In praise of boxing

At our June Salon, Chris Akers will speak up in praise of boxing:

“There is a nobility beauty and artistry within the sport of boxing. These qualities of boxing have been conveyed by writes of the calibre of Ernest Hemmingway and Joyce Carol Oates. Boxing can also instil young people with qualities such as discipline and confidence. Boxing has social benefits for individuals and communities far beyond competing in the ring.”.

About Chris

Chris is a psychology graduate. His interests include sport, art and politics. His podcast, the ‘286 Project’ focuses on interviews with notable people in the fields.

Chris is also the ghost writer for autobiography King of the Journeymen: the Peter Buckley story.

He has been a member of the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board since 2021.

Date, Time, and Venue: Thursday 22 June at 19.00 in the parlour of the Brunswick Inn, Derby.

Tickets £3 (plus fee) on Eventbrite.

Readings

Chris Akers

Leon Gast (Director) When We Were Kings (1997) Oscar Winning Documentary Film of ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’. Highly recommended.

Lee Groves (2014) The Rumble in the Jungle Retrospective: Ali v Foreman 40 years on, The Ring, 30 October 2014.

Tom Ogg (2012) Boxing Clever. Boxing Clever is Tom Ogg’s account of teaching teenagers at the London Boxing Academy Community Project (LBACP) in Tottenham, North London, who had been expelled from school. The aim of the project was to make use of the strong relationships that boxing coaches have with wayward young men.

(Image Credit: Jan Bowman)

Is it time to depoliticise art?

“The author Howard Jacobson once wrote that if an artist’s work is political, it only works as art if it transcends politics. Today, curatorial choices seem to have been driven by political perspective rather than artistic merit. Or, as art critic Matthew Collings wrote of the Tate Modern, its overriding message now appears to be ‘Meaning must always entail moralising’.

Worse still – argues our speaker Wendy Earle – “the modern politics of art is trite, the idea of collective art-making and performance art largely uninteresting, and the general slightness and messiness of many of the works irritating and the overall lack of nuance, subtlety and, yes, beauty is wearisome and tedious.”

Date, Time and Venue: 11 May 2017, 7 PM in the Parlour of the Brunswick Inn, Derby. £3 (£2 unwaged).

Speaker: Dr Wendy Earle

Wendy writes on the arts and culture for spiked and is convenor of the Institute of Ideas Arts and Society Forum, which promotes open and open-ended discussion of the arts and culture and of the place of arts and culture in society. She works at Birkbeck, University of London, to promote knowledge exchange and public engagement with research in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Previously she worked in educational publishing and at the British Film Institute.

A selection of Wendy’s articles is available in the Spiked Author Archive

Chair: Dr Vanessa Pupavac (University of Nottingham)