Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. Softcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> Is this a book written by the Other! Someone with a Chinese name writing about contemporary British and American art and culture is bound to raise a few eyebrows and I have frequently been questioned about my back ground and the qualifications I have to deal with my chosen subject. As an outsider I would be assumed zither to be naively ill informed or to enjoy some sort of privileged perspective on the cultural scene that I was attempt- ing to describe. Nesther is true. When I arrived in Britain in 1987 I was immediately struck by the many entitlements that people here had come to take for granted: free libraries free admission to museums and galleries free education and above all a National Health Service accessible to all. Having grown up in a coun- try where there was no welfare state such privileges were alien to me. By the time I learned to appreciate how the British system worked however many of the entitlements were disappearing being diluted or transformed into something else. Even before I finished my postgraduate studies in 1996 I witnessed people being turned away from the University of London Library because they were unwilling or unable to pay the 16 required for a day’s membership. The growth of the so-called ‘enterprise culture in Britain is something that I experienced at first hand and such have been the changes in social attitudes that to talk nowadays of the principle of the fair redistri bution of social wealth is to run the risk of being categorised among what the New Labour Prime Minister terms ‘the forces of conservatism. (SP)