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From: Vast Inpance Category: Art Date: 30 July 2009 Time: 10:56 AM Review: Man on a wire is an extremely evocative testimonial to the life of a gifted artist who would have been ignored by the sneering fettered, the victim culture club or the petty time wasting half baked nutters who measure everything with their own undeveloped yardstick had it not been recently exhumed and redistributed. When you live in a hole it must be very difficult to coax the brain and the heart into believing that there is life out there. The Man on a Wire, is of slightly dubious provenance, a docu-remake. to have to go back in time but they are the only "grounds" that the most vehement critic could level at this outstanding piece that sutures re-enacted slides with good grainy footage of actual performing, and retelling the tale - this film is the source of great inspiration, not only to similarly disciplined artists and performers but to anyone daunted by the reality of contemporary risk assessment procedures in public arts arena. History should never be valued against a modern criteria, the times have their own idiom,any fool knows society did not evolve from money or capital or class, they were side-effects from society which now predominate the kind of art of today, based on money, about money or indeed just money. In fact so dominant has money become that it now seems almost impossible for the collective imagination to be inspired to do anything for the love of simply doing it. In a recent edition of The Word music magazine, the preface editorial analyzes a recent publication , a retrospective biographical account of the class differences in the Beatles, the sixties pop combo, not the car, the editorial alludes to John Lennon having a middle-classed aunt who funded or supported his ambition, his political views and his confidence, that McCartney was some kind of prey for Lennons class based authority and that between Lennon and McCartney the two working class George Harrison and Ringo Starr were some kind of walk over for the manipulative art student Lennon and the ready to please shadow McCartney but that is a simplistic measure based on the socio-economic reckonings of now and post eighties Thatcherism, post nineties Blairism, it is way too simplistic to be accurate. you must somehow be conscious of how, on the one side class, particularly "working class" has been vapourized and replaced with "money", the literal delight taken in having a stab at Lennons "working class hero" probably felt good too, even if it is of interest unless of course you hate the music, the antics in which case, well, go ahead and conject narrowly.