Jarvis named Cultural Ambassador for Eurostar

Jarvis Cocker is the inaugural cultural ambassador of Eurostar’s Culture Connect initiative. Beyond the generated hype, Culture Connect serves to promote the Eurostar service for cultural trips to the continent and Eurostar ticket holders get 2 for 1 entry in any of the museums participating in the scheme. You can find details of the scheme here and the participating museums and institutions. So if anyone out there, is getting sick of the London Art Scene, you can pop over to Brussels or Paris and check out what’s going on there.

A veteran of rail channel crossing, Jarvis regularly travels twice a week between Paris and London, and still moans about the price of the sandwiches. He’s passionate about destroying the elitist myths behind culture and art though, and is stressing the benefits of visiting museums, galleries and gigs in Brussels, Paris and London. There’s another important issue for Jarvis regarding train travel – the environment. He spoke of how everyone should be looking at reducing their carbon footprint and doesn’t consider himself as an artist above those concerns; a breath of fresh air when you consider self righteous eco-celebrities (and private jet junkies) like Sting.

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Tomorrow night is the opening of a exhibition of modern, urban art in Brighton at the Geisha Arts Centre.

Its promising to be a definitive exposition of the urban genre with artists of the calibre of Matt Small, Zac Walsh, Rob Sample and Goldie exhibiting. There’s a real energy about this exhibition, and its been eagerly anticipated by many in the know. The exhibition, in aid of the International Childcare Trust  is taking place as part of the Brighton fringe festival and there are events all weekend. On the 30th there’ll be live graffiti art, workshops and open forums for art discussion. There’ll also be a kids workshop, where children are encouraged to make their own drawings or paintings that will appear in an exhibition.

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Opening tonight from 6pm at Blackall Studios, 73 Leonard Street. A fund raising exhibition of portraiture in aid of Single Homeless Projects. Should be a good one.

Alfie Dennen recently wrote to london art blog to introduce his new project, shortlisted for the Artists Taking The Lead fund which is a UK Arts Council and Olympics commissioning fund.

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In keeping with a dreary fashion for scientific/academic nomenclature within the arts, Bilateria opened last thursday at Five Hundred Dollars on Vyner Street. A group show of up and coming (they are always either up and coming or emerging) artists the name is taken from Bilateria Triploblastic. Me neither. I wikipedia’d it. It’s a highly scientific denomination for organisms arising from three primary germ layered ova that possess bilateral symmetry – having a front and back and an upside and a downside. The press release simplifies this definition as “possessing both a mouth and an anus.”

So why not call it Mouth and Anus? Or call it digestion? Perhaps that wouldn’t provide the snobbery and pseudo scientific resonance of using latin/scientific terminology. Its not like Bilateria is in the common vernacular is it?

Who were they expecting? Virgil? Juvenal? Pliny the Elder? Or perhaps a group of biologists specialising in embryonic development of the digestive tract in vertebrae?

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There is now a forum (see the tab “forum” above or just click here) to discuss art in real time, collaborate on art projects or argue like hell over art theory, exhibitions and whether such and such is overrated.

Come on in and join the discussion.