HMV's woes do not signal the end for record shops
"But, for once, the smaller independent retailers could be among the winners. Despite HMV's inability to make high street music retailing pay, many independent record shops are already reporting higher demand and sales, due partly to a backlash against Amazon's tax set-up and the difficulty of stumbling across unexpected gems online.
Stephen Godfroy, co-owner of Rough Trade, a chain of three London shops including a 500 sq m (5,000 sq ft) warehouse off Brick Lane, east London, said business is 'the best it's ever been' in the company's 36-year history. He said Rough Trade sales in the latest quarter were up 8% on the previous year and the company is in the process of launching a new online store and an outpost in Brooklyn, New York.
'UK music is in rude health, despite the woes of the last outdated chain of entertainment retailer,' he said. 'The collapse of HMV is sad but ultimately a necessary process of renewal that will result in a significantly brighter future for UK music consumers.'"
(Rupert Neate and Martha Thomas, 16 January 2013, Guardian News and Media Limited)
Fig.1 The Silent League [http://www.silentleague.com/] play in the intimate performance space at the back of Rough Trade [http://irocklondon.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/vinyl-paradise-with-occasional-live.html].
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Joseph Cornell: navigating the imagination
"American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) ... forever altered the concept of the box - from a time-honoured functional container into a new art form, the box construction. ...
His ... exhibition is organised thematically to suggest his understanding of the imagination as an echo chamber where possibilities and connections can be discovered through subtle repetition and variation. Each thematic section mingles the series, media, and time frames in which he worked. ...
It is also central to the modern concept of creativity as the collision and recombination of ideas. Traditions can be reinterpreted; connections can be forged between the seemingly random or disparate. Cornell believed that artists renew and transform materials, experiences, and ideas, and this belief fuelled his ability to communicate the beauty and magic in ordinary, often forgotten things."
(Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Peabody Essex Museum)
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The Constellations ProjectSHARE
Charles Paget Wade: a unique collection of minor objects
"Mr Wade, being both architect and antiquary, has adopted the house, its lineage and its idiosyncrasies. To him it is an inspiration. ...You will concede that it is no mere gallery, neither is it a museum, yet a more unique collection of minor objects of national interest would be difficult to name."
(A. E. Richardson, 1 October 1927, Country Life)
[The collection includes: furniture, musical instruments, craft tools, toys, clocks, bicycles and armour.]
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The Constellations ProjectSHARE
Cabinets of Curiosity: ways of knowing through similitude
"the constitution of heterogeneity as a world of objects separate and distinct from the viewing subject. The 'heterogeneous' world is identifiable with the position of the objectivised subject during the Renaissance and that identification is organised through similitude into an homology between a viewing subject and a multifarious object world. If the classical age can be said to be about anything it is, as Foucault has shown, about the move away from ways of knowing through similitude to ways of knowing through mathesis and representation (Foucault, M.1989. The Order of Things). While we might take issue with the speed and degree of completion of this epistemic shift, representation as a way of knowing, as a form of gaze, comes to be constituted through the separation of the subject from the world and the development of an idea of material heterogeneity as something Other to that subject."
(Hetherington, Kevin. 1999 p.51-73)
[Hooper-Greenhill's (quoted in Hetherington 1999) contention is that during the Renaissance the dominant approach to understanding was informed by ways of knowing through similitude. She contrasts this approach with ways of knowing through, what Foucault calls mathesis (Foucault 2003), and representation. Hooper-Greenhill's discussion is useful for understanding Western understanding's general shift after this period towards nomological strategies and the rise of Modernism. She presents her analysis in reference to the emergence of the cabinets of curiosity during the Baroque period in Europe which became the forerunners to the Modern museum and fine art galleries.]
Foucault, M. (2003). The Order Of Things. London, Routledge: 156-158.
Hetherington, K. (1999). From Blindness to Blindness: Museums, Heterogeneity and the Subject. Actor Network Theory And After. J. Law and J. Hassard.
Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1992). Museums and the Construction of Knowledge. Leicester, Leicester University Press.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
