I am going to finally make a start on reading "The Eureka Stockade".

Just finished Harper Lee “To kill a mockingbird.”

Need to read it again—different era, different country—the rural south. Little echos of Huckleberry Finn.

It is 1935, Atticus Finch drives a Buick but horse and mule drawn transport is common. “Old Hitler” gets a mention. “black people” play a big part in the story.

Poor Artists is critical of the art world as it exists: the convoluted funding applications, sycophantic gallery dynamics and snobby collectors, art schools that overpromise and underdeliver, and the poverty and precarity of life as a working artist. It is not particularly critical of any art in itself, except to disparage “beautiful” art made to appeal to “magpie” collectors and influencers.


Sociopolitical critique stands for art criticism here in the same way that it often stands for contemporary art. Muhammad and De la Puente scrutinise dysfunctional structures of inequality through Quest’s naive eyes, but it’s beyond the scope of the book to think especially critically or interpretively about the art she sees and makes. The conclusion is simply that it should be easier to be an artist, and that there should be space in the world to make stuff just for the pleasure of making it. What happens next is anyone’s guess: how would the fabric of society shift if we acknowledged the centrality of art to the human experience? The many voices in Poor Artists start us thinking about how to find out.

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/28/poor-artists-by-the-white-pube-rev...





NOT satire.

A book on "Eureka". Interesting start, so far.