Reading or not reading the news. Artists. The madness of the world.

 I complain about losing an hour’s sleep when we put the clocks forward, as we did at the weekend, but I have to confess that I like having longer afternoons and lighter early evenings. Persuading myself to leave my warm bed in the morning remains a slight problem. The trouble with lingering in bed before getting up and going for a run means that by the time I have showered and we have had breakfast, half the morning has slipped away.

We have been having some nice mornings, however, even if the cloud moves in later. Today we have blue sky and sunshine. There’s a bit of a breeze and the air is still cold but if you find a sheltered spot to stand in the sunshine, it’s very pleasant and you can make believe that summer might arrive eventually. 

Over breakfast I skim the headlines in the newspapers online. Sometimes you have to go on and read the article as headlines can be misleading, with words chosen for dramatic effect. According to the head of BBC news, there is a “growing trend of news avoidance”. “I used to have the news on the TV every morning for an hour or so as I got the children ready for school and completed my household tasks,” said one person they spoke to. “Now it has literally been switched off and unplugged. I can’t cope with it any more. It’s just too much and there’s nothing I can do about it”. There are even columnists such as Eva Wiseman more or less advising us to avoid the news if we want to stay sane. Actually, she’s mostly advising turning off those annoying news alerts that pop up far too often on your mobile phone, the senders fully aware how difficult it is to resit looking when your phone goes piiing!.

As this article points out, news producers are concerned about falling audiences. People are turning away from established media news outlets. Some of that may be because it’s hard to find an unbiased source. So a lot of people get their news off social media. That too is biased, of course. You end up receiving material that is selected to match what AI perceives as your area of interest. And of course, I too get information from social media, but I try to keep things balanced. 

As I skim headlines and dip into articles, I bookmark things of interest and occasionally copy the odd paragraph, intending to come back to it later. In such cases, I sometimes forget what the original whole article was all about. Here’s an example:

“Maurizio Cattelan will need no introduction. The Italian conceptual artist has been provoking and delighting audiences in equal measure since the 1990s. Cattelan has a new show, Bones, opening at the Gagosian in London in April and, to run alongside this, a set of posters will appear in Tube stations. For these, Cattelan has used the tropes of classic Greek myths to portray the trials of modern life. So next time you’re on the central line, look out for Sisyphus with a shopping trolley or Atlas dressed for the 9-5 with the weight of the world on his back.”

It was the image of Sisyphus with a shopping trolley that led to my saving that paragraph. 

Reading the introductory sentence, “Maurizio Cattelan will need no introduction”, had me googling him, as I had no idea who he was. It turns out he’s the artist who duct-taped a fresh banana to a wall as part of an exhibition in 2019. He called it Comedian and it sold for $6.2 million in 2024. Not bad for a self-taught artist. 

I have to say I find the Sisyphus picture more interesting than the banana. 

In the wider world, and in the world closer to home, craziness continues. April is being dubbed “Awful April” because of price rises. Medics and journalists are being targeted by the IDF. The Met police are breaking into Quaker meeting houses and arresting young people for discussing the state of things. And Palestinian teenagers arrested without charge are dying in Israeli prisons.

That’s why people avoid reading the news. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!