The New Arcades Project

Burning Pyre is sick of the serviette badinage which passes for trench warfare between modern media talking heads. We’ve read of the time when men would beat and shoot each other to death over their opinions, viz. 1919:

 

What are we trying to say, ever so clumsily? That the cultural commentator and artist should stop whispering behind his napkin, embarrassed by a ballsy opinion, and say something real.

The New Arcades Project is an attempt to understand – hell: appreciate – art, politics, philosophy, history, economics, etc, etc, within a fragmented narrative context which is not history, but nevertheless seems like history. The rise of new media means that a new understanding can be developed which is not based in the art gallery or in the venerable book (which we continue to venerate, Amazon’s space-saving toy be damned) and, thanks to its brevity, need not be monotonically classicist or Marxist or fascist or capitalist or –ist at all. It can interweave competing, fragmented narratives to present a mosaic-like picture of events. It is the theory of history for an over-intellectualised, over-stimulated, over-fed generation who do not know what war or political rioting is, but who wish to understand the past more viscerally and without regard to political correctness or narrative structure than a million History Channel reconstructions, based on a phenomenological bootstrapping of personal experience to general, 'public' experience.

What the fuck does this mean?

We all remember the time, however distantly, a great record was released; an artwork seized the headlines; a terrorist event gripped our attention and our pity; a magnificent moment which was greater than our own personal agendas and felt, yes, like the Zeitgeist itself! This is the New Arcades Project.