz is white and, therefore, “It’s not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun,”. As a result the author of that line has decided to go beyond mere criticism and to call for the painting's destruction:

UK-born, Berlin-based artist Hannah Black has launched a campaign demanding the Biennial curators Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks remove Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket from the show, and calling for its destruction.

In a long and angst-ridden letter Ms Black explains that the terrible imagery in the painting - 'black pain' she calls it - might, in the event of the painting's sale, result in profit. Meaning that white people will have gained from the exploitation of that pain. And, moreover, that the artist should know better than to continue to use such expropriation. Dozens of fellow artists have lined up behind Ms Black in saying that the Whitney Gallery should remove and destroy the painting - though Ms Black has only allowed black artists to sign the letter.

It seems to me that, whatever the merits of the painting (and everyone, even Ms Black, seem to think is is powerful and well-executed) the idea that we destroy art because we don't like its message, its image or its artist simply takes these Progressive voices into the same world as the book burners of 1930s Germany or the Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Ms Black and others may see their cause as righteous but then so did those who, back in 1989, tried to ban Robert Mapplethorpe's "The Perfect Moment" exhibition because it featured explicit gay sex. Or a thousand other examples of censorship by the state and other authorities - on grounds of taste, religion and the ethnicity of the artist.

It's fair to say that our Progressives are a bit mixed up over this:

Prior to that conversation, if you’d asked me if I thought it was a good idea for white artists to refrain from rendering certain racially charged subjects, I would have responded with a rant about how all this debate would lead only to white artists depicting black subjects less frequently. I’m not sure that position would have been wrong, but I’d now add the caveat that some subjects might be worth leaving alone. I write this knowing this road has “slippery slope” written all over it. After all, I’ve now written about this painting. Am I now profiting off black suffering too? I don’t think so, but then again it’s in my interest to think that.

Confusing eh? For my part I suspect that the politicised hypersensitivity of the black artists seeking the painting's destruction serves the cause of art badly and the idea of liberty not at all. Such actions merely reinforce the idea that offence and sensitivity must be policed, the very same idea that led to literature, music and art being suppressed by public censorship for its portrayal of women, gay men and sexual liberty. This is why - despite the arts world describing itself as such - I have called the protagonists here Progressives rather than liberals. Suggesting it is liberal to want a painting destroyed simply because the artist is white is the very opposite of of artistic freedom. Indeed it is little different to the idea, from another bunch of modernist illiberals, of degenerate art.

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Quote of the day - tax fraud as a thought crime

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Quite amazing:

Despite this new evidence providing the artist had paid his taxes, Nerdrum was sentenced in June 2014 to one year in prison for tax fraud after the case had been appealed twice “because he had admitted to considering evading his taxes,” says Molesky.

All-in-all a strange story involving Icelandic citizenship, allegations of state corruption and the mixing of paint by an artist with the splendid name, Odd Nerdrum. Plus an arcane "when is a painting a new painting or an old painting" debate. It does appear that the artist paid his taxes in full through a scheme that could be used to avoid taxes.

Governments, dontcha just love 'em!
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A London Tale: the merely stinking rich shoved out by the filthy rich...

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Andrew Marr, who is pretty rich by most folks standard's is moaning in The Spectator:

A recent victim is Cork Street, for generations the heart of the commercial British art world. But as Spectator readers may know, it is ceasing to beat. Seven art galleries are going after Christmas, mostly to make way for flats for billionaires. Another four are to go next year. In a few years’ time there will still be galleries here but they will be run by international fashion houses who have the money. A unique part of London life, which grew by accident, will be destroyed by speculative investment.

I for one won't miss those galleries. And I'm pretty sure there'll still be a commercial art market for people to write about in The Spectator. However, it won't be in Cork Street - it'll be somewhere else, somewhere a little further out - perhaps New Cross or Stoke Newington.

And in moving out, these rich art dealers will push out what's there now - maybe some pleasant, treasured shops loved by locals. Perhaps the little corner shop where celebrities go once or twice a year in extremis when faced with a shortage of some essential (or a weird craving for a Snickers).

It has always been like this, the city. Changing. Dynamic. Exciting.

And when you get bored with this creative destruction, you retire - in Andrew Marr's case to a nice barn conversion in the Cotswolds or a farmhouse in Sussex. Forgetting, of course, that the barn once had cows in it and the farmhouse provided a home for generations of farmers.

There's something poetic about the various translations of Heraclitus' famous dictum (Πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει) in Wikiquote :

Everything flows and nothing stays.
Everything flows and nothing abides.
Everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.
Everything flows; nothing remains.
All is flux, nothing is stationary.
All is flux, nothing stays still.
All flows, nothing stays.

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Gardens on buses...a cracking (if pointless) idea

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Over at pop-up city they've found buses with gardens on the roof. I love this!

Mad - to see more visit the Pop-up City!

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In which Banksy grants me the right to deface his daubings

Celebrity vandal, Banksy has been proclaiming his bewildering world view to the applause of the usual right-on audience (from where I've lifted the wall dauber's quote below):

Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

My conclusion from this is that we cannot limit this presumption of rights to advertising - it must apply to any message in a public space that "gives you no choice whether you see it or not".  I don't ask to see Banksy's twee, ever-so-witty, pseudo-political cleverness yet by choosing graffiti as a medium he imposes it on me without me choosing to see it.

So on his logic, I shall be pasting advertising slogans onto his witty daubs at the next opportunity!

And while we're about it, remember that Banksy is a mere workman besides the genius that was "The Master of Paddington":

"Near at hand is far away in images of elsewhere"

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Tenets of the New Puritans #1: denormalisation and social direction

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The essence of the New Puritan faith is not prohibition – the adherents of the Church of Public Health do not wish to ban pleasure, any more than their Puritan antecedents wished to do so merely that such pleasure should be approved, communal and uplifting::

From the rich array of popular pastimes in Tudor-Stuart England…the reform-minded founders of New England drew selectively, transplanting only those "lawful recreations" compatible with their errand into the wilderness. Cock-fighting, horse racing, and ball games were out; reading and writing were in. Far from offering release from social duty, recreation was rationalized to serve official ends. Puritans socialized at public worship, town meetings, funerals, and executions. Integrating work and play, they enjoyed a "productive party" -- a barn-raising or quilting bee -- that epitomized the ideal of "useful recreation". Such civic events "expressed the communal spirit of a covenanted people".

The aim of the New Puritan is re-education – to bring about an epiphany of good behaviour. And while they make common cause with prohibitionists – and will support bans – New Puritans prefer the process of ‘denormalisation’.

However, as recent observers have noted, through the widespread implementation of tobacco ‘denormalization’ strategies, tobacco control advocates appear to have embraced the use of stigma as an explicit policy tool. In a recent article, Ronald Bayer (2008) argues that the mobilization of stigma may effectively reduce the prevalence of smoking behaviors linked to tobacco-related morbidity and mortality and is therefore not necessarily antithetical to public health goals.

While the ‘denormalisation’ strategy is most developed in the world of anti-smoking campaign, we see it begin to creep into anti-alcohol campaigns :

One of the key issues coming out of this research is the lack of any evidence showing that normalising the use of alcohol is a good prevention strategy" says Professor Doug Sellman of the University of Otago, Christchurch, who was invited to write an accompanying commentary.

"In fact the opposite is the case. The less alcohol is normalised in family life, and particularly when parents avoid being at all intoxicated in front of their children or supplying them with alcohol, the better the prevention of alcohol problems in young people will be" he says.

And with  ‘junk food’:

The issue of junk food and its consequences is a major challenge for 21st-century society, one which requires actions that are concrete, complementary, and immediate. Concerned by the urgent need to address it, and boasting a solid track record in the promotion of healthy eating habits and denormalization in the tobacco industry, the RSEQ1 is now involved in denor¬malizing junk food in schools.

Thus we see these “harmful” behaviours ‘denormalised’ while at the same time we are urged – and this is especially the case with young people – to seek “value” from leisure activity. Take this Chapter on “Youth Work Ethics”:

The young people decide that this is the way they want to spend Friday evening. It will be a good time. They have been looking forward to do it. It is a chosen and planned part of their life.

Their parents are pleased about the youth project. Their child (who they worry about) is making a good choice: they learn more about life in good ways, they meet new friends, their horizons are widened, and so on. Their child is also not making a bad choice: they are not getting drunk, falling into fights, at risk of dying, and so on.

Read those words – see the directions involved: “it will be a good time”, it is “chosen and planned” and the young people “learn more about life”. The New Puritan denies the possibility of pleasure for reasons of pure hedonism – fun for fun’s sake, if you will! Entertainment must only be entertainment with a purpose – the frivolity of mere fun is sinful. Or, as adherents to the Church of Public Health will say, ‘not in the interests of wider society’.

So youth work – activity taking place outside of formal education – seeks to indoctrinate young people with the tenets of the New Puritan faith: communalism, judgmental environmentalism, the stigmatising of sinful pleasures and the avoidance of risk.

This suppression of adventure, of exploration and of enterprise is carried forward by the New Puritans into their attitude to adult entertainment – the requirement for social meaning in art and literature, the preference for the uplifting story and the morality play, and the use of documentary to bend opinion towards purposeful pleasure and the denormalisation of hedonistic behaviour.

And educationalists grasp this in what they present to learners:

This unit helps students understand how artists can be influential in shaping human values. It does so by addressing social and global issues such as poverty, starvation, crime, discrimination, sickness, war and the environment. Students are encouraged to consider the subjective and expressive currents in art of our time in relation to these issues.

The idea that painting, music, reading and theatre are escapes from our workaday lives does not figure in the New Puritan’s mindset – these things are tools for passing on selected, preferred social values up to and including the denormalisation of those activities that are not approved.

That people continue to enjoy themselves – to reject the prescribed pleasures from the Church of Public Health in favour of hedonism remains a glint of sunlight in an otherwise bleak society. What we can hope for is that, as was the case in New England all those years ago, the search for real pleasure will triumph over the direction and denormalisation directed by our elders and betters:

“Pursuing pleasure for its own sake, New Englanders seized on solemn occasions as pretexts for parties. Austere funerals turned into lavish affairs; "ordination balls" celebrated the installation of ministers; execution days took on "a carnival atmosphere". Notwithstanding jeremiads from the pulpit, alcohol was ubiquitous; under its influence, militia drills could descend into drunken brawls and corn-huskings into trysts. "The tavern became the new meetinghouse": a centre of news, politics, trade, and entertainment. In the more permissive atmosphere of the eighteenth century, men and women flirted at singing schools, drank and danced in alehouses, devoured romantic novels, and engaged in a good deal of premarital sex.”

*The two New England quotes are from a review "Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England" by Bruce Daniels

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Tenets of the New Puritans #1: denormalisation and social direction

****
The essence of the New Puritan faith is not prohibition – the adherents of the Church of Public Health do not wish to ban pleasure, any more than their Puritan antecedents wished to do so merely that such pleasure should be approved, communal and uplifting::

From the rich array of popular pastimes in Tudor-Stuart England…the reform-minded founders of New England drew selectively, transplanting only those "lawful recreations" compatible with their errand into the wilderness. Cock-fighting, horse racing, and ball games were out; reading and writing were in. Far from offering release from social duty, recreation was rationalized to serve official ends. Puritans socialized at public worship, town meetings, funerals, and executions. Integrating work and play, they enjoyed a "productive party" -- a barn-raising or quilting bee -- that epitomized the ideal of "useful recreation". Such civic events "expressed the communal spirit of a covenanted people".

The aim of the New Puritan is re-education – to bring about an epiphany of good behaviour. And while they make common cause with prohibitionists – and will support bans – New Puritans prefer the process of ‘denormalisation’.

However, as recent observers have noted, through the widespread implementation of tobacco ‘denormalization’ strategies, tobacco control advocates appear to have embraced the use of stigma as an explicit policy tool. In a recent article, Ronald Bayer (2008) argues that the mobilization of stigma may effectively reduce the prevalence of smoking behaviors linked to tobacco-related morbidity and mortality and is therefore not necessarily antithetical to public health goals.

While the ‘denormalisation’ strategy is most developed in the world of anti-smoking campaign, we see it begin to creep into anti-alcohol campaigns :

One of the key issues coming out of this research is the lack of any evidence showing that normalising the use of alcohol is a good prevention strategy" says Professor Doug Sellman of the University of Otago, Christchurch, who was invited to write an accompanying commentary.

"In fact the opposite is the case. The less alcohol is normalised in family life, and particularly when parents avoid being at all intoxicated in front of their children or supplying them with alcohol, the better the prevention of alcohol problems in young people will be" he says.

And with  ‘junk food’:

The issue of junk food and its consequences is a major challenge for 21st-century society, one which requires actions that are concrete, complementary, and immediate. Concerned by the urgent need to address it, and boasting a solid track record in the promotion of healthy eating habits and denormalization in the tobacco industry, the RSEQ1 is now involved in denor¬malizing junk food in schools.

Thus we see these “harmful” behaviours ‘denormalised’ while at the same time we are urged – and this is especially the case with young people – to seek “value” from leisure activity. Take this Chapter on “Youth Work Ethics”:

The young people decide that this is the way they want to spend Friday evening. It will be a good time. They have been looking forward to do it. It is a chosen and planned part of their life.

Their parents are pleased about the youth project. Their child (who they worry about) is making a good choice: they learn more about life in good ways, they meet new friends, their horizons are widened, and so on. Their child is also not making a bad choice: they are not getting drunk, falling into fights, at risk of dying, and so on.

Read those words – see the directions involved: “it will be a good time”, it is “chosen and planned” and the young people “learn more about life”. The New Puritan denies the possibility of pleasure for reasons of pure hedonism – fun for fun’s sake, if you will! Entertainment must only be entertainment with a purpose – the frivolity of mere fun is sinful. Or, as adherents to the Church of Public Health will say, ‘not in the interests of wider society’.

So youth work – activity taking place outside of formal education – seeks to indoctrinate young people with the tenets of the New Puritan faith: communalism, judgmental environmentalism, the stigmatising of sinful pleasures and the avoidance of risk.

This suppression of adventure, of exploration and of enterprise is carried forward by the New Puritans into their attitude to adult entertainment – the requirement for social meaning in art and literature, the preference for the uplifting story and the morality play, and the use of documentary to bend opinion towards purposeful pleasure and the denormalisation of hedonistic behaviour.

And educationalists grasp this in what they present to learners:

This unit helps students understand how artists can be influential in shaping human values. It does so by addressing social and global issues such as poverty, starvation, crime, discrimination, sickness, war and the environment. Students are encouraged to consider the subjective and expressive currents in art of our time in relation to these issues.

The idea that painting, music, reading and theatre are escapes from our workaday lives does not figure in the New Puritan’s mindset – these things are tools for passing on selected, preferred social values up to and including the denormalisation of those activities that are not approved.

That people continue to enjoy themselves – to reject the prescribed pleasures from the Church of Public Health in favour of hedonism remains a glint of sunlight in an otherwise bleak society. What we can hope for is that, as was the case in New England all those years ago, the search for real pleasure will triumph over the direction and denormalisation directed by our elders and betters:

“Pursuing pleasure for its own sake, New Englanders seized on solemn occasions as pretexts for parties. Austere funerals turned into lavish affairs; "ordination balls" celebrated the installation of ministers; execution days took on "a carnival atmosphere". Notwithstanding jeremiads from the pulpit, alcohol was ubiquitous; under its influence, militia drills could descend into drunken brawls and corn-huskings into trysts. "The tavern became the new meetinghouse": a centre of news, politics, trade, and entertainment. In the more permissive atmosphere of the eighteenth century, men and women flirted at singing schools, drank and danced in alehouses, devoured romantic novels, and engaged in a good deal of premarital sex.”

*The two New England quotes are from a review "Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England" by Bruce Daniels

....

Tenets of the New Puritans #1: denormalisation and social direction

****
The essence of the New Puritan faith is not prohibition – the adherents of the Church of Public Health do not wish to ban pleasure, any more than their Puritan antecedents wished to do so merely that such pleasure should be approved, communal and uplifting::

From the rich array of popular pastimes in Tudor-Stuart England…the reform-minded founders of New England drew selectively, transplanting only those "lawful recreations" compatible with their errand into the wilderness. Cock-fighting, horse racing, and ball games were out; reading and writing were in. Far from offering release from social duty, recreation was rationalized to serve official ends. Puritans socialized at public worship, town meetings, funerals, and executions. Integrating work and play, they enjoyed a "productive party" -- a barn-raising or quilting bee -- that epitomized the ideal of "useful recreation". Such civic events "expressed the communal spirit of a covenanted people".

The aim of the New Puritan is re-education – to bring about an epiphany of good behaviour. And while they make common cause with prohibitionists – and will support bans – New Puritans prefer the process of ‘denormalisation’.

However, as recent observers have noted, through the widespread implementation of tobacco ‘denormalization’ strategies, tobacco control advocates appear to have embraced the use of stigma as an explicit policy tool. In a recent article, Ronald Bayer (2008) argues that the mobilization of stigma may effectively reduce the prevalence of smoking behaviors linked to tobacco-related morbidity and mortality and is therefore not necessarily antithetical to public health goals.

While the ‘denormalisation’ strategy is most developed in the world of anti-smoking campaign, we see it begin to creep into anti-alcohol campaigns :

One of the key issues coming out of this research is the lack of any evidence showing that normalising the use of alcohol is a good prevention strategy" says Professor Doug Sellman of the University of Otago, Christchurch, who was invited to write an accompanying commentary.

"In fact the opposite is the case. The less alcohol is normalised in family life, and particularly when parents avoid being at all intoxicated in front of their children or supplying them with alcohol, the better the prevention of alcohol problems in young people will be" he says.

And with  ‘junk food’:

The issue of junk food and its consequences is a major challenge for 21st-century society, one which requires actions that are concrete, complementary, and immediate. Concerned by the urgent need to address it, and boasting a solid track record in the promotion of healthy eating habits and denormalization in the tobacco industry, the RSEQ1 is now involved in denor¬malizing junk food in schools.

Thus we see these “harmful” behaviours ‘denormalised’ while at the same time we are urged – and this is especially the case with young people – to seek “value” from leisure activity. Take this Chapter on “Youth Work Ethics”:

The young people decide that this is the way they want to spend Friday evening. It will be a good time. They have been looking forward to do it. It is a chosen and planned part of their life.

Their parents are pleased about the youth project. Their child (who they worry about) is making a good choice: they learn more about life in good ways, they meet new friends, their horizons are widened, and so on. Their child is also not making a bad choice: they are not getting drunk, falling into fights, at risk of dying, and so on.

Read those words – see the directions involved: “it will be a good time”, it is “chosen and planned” and the young people “learn more about life”. The New Puritan denies the possibility of pleasure for reasons of pure hedonism – fun for fun’s sake, if you will! Entertainment must only be entertainment with a purpose – the frivolity of mere fun is sinful. Or, as adherents to the Church of Public Health will say, ‘not in the interests of wider society’.

So youth work – activity taking place outside of formal education – seeks to indoctrinate young people with the tenets of the New Puritan faith: communalism, judgmental environmentalism, the stigmatising of sinful pleasures and the avoidance of risk.

This suppression of adventure, of exploration and of enterprise is carried forward by the New Puritans into their attitude to adult entertainment – the requirement for social meaning in art and literature, the preference for the uplifting story and the morality play, and the use of documentary to bend opinion towards purposeful pleasure and the denormalisation of hedonistic behaviour.

And educationalists grasp this in what they present to learners:

This unit helps students understand how artists can be influential in shaping human values. It does so by addressing social and global issues such as poverty, starvation, crime, discrimination, sickness, war and the environment. Students are encouraged to consider the subjective and expressive currents in art of our time in relation to these issues.

The idea that painting, music, reading and theatre are escapes from our workaday lives does not figure in the New Puritan’s mindset – these things are tools for passing on selected, preferred social values up to and including the denormalisation of those activities that are not approved.

That people continue to enjoy themselves – to reject the prescribed pleasures from the Church of Public Health in favour of hedonism remains a glint of sunlight in an otherwise bleak society. What we can hope for is that, as was the case in New England all those years ago, the search for real pleasure will triumph over the direction and denormalisation directed by our elders and betters:

“Pursuing pleasure for its own sake, New Englanders seized on solemn occasions as pretexts for parties. Austere funerals turned into lavish affairs; "ordination balls" celebrated the installation of ministers; execution days took on "a carnival atmosphere". Notwithstanding jeremiads from the pulpit, alcohol was ubiquitous; under its influence, militia drills could descend into drunken brawls and corn-huskings into trysts. "The tavern became the new meetinghouse": a centre of news, politics, trade, and entertainment. In the more permissive atmosphere of the eighteenth century, men and women flirted at singing schools, drank and danced in alehouses, devoured romantic novels, and engaged in a good deal of premarital sex.”

*The two New England quotes are from a review "Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England" by Bruce Daniels

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Art, animation, enterprise, people - the secret of regeneration

Julian Dobson from his eyrie as the guru of community regeneration has set out "ten things we didn't learn about regeneration". Now while I don't agree with it all (I get a little worried when people talk about value without seeing its source, for example), it is the best summation of why regeneration needs to be done at the scale of the ordinary. In doing this we can achieve the extraordinary - real change and even, after Julian's appointed 25 year wait, transformation.

And as Julian points out, we talked the talk but never got it right on the ground. We said we believed in participation but:

the money went, by and large, into building things: shopping centres and offices and hotels and roads.

We got shiny regeneration - the city of gold in the far distance - not what communities either wanted or needed. The focus was not on real change but on replacing the people we didn't want with the folk we did. We talked about culture in terms of institutions rather than art. We got animated - about the huge sums promised in investment not the events and activities in the places where people lived. And we talked endlessly of enterprise - by which we meant some new sheds at the motorway junction and a shiny new "business incubator".

The image above - Bradford Town Hall lit up by Patrice Warrener - does more for my City than all the inward investment strategies, trips to conferences in Cannes or talk of £250m in new investment. It is real, it is exciting, it animates and it gives a sense of pride. Just as with the international market, the new art and photography galleries and the work of Bradford Kickstart, this image speaks of a City that can do something. Not a wonderful, wealthy city. Nor a place that can forget the 7th July 2001 all that easily. But a place that thinks animation, activity, events and involvement are what matter.

Go and read Julian's piece - it tells the story of 40 plus years of failed regeneration. But in doing so it points to successes, to ideas of making change stick and to a way in we (not grand government agencies or multi-billion pound turnover international developers) can do something - not just for the place we live but more importantly, for ourselves.

And by the way this is what I did for Bradford.
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Friday Fungus: Mushroom Art

Image from Daylife www.daylife.com/photo/0agNdEa0Yj9N0

It may be about the interaction between nature, about the environment and emphasising cycles of destruction and regeneration in nature but Chris Drury's "Mushrooms: Clouds" exhibition did feature some interesitng art made using dried mushrooms! As the writer of the exhibition brochure commented:

As the primary regenerators of soil in nature, but also poisonous agents of death, mushrooms are a metaphor for the cycle of destruction and regeneration in the environment. From mushroom spore prints to a sculpture that takes the form of a nuclear mushroom cloud; a multiple video works that explore cloud-like properties of smoke and water, Drury makes visible the subtle connections between art and environment.’

Although the exhibition has long finished there's now a book you can enjoy and it's reviewed here:

"He draws striking visual parallels between mushrooms (decomposers, remediators, life renewers) and bomb clouds (beyond the obvious, ya smarty pants)."

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