RUSSIAN ROULETTE
A FORMER Russian spy living in exile in the UK while on Vladimir Putin's death list fears it is only a matter of time before he is killed.
Ex-double agent Boris Karpichkov, 62, has accused the UK government of "playing Russian roulette" with his life after revealing his British alias, address and leaving him feeling unprotected from Putin's assassins and spies.
I am an ex-Russia spy living in the UK – Putin wants me dead just like Litvinenko & Britain isn’t protecting me
Surveillance, spies, bribery, a flamethrowing KGB man: What it took to get Francis Bacon to Moscow
Bacon in Moscow by James Birch review – darkly funny account of art behind the iron curtainGuardian
In the wake of the Second World War, in an Australia vastly different to today, authorities uncovered a local Soviet spy ring.
At the time, the government was desperate to prove that Australia could be trusted with America’s military secrets, so it set up the Australian security agency — ASIO.
ASIO's job was to weed out communist spies and infiltrate subversive organisations.
Australian historian Phillip Deery has delved into ASIO's history, and looked at eight people whose lives were intimately caught up in the organisation's covert investigations.
Spymasters and secret agents: the birth of ASIO
Bacon in Moscow by James Birch review – darkly funny account of art behind the iron curtain
Spats, KGB threats, dodgy Soviet plumbing… a London gallerist’s vivid memoir of organising a Francis Bacon show in the USSR really brings the artist to life
The NFT Art World Wouldn’t Be the Same Without This Woman’s ‘Wide-Awake Hallucinations’
The Bored Ape Yacht Club lit up the internet — but its lead designer, Seneca, has been watching from the shadows
Her creativity helped fuel a technological revolution she knew almost nothing about. Although the Bored Ape Yacht Club — now, arguably, the world’s biggest NFT project — first appeared online in May and quickly started selling for millions, the woman who drew its primary characters had no idea that the collection was a hit until she Googled the name months later.
These cartoonish primates have since generated more than a billion dollarsand lassoed mainstreamers into the crypto scene. Yet Seneca — the 27-year-old Asian-American artist who played an integral role in bringing their ideas to life — gets little credit.
I n daily life, we regularly rely on hinges, clamps, buttons, zippers, Velcro, laces, knots, stitches, tape, stickers and glue,’ Rita Felski writes. ‘What are their aesthetic equivalents?’ In Hooked, she examines the way we connect to novels, films, paintings and music, and argues that our enthusiasms should be an integral part of conversations about art
There are, though, some very unabstract emotions on display in Hooked. Felski is interested in the feelings writers, theorists and critics have about the works of art they encounter – particularly the feelings they feel they ought not to have. She quotes George Steiner, that ‘most mandarin of critics’, on Edith Piaf’s ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien’:
‘The text is infantile, the tune stentorious, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive,’ Steiner begins stonily, yet ‘the opening bars, the hammer-beat accelerando
... tempt every nerve in me, touch the bone with a cold burn and draw me after into God knows what infidelities to reason, each time I hear the song and hear it, uncalled for, recurrent inside me.’
‘The phrasing is a tad overheated,’ Felski writes, ‘but it is to Steiner’s credit that he is willing to own up to the intensities of his response: how a popular tune is able to seize command of his mind and body.’ Felski is good company here. She laughs a little, but not too much. An academic readership, conditioned to be detached, is gently rebuked for its stoniness, but she also reminds us of the dangers of going too far the other way. It is this line, between irony and sentiment, that Hookedencourages us to tread.
The social meaning of art goes beyond academics’ dispassionate theorizing. Rita Felski explains Hooked