ecopolis

Happy Birthday Luca from Ilari
(Tobi Neumann rmx)

Sunday 3rd August, Publish And Be Damned Fair, London, E2

THE ASSAULT ON CULTURE: A Mute Magazine talk on privatisation and critical artistic practice

Does private-public funding and management of culture mark the death of institutional and critical autonomy? And is direct censorship an anomaly, the most visible form of a wider constriction of cultural freedom, or the shape of cultural policy to come?

Mute has invited a range of practitioners along to discuss the perils and opportunities for critical cultural activity in neoliberalising institutions:

Leigh French, co-editor of Variant magazine and contributor Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt will discuss the recent censorship of Variant by Culture and Sport Glasgow, the new private charitable trust that runs the city’s arts and leisure. They will be joined by Richard Birkett, assistant curator of the ICA’s current Nought to Sixty programme and David Garcia, ‘tactical media’ theorist and Dean of Chelsea College of Art and Design London.

The talk will raise some of the following questions:

Does commercialisation enhance or corrode ‘critical’ culture? Why does an institutional turn to ‘openness’, collaborative and politicised art practices coincide with privatisation? And how will capitalist crisis impact on arts funding and cultural practice – a shift from radical reformism to conservative reaction or revolutionary refusal?

Where: Upstairs at Publish And Be Damned self-publishing fair Rochelle School, Arnold Circus, London E2.

When: 3-5pm, Sunday 3 August 2008.

Dr. Dragan “David” Dabic was born some six decades ago in a small Serbian village of Kovaci, near Kraljevo. As a young boy he liked to explore nearby forests and mountains, spending a lot of time on Kopaonik mountain where he tended to pick the omnipresent, natural and potent medicinal herbs that grew at those green pastures. As a young man he moved to Belgrade, and then on to Moscow where he graduated with a Doctor of Medicine degree (spec. in Psychiatry) at the Moscow State University (Lomonosov). After Russia, Dr. Dabic travelled around India and Japan, after which he settled in China where he specialized in alternative medicine, with a special emphasis on the mind-body control, meditation, Yoga, spiritual cleansing, as well as Chinese herbs. In mid-1990s Dr. Dabic returned back to mother Serbia for good, and ever since then emerged as one of the most prominent experts in the field of alternative medicine, bioenergy, and macrobiotic diet in the whole of the Balkans, and is frequent contributor to the regional alternative health magazines, and guest expert with numerous TV appearances and on many public forums, seminars and symposiums (Belgrade, Novi Sad, Pancevo, Sombor, Smederevo, Kikinda…) dedicated to these issues and topics.

Dr. Dragan Dabic currently resides on Yury Gagarin street in New Belgrade, but for public forum invitations, television appearances or private consultations he can be reached directly at the following contact:

healingwounds @ dragandabic . com