Mike Tidmus

Bonjour mes amis!   To accompany your steaming cup of joe, or Bloody Mary, and the Sunday papers, here are some links to unmissable writing on the internets that you might otherwise, but ought not to, miss.

Adrian Searle : Painted screams

But it is a hollow cry. Francis Bacon was a pasticheur, a mimic. He ended up imitating himself. It was a kind of method acting. His career took off in the 1940s and with a few exceptions his best work was behind him by the mid-1960s. Walk through this show and feel the disengagement – yours as well as his – setting in. This latest retrospective, which will travel, among other places, to the Prado in Madrid, is as uneven and overstretched as the artist himself was. Bacon died suddenly in Madrid in 1992. Velázquez will kill him there again, when the show comes to town – but then Velázquez kills everyone.

Charles Darwent : Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, London

With the exception of Andy Warhol, Bacon comes bogged down with more anecdotage than any modern artist I can think of. There are more soi-disant Friends of Francis than there are fragments of the True Cross. Stories about him abound and (their subject having been a gleeful mythomane) are often untrue. The beatings, buggery, boot-blacked hair, the Colony Room witticisms – “Champagne for my real friends! Real pain for my sham friends!” – all encourage us to see his pictures as artefacts rather than as art. As a result, it’s easy to forget Bacon the master painter.

E J Dionne : Lame you can believe in

… Obama bears responsibility, too: His task is to remind Americans that the stakes in this election are far higher than the matter of who said what and when about Palin. He isn’t doing it.

Eugene Robinson : A campaign without ideas

There was a time when Republicans campaigned on their ideas, programs and values. This year—lacking ideas, programs or values—John McCain and Sarah Palin are running for the White House on an elaborate fictional narrative of victimhood. Their supposed persecutors are Democrats and the news media, and the aim of this whole charade is to keep Americans from talking about ideas, programs and values.

Margot Canaday : We colonials

No sooner had this legal regime been put up than it began to be pulled down (in the longue durée of history, antihomosexualism may yet turn out to be something of a blip). But here, too, the story is probably not what you think: reform did not come from a nascent gay rights movement. Not at first. Rather, it was pushed by the legal community, influenced by Kinsey’s findings about what Americans actually did in bed. Some 95 percent of Americans were technically lawbreakers–a situation that, if not remedied, might lead to the same kind of disregard for law that had marked the Prohibition era (as well as blackmail and police corruption).

Doug Ireland : Socialism and Homosex

Recovering our hidden gay history has been a critically important byproduct of the modern gay movement, and in its current Summer 2008 issue, the 46-year-old independent socialist review New Politics has published a significant discovery that restores to us a lost moment of our political history – specifically, of the history of gays and the left.

Elizabeth Fernandez : Young black men at high risk for HIV, CDC says

“The house has been on fire for African American gay men for many years,” says Mark Cloutier, chief executive of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. “It keeps spreading, and we aren’t bringing the fire corps to it.”

Robert Hughes : Day of the dead

By now, with the enormous hype that has been spun around it, there probably isn’t an earthworm between John O’Groats and Land’s End that hasn’t heard about the auction of Damien Hirst’s work at Sotheby’s on Monday and Tuesday – the special character of the event being that the artist is offering the work directly for sale, not through a dealer. This, of course, is persiflage. Christie’s and Sotheby’s are now scarcely distinguishable from private dealers anyway: they in effect manage and represent living artists, and the Hirst auction is merely another step in cutting gallery dealers out of the loop.

Peter Conrad : I have to admit it: I was wrong about Hirst

The cynic, as Oscar Wilde put it, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. For critics, that switches into reverse: indifferent to price, we are expected to deliberate about value. So I reacted as you might expect to the news that Damien Hirst hopes to cream off a commission-free £60m from an auction of 223 works that begins tomorrow.

Caroline Moorehead : Manifestos for the 21st Century

“Wherever they burn books,” wrote Heinrich Heine in 1823, “they will end up burning people.” Predictably, Heine was one of the writers whose books were flung into the flames by the SA in Berlin a little over a century later, along with those by Marx, Freud, Maxim Gorky, Stefan Zweig and many others. As these four short books on censorship – of the word, the body, the moving image and sexuality – make clear, freedom of expression in all its forms has always been deeply threatening, not only to totalitarian regimes, but to society itself. But fashions change and it is precisely these constantly shifting and evolving forms of perceived threat that make this series, subtitled rather portentously Manifestos for the 21st Century, so fascinating.

Pam Chamberlain : Abstaining from the truth

Sexuality education has become a skirmish in the culture wars, and the minefield is public education. It is no coincidence that the struggle happens in schools. Public education has long been recognized as a major tool in imparting more or less universally accepted societal values such as hard work and civic engagement, but it also sparks debates over the value of competition, individualism, and unquestioned patriotism. Because schools define what knowledge is useful for the populace, the arena of schools is the locale for “ideological management,” according to educational philosopher Joel Spring.