It seems to us that a response is necessary to this impudent and silly provocation. Silence on the part of people like us – who have spent many years and a great deal of effort trying to understand, enrich and act in accordance with what remains vital and relevant in the situationist critique of spectacular society – would only allow those unfamiliar with, newly informed of or hostile to the legacy of Guy Debord and the other members of the Situationist International to think that impudent and silly provocateurs such as McKenzie Wark are the only ones who are interested in this legacy today.

Among the noteworthy musicians active in New Orleans in the early 1900s, Antonio Maggio remains a dim historical figure, remembered only for a single pioneering composition, “I Got the Blues,” published in 1908. David Lee Joyner identifies Maggio’s work as an “early example of twelve-bar blues in ragtime” that foreshadows W. C. Handy’s famous “St. Louis Blues.” Peter Muir calls it a “milestone in blues history,” as it is the “first known instance in print of the [twelve-bar blues] sequence being associated with the notion of having the blues.”

The majority of the critiques of the Guy Debord exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale [BNF][1] concern the presumed incompatibility between the thought and morals of Debord and the fact that his works are being shown at a large State institution, henceforth recuperated by the spectacle, recognized as a national icon, a national treasure or, secondarily, they concern the financial bonanza that his widow received for his archives and the rich donors who contributed to their acquisition.

A Guy Debord expo at the very temple of the cultural institution is the worst dirty trick to play on this man, whose anti-cultural, anti-artistic and anti-institutional radicalism would surely not have accommodated itself to such official glorification. It certainly isn’t the job of the critic, the curator, the commentator, or, of course, the researcher to piously follow the wishes of an author without questioning him, updating him, stretching him [le mettre en tension] and confronting him with the realities that he has, perhaps, dodged. Not putting the thought of a man into a contradictory situation, in order to confront it with its own limits, is even the worst way of paying tribute to it.

One of the women who spoke at the Women’s Assembly during the World Social Forum in Tunisia was not a political activist, but a cartoonist. Dooa Eladl is 34-year-old Egyptian woman who calls herself a Muslim anarchist. Her work appears in the prominent newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm—Egyptians Today. She has become one of Egypt’s best-known political cartoonists, in a field completely dominated by men.

The email sent to me by my principal correspondent (henceforth called Mrs. Press) at 9:51 am on Thursday 21 March 2013 is revealing in this sense. It declares that it is impossible for her to give me authorization to publish on my blog photos taken by me at the exhibition. Already foreseeing my intention to play “the Internet card” – my reputation has preceded me – she hastened to specify that this would apply to all other media. She affirmed that the reason is the rights covering certain photos.

With dawn approaching on the morning of March 24th, after a night of revelry involving freakshows and failed attempts at ordering broccoli sandwiches, we biked to the Franklin Avenue railroad overpass in the 8th Ward of New Orleans to make our voices heard and have our solidarity recognized.

Prompted by news that Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is releasing a heavy metal album, the Atlantic's Matt Schiavenza questions just how useful China's best known dissident's antics are for advancing the cause of democracy in his own country:

The Pantheon is the ancient church in which the Republic pays homage to the “great men for whom the country [la patrie] is grateful.”

It is well known that women are absent from it, and, as a result, one suspects that Marie Curie and Sophie Bethelot[1] were admitted together, as if they were spouses, not separate individuals! Why is the Republic not more grateful for the women who have marked our history?

The first appearance of Miroslav Tichý in the world of art – if one excepts the infrequent exhibitions of his paintings in Czechoslovakia when he was young (of which Milan Chlumsky speaks in his essay) – was in 1989, under the auspices of Roman Buxbaum, a Czech psychiatrist based in Zurich who had discovered Tichý’s works several years previously during a trip to Kyjov, where the artist and members of the psychiatrist’s family lived. At the time, Buxbaum’s discourse was very clear and marked by his profession and his interest in art-based therapy (which he practiced in his Königsfelden clinic in Zurich) and outsider art (he gave presentations at the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich on the art made by mentally ill patients)