Hijabgategate
WHAT THE HOLY FUCK BRITAIN
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/feb/15/brick-lane-hijab-gates
Seriously, what were they thinking?
And THIS is exactly every single thing that is wrong with the collective biscuit wank that is local council and their condescending, baby-mush, utterly disconnected mode of communication with its constituency. Who signs this off? Who actually puts their head on the pillow at night thinking 'this'll fly'?
This wasn't conceived by an artist. It will have been conceived by some sort of 'public art consultancy', a weird world with no connection to anything, let alone art or architecture. They sit in circles in boardrooms roughly modelled on what they think a 1990s dotcom 'creative industry' office looked like, asking themselves: what do the Muslims like? I know, the Muslims - they like headscarves! And women wear headscarves, so we're addressing a minority!
A spokeswoman for the council [...] said headscarves were worn for a variety of purposes, "such as for warmth, for sanitation, for fashion or social distinction; with religious significance, to hide baldness, out of modesty, or other forms of social convention", and not only by Muslims.
Yes, thanks for speaking on behalf of Muslim women everywhere, love. Acting as though the headscarf can be understood as just another complex fashion item worn for a variety of mundane reasons in the UK is attempting a totally disingenuous cultural relativism and a startling lack of responsibility towards, well, anybody who ever looked around themselves in the UK and realised that just maybe the hijab is just a teensy bit of a hot-button issue. Because also people wear jeans here. Do you spend time articulating to people why muslim women wear jeans? No, you don't.
Fine, it's fine to act all blase and culturally relativist and blandly diversity-celebrationist about the headscarf, I applaud this slight attempt to see it in the live and let live piece of clothing that it is, but then don't go and erect a fucking statue of it . Fucking chumps. You can't have it both ways. You know, if the constant ambient poking-at and condescension to Muslim women weren't the main problem here, I'd also be angry on behalf of art. Art as a fucking badly wielded political tool, instrumentalised to death, seen so narrowly down the pinhole-sized perspectives of these wankers who equate Big Pictures of Things as effective forms of political representation, and who anyway think that representation alone is art's Big Answer, its only conceivable contribution to life and human equality.
And seriously. I honestly and truly have no problem with whatever the fuck any woman anywhere wants to wear, ever, ever, ever, except maybe a t-shirt that says 'I love misogyny, please rape me'. But this kind of condescending, insulting culture-by-numbers is not even naive, it's... a whole class of intrinsic stupidity of its own.
Even so, I blame Anthony Gormley. More things should be blamed on Anthony Gormley, on principle.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/feb/15/brick-lane-hijab-gates
Seriously, what were they thinking?
And THIS is exactly every single thing that is wrong with the collective biscuit wank that is local council and their condescending, baby-mush, utterly disconnected mode of communication with its constituency. Who signs this off? Who actually puts their head on the pillow at night thinking 'this'll fly'?
This wasn't conceived by an artist. It will have been conceived by some sort of 'public art consultancy', a weird world with no connection to anything, let alone art or architecture. They sit in circles in boardrooms roughly modelled on what they think a 1990s dotcom 'creative industry' office looked like, asking themselves: what do the Muslims like? I know, the Muslims - they like headscarves! And women wear headscarves, so we're addressing a minority!
A spokeswoman for the council [...] said headscarves were worn for a variety of purposes, "such as for warmth, for sanitation, for fashion or social distinction; with religious significance, to hide baldness, out of modesty, or other forms of social convention", and not only by Muslims.
Yes, thanks for speaking on behalf of Muslim women everywhere, love. Acting as though the headscarf can be understood as just another complex fashion item worn for a variety of mundane reasons in the UK is attempting a totally disingenuous cultural relativism and a startling lack of responsibility towards, well, anybody who ever looked around themselves in the UK and realised that just maybe the hijab is just a teensy bit of a hot-button issue. Because also people wear jeans here. Do you spend time articulating to people why muslim women wear jeans? No, you don't.
Fine, it's fine to act all blase and culturally relativist and blandly diversity-celebrationist about the headscarf, I applaud this slight attempt to see it in the live and let live piece of clothing that it is, but then don't go and erect a fucking statue of it . Fucking chumps. You can't have it both ways. You know, if the constant ambient poking-at and condescension to Muslim women weren't the main problem here, I'd also be angry on behalf of art. Art as a fucking badly wielded political tool, instrumentalised to death, seen so narrowly down the pinhole-sized perspectives of these wankers who equate Big Pictures of Things as effective forms of political representation, and who anyway think that representation alone is art's Big Answer, its only conceivable contribution to life and human equality.
And seriously. I honestly and truly have no problem with whatever the fuck any woman anywhere wants to wear, ever, ever, ever, except maybe a t-shirt that says 'I love misogyny, please rape me'. But this kind of condescending, insulting culture-by-numbers is not even naive, it's... a whole class of intrinsic stupidity of its own.
Even so, I blame Anthony Gormley. More things should be blamed on Anthony Gormley, on principle.