The Afghan John Lennon

In his latest blog post, Adam Curtis tells the story of the king of Afghan pop music, singer Ahmad Zahir. With the style of Elvis Presley and the political commitment of John Lennon, he remains an idol to his countrypeople. He was the son of Abdul Zahir, Columbia alumnus, court doctor, health minister, and prime minister under Mohammed Zahir Shah.

As Afghanistan's elite grew more westernised in the 1960s, the children of the ruling class looked for new forms of entertainment and expression. Ahmad started making pop music that blended western influences with traditional music and poetry as well as songs from Indian cinema.

This is Aye Darya* from his first album, with the Habibia Amateurs. It starts very strangely but bear with it a minute:



Later he became more involved with prog rock, working with Afghan band The Stars, who loved Emerson Lake and Palmer but also covered western disco songs. Begzar Ta Begeryam Chon Abaro Dar Bah is from Beyayed Beyayed, the album they recorded together:



Here's Khuda Bowad Yaarit, another proggy song, with a striking video:



And one of his last songs, Tu Ba Mani (1978; released 1979), with another dodgy fan video:



Following the marxist takeover in 1978, he protested against the new government and his songs were banned from state radio. He died mysteriously in his car on June 14, 1979. Officially it was a car accident, but many people believe he was shot dead by one of his friends who were travelling with him, on the order of communist general Daud Taroon.

Following the Soviet invasion in December 1979, his sister Zahira fled to the west, settling in Washington DC, where she set up a hair salon in the Watergate building. Her customers included Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George HW Bush and his son George W.

When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, they destroyed Zahir's grave, believing all music to be sinful. But Ahmad Zahir still retains incredible popularity in Afghanistan and elsewhere, not least at his official web site. Recently his music featured in the film The Kite Runner, set in Afghanistan.

*Unfortunately the romanisations of his song titles vary a lot (probably from being translated between Persian, Pashtun, and other languages).

Where are the right-wing writers?

It's a common supposition on both left and right that everyone in the arts is a liberal, lefty, communist, or fellow traveller; at most there's one or two exceptions writing from a conservative position. Thus, Tony Kushner in Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy has Laura Bush say:

The liberals may have nearly all the poets and painters and everybody else but WE have Dostoevsky and he obliterates the whole kitandkaboodle, we have Dostoevsky and so we win.

But is this the full story? For your consideration, I present the following. From libertarians to upper-class high-church snobs, with a smattering of one-nation tories, Nazi sympathisers, and the unprincipled rich, here's a list of notable novelists, poets, and a few other literary types of a rightist persuasion.

1. Kingsley Amis - despite early socialism, he moved rightwards through his life to become a curmudgeonly conservative
2. Martin Amis - in recent years has followed his father's path, with his views on Islam condemned by many left-wingers; also anti-communist, writing books about Stalin
3. Jeffrey Archer - popular novelist and former Conservative Party MP; also convicted perjurer
4. Honoré de Balzac - royalist and chronicler of a society in decline
5. Hilaire Belloc - the poet and writer, known for his verse for children, was an admirer of fascism and especially Mussolini; he was a devout Catholic and has been accused of anti-semitism
6. Saul Bellow - a youthful leftist he moved to the right, was culturally conservative, opposing political correctness and multiculturalism
7. John Betjeman - a small-c conservative: an admirer of the English upper classes, a campaigner to preserve disappearing aspects of England, scornful of mass culture, and a Catholic
8. William Peter Blatty - the Exorcist writer is a donor to the US Republican party
9. Robert Brasillach - French novelist and journalist who collaborated with the Nazis
10. Rupert Brooke - upper-middle-class poet known for his patriotic World War One verse, although he also moved in liberal circles
11. John Buchan - the author of the 39 Steps was an MP for the Unionist Party in Scotland (which later merged with the Conservative Party), a keen imperialist, and has been accused of racism
12. Jorge Luis Borges - the Argentinian postmodernist was an admirer of Latin American dictators, including Pinochet
13. William F. Buckley, Jr - writer, tv presenter, and occasional novelist, a leading intellectual of US Republicanism from the 1960s to the 2000s
14. Roy Campbell - South African poet and Catholic, he moved to Spain in the 1930s and supported Franco (unlike most writers who went to Spain); turned against the Bloomsbury group after his wife had an affair with Vita Sackville-West
15. Orson Scott Card - best known for science fiction novels such as Ender's Game, he is also a pro-Republican commentator and a Mormon
16. Thomas Carlyle - Scottish historian, satirist, and essayist who distrusted democracy and modernity, and believed nations needed great men to lead them, writing an admiring biography of Frederick the Great
17. Willa Cather - a novelist who was conservative both in aesthetics and politics
18. Louis-Ferdinand Céline - the modernist novelist was an anti-semite and supporter of Vichy France
19. François-René de Chateaubriand - French royalist and a devout Catholic
20. GK Chesterton - humorist and Christian apologist, converted to Catholicism; George Orwell accused him of writing "endless tirades against Jews"
21. Agatha Christie - reactionary conservative who portrayed a bygone England, her early books included various racial caricatures
22. Winston Churchill - winner of Nobel prize for literature for his non-fiction, and Conservative prime minister
23. EM Cioran - Romanian philosopher and essayist, a pupil and follower of far-right philosopher Nae Ionescu
24. Tom Clancy - popular spy novelist, has donated large amounts of money to the US Republican party
25. Robin Cook - the thriller writer, not the deceased British Labour politician, is a Republican donor
26. James Fenimore Cooper - wrote widely on political matters, influenced by Jefferson, notably supporting the landowners in the New York Anti-Rent Wars in the 1840s and 50s
27. Patricia Cornwell - crime writer and Jack the Ripper enthusiast who has made large donations to the US Republican party, despite being a lesbian who has spoken out for equal rights
28. Noel Coward - naturally conservative, author of comedies about the upper middle classes, although he was an agnostic
29. Michael Crichton - climate-change denialist who satirised political correctness and accused liberal magazine editor Michael Crowley of being a small-dicked paedophile
30. Ian Curteis - British writer whose play about the Falklands war was allegedly a victim of censorship by the left-wing BBC
31. Robertson Davies - Canadian novelist with old-fashioned literary style and reactionary politics
32. Benjamin Disraeli - Conservative prime minister and novelist, the father of moderate one-nation conservatism
33. Michael Dobbs - conservative politician and prolific novelist, best known for Francis Urquhart books
34. John Dos Passos - modernist novelist, initially a communist, he moved all the way across the political spectrum to become an admirer of Joe McCarthy
35. Feodor Dostoyevsky - a reformer in his youth, he later moved to the right, seeking to defend the traditional Russian spirit
36. Mircea Eliade - Romanian fiction writer and philosopher of religion, a fascist in the 1930s
37. TS Eliot - former banker, socially and politically conservative, also accused of anti-semitism, said: "I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics"
38. James Ellroy - critically acclaimed crime novelist has expressed right-wing authoritarian viewpoints, e.g. defending the LAPD over the Rodney King beating, but elsewhere claims this was just controversialist nonsense
39. William Faulkner - although a liberal in his attitudes to race, the Southern US novelist is generally judged to be overall conservative
40. Julian Fellowes - a writer whose subject is the English upper classes, his Conservative politics are no great surprise, and he's often on lists of celebrity Tory supporters
41. Fillià - Italian futurist writer and painter known for his religious art, had links with fascists
42. Frederick Forsyth - the British thriller writer has long been a supporter of the Conservative Party
43. George MacDonald Fraser - the author of the humorous Flashman novels was a military man and a traditionalist in many areas of life, prominently campaigning against the metric system
44. Robert Frost - American poet of conservative political views who became a national treasure and spoke at Kennedy's inauguration; he played at being a farmer but earned his money from teaching
45. JW von Goethe - romantic conservative, admired the upper classes, and opposed the numerous revolutions of the late 18th/early 19th centuries
46. Terry Goodkind - Ayn Rand-influenced sword and sorcery writer with enormous sales
47. Knut Hamsun - Norwegian Nobel laureate (Hunger) and later a Nazi sympathiser
48. Robert Heinlein - right-wing libertarian militaristic writer of (mostly) intelligent science fiction
49. Hergé - Belgian comic-book writer of conservative politics, accused of racism and collaborating with the Nazis
50. Michel Houellebecq - anti-political correctness, anti-Islam, anti-women, for his admirers he offers a critique of modern liberal humanism
51. Ted Hughes - misanthropic violence-loving nature poet who detested modern life and became poet laureate and friends with the Queen Mother
52. JK Huysmans - in his early life, a writer of Zola-influenced liberalism, he dallied briefly with fin de siecle decadence but converted to Catholicism and became a conservative
53. PD James - English crime novelist and a Conservative peer in the House of Lords
54. Antony Jay - Thatcherite writer of satirical sitcom Yes Minister
55. Ernst Jünger - German writer who glorified the military following World War I and opposed democracy
56. Jack Kerouac - the beat novelist moved right in the 1960s, supporting the Vietnam war, becoming friends with William F Buckley, and returning to the Catholic faith he was raised in
57. Rudyard Kipling - poet of British patriotism and imperialism, defender of the British soldier
58. Dean Koontz - thriller writer and supporter of US Republican party
59. Philip Larkin - his posthumously-published letters revealed a racist, misogynistic, right-wing private man, while his poetry showed a kindlier backward-looking conservatism
60. DH Lawrence - novelist and poet had liberal views early in his life but later moved towards fascism
61. CS Lewis - Christian apologist and a moderate conservative, though he avoided political association and refused a CBE from Churchill
62. Wyndham Lewis - influenced by the Futurists, he was briefly a supporter of Hitler, and often anti-semitic
63. Liu Xiaobo - the Chinese writer, poet, and Nobel Peace Prize-winner was an admirer of George W Bush and a defender of American imperialism who criticised John Kerry for being insufficiently right-wing; also anti-Islam
64. Mario Vargas Llosa - once a supporter of Castro, he became a free-market centre-right politician, while defending human rights, and ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Peru
65. André Malraux - the novelist, art historian and resistance fighter fought for the Republican side in the Spanish civil war, but in the 1960s he served as Charles de Gaulle's Minister of Cultural Affairs
66. Thomas Mann - a supporter of the Kaiser in his youth, he moved in a liberal direction during the Weimar republic
67. FT Marinetti - Italian proto-fascist poet, active as both an artistic and political leader; he split with Mussolini because he felt the Fascist party was too backward-looking
68. Allan Massie - Scottish conservative historical novelist and journalist
69. HL Mencken - satirist who opposed the New Deal and hated Franklin Roosevelt
70. Stephenie Meyer - Mormon vampire novelist of conservative views
71. Yukio Mishima - right-wing anti-democratic Japanese novelist and playwright who attempted a military coup
72. Marianne Moore - like many in Pound and Eliot's circles, she was right-wing, a defender of American capitalism
73. Iris Murdoch - a youthful communist and populariser of Sartre, she seemed to move rightwards, and like Ayn Rand was a fan of strong-willed almost demonic men; her philosophy focused on topics such as moral virtue; she opposed literary experimentalism, and demanded striking miners be shot
74. Vladimir Nabokov - a conservative aesthete who fled Stalin's Russia
75. VS Naipaul - Indo-Trinidadian Nobel laureate, conservative, accused of disliking the third world and Muslims
76. Flannery O'Connor - Catholic moralist who mocked the godlessness of modern life in grotesque fiction
77. Alexander Pope - conservative satirist
78. PJ O'Rourke - satirist of right-wing sympathies
79. John Osborne - angry young man who turned into a cantankerous old man
80. Luigi Pirandello - experimental playwright allied himself with Mussolini, although his supporters claim it was purely from self-interest
81. Ezra Pound - sophisticated and erudite aesthete, accused of being sympathetic to Mussolini in World War Two and imprisoned
82. Anthony Powell - his Dance to the Music of Time chronicled rich English bohemians and he was an upper-class conservative
83. Marcel Proust - upper-class aesthete, although homosexual, came from a conservative background; he avoided politics and his political position is contested
84. Ayn Rand - popular philosopher and author of very long novels, known for her defence of entrepreneurs and for championing reason over emotions
85. John Crowe Ransom - conservative US Southerner, involved with the Southern Agrarians (backward-looking pro-Confederate grouping) for a time
86. Tim Rice - the lyricist, writer, and TV personality has supported the Conservative party for ages; he also does a lot of good work for charity
87. Walter Scott - Scottish historical novelist of Tory sympathies, active in conservation but condemned by Mark Twain for romanticising war and chivalry; while pro-Jacobite and romantic about Scottish history he also defended the union with England
88. Moshe Shamir - Israeli novelist, playwright, and politician, moved from early socialism to right-wing Likud and Tehiya parties
89. Alexander Solzhenitsyn - the Soviet dissident had an understandable hatred of communism; on his arrival in the USA he allied himself with the neo-conservatives who believed the Soviet Union was the gravest threat to the USA's existence, and called for its destruction
90. Nicholas Sparks - the author of drippy romantic fantasies donated to Republican senator Elizabeth Dole
91. Gertrude Stein - collaborated with Vichy France; claims that she called for Hitler to be given the Nobel Peace Prize were probably a joke
92. Wallace Stevens - insurance company executive who wrote abtruse modernist poetry
93. Tom Stoppard - playwright is generally reckoned to be slightly right of centre despite his human rights work; an anti-communist long-associated with east European dissidents
94. Jonathan Swift - conservative, devout Anglican satirist, converted from Whig to Tory
95. Allen Tate - American agrarian poet, who later became a Roman Catholic and a legendary womaniser
96. Alfred Lord Tennyson - the poet laureate was a traditional English gentleman who celebrated military virtue and the chivalrous middle ages, but was more liberal on some causes - he refused a baronetcy from Disraeli and was agnostic
97. Hunter S Thompson - a libertarian and great believer in gun rights, although he hated most Republicans (despite a grudging respect for Nixon)
98. JRR Tolkien - deeply conservative and strongly Catholic throughout his life, he supported Franco in the Spanish civil war, although he hated Hitler for perverting northern-European myths and traditions
99. John Updike - novelist who wrote about suburbia with a conservative viewpoint
100. Robert Penn Warren - poet, critic, and novelist (political satire All the King's Men), who had links with the Southern Agrarians but moved left and later became a father figure of American liberalism
101. Keith Waterhouse - the author of Billy Liar was a Daily Mail columnist for decades until his death
102. Evelyn Waugh - satirist of the British upper classes and author of Brideshead Revisited, a right-wing Catholic
103. AN Wilson - British novelist, biographer, and newspaper columnist for the right-wing press, of firmly Conservative views
104. PG Wodehouse - although he satirised British fascism in the 1930s, he did broadcasts from Nazi Germany in World War Two, and has been condemned as a collaborator; certainly a small-c conservative
105. Tom Wolfe - satirist, journalist, and winner of the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Prize, an admirer of George W Bush and long-time Republican
106. William Wordsworth - a radical in his youth, he became more conservative as he got older, repudiating his initial support for the French Revolution and eventually becoming a member of the establishment
107. WB Yeats - Irish nationalist and mystic, a Nobel laureate for his poetry, who became increasingly conservative and eccentric and even flirted with fascism

Some suggestions from: Sans Everything, Ranker, WP, Bookslut, Iain Dale, BBC, ChuckerCanuck, Daily Mail, LibraryThing.

Top Ten Internet Hoaxes

MSNBC has produced a list of the 10 most heinous hoaxes on the Net. The list doesn't appear to be in order.

Twitter/Facebook AMBER alert: people broadcasting fake alerts about missing children over Twitter and Facebook.

Bonsai Kitten: fake images of a kitten in a bottle, complete with instructions on how to make your own. The American Humane Society and the FBI investigated it.

Epilepsy Forum Raid: Hackers got into the websites of Epilepsy Foundation of America and the British National Society for Epilepsy, filling them with rapidly-flashing images. It has been blamed on Anonymous (best known for their anti-Scientology actions), 7chan, eBaum's world, and the Internet Hate Machine.

Bigfoot's body: Two men in Georgia, USA, claimed to have bigfoot in their freezer, and sold the corpse to a man from Indiana for $50,000.

Changing pi: Mark Boslough wrote an April Fools story in 1998 about how Alabama legislators were going to change the mathematical constant pi to 3.

Save Toby: In 2005, some people announced they had found an injured rabbit and restored it to health. The heartwarming story changed tack when they said they'd cook eat it unless people donated $50,000.

Myspace Suicide: 13 year old Megan Meier met a boy called Josh on MySpace. They exchanged emails and she fell in love with him. He broke it off a month later and she committed suicide, hanging herself in her bedroom on 16 October 2006. But Josh never existed: Lori Drew, the mother of a girl who knew Megan, created the fake profile and Drew and others used it to send Meier abusive messages.

419 Nigerian scams: The classic get-rich-quick scheme, where someone emails to say that they've got $100 million in an African bank account and with your help they can get it out. Just send some money to help. And your bank details... In 1995, an American who went to Lagos after one of these schemes was murdered.

Work-at-home scams: Another age-old trick: just send money and we'll tell you how to earn $$$ from your own home. Whether the method involves setting up your own work-from-home scam will vary.

Facebook hoax on TechCrunch: Facebook tricked technology news website TechCrunch into believing Facebook had added a "fax this photo" feature to every photo on Facebook.

(Via Museum of Hoaxes, who suggests they missed manbeef.com, Marry Our Daughter, and "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad, then he knocked up my sister!")

We Live In Ethiopia Now

The Guardian has a feature on Josh Harris, an early and eccentric internet millionaire who funnelled his profits into massive art projects. He founded a company called Jupiter Interactive and a website pseudo.com for streaming audio and video. He offered sex chat and streamed audio programs on subjects such as video games over dial-up connections, later moving up to video. The company went bankrupt in the first dot com crash in 2000.

What's more interesting is how Harris managed to spend $80m he earned from his businesses. He was obsessed with the ability of the internet to broadcast people's lives in real-time audio and video. One project of his, called We Live in Public, involved him and his girlfriend broadcasting every action from dozens of video cameras in their luxurious Manhattan apartment for 100 days. Their relationship broke down under the stress.

He was also known for wild and eccentric parties, including his event marking the end of the last millennium, Quiet: We Live in Public, which involved a group of people living for a month in a Broadway warehouse, with all their actions broadcast on pseudo.com. The premises included "a shooting range, ... a banquet hall, theatre, temple, club, giant game of Risk, and a public shower area, all covered by cameras", as well as lots of drugs and sex. To explain this, Harris referenced his New York predecessor Warhol: "I think what people are demanding is 15 minutes of fame every day. And mark my words, they will get it. That's where we're heading, whether we like it or not."

Ondi Timoner has made a film, called We Live in Public, about Josh Harris. After spending the early 2000s running an apple farm in Columbia County, NY, Harris now lives in Sidamo, Ethiopia, where he is apparently CEO of an organisation called the African Entertainment Network. Pseudo.com now offers a range of music videos for online viewing.

Give a man a twitter account and he thinks he's Edward R Murrow

Recently there have been a number of outrages against public decency that have broken as stories or been heavily promoted by celebrity Twitterers: these include Jan Moir being rude about a dead gay singer; Carter-Ruck and Trafigura injuncting the Guardian; and the Scottish Sunday Express intruding on Dunblane.

What's curious is that the voices promoting these issues are not in the main political reporters, politicians, or even political bloggers. Instead the likes of Graham Linehan (instrumental in the Dunblane issue), Stephen Fry (credited with publicising Trafigura), and Charlie Brooker (promoting a variety of liberal causes from drug policy to being nice to Stephen Gately) are comedy writers and/or presenters. The tone is summed up by this tweet from Brooker: "RT @arusbridger: Thx to Twitter/all tweeters for fantastic support over past 16 hours! Great victory for free speech. #trafigura #guardian". The Guardian makes use of Twitter for advertising as well as campaigning so this is a happy collision of both.

The JCPR Twitter Index attempts to rank Twitter account holders based on retweets and other measures as well as the number of followers. The top 10 British Twitterers as of 30 Oct are:

1 Jonathan Ross 438,099 followers
2 Fry 921,760
3 Linehan 33,458
4 Downing Street 1,523,922
5 Jason Bradbury (The Gadget Show) 39,913
6 Philip Schofield
7 Alan Davies
8 Russell Brand
9 Coldplay
10 Phil Jupitus

Brooker was further down, 51st of the British, but with 83,856 followers was more popular than many above him. He does retweet a lot, though.

In contrast, when The Independent asked "Who are the most influential bloggers on Twitter?" on 3 Aug 2009, the top 3 were Guido Fawkes (notorious right-libertarian blogger) (as of 30 Oct, he has 5672 followers), Jon Snow (Channel 4 newscaster of somewhat liberal persuasion) (8800 followers), and Iain Dale (mainstream Conservative) (6411 followers). None of them feature in Twitter Index's list. So it's clear that (with the uncertain exception of Downing Street) it is comics, not politicans or political writers, who are getting their message across on Twitter.

While Fry is in the popular imagination something of a polymath, with plentiful books (fiction and non-fiction), numerous factual TV shows, newspaper columns, dramatic acting, as well as being funny, the others have less obvious claim to be moral guardians. Linehan has written or co-written some amusing TV comedy (working on Father Ted, Big Train, Black Books, the IT Crowd, and others).

Brooker's story is perhaps the most interesting example of a man pushed to fame by his ability to spout opinions in easy to package doses. He started off as a video-game journalist before progressing to mock bad TV online and in the Guardian. Eventually he progressed to an all purpose ranter, mocking the obsession with Twitter (1, 2), attacking the mob mentality of the outraged who rush off to complain about everything they see or hear, saying "I hate offended people", and that he hates opinions. The self-contradiction is almost-certainly tongue in cheek.

In October 2008 he penned a column about how maybe it's not so good to mock celebrities, after reading some of the megabytes of hate-filled email he gets from wannabe comedians seeking his seal of approval: "Perhaps I'm mellowing in my old age, or perhaps I've grown 15% more human, but kicking real people when they're down doesn't really activate my chuckle cells." A few weeks before he'd talked about his spiritual emptiness, suggesting a kind of personal crisis.

Since then his columns have been less sneery, and Brooker's career has had its ups and downs: You Have Been Watching, a Channel 4 panel game in which he sneered at TV got mixed reviews, while Newswipe in which he reported more seriously on TV news coverage was widely appreciated as one of the few TV programs to take television seriously. His tweets and columns reflect a growing interest in the reporting of science, as well as the more obvious expressions of outrage (Trafigura, Moir).

Will the growth of the comic-turned-twitter-politician be the start of a new popular movement? Fry, being intelligent, sees the risks and has expressed sympathy for Moir in the witchhunt she suffered:

I feel sorry for her because I know just what it is like to make a monumental ass of oneself and how hard it is to find the road back. I know all too well what it is like to be inebriated, as Disraeli put it, by the exuberance of my own verbosity.

He continued musing on his own Twitter popularity:

And what am I after all? What right have I to wield this kind of influence? A question people have been asking about journalists for years, but which they have every right to ask about me too. I don't know what business I have wielding influence either. This whole thing has just grown up around me and now I cannot help wondering if, despite my preference for turd-sucking over politics, I have found myself in a new Fifth Estate political assembly, willy-nilly hailed as some sort of tribune by friendly people on one side and being yelled at by unfriendly people on the other. I am not cut out for the hurly-burly of adversarial politics. I am not qualified to represent anyone nor, I cannot repeat often enough, do I wish to. So I should shut up.

Fry continued for another 1000 words.

---

ADDENDUM: Further controversy has accompanied Fry's Twitterings (Guardian 2009/10/31, 2009/11/02). A twitterer called brumplum called Fry's postings boring, and Fry announced his retirement: "You've convinced me. I'm obviously not good enough. I retire from Twitter henceforward. Bye everyone." Large number of Fry-followers attacked brumplum (some names removed):

@brumplum IS SO BORING HE FUCKS SHEEP @brumplum ur soo gonan be fucking sorry for callin my fav celeb boring u fukin turded faceless arsole

@brumplum You sound like a prick and I only half read your Twitter.

@brumplum r u the reason that stephen fry is thinking of leaving Twitter?Shame on u -he's a national treasure with a kind soul y b so nasty?

@brumplum you truly are a nasty little individual.

I can think of fewer things worse really. Who the fuck is @brumplum to upset Twitter's and England's darling?

@askjeevesdotcom guess what the arsehole @brumplum called @stephenfry boring when stepehn fry isnt

Fry defended brumplum and the two made up:

stephenfry: @brumplum I am so sorry to hear ppl have been abusing you. You had every right to say what you did. Pls accept my apols. This is so awful.

brumplum: @stephenfry Thanks. Can we all be friends again? *tweet favourited* (I have an ego as big as the next man!) ;-)

As already mentioned, the whole story was covered in detail in the Guardian and much of the other media.

Art has already died more times than Dracula, but down it goes again...

Jonathan Jones, who reviews old art for the Guardian, has written a savage attack on Damien Hirst and contemporary art:

Hirst's exhibition is a stupefying admission of defeat, a self-obliterating homage, that reveals the most successful artist of our time to be a tiny talent, with less to offer than even the most obscure Victorian painter in the Wallace Collection [...] Hirst has said: I want to be compared directly with the old masters, on their own turf, in their own visual language. In his eyes, it would seem that all the readymades, all the vitrines – all the ideas that have made him rich – are not real art at all. They are substitutes for the art he wishes he could make. The one truly great art, in his eyes, is the high western tradition of oil painting. He can't do that at all; can't paint his way out of a paper bag. [...] No critic has even come close to the total dismissal of 21st-century art implied by Hirst's turnabout.

Tales of central Asia: the artist and the Islamist soldier

Adam Curtis traces (1 2) the relationship between conceptual artist Alighiero e Boetti and 18th century Muslim rebel Sheikh Mansur who led the Chechens against the Russian empire under Catherine the Great. Mansur may have been born in Italy, a one-time monk called Giovani Batista Boetti who went to the region a missionary, fell in love with the daughter of a local leader, and converted to Islam. He was also, perhaps, an ancestor of the other Boetti - unless the letters from Mansur, found in Turin in the late 19th century, describing his Italian roots, were forgeries. Alighiero e Boetti, an artist with roots in the arte povera movement, arrived in central Asia - Afghanistan - in 1971. Seeking to expunge western ideas of creativity and individuality, the later Boetti paid Afghan weavers to produce embroidered designs for him, maps of the world and diagrams encoding the predicted date of his death. He also bought a hotel and took a lot of heroin; with the new flow of western travellers to the region, heroin became increasingly popular, and people started to smuggle it back to Europe. In the last few years, Italian soldiers have arrived in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, who are at once Islamist warriors and drug dealers.