Posts by 81stcolumn
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Paul –
I would not dispute Hattie’s expertise in matters of education, indeed I much admire what he has tried to do with his book.
Like any form of statistics, meta-analysis involves data manipulation and for the most part there are agreed rules to which most researchers adhere. This is not the core of my criticism; it is the issue of which experimental effects should be included for analysis. This is a common debate amongst researchers and often a difficult one to resolve given the sheer volume of research that needs to be understood.
My overriding criticism rests with a government who is in my direct experience becoming increasingly adept at “managing research reports”.
Anecdotally I might add it is not only the teachers that need to adjust to smaller class sizes, but also the learners.
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I don't know if it was me but some things stood out over "teh cuts".
i) The persistent pushing of "evidence that smaller class sizes make no difference" the qualification to this got lost in transmission. Smaller class sizes make less than expected difference, most probably due to teaching methods not being suitably adapted to the change in numbers. There is to my knowledge little evidence the bigger is better BTW.
ii) I think I read that some of the savings were to be put into teaching quality and monitoring. So the extra dead rat to be swallowed would have been that teachers may well have had to pay for their own scrutiny.
FWIW.
I’ve actually taken the time to read Hattie’s book. It is a bold attempt to assemble large body of results around some key questions; which is on the whole a good thing. Unfortunately not all the evidence assembled was a good fit for the questions asked. In particular cases Hattie quite plainly was comparing Apples and Bananas in the same system. Classroom learning and feedback driven skill acquisition are not the same thing at all for example.
D’you think John Roughan wants to be a right wing blogger?
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I'll add them to the plaster, chicken-wire and airbrushes at the back of the garage ;-)
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I feel awkward over this largely because I would not wish to be seen as an apologist for Hirst any more than I would for Jack Vettriano.
Consequently;
I’m sure Thomson approves of this because it involves paint….
This is a better argument than I have ever read by Thomson in so far as it makes clear that you either accept Duchamp’s position or you don’t. The bit about Childish and Emin is just odd though.Above all I find Thomson irritating because he seems to be a good deal better at being disagreeable than he is at being an artist. The argument here is one of weak witted equivalence and polemic. Adopting such a position completely, would eliminate an awful lot of art and somehow magically protect the business of painting. Painting dare I say it, stuck in a time before impressionism when I suspect there was little distinction between artists and favoured craftsmen. I am honest about my struggles to grasp the difference between Art and Craft as well as the difference between homage, inspiration and plagiarism. I don’t make a career or cause of it though.
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It would appear that while Hirst may be/have been an artist he cannot paint.
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81st sidesteps quietly towards the door..
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It Hirst hadn’t pulled off this trick of selling his work for vast sums, I doubt anybody would take any notice of it.
FWIW. Damien Hirst and I share roughly the same age bracket and many common cultural threads. I first saw Hirst's work in 1992 at the Turner prize preview; at the time, I was unaware of the hype that surrounded the work. After that I went regularly to London to catch up at the White Cube and went out of my way to follow up on what I had seen. In 1997 I bought a first edition of ” I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, ………. “ (I wish I had bought two). I’m pretty sure that no one made any money from that book at the time (but that might have been part of it). Indeed it cost barely twice the price of certain exhibition catalogues of the era. I didn’t get excited about Hirst again, until For the Love of God which grabbed me without seeing it for real.
I am for my own part a denizen of the first proper British consumer generation. My sensibilities were tuned by 24hr TV, MTV and a high period for television advertising that culminated in Tony Kayes’s tested for the unexpected Dunlop advert (also 1992/93) and Guinness’s “not everything in black and white makes sense”. In print I got to see ads that mixed art and product in many ways. For a while, adverts were concentrated culturally referent devices. I’ve always assumed that Hirst saw that too. It certainly seemed that way when I saw “pharmacy” and “the impossibility”. I disagree with Greer in so far as Hirst’s work isn’t just about the money/sale and the theatre surrounding it. The contemporary reference is part of the work and I wonder about how folks in the 70’s must have seen the work of Warhol.
Like it or not Hirst owes to Kandinsky, Pollock, Duchamp, Hopper, Bacon, Freud and Warhol amongst others, drawing from a palette of my time. Anticipating the dilemmas of a modern internet age, Hirst smears homage, plagiarism, craftsmanship and greed in unexpectedly concentrated ways. For me the works function on many levels through the references they make even after twenty years. This is a deeper art in its own right, and one that I suspect will be treated kindly in parts, if not entirely, by future generations.
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Lillith-
Tomato - tomayto
Trivial - Immediacy
I agree though that his work is patchy, as for chutzpah he speaks to a generation for whom chutzpah has become currency.
Sometimes I long for the days when galleries where quiet, inhabited by snooties students and some others.
How busy was it?
Ohh and that skull........... -
'I've nothing to fear' - Of course not John we need to to provide a distraction while we get this Skycity thing done.
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Hard News: Doug the Goth, in reply to JacksonP,
Oh golly, that's probably more kindness than the post deserved, thank you.