Final Exam Questions updated again

Interesting article for the question about most visited places in Travel - http://www.afghanscene.com/may-2013-issue-may-2013-issue/10384-the-25-least-visited-countries-in-the-world?

Media - Good article for freedom of the press question - http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/02/us-press-freedom-fell-27-places-last-year-to-47th-in-the-world/252391/

Business and Finance - Great talk about austerity. Scottish accent, swearing and economics! - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JQuHSQXxsjM#!

Relationships - Good ideas for the monogamy question - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/books/review/what-do-women-want-by-daniel-bergner.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1

Hey gang. I've tried to make the changes we talked about the other day plus I've made a few other little ones so please have a look again. I've also changed the settings so that anyone can now comment and there shouldn't be a verification, so please comment away. The deadline for submitting questions to my superiors is June 7th, so no changes can be made after that time. I'd like another Business question and think Ethics as well as Arts and Culture still need a little work.

Lifestyle

1. How does consumerism influence family life?

2. Why is consumerism so important for a country's economy?

3. What do you think about shopping on Black Friday?

4. What are some interesting subcultures that you know?

5. What is the role of the media in the increased popularity of vampirism?

6. Why do people become hoarders?

7. Should local authorities help hoarders and what could be done?

Travel & Tourism

1. Why do you think people decide to spend their holidays in strange and unconventional places?

2. What are the most frequently visited places/countries and why? What are the trends?

3. What are the advantages of traveling?

4. In what way has the development of technology transformed tourism?

5. What are the reasons to travel?

6. What are the differences between 'glamping' and camping?

7. Why do people take pictures during their holidays?

Technology

1. How has technology changed society? Has it made our lives better and/or easier?

2. Does technology help to prevent crimes or the other way round, does it encourage criminals to commit crimes?

3. What are some different kinds of cyber crimes?

4. Why do people become body hackers?

5. What kind of computer hackers are there and what are the differences?

6. How can people protect themselves from becoming victims of cybercrime?

7. Is 'sextortion' an inevitable result of technological advancement?

Media

1. Why did the "Golden Eagle Kid" video become so successful?

2. Does the freedom of the press and media really exist?

3. How important is television in your life? What kind of TV programs do you watch (if any)?

4. Explain the term "honey trap".

5. Can the Internet fully compete with television?

6. What was meant by Chris Bauer when he referred to the democratization of the news?

7. Why has it been said that TV is a social killer?

Business & Finance

1. Is income inequality only a problem for the 99%

2. Describe how the level of inequality in the US has evolved over the past century.

3. Should the super rich be taxed at a higher rate than the poor? Justify your choice.

4. What is meant by the term fiat currency and what gives it value?

5. What are some of the causes of the current financial crisis?

6. What is a Ponzi scheme and how does it compare to the financial system?

7. Is it true that nobody could have predicted the financial crisis?

Politics & Society

1.Would you ever take part in a protest?

2. Is protesting an effective way of expressing dissatisfaction with the government?

3. How do you feel about the techniques used by the police during the UK tuition protests and the sentencing of the rioters after the UK riots?

4. Is violence as a part of protests ever justified?

5. What's the difference between riots and protests?

6. What options do people in non-democratic states have to express their dissatisfaction?

7. What was the trigger for student protests in Quebec and what do you think would happen if it happened in Poland?

Relationships

1. Are polyamorous relationships possible to maintain over the long term?

2. Is it possible to claim that monogamy is superior to polygamy or vice versa?

3. Why do people become involved in polyamorous relationships?

4. What benefits of monogamy and polygamy can you think of?

5. Why would someone want to have a long term relationship with a death-row convict?

6. Could you present some of the possible societal and personal benefits derived from intercultural relationships?

7. What kind of problems resulting from intercultural marriage can you think of?

Ethics

1. Who or what was responsible for the financial crisis?

2. Explain the term 'revolving door'. Give some examples.

3. Why do rich people quite often get away with criminal and/or unethical behavior?

4. Are rich people less ethical than the rest of society?

5. Where do people get their notions of right and wrong from?

6. What is meant by the term 'moral hazard'?

7. Should employers employ family members in their company?

Arts & Culture

1. To what extent should art represent reality?

2. Should art be funded with public money?

3. Should art which is controversial or offensive be censored?

 4. What was the purpose of the film 'Exit Through the Gift Shop' in your view?

5. Was the Thierry character real? What was Banksy trying to satirise through his character?

6. Is there such a thing as good or bad art? Who is able to decide this?

7. Is graffiti vandalism or art?

Arts and Culture Presentation

Hey everyone. Don't get too excited, but here's the final article of the year for the last presentation of the year! See you next week!

http://www.vice.com/read/i-went-to-art-basel-to-try-and-get-art

Here's another I found about graffiti, just extra - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22551669

I Went to Art Basel and Tried to "Get" Art

By Words: Glen Coco, Photos: Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

A while ago, I wrote a thing about how I don't "get" art. In the piece, I dared to suggest that maybe it was silly that a neon sign that says "my cunt is wet with fear" is worth $100,000. It got read by a lot of people, many of whom disagreed with me and got very very angry. After reading people's feedback, I thought maybe I had been a little harsh, and decided to give art ONE MORE CHANCE.
So I headed to Art Basel in Miami. In case you don't keep up with #art, Art Basel is the world's largest art fair. A bunch of galleries from all around the world gather in a big exhibition center in Miami and show off their bestest bits of art (pictured above), and have some parties and stuff.

First thing I noticed while walking around the main exhibition was the INSANE amount of canvases-painted-one-color that were on display.

I mean, I get it. It's "making us question what art REALLY is" or some shit. Which I guess would have been kinda interesting the first time someone did it 100 years ago. But do we really need to keep doing it? It's been pretty well established what art is by now.

What I don't get, is who the fuck is buying this stuff? Is this really worth $20,000? I know that nothing is worth what you pay for it, that's just how the world works. Like, the computer I'm typing this on probably cost the manufacturer about 1/50th of what I paid for it. But come the fuck on, man. A black square? That costs as much as an entire third-world school?

I know the term "laughing all the way to the bank" is overused, but I find it hard you wouldn't at least chuckle while driving to Chase if you were the guy who just made a year's rent by painting a $30 canvas black. 

And how does an artist even decide this is what they're gonna do with their life? It's like when people become an acoustic singer/songwriter. There is not one single thing that you can add to that world, so why bother?

I guess it's probably "Blair Witch syndrome"—where someone sees another person making a ton of money doing something that they themselves could have done and it makes them temporarily lose their mind.

Maybe that's just what the entire art world is. Like how the tech world is made up almost completely of people who wish they could have been Mark Zuckerberg, the art world is people who are bummed they didn't think of someone else's obvious idea first. 

Like how Tracey Emin made a bunch of money writing completely asinine statements in neon lighting, and now there's an entire artistic movement of it. Like what you see above. Which are just four examples of about 1000000 I saw at Basel of people taking nominally profound statements and then turning them into art 3D objects to be sold for more than I make in a year.

Weirdly, Pharrell is taken seriously by people in Miami. I saw him at a bunch of shows, and he wasn't laughed out of the building a single time. He even did a talk about design which, unfortunately, I missed, as I'm sure it would have been fucking GOLD. Apparently Kanye showed up and they had a debate about modern aesthetics, hahahahaha. This is the same guy who once asked everyone to start calling him "Skateboard P," right? The one who was "rhymin' on the top of a cop car"? I didn't imagine that? And people are paying to hear him give his opinions on design now? Got it.

They don't have the accompanying literature that explains what the art "means" at most of the exhibits, which is a shame as, TBH, I was pretty bored most of the time I was there, and reading people waffle on about what art means is what can really take a piece of art from Snoozetown to the Land of LOL.

For instance, this piece was a woman laying in a dark room while some stupid song about Megaupload played, which the accompanying text described as a "monolithic structure" that was "representative of an archaic relic from pre-Internet times" and "literally (and metaphorically) trapping her in the physical world... the only possible mode of transcendence from this uncomfortable reality is offered by the artist herself... singing instructions on 'how to upload your soul to the internet.'"  

Which elevates it from "some woman lying on the ground surrounded by a bunch of shit" to "some woman taking several days out of her life to lie in a gallery and try to make some non-point about the internet AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA." 

I really feel like I missed out on so much hilarious shit due to the absence of explanations. There was so so so much stuff there that I would love to hear someone attempt to justify. Like this: a plastic child's head, with underwear on it, smoking a cigarette, on a MacBook.

Speaking of, do you think artists think of a point they want to make and then make an art piece around that? Or do you think they do it in reverse? Like this one, which is a misshapen plate that says "mother fucker" on it—the artist's reasoning for it was this:

"Rainer Ganahl introduces his personal view on one of the most renowned artist of the 20th century, Lucio Fontana. The famous sliced open canvases, although bearing traces of obvious violence, are nonetheless serving an idealistic quest. But Rainer Ganahl only keeps the regressive and sadistic aspect of the gesture. Through Ganahl's raw and dirty style, Fontana's works now appear outrageous."

Do you think he actually woke up one day thinking all that stuff, and then set out to find a way of communicating that message to the world? Or do you think it's like my high school design projects where I'd be like, "I wanna make a pencil holder with Marvin the Martian on it," and then would have to retroactively make a whole project around it acting like I developed it n' stuff? 

It's like with mediums and psychics. I can never tell if they know they're lying, or if they're mentally ill and actually believe what they're saying to people. If artists are in on the joke and know they're full of shit and what they're doing is totally fucking ridiculous, then that's kind of amazing.

Like, if the guy who made this was stoned with his buddies one day and went "you think I could get away with it if I just made a wall mounted vagina and charged like, ten grand? That would be so sick"? He would be my hero.

"HAHAHAHA you're never gonna fucking believe this, but you know that canvas I did, the one with the shitty little spraypainted squiggle on it? Some idiot bought it! Drinks are on me!"

It costs 50 grand for an exhibition space here, apparently. Fifty grand! Can you imagine how embarrassing it would have to be to sit there all day if you were a gallerist and this was the art you were showing? Just in case it's unclear, this is a couple of empty banana boxes, and some spotlights, and it was the ENTIRE body of work that some gallery from Zurich was displaying.

And that's just 50 grand to exhibit, that doesn't take into account how much it must have cost them to fly the installation and staff over from Zurich. And then you have to sit in front of this piece of shit all day for a week while people come over and look at it knowing that they know you paid thousands to be there? Brutal. 

Bleugh. I dunno, if anything, going to Basel has made me hate art even more. Because the fact that it was a trade show just underlined how much money was going into the whole thing. Every time I saw some stuff that I liked or that I thought was funny, I would think about the money and time that went into it, and just get bummed out.

The other thing that people at Art Basel do is throw big, exclusive partes so that art people can hang out with other art people.

Presumably, most people reading this will never get invited to one, so let me talk you through it:

It starts with a line. Which is much like the line at a regular club/party, except that it's guest list-based, and everyone in it thinks they are the most important person in the world. This was taken at some party I went to that Demi Moore and Martha Stewart were at. We had to line up for 30 minutes or so, and people LOST THEIR FUCKING MINDS. I heard one girl compare her situation to Auschwitz, and another was repeatedly screaming that she would sue the hotel if she got bitten by any bugs. Eventually people just decided to Braveheart it and charge in by any means possible, like these old-timers who are scrambling through the fucking wilderness like they're running away from Predator.

I really hope I'm not climbing through bushes because I feel too entitled to have to wait ten minutes when I'm this guy's age :(

Inside is a lot like a regular party, except the music is really quiet, the drinks are free, and people don't appear to be having fun. 

There are also lots of people there who are famous that you won't recognize. Like these two. Lots of people were asking to take their photo, so I assume they're "somebodies." Can someone lemme know who they are in the comments? I'm assuming by their clothes/skin color, that they're both real housewives of Miami. 

Unrelated, but I was at some barbeque that Chanel was throwing (lol) and found out the next day that Lenny Kravitz had been there. I am so so so bummed I didn't realize he was there at the time. I feel like Jon Snow after he was on that plane with Idi Amin. I could've just walked up to Lenny and murdered him right there in the party, and the world wouldn't have had to see him tweet another picture of himself wearing a leather jacket with no shirt underneath (come the fuck on, Lenny, if it's cold enough for a leather jacket, it's cold enough for a shirt, too).

Sorry everyone!

There were also lots of people at the parties who looked like this. When I asked this girl for a photo, she didn't say a word, just did a subtle nod while blue-steeling, posed like this, then walked away looking like she was about to burst into tears.

When did really, really serious people co-opt dressing goofy? How're you gonna turn up to a party dressed like fun-time chemo-Barbie and then act like everyone in the room just killed your puppy? She should be arrested and charged for false advertising. 

This guy, too. He's dressed like a one-man party, but it would be physically impossible for him to have a more self-serious facial expression. Can you imagine if an old lady had to sit next to this guy on a bus? She would think he was a blast, start a conversation, and then he'd end up getting all mad at her about Rihanna ruining sea-punk on SNL. Can someone fun please take back dressing whacky from these assholes?

And that's pretty much Art Basel in a nutshell. Apparently it generates one billion dollars for the city of Miami. Huh.

To conclude:

Final Exam Questions Updated

Hey everyone. I've received a couple of suggestions and put the options that have been made so far. Pleas have a look at the lifestyle, media, and relationship topics and continue to make suggestions in the comment section. Additionally, the ethics questions need a lot of work and we need to start to make questions for arts and culture. You can choose from these plus from next weeks class:

1. To what extent should art represent reality?
2. Should art be funded with public money?
3. Should art which is controversial or offensive be censored?
4. What was the purpose of the film Exit Through the Gift Shop in your view?
5. Was the Thierry character real? What was Banksy trying to satirise through his character?
6. Is there such a thing as good or bad art? Who is able to decide this?
7. Are illegal forms of art such as graffiti and street art genuinely art?

Hey, here's the list for final exam questions up to now. I've marked a couple of places where changes still need to be made plus we still to make questions for arts & culture, please feel free to comment below or bring ideas to class. Before that though, I've been asked for a class list by the exam committee, please ensure your name is below and is spelt correctly (feel free to add Polish signs:

Martyna Grygier
Magdalena Wolanska
Krysia Kulak
Marta Makos
Magda Lytka
Dominika Konicka
Justyna Zaleska
Joanna Cieslak
Aleksandra Sznabel
Izabela Michniewska
Patryk Stefanowicz
Juliusz Dereszewicz
Marcin Kowal 
Joanna Gil

Lifestyle

1. How does consumerism influence family life?

2. Why is consumerism so important for a country's economy?

3. What do you think about shopping on Black Friday?

4. What are the techniques used by companies to encourage people to buy their products?
(or: Do you think that such phenomena as hoarding, vampirism etc. could have occurred 70 years ago? Why? Why not?" ?
5. What are some interesting subcultures you know?

6. What is the role of the media in the increased popularity of vampirism?

7. Why do people become hoarders?

8. Should local authorities help hoarders and what could be done?

Travel & Tourism

1. Why do you think people decide to spend their holidays in very strange and
unconventional places?

2. What are the most frequently visited places/countries and why? What are the trends?

3. What are the advantages of traveling?

4. In what way has the development of technology transformed tourism?


5. What are the reasons to travel?

6. What are the differences between 'glamping' and camping?

7. Why do people take pictures during their holidays?

Technology.

          1. How has technology changed society? Has it made our lives easier and better?

2. Does technology help to prevent crimes or the other way round, does it encourage criminals to commit crimes?

3. What kinds of cyber crimes do you know?

4. Why do people become body hackers?

5. What kind of computer hackers are there and what are the differences?

6. Can you think of any ways of preventing people from committing cyber crimes? How can people protect themselves from becoming victims of it?

7. Is 'sextortion' an immediate effect of technological advancement?

Media -

1. Why did the "Golden Eagle Kid" video become so successful?

2. How can the mass media be useful in spreading propaganda?
(or: "Are any circumstances in which mass media censorship can be justified? Does the freedom of media still exist?")
3. How important is television in your life? What kind of TV programs do
you watch (if any)

4. Does televisiom generally have a positive or negative influence?
(or: Explain the term 'Honey Trap')
5. Can the Internet fully compete with television?

6. How can the television bring people together?
(or: What was meant by Chris Bauer when he referred to the democratization of the news?)
7. Why has it been said that TV is a social killer? How can watching TV be
addicitve?

I think there are too many TV questions here and that we need a question or two from the obligatory set material. Please choose 1 or 2 to remove and a couple from below to add:

1. Explain the term ‘Honey Trap’. 

2. What arguments does Louise Mensch give to support the idea that publishing the photos was in the public interest?

3. How does John Prescott argue the opposite point?

4.Explain Jeremy Hunt’s description of Rupert Murdoch as a ‘Marmite proprietor’?

5. Does Hunt believe the photos should have been published?

6. Why was it so important for Rupert Murdoch to publish the pictures?

7. How has the digitalisation and globalisation of the media rendered regulatory frameworks obsolete?

8. What is the ‘grey market’? Give examples of news stories where the ‘grey market’ has operated?

9. What does the author mean by the ‘democratisation’ of news? 

10. What is the underlying thesis of the article?

Business & Finance

1. Is income inequality only a problem for the 99%
2. Describe how the level of inequality in the US has evolved over the past century.

3. Should the super rich be taxed at a higher rate than the poor? Justify your choice.

4. What is meant by the term fiat currency and what gives it value?

5. What are some of the causes of the current financial crisis?

6. Describe the origins of the crisis in Cyprus and its consequences

Politics & Society

          1.Would you ever take part in a protest?

2. Is protesting an effective way of expressing dissatisfaction with the government?

3. How do you feel about the techniques used by the police during the UK tuition protests and the sentencing of the rioters in the UK riots?

4. Is violence, as a part of protests ever justified?

5. What's the difference between riots and protests?

6. What options do people in non-democratic states have to express their dissatisfaction?

7. What was the trigger for student protests in Quebec and what do you think would happen it happened in Poland?
8. Why does it seem western governments have been seemingly less enthusiastic about intervening in Syria than they were in Libya?

Relationships – There are too many similar question here. Which should be removed/reworded?

    1. Are polyamorous relationships long-standing?

       2. What are the legal obstacles to polyamory?

       3.  Polygamy vs monogamy – which is better? Why?

       4. Why do people start polyamory relationships?

       5. What benefits of monogamy/polygamy can you think of?

       6. Would you date a convict? Why? Why not?

       7. Why would people want to have a long-standing relationship with a
           death-row convict?

    8. Is it possible to have a satisfying relationship with a convict?

        9. Could you present possible societal and personal benefits from
            dating person from a different culture?

    10. What kind of problems in intercultural marriage can you think of?

The suggestion has been made to remove questions 2, 6 and 8 

Ethics - Definitely still needs work

1. Who is responsible for the financial crisis?
2. Explain the term 'revolving door'. Give some examples.
3. Why do rich people quite often get away with punishment?
4. Are rich people less ethical?
5. How does a person get their notions of right and wrong?
6. What is meant by the term 'moral hazard'?
7. What is TARP? Describe its consequences.
8. Should employers employ the family members in their company?

Arts & Culture –

1. To what extent should art represent reality?
2. Should art be funded with public money?
3. Should art which is controversial or offensive be censored?
4. What was the purpose of the film Exit Through the Gift Shop in your view?
5. Was the Thierry character real? What was Banksy trying to satirise through his character?
6. Is there such a thing as good or bad art? Who is able to decide this?
7. Are illegal forms of art such as graffiti and street art genuinely art?

Arts and Culture extra

Hey guys, no article for next week as there will be a movie. However, here's something for you to look at; it's just the names of the art work we looked at last week along with a description of each of the art movements (not in order) plus  the set questions we looked at. See you Thursday.

1. Claude Monet, Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), (1872), Impressionism
2. A Russian advertising construction, date unknown, Constructivism
3. Banksy, Art Attack ( Street-Art mural at West Bank Barrier Israel), (2005), Post-Modernism
4. Max Ernst, The Elephant Celebes, (1921), Surrealism
5. Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians (1921), Cubism
6. George Bellows, Dempsey and Firpo, (1924), Figurative Art
7. Edvard Munch, The Scream, (1893), Expressionism
8. Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Woman Cleaning Turnips, (ca.1738), Realism

1. “Its typical trait is to present the world in an utterly subjective perspective, radically distorting it for emotional effect, to evoke moods or ideas. Its artists sought to express the meaning of being alive and emotional experience rather than physical reality.”

2. “It involves the belief that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social constructs, as they are subject to change inherent to time and place. It emphasizes the role of language, power relations, and motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial.”

3. “It rejected the idea of autonomous art in favour of art as a practice directed towards social purposes. It lasted as an active force lasted until around 1934, having a great deal of effect on developments in the art of the Weimar Republic and elsewhere, before being replaced by Socialist Realism.”

4. “In its artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.”

5. “Characteristics of its paintings include relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on the accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles”

6. “It describes artwork—particularly paintings and sculptures—which are clearly derived from real object sources, and are therefore by definition representational.”

7. “It believed in the ideology of objective reality and revolted against the exaggerated emotionalism of the Romantic Movement. Truth and accuracy became the goals of many of its exponents”

8. “Its works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur”.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   According to your ranking, what are your favourite/least favourite types of art?  Why do you think this is so? 

         To what extent should art represent reality?

         Should art serve a social purpose?

         Should art be funded with public money?

         Should art which is controversial or offensive be censored?

Arts & Culture

Hey guys, hope you had a great Majowka. On to the final topic, everyone's (un)favorite, arts and culture. Here's your article for this week:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17872666

If you want to see more work, here's a site for some of Crabapple's stuff - http://www.vice.com/read/sevilles-squatters-no-light-no-water-no-fear and another article about her - http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112903/molly-crabapple-and-occupy-wall-street-protest-art#

If you're bored, yiou can always learn something about your country by checking out my last blog post, Thatcher's Poland on the right side. Laters

Does Occupy signal the death of contemporary art?

By Paul Mason Economics editor, Newsnight

There has been so much art centred around the Occupy protests that it is beginning to feel like a new artistic movement. What defines it, and could it supplant the world of the galleries?

We get in the van and speed along to Bed-Stuy. It is the New York equivalent of London's Shoreditch or Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg, a hipster sub-metropolis, but with cuter beards.
I am with The Illuminators - a group of performance artists whose art is to shine revolutionary logos onto buildings in support of the Occupy Wall Street protest, including one that has become iconic - the 99% logo, known to protesters as "the bat signal".
In the van is not just a projector and a laptop, but also posters, a mobile library, and a whole vat of hot chocolate. The woman controlling the projector is a union organiser. The man vee-jaying the video is - well, a vee-jay (video jockey) in real life, but for corporates, fashion shows and the like.

 

And Mark Read, the driver and instigator, is a college lecturer in media studies.
"The bat signal is really simple. It's big and it reads as a bat signal - it's culturally legible," he says. It's a call to arms and a call for aid, but instead of a super-hero millionaire psychopath, like Bruce Wayne, it's ourselves - it's the 99% coming to save itself. We are our own superhero," he explains.
When Read and his collaborators shone the famous 99% logo onto the Verizon building, as protesters occupied Brooklyn Bridge in November 2011, one art critic called it "the most emblematic artwork" of the year, "the artistic gesture that stood for its rebel aspirations and its thwarted dreams".
Tonight they have a smaller scale work in hand. They get to Bedford, do a double sweep of the area as the cops move them on a few times, then unleash the full experience of Occupy projections, subversive Disney movies from the 1930s, hot chocolate, techno music and free books.
They get a good reception: Brooklyn is home to many of the "Gwaf" generation - "graduates without a future".
In the months since it was cleared from Zuccotti Park, the Occupy movement has been doing lots of culturally centred guerrilla actions around New York and other cities. So much so that it is fair to say that among youth, organised labour and some minority communities there is a bit of an Occupy zeitgeist going on.

  

Occupy Wall Street began in Zuccotti Park, in New York's financial district, in September 2011

Which is why I am here. There has been so much art centred around the Occupy experience that it is, even this early, possible to ask whether we are seeing the emergence of an Occupy "style" - a tangible artistic movement in response to this major political event in American life that could upset the world of the white-walled galleries.
"It's been interesting," says Read. "A lot of the work coming out of Occupy is not concerned with how it will be perceived by a buying public. It's not designed to be bought, but shared - it's designed to be made available as widely as possible.
"It's attracted an audience, and wherever you get an audience you get art critics. The art itself is super 'copyleft' - people are putting out their work as posters."
Molly Crabapple is one of those who have contributed to the poster art. During the protest her acrylic paint and canvas strewn apartment, a few streets away from Zuccotti, became an impromptu salon for the graphic novelists, painters, illustrators and graphic designers who clustered around Occupy.

Now she is hard at work on a major series of paintings on themes of protest and rebellion, entitled Shell Game. The most complete of the works shows a Vampire Squid, depicting Goldman Sachs, surrounded by a crowd of little fat-cat capitalists doing various unspeakable things in the style of a Bosch or Breugel painting.

"I started out just doing graphics - I drew this picture of an octopus with 'Fight the Vampire Squid' on its belly - and put it online and people used it as protest signs all over the country," Crabapple says.
"I think what Occupy did to my generation is it took us outside of ourselves. Outside of the gallery system, outside this very arid, self-referential way of working and it made us engage with real people, and the outside world.
"With my work for Occupy I am not just producing a cool, pretty image that decorates things, I am producing a functional and persuasive piece of work that's going to be pasted on buildings and held up by demonstrators."
When I try to do a piece to camera in the deserted, windswept concrete of Zuccotti not even my BBC press pass entitles me to stand in this quasi-public space.
But the protesters have been sneakily busting back into the space under the cover of Zoe Beloff's performance project "Days of the Commune". This involves getting protesters and ordinary New Yorkers to rehearse, in full costume, a play by Brecht about the 1871 seizure of Paris by the working class.
Beloff, an experienced concept artist who will bring the work to galleries in Edinburgh (Talbot Rice Arts Centre) and Blackpool later this year, was mesmerised by the Occupy protest in Zuccotti Park:
"At first I just went down there and drew, documentary drawings. And I would observe and I began to think about the time when documentary drawing was socially relevant: as when Manet drew the dead revolutionaries after the Paris Commune.

 

"I'd been, in my work, thinking about ideas of a utopian society abstractly and then suddenly it was - my god - it's just happening a few blocks from my house: I'd better get down there."
The work itself is more than just a play, for Beloff. It is about drawing out the parallels between the Commune "the first occupation of a city by its poor" and what the rebels at Zuccotti were trying to do.
It is not just in the visual arts that stuff is happening around Occupy. The protest movement has been a golden age for the various oppositional blogs and online magazines: n+1, founded in 2004, took up the various themes of Occupy early: student revolt; social injustice etc.
Another, The New Inquiry, grew out of an unofficial "salon" and illegal bookshop in a Manhattan apartment. Its founder, Rachel Rosenfelt, tells me she started it because she spotted a "surplus population" of talented young writers and artists left directionless after the economic crisis of 2009 ripped the heart out of the media business in New York.
"A year earlier we'd have been written off as hipsters, but nobody calls us that. What Occupy has done is created a spectacle of that youthful population: a spectacle of the simmering complaint that exists among that generation.
"It recognises there are in fact political stakes to our culture and our art - it's not about would-be academics and novelists daydreaming and writing for a small specialised group, it has made central to the cultural discussion the possibility of action."
Though TNI is not a magazine "about" Occupy, its writers and its subject matter clearly speak to an Occupy zeitgeist. But is it too early to identify an Occupy "movement" in art and wider culture?
It is certainly very clear what the artists involved are challenging: the world of the multi-millionaire concept artist, whose work is executed by what Crabapple calls "minions"; the white-walled gallery - with its air of non-committal, its preference for meaningless gesture, its reliance on interpretation by the viewer, and its extreme focus on commercialisation.

  

Zuccotti Park was cleared of the protest camp in November 2011, but the movement has continued

Christopher Kulendran Thomas, an artist and curator whose work spans London and New York, says:
"Occupy signals the limitations of what we've come to call Contemporary Art. Because the art of Occupy doesn't really work as Contemporary Art. It's bad art if you judge it in Contemporary Art terms because it's not open to interpretation.
"It uncritically uses the language of advertising to communicate: it goes where Contemporary Art can't go - because the latter is useless in situations of political urgency."
If there is an Occupy cultural zeitgeist what are its characteristics? Here's a speculative list:

• It is highly figurative (Crabapple points out that she and others come from the illustration craft, not fine art postgrad schools)

• There is an emphasis on typography

• Posters with artistic rather than strictly graphic design values are the norm

• The default "genre" is the graphic novel, with heavy influences of graffiti and graffiti art (Banksy, though a generation ahead of them, is one of the few mainstream artists they revere)

• And whereas for example "Pop Art" would subvert cultural icons as an act by the artist (think Warhol, Marilyn, Campbell's soup), here the subversion is done knowingly as a shared act between the artist and a mass audience that understands the concept of subverting icons as a normal cultural practice

And it is an art in search of ways beyond the multimillionaire-oriented art market to get to an audience.

Crabapple, whose work commands serious money now, recently used a web site called Kickstarter to "crowdsource" the funding for her paintings. She raised $64,000 from people who will not get the actual work, but who will get various souvenirs or sketches associated with it.
The money will support her while she does the work, but the actual paintings will sell at commercial prices:
"I thought that creating work that could only be bought by really rich people was silly. I started thinking of how I could break up the components so that people who were not that wealthy could participate in it."
These common themes - rejection of commercialism, a return to unironic figurative painting, a focus on mass, collaborative subversion of mainstream imagery and above all art with a social purpose - would be evidence of the beginnings of a new style under any circumstance.
But these themes coincide with a revolutionary new thought among art theorists - that the era of "contemporary art" as a whole may be over.
Kulendran Thomas tells me that if Lehman Brothers announced the death of neo-liberal economics, and the decline of the West, it would be logical for there now to be the death of an art that celebrated the freemarket age and the dominance of America:

"Contemporary Art faces a potentially terminal crisis. Contemporary Art has sold itself as a non-specific, expanding, universal non-genre, much as neo-liberalism passed itself off as the natural state of things. The realisation that Contemporary Art is in fact a time-limited historical period, that can end, is a radical moment. But it's an idea that's gathering momentum."

"I can't see what will emerge afterwards, anymore than I can see what the world economy might look like after Western dominance, but Occupy art can be seen as foreshadowing what replaces Contemporary Art."
Next year will see the anniversary of a landmark in the birth of American modern art: The Armory Exhibition of 1913 introduced the United States to Cubism, Expressionism, Fauvism and the whole shebang of modernism in one, massive slamdunk.
By contrast, postmodern or "contemporary" art emerged - and modernism died - through a more protracted process.
If theorists like Kulendran Thomas are right then a significant event is happening: a new period of post-contemporary art may be opening up, with its early signals to be found in the graffiti, the graphic novels, light shows, street theatre, posters and figurative paintings associated with the Occupy movement.
Like modernism it has started with the sudden import to America of a meme of revolt from outside - though in this case from Tahrir, Syntagma and Trafalgar squares, rather than from the bohemian salons of Europe.
It is the art of outsiders: often craftspeople in the new workshops of the 21st Centuries - ad agencies, light-show technicians, graphic novel imprints, interior design groups. Its funding models - at least in this stage - are anti-commercial: much of it is in fact done "off the side of a desk" by people trying to hold down real-world jobs. And its aim, like Occupy, is to change American politics.
"There's a global uprising for democracy going on," says Read, "and these artists are trying to champion that movement".