Capitalist apocalypse in the painting of John Martin and Gordon Cheung

Taking as its starting point Tate Britain’s recent John Martin retrospective, entitled John Martin: Apocalypse, this paper considers the possibility that depictions of biblical apocalyptic scenes in Martin’s paintings are actually metaphors for revolution (French and American). The frst half of the paper investigates possible links between Martin’s apocalyptic imagery, British imperial ambitions and the rise of capitalism. It also considers how Martin’s plans for urban redevelopment are linked to his preoccupation with cataclysmic doom. Through icono- graphical readings of Martin’s paintings the paper hypoth-esizes that themes such as the fall of great civilizations and the wrath of god are not coincidental but concerns contemporary to Martin caused by capitalist expansion. The second part of the paper goes on to investigate the possibility that our contemporary interest in the apocalypse is in fact, just as it was in Martin’s time, a metaphor for militant unrest, which is manifested in theory and culture because of our inability to imagine the end of capitalism in this context the paper turns to contemporary painter Gordon Cheung to reconsider the idea, attributed to Jameson and Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

Militant training camp and the aesthetics of civil disobedience

This paper examines the current interest in ‘art activism’ (Grindon 2010), and the relationship between artistic expression and civil disobedience. Boris Groys has argued that the lack of political dissidence within contemporary art is not down to the ineffectiveness of the aesthetic, but the far more effective intrusion of the aesthetic by the political (Groys 2008). As such, the political question of civil disobedience is necessarily an aesthetic one. At the same time, this raises problems for how politically effective artistic dissidence can be. As Grindon argues, if art activism often only mimics ‘real’ social activism, it remains within the boundaries of the gallery system with no real consequences (2010: 11). Most art activism fails to be effective civil disobedience, in this sense, as it already operates within the confines of pre-established curatorial spaces. As such, the use of art for the purposes of civil disobedience cannot be, then, mere aestheticism, but rather must act as ‘an insight into the transformed mechanisms of conquest’ (Groys, in Abdullah & Benzer 2011: 86): a conflict over the topology of disobedience which exposes the interrelation of aesthetics and politics through medium, space and archive. This paper critically assesses attempts in contemporary art to re-appropriate the symbolic dimension of dissidence as an aesthetic; in particular the use of militancy, asceticism and dissidence as an attempt to move beyond mere counter-political protest and towards a reclaiming of aesthetics from the intrusions of politics. It uses as a specific case example Militant Training Camp, a social experimental performance camp held at Arcadia Missa Gallery in London, March 2012. This weeklong performance piece was designed to explore the activity and mind-set of militant groups and the idea of non-pacifist activity within wider social movements. Engaging with not only the tradition of anarchist activism, but also more recent artistic engagements with civil disobedience (such as the Yes Men; Avaaz.org; Bike Bloc), the camp involved a residential ascetic ‘training programme’ followed by a series of violent performances open to the public, often disturbing other sites of protest such as Anarchist theatres and Occupy sites in the process. The paper uses first-hand documentary evidence and critical reflection on the event in order to argue that, as both an act of civil disobedience, and an exploration of the limits of its aesthetic treatment, the event raises two specific issues surrounding the notion of disobedience and its conceptual possibilities. The first issue is the representation of rage within the context of art activism. Here, the performance is discussed with particular reference to Sloterdijk’s arguments that argues that militancy and revolt operate under a ‘thymotic economy’ (2010: 58). However, Sloterdijk’s re-appropriation of the thymotic – a conceptualising of ‘rage’ which is not absorbed within the sublimination of psychology or Habermasian symbolism – is not as simple as offering an alternative, ‘non-symbolic’ rage. Given that modern militancy is always subject to containment (the ‘civility’ of civil disobedience), the second issue raised is the formative role of ‘curating’ acts of disobedience. Using the work of Groys on aesthetics and power, the paper assesses how ‘events’ of civil disobedience such as Militant Training Camp are located, represented, circulated and even stored, and the ways in which they might resist their reduction to or supplementing of a further economy (be it symbolic, banal or simply pious) which conceals the formative ‘rage’ of disobedience

Hierarchies of factor solutions in the intelligence domain : applying methodology from personality psychology to gain insights into the nature of intelligence

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Competitive Balance and Revenue Sharing in Sports Leagues with Utility-Maximizing Teams

This paper develops a contest model of a professional sports league in which clubs maximize a weighted sum of profits and wins (utility maximization). The model analyzes how more win-orientated behavior of certain clubs affects talent investments, competitive balance and club profits. Moreover, in contrast to traditional models, we show that revenue sharing does not always reduce investment incentives due to the dulling effect. We identify a new effect of revenue sharing called the "sharpening effect". In the presence of the sharpening effect (dulling effect), revenue sharing enhances (reduces) investment incentives and improves (deteriorates) competitive balance in the league.Competitive balance, contest, invariance proposition, objective function, revenue sharing, team sports league, utility maximization

The Sugar Daddy's Game: How Wealthy Investors Change Competition in Professional Team Sports

Professional sports leagues have witnessed the appearance of so-called "sugar daddies" - people who invest enormous amounts of money into clubs and become their owners. This paper presents a contest model of a professional sports league that incorporates this phenomenon. We analyze how the appearance of a sugar daddy alters competitive balance and social welfare compared to a league with purely profit-maximizing club owners. We further show that the welfare effect of revenue sharing in a sugar daddy league is ambiguous and depends on the degree of redistribution and on whether the sugar daddy invests in a small or large club.Competitive balance, contest model, social welfare, sports leagues, sugar daddy

Revenue Sharing and Competitive Balance in a Dynamic Contest Model

This paper presents a dynamic model of talent investments in a team sports league with an infinite time horizon. We show that the clubs' investment decisions and the effects of revenue sharing on competitive balance depend on the following three factors: (i) the cost function of talent investments, (ii) the clubs' market sizes, and (iii) the initial endowments of talent stock. We analyze how these factors interact in the transition to the steady state as well as in the steady state itself.Contest, Sports Economics, Competitive Balance, Revenue Sharing

Counter cultural production: a militant reconfiguration of Peter Bürger’s “Neo-avant-garde”

This article re-examines Peter Bürger’s negative assessment of the neo-avant-garde as apolitical, co-opted and toothless. It argues that his conception can be overturned through an analysis of different sources – looking beyond the usual examples of individual artists to instead focus on the role of more politically committed collectives. It declares that, while the collectives analysed in this text do indeed appropriate and develop goals and tactics of the ‘historical avant-garde’ (hence meriting the appellation ‘neo-avant-garde’), they cannot be accused of being co-opted or politically uncommitted due to the ferocity of their critique of, and attack on, art and political institutions

Construction of Identities and Late Mesopotamian Archives as Found in the Fragments of the ‘Graeco-Babyloniaca’

This article focuses on the social reality behind the so-called Graeco-Babyloniaca, a small sample of less than two dozen fragments of clay tablets, mainly inscribed with cuneiform signs on the obverse, with alphabetic Greek signs on the reverse. As possibly one of the last signs of life of the time-honored cuneiform script, in a Janus-faced manner they hint at the long tradition of Babylonian scholarship and learning on the one hand, and at its disappearance via script-obsolescence on the other. Notwithstanding the fact that there are only a few tablets, the aim of this article is to trace the social group behind the textual remains of the Graeco-Babylonian tablets and tablet fragments