G’day contemporary groovers. Just back from a visit to the old country, where I’ve been assured that I’ve no need to brush up on my accent. But just in case, it’s about to get ‘Aus – as’ round here. At least for today.<\/p>\n
There’s been a bit a bit of a palaver around the ole contemporary jewellery (we’re going to use CJ for short from now on, and not just because if you squint while you say it, it can sound kinda off-colour..) scene in the last little while. I didn’t want to draw attention to it until I could point towards some more positive views (that weren’t just my own – yawn – ) that could also be found around the place. Since I’m one of those terrible disbelievers that you heard tell of in yer yoof, and because I can barely be bothered with the nay-sayers who seemed to have ganged up all of a sudden, I wanted to be able to present more than one take on the issues being discussed. And perhaps that’s also in part because I am also of the persuasion that a convincing argument deserves a convincing counter-argument. So, here goes:<\/p>\n
Are you worried that the sky is falling on the CJ movement on Susan Cohn<\/a>‘s, Ted Noten<\/a>‘s and Liesbeth den Besten<\/a>‘s say so? Is your brow furrowing further because those who leapt to respond to these CJ luminaries –\u00a0 Andr\u00e9 Gali<\/a> and Ezra Satok-Wolman<\/a> – have gone against the best advice of those soothesayers on The West Wing, and accepted the premise of the arguments that were being made?<\/p>\n If, like me, you have accepted the one truth that is The West Wing and therefore have fully absorbed Annabel’s advice to veteran party-room ‘fixer’ Leo McGarry, “If you don’t like what they’re asking, you don’t accept the premise of the question.” and thus have refused to accept the premise of the current dominant argument (ie. that our mate CJ is faaarked), or perhaps simply because you personally are yet to have been pelted with acorns to the head and therefore are stubbornly clinging to the notion that there is a little bit of wind left in CJ’s sails, or, if in fact you never did think that Munich was the centre (apostate! somebody get her!) and you weren’t making works as if you were responding to some greater aestheic in-joke, should you believe the hype?<\/p>\n