Broadly the interference of gallery owners and directors, curators, super collectors, university lecturers, art theorists and the media are the major factors sullying the art world.

Artists spineless enough to cater for the above are of course the real evil.

1. Nobody knows what good art looks like.

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I am the defense early warning radar system, I see nothing but bombs. Ginsberg.

Another exhibition another vision of dystopia. I feel like I’m saying it all the time, dystopia, dystopia, dystopia. Is there no good left in the world? Has no one got a good feeling about tomorrow, where’s the positivity people?

Well, with New Labour taking away the majority of our civil liberties (see here), and 20% of the CCTV cameras in the world filming our every move, a poorly educated electorate brainwashed by the marketing departments of large multinational corporations, internet surveillance, ID cards on the way, a war on terrorism being used as an excuse for a war on the public and the police forming themselves into a brutal Stasi to beat up protestors, lock them up for thinking about protesting or just savagely murdering passers by, you can be forgiven that we are descending into a Dystopian reality. Two way video screens never came in and Orwell got his dates wrong by twenty five years but other than that, one could imagine he did his research for 1984 with a time machine.

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Not far from the the railway arches, lies Paradise Row, tucked between a housing estate and the trendy brick lane thoroughfare. This odd domicile for an art gallery belies a progressive eclectic program of increasingly important artists; currently Gosha Ostretsov from Moscow, exhibiting an installation and paintings entitled The adventures of Robbing Good.

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The Guardian with a few more typos than usual

Kim Rugg’s new exhibition at Nettie Horn (Next to the Victory Pub off Vyner St) presents her iconic cut up Guardian Newspapers, with wallpaper, postage stamps, comic books and cereal boxes.

Proliferating successfully across the art world, Rugg’s cut-up newspapers have been featured on the BBC website as well as other major media sources. They are immediately arresting and beguiling. One of the things that strikes you instantly is disorientation – the brain accustomed (through learned responses) to the layout instinctively attempts to read and decode it. Confronted with the Guardian front page, your eyes scan to the top left hand corner (this is where we all scan pages from – unless we are reading Hebrew or Japanese) and read the first few words only to be confronted by gibberish, staccato letters, and harsh constants. The eyes quickly learn that none of the text is forming into intelligible words; the sounds of words and the images they trigger have hit static, noise. Looking for relief in the headline picture one experiences a similar difficulty, something has disrupted the signal. After a time the eyes no longer attempt interpretation of the text or pictures, a new strategy must be formulated to assimilate meaning from the familiar.  Reading becomes arbitrary, different areas, devices, without regard for convention, stick out – the whole rather than the parts are digested, the graphic designed format we are left with is filled with garbled content, or rather emptied of its former purpose or meaning.

Ultimately the uniqueness that remains, or that the artist has deliberately, almost as hyper brutal editor, retained – is the graphic designed template. We begin to analyse this for the first time. The strategies the designer used to embed qualities inherently and subliminally. The palette of corporate branding rather than fine art; spacing, typefaces, weight of font, colour, placement, use of caps, italics, bold, column width, demarcations, lines, logos etc.

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