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My book Contemporary Indonesian Fashion. Through the Looking Glass is published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts. It is available for pre-order
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The female nude and Camille Paglia

Photographer: Gregory Brown My injury is slowly healing - oh, we do need both our hands, there is no doubt! I find it hard not to use my left hand at all. I am housebound. Fortunately, Christmas is coming up and having finally given up on the idea of travelling - too complicated with a plaster, and airlines insist on it being cut, which defeats the purpose of wearing it, I am not wasting away precious time. I can be at home, relax and plan for future work. The enforced rest has been useful, I have done more online curatorial work for the deviantArt groups I am involved with and am planning my DMP essay whose deadline is early February, as well as my next term teaching. A lot of reading these days can be done online, through ebraries. When I was a postgraduate student back in the early 1990s I used to live in libraries. Now the whole pattern of studies has changed, if you know what you are looking for, you can access it easily on the internet. Even then, nothing beats the ple

'Classically ageless': unpacking a classic myth.

Me and model Alessandro Manfredini . This is the time of the year when agelessness, perhaps with a touch of tokenism, is featured in magazines. For some years now Vogue has had an annual issue dedicated to agelessness, this year it was the one that came out in July with Renée Zwelleger, now 48, on the cover. I feel ambivalent about this idea of 'agelessness'. On one hand, the notion of agelessness taps into our classical cultural roots - classical art and classicism are after all, by definition ageless - on the other, it is a euphemism for 'near-youthfulness' or 'youthfulness' which is what classical art, after all, eulogises. The 'ageless' women we are prompted to regard as aspirational tend to be the ones who have made a success of having been able to defeat the 'ravages' of time - we truly need a different vocabulary to talk about older age, the words we use to discuss it are so loaded! Very occasionally magazines will sh

Sexual relationships and a reader's comment

Photographer: Neil Huxtable Model: myself My earlier post has invited some interesting comments but for some reasons rather than leaving them here people felt the need to send me personal notes on deviantArt , where I always publish a teaser every time I write a blog post. Some young men wanted to share with me that they had had meaningful relationships with older women and really enjoyed the experience. "It was not just a sexual thing" writes one of them , "it was intensely emotional". I was a little puzzled by the comment. I never said anything in my post about sexual relationships not being emotional. In fact this is something I have always maintained, that there is not such a thing as sex with another person which is "just sex". It is a fallacy. A sexual relationship even if only a short encounter is always emotionally charged. By emotion I don't mean romantic love. But when getting close to someone physically, exchanging bodily fluids,

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