Egovernance In Admission Systems Africa Education Essay

What is the nature of guidance offered in higher guidance foundations. This request has been raised by everybody related with higher guidance foundation like institutional individuals, guardians, understudies, workers, financing natural structures and the experts at the end of the day ; the partners of higher guidance foundations ( HEIs ) ( Bhanti et al. , 2012:16 ) . Antony ( 2005 ) refered to in Bhanti et Al. ( 2011:16 ) declares that, the partners raise this request with at least one contribution: understudies †for pick of foundation ; guardians †for worth of individual putting resources into the guidance of their children ; for specialists †answerability and policymaking ; bolster departments †for help conclusions. The answers for this request can be acquired from various beginnings exceptionally the definite one like regulative governments which control the quality and standards of higher guidance framework. The capacity of ICT in advanced associations including HEIs keeps on spreading out in range and multifaceted nature ( Garrity et al. , 1998 ) . As of late, the HEIs unconventionally regulative governments have gotten mindful of the advantages of e-administration in higher guidance course frameworks. In students permissions for delineation, HEIs are utilizing ICT for directing nature of conceded understudies and general quality certainty. In ongoing mature ages, the inclination of ICT innovation ( Archmann et al. , 2010 ; Batagan et al. , 2009:372 ) and the turning utilization of the Internet and itinerant telephones has changed the way students are conceded into higher guidance foundations ( HEIs ) , changing from exhausting manual to a cutting edge ways, for example, brought together on-line induction systems.2.8.1 E-administration in permission frameworks: WorldwideWorldwide, there is a gigantic expansion in the figure of schools, establishments and colleges which have raised worry on arranged features identified with the quality guidance, for example, permission and the figure of understudies. This has prompted the higher guidance regulative governments to keep up an oculus on induction quality certainty by sending a few frameworks, which aid pull offing acts of neglect identified with permission. Such frameworks incorporate, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service ( UCAS ) in United Kingdom ; the Joint University Programs Admissions System ( JUPAS ) in Hong Kong ; Central Admission System ( CAS ) under Higher Education Admission Center ( HEAC )[ 1 ]in Oman, which turned into the primary state in the Middle East to follow electronic inductions for understudies looking for higher guidance classs[ 2 ]. Others incorporate the Higher Education Centralized Admission System ( HECAS )[ 3 ]in Negara Brunei Darussalam ; and China ‘s University and College Admission System ( CUCAS )[ 4 ], to advert a couple. Writing demonstrate that candidates to a higher guidance framework originate from an expansive extent of foundations and, because of this reality, inductions arrangements need to go to the concocting of rather complex sentiments about similar intensity inside a different populace of appliers. In any case, to-date in numerous states, each higher guidance foundation sets and executes permissions approaches that are predictable with its particular strategic QAAHE. 2006:5 ) . It has been demanded that, the arrangements and examples for student inductions ought to be intended to obtain a decent lucifer between the capacities and aptitudes of the applier and the requests of the program, in this way taking to the selection of understudies who can reasonably be required to complete their surveies effectively. Those doing permissions conclusions need to know separated between appliers, to discover who ought to be chosen. This requires a practicing of judgment ; it is of import this is support ed by notice to straightforward and reasonable norms ( QAAHE. 2006 ) .2.8.2 E-administration in permission frameworks: AfricaDespite the way that few states are actualizing electronic induction frameworks significance in addition to other things to control permission acts of neglect in Africa, the writing depicts that there are less endeavors in following electronic permissions for understudies looking for higher guidance. In East Africa, for delineation, just Tanzania is actualizing to the full mechanized undergrad permissions into HEIs. Be that as it may, there is a comparative induction framework in Nigeria, which is known as the â€Å" Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board † ( JAMB )[ 5 ]. The majority of these innovations in Africa ‘s guidance division have been bolstered by multi-partner projects, for example, the African Virtual University ( AVU ) and the World Bank to propel e-administration in HEIs.2.8.3 E-administration in permission frameworks: TanzaniaTan zania is positioned 114th out of 132 states known to mankind using logical control and designing ( URT, 2008 ) . In East Africa, Tanzania is the principal state to set up a machine-controlled permission framework in HEIs undergrad inductions ( TCU, 2010 ) .2.8.3.1 Country OverviewTanzania is the greatest ( land nation ) among the East African states ( for example Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania ) . It got free from the British on 9 December 1961 and acquired an instructive framework from its pioneer Masterss. Since independency, the Tanzania ‘s guidance framework has developed rapidly from a straightforward essential and auxiliary guidance to a mind boggling guidance framework including higher guidance run by both open and private segments ( Mashalla, 2002:8 ) . By and by, the state has a populace of 42,500,000 individuals ( IMF, 2008 )[ 6 ].2.8.3.2 Higher guidance advancement and enrolment propensity in TanzaniaThe history of higher guidance in Tanzania returns to pre-freedom when the state had no individual higher guidance foundation ( URT, 2008:1 ) . Tanganyikans who had chances for higher guidance were prepared at Makerere, Uganda. Inside East Africa, higher guidance was last to come in Tanzania, thusly doing the state to hold littler figure of talented and prepared HR in the state in 1961. The previous and first leader of Tanganyika had watched this deficiency of prepared and talented HR and expressed: â€Å" So little guidance [ had ] been given that in December 1961 we had exorbitantly scarcely any individuals with the fundamental guidance makings even to grown-up male the removal of specialists as it was along these lines, considerably less to set about the huge monetary and cultural improvement work which was irreplaceable. Nor was the school populace in 1961 major bounty to let for any viewpoint that this situation would be immediately adjusted † ( Nyerere, 1967:4 ) . Higher guidance in Tanzania during the only remaining century was dominantly given by University of Dar es Salaam ( UDSM ) . This was built up as a school of the University of London in 1961 thus later it turned into a part of the University of East Africa. In 1970, it turned into an autonomous University. During the 1970s UDSM was viewed as â€Å" an advancement college † with all understudies being required to investigate improvement surveies and with field affectionate respects in numerous subjects. The inventive action of Sokoine University of Agriculture ( SUA ) as the second college in Tanzania was explanatory of a cognizance of the significance of agribusiness in Tanzania ‘s improvement. The 1980s and mid 1990s were a time of reduction for the college with enlistments deteriorating and passing per student falling drastically. In 1994, the Institutional Transformation Program was started and since so there has been a significant expansion in understudy Numberss. A few other third arrangement foundations have now become colleges. All the more late, a figure of private colleges have opened, predominantly run by otherworldly natural structures ( Cooksey et al. , 2001 ) . Enlistment in third guidance during the 1990s was truly constrained in this way, with only around 6,500 undergrad students in 1998/1999 ( Cooksey et al. , 2001 ) . Since the terminal of the 1990s, enlistment in higher guidance has extended rapidly, albeit a great part of the development has experienced in private supported campaigners, both at the territory colleges and at private foundations, which have been allowed college position. Affirmations expanded all through the 1990s however since the 2002/3 scholarly twelvemonth, the specialists had put a bound on the figure of understudies that it would disparage. Until along these lines, the figure of in private supported students had been about unimportant, however since 2003, the vast majority of the development in enlistment had experienced in private supported campaigners ( Ishengoma 2004 ) . In ongoing mature ages, the state has been spread excursion course in the guidance segment get bringing down with essential guidance through the essential guidance improvement program ( MMEM ) in 2001, and the auxiliary guidance advancement program ( MMES ) in 2004. Along these lines, the state has been in endeavors to spread out higher guidance in coaction with private areas to run into the advancements accomplished at lower degrees ( URT, 2010 ) . To day of the month, there are in excess of 60 higher guidance foundations offering undergrad grades in the state. Regardless of the way that the gross enrollment rates ( GER ) in higher guidance have been lower side when contrasted with other creating states ( URT, 2010 ) ; yet the expanded enlistment at lower degrees has come about into solid power per unit zone on higher guidance permissions which in twist has required the constitution of the Central Admission System in the state.2.8.3.3 Constitution of CAS: An occurrence surveyHigher Education Institutions ( HEIs ) in Tanzania have experienced significant changes in ongoing mature ages. Huge amplification of the framework so as to recognize an expanding associate of school departers, adult researchers and all around a more differing set of students than in the days of old has been a cardinal part of this change. These alteratio

BATTLE OF THE ALAMO

ALAMO, BATTLE OF THE ALAMO, BATTLE OF THE. The attack and the last ambush on the Alamo in 1836 comprise the most commended military commitment in Texas history. The fight was obvious for the huge number of famous characters among its warriors. These included Tennessee congressman David Crockett, business visionary explorer James Bowie, and Mexican president Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. In spite of the fact that not broadly renowned at that point, William Barret Travis accomplished enduring qualification as authority at the Alamo. For some Americans and most Texans, the fight has become an image of enthusiastic sacrifice.Traditional well known portrayals, including books, stage plays, and films, underline incredible viewpoints that frequently dark the authentic occasion. To comprehend the genuine fight, one must value its key setting in the Texas Revolution. In December 1835 a Federalist armed force of Texan (or Texian, as they were called) settlers, American volunteers, and their Tej ano partners had caught the town from a Centralist power during the attack of Bexar. With that triumph, a greater part of the Texan volunteers of the â€Å"Army of the People† left help and came back to their families.Nevertheless, numerous authorities of the temporary government dreaded the Centralists would mount a spring hostile. Two primary streets drove into Texas from the Mexican inside. The first was the Atascosito Road, which extended from Matamoros on the Rio Grande northward through San Patricio, Goliad, Victoria, lastly into the core of Austin's state. The second was the Old San Antonio Road, a camino genuine that crossed the Rio Grande at Paso de Francia (the San Antonio Crossing) and twisted northeastward through San Antonio de Bexar, Bastrop, Nacogdoches, San Augustine, and over the Sabine River into Louisiana.Two posts obstructed these methodologies into Texas: Presidio La Bahia (Nuestra Senora de Loreto Presidio) at Goliad and the Alamo at San Antonio. Every e stablishment worked as a boondocks picket watch, prepared to alarm the Texas settlements of a foe advance. James Clinton Neill got order of the Bexar army. Somewhere in the range of ninety miles toward the southeast, James Walker Fannin, Jr. , in this way took order at Goliad. Most Texan pilgrims had come back to the solaces of home and hearth. Thusly, recently showed up American volunteers-some of whom included their time in Texas continuously comprised a larger part of the soldiers at Goliad and Bexar.Both Neill and Fannin resolved to slow down the Centralists on the wilderness. In any case, they worked under no hallucinations. Without rapid fortifications, neither the Alamo nor Presidio La Bahia could long withstand an attack. At Bexar were some twenty-one mounted guns bits of different gauge. In light of his big guns understanding and his customary armed force commission, Neill was a coherent decision to order. All through January he put forth a valiant effort to invigorate the mission fortification on the edges of town. Maj. Green B. Jameson, boss specialist at the Alamo, introduced the majority of the guns on the walls.Jameson gloated to Gen. Sam Houston that if the Centralists raged the Alamo, the protectors could â€Å"whip 10 to 1 with our big guns. † Such expectations demonstrated too much idealistic. A long way from the majority of Texas settlements, the Bexar army experienced an absence of even fundamental provender. On January 14 Neill composed Houston that his kin were in a â€Å"torpid, unprotected condition. † That day he dispatched a bleak message to the temporary government: â€Å"Unless we are fortified and victualled, we should turn into a simple prey to the foe, if there should be an occurrence of an assault. â€Å" Skirmish OF THE ALAMO ALAMO, BATTLE OF THE ALAMO, BATTLE OF THE. The attack and the last ambush on the Alamo in 1836 comprise the most commended military commitment in Texas history. The fight was prominent for the huge number of celebrated characters among its warriors. These included Tennessee congressman David Crockett, business visionary explorer James Bowie, and Mexican president Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. In spite of the fact that not broadly well known at that point, William Barret Travis accomplished enduring differentiation as leader at the Alamo. For some Americans and most Texans, the fight has become an image of enthusiastic sacrifice.Traditional well known delineations, including books, stage plays, and films, accentuate amazing angles that frequently dark the authentic occasion. To comprehend the genuine fight, one must value its key setting in the Texas Revolution. In December 1835 a Federalist armed force of Texan (or Texian, as they were called) settlers, American volunteers, and their Tejano partners had caught the town from a Centralist power during the attack of Bexar. With that triumph, a dominant part of the Texan volunteers of the â€Å"Army of the People† left help and came back to their families.Nevertheless, numerous authorities of the temporary government dreaded the Centralists would mount a spring hostile. Two fundamental streets drove into Texas from the Mexican inside. The first was the Atascosito Road, which extended from Matamoros on the Rio Grande northward through San Patricio, Goliad, Victoria, lastly into the core of Austin's state. The second was the Old San Antonio Road, a camino genuine that crossed the Rio Grande at Paso de Francia (the San Antonio Crossing) and twisted northeastward through San Antonio de Bexar, Bastrop, Nacogdoches, San Augustine, and over the Sabine River into Louisiana.Two strongholds hindered these methodologies into Texas: Presidio La Bahia (Nuestra Senora de Loreto Presidio) at Goliad and the Alamo at San Anto nio. Every establishment worked as a wilderness picket monitor, prepared to alarm the Texas settlements of an adversary advance. James Clinton Neill got order of the Bexar battalion. Somewhere in the range of ninety miles toward the southeast, James Walker Fannin, Jr. , in this manner took order at Goliad. Most Texan pioneers had come back to the solaces of home and hearth. Therefore, recently showed up American volunteers-some of whom included their time in Texas continuously comprised a greater part of the soldiers at Goliad and Bexar.Both Neill and Fannin resolved to slow down the Centralists on the outskirts. All things considered, they toiled under no dreams. Without fast fortifications, neither the Alamo nor Presidio La Bahia could long withstand an attack. At Bexar were some twenty-one big guns bits of different bore. On account of his big guns understanding and his normal armed force commission, Neill was a legitimate decision to order. All through January he gave a valiant effort to invigorate the mission fortress on the edges of town. Maj. Green B. Jameson, boss architect at the Alamo, introduced the majority of the guns on the walls.Jameson bragged to Gen. Sam Houston that if the Centralists raged the Alamo, the protectors could â€Å"whip 10 to 1 with our gunnery. † Such forecasts demonstrated exorbitantly hopeful. A long way from the majority of Texas settlements, the Bexar army experienced an absence of even essential provender. On January 14 Neill composed Houston that his kin were in a â€Å"torpid, exposed condition. † That day he dispatched an inauspicious message to the temporary government: â€Å"Unless we are strengthened and victualled, we should turn into a simple prey to the adversary, in the event of an assault. â€Å"

Retail Industry Comparison of China and United States Essay

Retail Industry Comparison of China and United States - Essay Example Retailing has progressed with innovation and now we have what we call web based retailing also. There are various kinds of retail outlets. They are ordered by the items they sell and by advertising systems. There are the sorts that don't fall in the two and are delegated others. Retailers of items are nourishment items retailers, hard merchandise retailers and delicate products retailers. Retailers arranged by showcasing systems are the most. They incorporate, retail chains, rebate store, discount stores, assortment stores, segment retailers, Mom-And-Pop retailers, claim to fame stores, boutiques, general store, hypermarkets, markets, shopping centers, Category authority, e-rears, and candy machines. Robotized retail locations and large box stores fall in the others classification (Pradhan and Pradhan, 2009). Retail Industry in China China’s retail industry is presently positioned as the second biggest on the planet after the USA. The chain stores and Chain grocery stores serv ing the every day needs of the individuals showed up in china in around 10 years prior and they quickly developed to the degree of being the second biggest retail showcase around the world. Nonetheless, there is no prevailing player in the retail business in spite of its fast development, not at all like the USA that has predominant players like Wal-Mart and others. Its quick development can be owed to the legislature of China in 1992. The administration propelled a progression of approaches to advance quick, methodical and sound development of the business. One of the arrangements was allowing remote interest in retailing. The legislature of China, by 1997, had endorsed around twenty-four outside contributed stores. Several remote contributed retailing, notwithstanding, had been built up before then in the wake of looking for endorsement from the common and civil specialists (Zhen, 2007). The retailing area of China is profoundly divided pleasing both medium estimated and little re tailers. This is diverse with the United States that have a ruling nearness of large retailers. This is a result of the hindrances nearby market get to. China does anyway boast about a wide scope of retail designs. Retail establishments are perhaps the most punctual configuration of retail outlets. They were extremely well known previously however they are currently confronting rivalry and battling to remain ahead. Instances of retail chains in China are Parkson, Beijing Cuiwei, Golden Eagle, and Shenzhen Suibao. Another retail outlet position is the hypermarkets whose improvement are owed to the universal retailers. Wal-Mart, Mart Shanghai, Trust-Mart, Tesco, and Carrefour are instances of hypermarkets. Stores are another retail outlet that is confronting rivalry. Local players rule this profoundly divided market. Instances of general stores in china are Baijia Supermarket and A-Best Supermarket. Accommodation stores are not completely evolved retailers however are now confronting rivalry from particularly from residential chains. Brisk of LianHua is a case of accommodation store in China. Claim to fame stores are retail outlets commanded by residential players with remote speculation being constrained. Models are GOME and Suning. Rebate stores are as yet developing and the first was presented in 2003 via Carrefour. Diversifying retailing comprises for around three percent of the all out retail market of china with a tremendous potential for development later on. Models are Pizza Hut, MacDonald’s, KFC, and 7-eleven. Direct selling is another retailing arrangement of china. Its potential for future development is enormous. Instances of direct selling retailers are AMWAY, Avon,

Great Gift College Cash in a 529 Plan

If you're looking to make an impact in a child's life without buying the latest trendy toy, consider providing cash for a 529 plan. "Kids often get gifts and rip through them faster than it takes to wrap them and forget about them shortly after that," says June Walbert, a Certified Financial Planner at USAA Financial Planning Services in San Antonio. "But if you get a small gift plus some funding in a college savings account, you're getting the best of both worlds." A 529 plan is a great way to save for college because contributions grow tax-deferred, and withdrawals are tax-free. Helping fund a 529 college savings account for a grandchild, friend or someone else doesn't just benefit them ï ¿ ½ it has potential tax savings for you. There are several ways to contribute to a 529 program, so consider the child's interests as well as your own as you determine the best method for you. Whether your goal is simplicity, a tax break or effective estate planning, there are smart ways to give and structure your gift. First steps Before signing on to a 529 program, talk to the parents of the child to make sure they ultimately want their child to go to college. The beneficiary's parents may have already started a 529 program and may request that any gifts go into the same program. You'll also want to find out if they already have a regular savings program. In some cases, the beneficiary may not need the funds. "If they're receiving large gifts from both sets of grandparents, for example, they may have enough in the account already," says Walbert. "You definitely want to avoid overfunding the account." If you're planning on setting up a new account for the child, you'll need a few basic pieces of information, including the beneficiary's address, date of birth and Social Security number. Sifting through the hundreds of programs offered across the country can be challenging, but finding a program with low fees ï ¿ ½ less than 1 percent ï ¿ ½ in your home state is often a good place to start. Hassle-free gifts If you plan to give a small one-time or annual gift ï ¿ ½ less than $500 ï ¿ ½ you should look closely at college savings registries such as Freshman Fund or Ugift. Ugift works with five Upromise plans in four states, and Freshman Fund works with all 529 plans. Minimum gift requirements range from $5 to $15. Such registries have significant benefits for donors: They have low minimums and don't require ongoing contributions, and if parents have already set up the account for their child, there's no hassle in transferring the funds. (If parents haven't set up an account, you can set up one for them easily.) You can even use a calculator to see what your $100 gift will be worth when Junior heads off to college. Better yet, you can use the registry even if your gift won't meet the initial funding requirement for the plan you've chosen, says Jason Olim, co-founder and CEO of Freshman Fund in New York. "If there is a minimum deposit for your plan, we hold the money in an FDIC-insured account until the minimum is reached," he says. "Then we deposit the money into the 529, and you'll receive notification." Savings registries are ideal for those who don't plan to give substantial gifts and who want to avoid the complexity and paperwork that often accompanies setting up 529 savings plans. Strategic gifts If you have a more substantial gift to help fund a 529 program, you have an array of options to consider. These choices can help you save money on taxes and even develop your estate plan. Here's what to keep in mind. State taxes. While you don't get a federal income tax deduction on 529 contributions, more than 30 states offer at least a partial state income tax deduction. If you plan to make a major gift and your state provides a break, you will likely want to make it to one of your own state's plans. Your beneficiary will still be able to use it regardless of where he or she lives or goes to college. If your state offers tax parity for 529 plans, you may have even more flexibility, says Mary McConnell, director of college savings products for Charles Schwab. Six states ï ¿ ½ Pennsylvania, Arizona, Minnesota, Montana, Kansas and Missouri ï ¿ ½ offer tax parity for 529 plans. If you live in one of these states, you can contribute to any 529 plan, not just those in your state, and receive a state tax deduction for your contributions. Gift maximums. Starting in 2009, you can contribute up to $13,000 each year to a 529 program without incurring a gift tax. If you have a spouse, together you can give up to $26,000 without incurring the tax. Gift tax exclusions. Interested in giving even more than the typical $13,000 limit? Because 529 accounts have special gift-tax exclusions, you can give five years' worth of gifts at once ï ¿ ½ $65,000 for one person or $130,000 for a couple. "It's a great opportunity, from a gifting and estate planning point of view, to be able to move the money out of a taxable estate and have the reward of gifting to someone for their future," says McConnell. Five years later, you can repeat the gift. Ownership and estate planning. In any 529 plan transaction, there are three parties, says Christine Moriarty, president of MoneyPeace in Bristol, Vt.: the beneficiary, the donor and the owner of the plan. Often, the donor and the owner are the same person. However, if you'd like to move your gift out of your estate to avoid potential taxes, you must transfer your gift to another owner. In general, you would designate the parent as the owner, but it could be anyone you trust. If you're not concerned about estate and tax consequences, you can keep the money under your control and even withdraw it if necessary. Posted June 12, 2009 If you're looking to make an impact in a child's life without buying the latest trendy toy, consider providing cash for a 529 plan. "Kids often get gifts and rip through them faster than it takes to wrap them and forget about them shortly after that," says June Walbert, a Certified Financial Planner at USAA Financial Planning Services in San Antonio. "But if you get a small gift plus some funding in a college savings account, you're getting the best of both worlds." A 529 plan is a great way to save for college because contributions grow tax-deferred, and withdrawals are tax-free. Helping fund a 529 college savings account for a grandchild, friend or someone else doesn't just benefit them ï ¿ ½ it has potential tax savings for you. There are several ways to contribute to a 529 program, so consider the child's interests as well as your own as you determine the best method for you. Whether your goal is simplicity, a tax break or effective estate planning, there are smart ways to give and structure your gift. First steps Before signing on to a 529 program, talk to the parents of the child to make sure they ultimately want their child to go to college. The beneficiary's parents may have already started a 529 program and may request that any gifts go into the same program. You'll also want to find out if they already have a regular savings program. In some cases, the beneficiary may not need the funds. "If they're receiving large gifts from both sets of grandparents, for example, they may have enough in the account already," says Walbert. "You definitely want to avoid overfunding the account." If you're planning on setting up a new account for the child, you'll need a few basic pieces of information, including the beneficiary's address, date of birth and Social Security number. Sifting through the hundreds of programs offered across the country can be challenging, but finding a program with low fees ï ¿ ½ less than 1 percent ï ¿ ½ in your home state is often a good place to start. Hassle-free gifts If you plan to give a small one-time or annual gift ï ¿ ½ less than $500 ï ¿ ½ you should look closely at college savings registries such as Freshman Fund or Ugift. Ugift works with five Upromise plans in four states, and Freshman Fund works with all 529 plans. Minimum gift requirements range from $5 to $15. Such registries have significant benefits for donors: They have low minimums and don't require ongoing contributions, and if parents have already set up the account for their child, there's no hassle in transferring the funds. (If parents haven't set up an account, you can set up one for them easily.) You can even use a calculator to see what your $100 gift will be worth when Junior heads off to college. Better yet, you can use the registry even if your gift won't meet the initial funding requirement for the plan you've chosen, says Jason Olim, co-founder and CEO of Freshman Fund in New York. "If there is a minimum deposit for your plan, we hold the money in an FDIC-insured account until the minimum is reached," he says. "Then we deposit the money into the 529, and you'll receive notification." Savings registries are ideal for those who don't plan to give substantial gifts and who want to avoid the complexity and paperwork that often accompanies setting up 529 savings plans. Strategic gifts If you have a more substantial gift to help fund a 529 program, you have an array of options to consider. These choices can help you save money on taxes and even develop your estate plan. Here's what to keep in mind. State taxes. While you don't get a federal income tax deduction on 529 contributions, more than 30 states offer at least a partial state income tax deduction. If you plan to make a major gift and your state provides a break, you will likely want to make it to one of your own state's plans. Your beneficiary will still be able to use it regardless of where he or she lives or goes to college. If your state offers tax parity for 529 plans, you may have even more flexibility, says Mary McConnell, director of college savings products for Charles Schwab. Six states ï ¿ ½ Pennsylvania, Arizona, Minnesota, Montana, Kansas and Missouri ï ¿ ½ offer tax parity for 529 plans. If you live in one of these states, you can contribute to any 529 plan, not just those in your state, and receive a state tax deduction for your contributions. Gift maximums. Starting in 2009, you can contribute up to $13,000 each year to a 529 program without incurring a gift tax. If you have a spouse, together you can give up to $26,000 without incurring the tax. Gift tax exclusions. Interested in giving even more than the typical $13,000 limit? Because 529 accounts have special gift-tax exclusions, you can give five years' worth of gifts at once ï ¿ ½ $65,000 for one person or $130,000 for a couple. "It's a great opportunity, from a gifting and estate planning point of view, to be able to move the money out of a taxable estate and have the reward of gifting to someone for their future," says McConnell. Five years later, you can repeat the gift. Ownership and estate planning. In any 529 plan transaction, there are three parties, says Christine Moriarty, president of MoneyPeace in Bristol, Vt.: the beneficiary, the donor and the owner of the plan. Often, the donor and the owner are the same person. However, if you'd like to move your gift out of your estate to avoid potential taxes, you must transfer your gift to another owner. In general, you would designate the parent as the owner, but it could be anyone you trust. If you're not concerned about estate and tax consequences, you can keep the money under your control and even withdraw it if necessary. Posted June 12, 2009

Health Assesment Of The Older Adult - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 2 Words: 735 Downloads: 9 Date added: 2018/12/30 Category Nursing Essay Type Research paper Level High school Tags: Health Care Essay Hospital Essay Did you like this example? Question 1 Geriatric disorders, for instance, dementia and functional weakening are frequent and commonly undiagnosed or ineffectively addressed in elderly individuals. Recognizing geriatric illnesses by carrying out a geriatric evaluation can aid medical experts to control these disorders and preclude or delay their impediments (Vischer et al, 2009). The Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA) or older people usually involve various essentials or components which are assessed during the analysis process. Some of these essential components include; functional status, financial concerns, cognition, polypharmacy, mood, social support, among other such as living situation and spirituality (Rockwood, Mitnitski, 2007). Functional capacity: Functional capacity is the capability to carry out activities essential or desired in day-to-day life. Functional status is unswervingly affected by health conditions, mainly in the setting of an elders situation and societal support system. Assessment of functional capability can be crucial in checking reaction to cure and can offer predictive evidence that helps in long-term treatment scheduling. Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Health Assesment Of The Older Adult" essay for you Create order Mood disorders: Depressing ailment among the old people is a severe health issue leading to superfluous anguish, weakened functional abilities, increased mortality, as well as disproportionate usage of healthcare resources. Cognition: The occurrence of dementia upsurges with age of a person, mainly amongst those over 85 years old, yet most of the patients with cognitive deficiency remain untested. The importance of conducting a prompt analysis includes the likelihood of discovering curable disorders. Polypharmacy: Aging individuals are usually recommended numerous prescriptions by different clinicians thus subjecting them to a huge jeopardy for drug-drug interfaces and adversative drug events. The health care provider ought to examine the patients treatments at every appointment. Financial and Social support: The presence of a sturdy communal support linkage in a seniors life can habitually be the defining feature of whether he or she can stay at home or requires placement in a health center. An ephemeral screen of the societal support comprises of taking a communal past and deciding who could be present to the patient to assist if he or she falls sick. Home geriatric valuation has been made known to be an efficient way of refining functional capabilities, averting institutionalization, as well as decreasing mortality rates among the old people. CGA conducted in the health institutions, particularly in devoted units as well has an advantage on survival. Question 2 Despite the development of palliative care initiatives and hospital programs, most of the aging individuals do not die in their homes, something which is against their wishes. Improvements in healthcare and medication in the 20th century intensely transformed the landscape: patients could be appropriately rendered treatment to the exact end of their lives. There is no uncertainty that such developments resulted in a remarkable transformation in terms of abating agony and assisting more individuals to undergo a respectable death. Besides, demographic factors contribute to this particular trend. There exists no uncertainty that demographic factors do account for some of the enormous disparities documented between local authority zones across the US. For instance, some regions have upper rates of demise from syndromes like respiratory and heart disorders where sanatorium healthcare in the final days of the patients life might be suitable. This can be a contributing factor to the conclus ion that the probability of infirmary demise upsurges with deprivation (Gruneir et al, 2007). Support of patients in End-Of-Life (EOL) healthcare and simultaneously granting their wishes prompts nurses to play a key role. As opposed to the views of the majority, I can apply direct approaches when handling patients at EOL. For example, I can take the role of the information broker and ensure smooth communication amongst the infirmary team and the family members of the sick person. Besides, I can enact the supporter role and initiate trusting relations with the families as they circumnavigate the EOL decision-making procedure and show empathy for the sick, family members, as well as the clinicians. References Gruneir, A., Mor, V., Weitzen, S., Truchil, R., Teno, J., Roy, J. (2007). Where people die: a multilevel approach to understanding influences on site of death in America.? Medical Care Research and Review,? 64(4), 351-378. Rockwood, K., Mitnitski, A. (2007). Frailty in relation to the accumulation of deficits. The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences,? 62(7), 722-727. Vischer, U. M., Bauduceau, B., Bourdel-Marchasson, I., Blickle, J. F., Constans, T., Fagot-Campagna, A., Tessier, D. (2009). A call to incorporate the prevention and treatment of geriatric disorders in the management of diabetes in the elderly. Diabetes Metabolism,? 35(3), 168-177.

Adolf Hitler as a Terrorist - 1 - 2592 Words

Adolf Hitler as a Terrorist Name Institution Adolf Hitler as a Terrorist Adolf Hitler, the famous Germany dictator and leader of National Socialist German Workers Party, commonly referred to as the Nazi Party, lived between April 20, 1889 and April 30, 1945; almost exactly fifty-six years. For the first thirty years of his life, he was an obscure failure; becoming a local celebrity almost overnight before becoming a man around whom the whole world policy revolved when he became Germany’s Chancellor in 1933 before turning his rule into a total dictatorship. Adolf Hitler was responsible for the outbreak of the Second World War and the Holocaust that resulted in the killing of 6 million Jews. He was born in Braun au am Inn, a†¦show more content†¦Such organizations reveal how fundamental hate was within the Nazi regime. The individual Nazi leaders most responsible for these institutions were Goebbels and Himmler. Both aimed to spread Hitler’s racial ideas and give them some structure, although their methods differed greatly. Goebbels s trove to operate within the rules of the Nazi Regime while Himmler transcended them by creating a new system (Lifton, 2000). The SA was initially formed to provide security in Nazi gatherings and campaign speeches against disruptions and assaults by members of rival parties. Its activities quickly changed to include assaults on the activities of other parties. SA men would attempt to disrupt the gatherings and campaign speeches for rival political parties, particularly left wing. They would also attack leftist marchers when they were demonstrating or attempt to generate a confrontation. At times they invaded party reading rooms and newspaper offices. SA’s terrorist activities were not just limited to secular and political violence; they played an important role in terrorizing and capturing Jews and other groups that did not fit Hitler’s ideology of a racially pure German state. The application of Nazi ideas and ideology was based on two types of force against individuals and social groups. One of these took the form of propaganda and indoctrination, the other was based on terror (Kühl, 2002). The Nazi ensured that not to appearShow MoreRelatedNazi Propagand Hitler Was The Fuhrer At The Time Of The Olympics1233 Words   |  5 Pages963 athletes represented them. Adolf Hitler was the Fuhrer at the time of the olympics and used it as Nazi propaganda. Hosting the olympics helped Germany show the world that it had recovered from the destruction and isolation The Treaty of Versailles had caused it. Adolf Hitler hid his racism towards Jewish people and Roma people and as well as its growing military. 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One day later, President Roosevelt spoke to the country about the abruptness of the attack and his callRead MoreRhetorical Analysis Of Donald Trump s Election Of The United States Essay2185 Words   |  9 Pagesaround otherization and nationalism, the atmosphere of this election, as well as the attitudes of the citizens of the country, bears similarities to 1930s Nazi Germany. While it may initially seem far-fetched to compare Donald Trump s election to Adolf Hitler s rise to power, both campaigns utilize nationalistic, racist sentiment and a fear of the foreign other to gain power within the country. Moreover, both campaigns utilize propaganda and the media in their own way to generate hatred and fear

A Philosophical Approach to Education Leadership free essay sample

An examination of many philosophers opinions on the importance of powerful leaders as educators. The following paper is a literature review which is organized as simply as possible along an organized framework. First is a brief introduction to the present state of debate over educational leadership and its effects on the criteria and methodology used in source selection. The second section deals extensively with an analysis of literature dealing with the philosophy of education. The third section deals directly with the present socio-political state of the crises and the way in which theories of leadership shape the fabric of politics and society. The fourth section deals with the theories of reform which compete for the attention of the leader, and attempts to establish the most useful and important steps which may be taken. It is in this section that the concept of co-regulatory leadership is introduced and found to be superior to all others on not only a philosophical, political, and sociological standpoint, but also in terms of positive results for the schools academic succ ess and the maintenance of a positive environment. We will write a custom essay sample on A Philosophical Approach to Education Leadership or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page An understanding of the different styles of leadership, the current sociopolitical conflict over schools, and the history of philosophical views on educational leadership is important because they have influenced a current proposal for effective schools. Leadership is undoubtedly the single most important aspect in creating a school environment for success. The quality of leadership in schools has become increasingly important in school reform to improve academic achievement of the students enrolled in school. The school leader (generally the principle) is inevitably held accountable for raising test scores, ensuring quality teacher, and making certain that all children achieve high academic standards. Demands will constantly be made upon his/her person that he/she find a way to fix the problems with the system (such as those mentioned in Chapter 1), and unfortunately, just as often as not the more he/she tries to fix the problem, the worse it becomes, or the more other problems crop up to take its place. Certainly some would suggest that leadership is one of those rare disciplines which is best served when it is least practiced, that is to say, the best leaders are those which do not lead too much, but rather create an environment i n which the led may actually learn to find their own way. (Allen, 1992; Beare, 2001; Gatto, 1992; Freire, 2000; Oyler, 1996) Students which are given the freedom to control their own destinies, guide their own education, and create their own environment, schedule, and society have proven time and again to be better adjusted and more learned than their over-dominated peers in leadership-intensive schools. (Freiberg Rogers, 1994; Taylor, 1993.) It is in hopes of promoting an understanding of this approach, and facilitating leadership (or one might say replacing it) through power-sharing and democratic procedures, that the following literature review focuses so extensively on the philosophical/moral and the actual practicality of a co-regulatory approach.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

The introduction When discussing one of the most well-known novels written by Virginia Woolf, I would like to disclose some fundamentals of her production. First of all, I would like to point out that the techniques the author uses seem to be defensive, as Woolf is known for her feminist views.Advertising We will write a custom essay sample on To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More In other words, one is to keep in mind that the expressions of anger the author highlights in her novel are related to three issues. Thus, it should be pointed out that aggression in relation to the patriarchy; the aggression male characters express; and Mrs. Ramsay’s aggression are considered to be the key manifestations of anger. Generally, it is also necessary to clarify what reason of the author’s aggression and anger is. Thus, on the one hand, it seems that Virginia’s description of her parents is negative; however, on the other hand, a deep analysis of the novel gives us an opportunity to suppose that there are no parents who cause the author’s anger, but the oppressive patriarchal system the main characters live within. The body When speaking about the language and writing style the author uses, one is to keep in mind that affective and non-semantic qualities of language are rather complicated. Thus, Woolf mostly uses numerous passive constructions, and the pronoun one in her novel. The extraordinary sentence structure the author uses cannot be neglected too. For instance, when reading the second paragraph of the novel, (a description of Mrs. Ramsay), one can make a conclusion that the writer’s language is also based on numerous parenthetical phrases, clauses as well as modifying constructions. The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear whatAdvertising Looking for essay on british literature? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More was said (as she sat in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, â€Å"How’s that? How’s that?† of the children playing cricket, had ceased†¦. (Woolf 15) It is not the end of the sentence; generally, this sentence includes 260 words; so, it is obvious that the author’s language is rather difficult to understand. While reading the paragraph, the reader loses the full meaning of the sentence and cannot understand its importance. On the contrary, such complex constructions transform potentially clear meaning of the fragment into uncertain and delayed meaning. When analyzing Woolf’s languag e, particularly the second paragraph, it becomes obvious that the words the gruff murmur at the beginning of the sentence determine the main clause. Other descriptions are considered to be modifying phrases. Had ceased is recognized to be the main verb; however, all, which is placed between the words the gruff murmur and had ceased confuses our mind, as when analyzing emotional associations between the main clause and the main verb, the reader loses the thread of a story. That is why Virginia Woolf’s language is rather complicated. The conclusion In spite of the fact that the author’s language is quite complex, nobody will deny the fact that Woolf depicts not only external details, but also important inner feelings of her characters. Thus, she discloses the thoughts and ideas in people’s mind. The novel To the Lighthouse requires the readers’ attention, as the author depicts the current drama of a human existence. Works Cited Woolf, Virginia. To the Light house, Fort Washington, PA, Harvest Books: 1989. Print. This essay on To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf was written and submitted by user Dayton Bruce to help you with your own studies. You are free to use it for research and reference purposes in order to write your own paper; however, you must cite it accordingly. You can donate your paper here.

Impeachment of Andrew Johnson essays

Impeachment of Andrew Johnson essays With the assassination of Lincoln, the presidency fell upon an old-fashioned southerner named Andrew Johnson. Although an honest and honorable man, Andrew Johnson was one of the most unfortunate Presidents. Over time there has been a controversial debate as to whether Johnson deserved to be impeached, or if it was an unconstitutional attempt by Congress to infringe upon the presidents authority. The impeachment of Andrew Johnson was politically motivated. The spirit of the Jacksonian democracy inspired Andrew Johnson. From this influence he helped found the Democratic Party in his region and became elected to the town council in 1829. After serving in his town council for two years he was elected mayor in 1831. Johnson was a strict constructionist and an advocate of states' rights who distrusted the power of government at all levels. Following his term as Mayor Johnson won elections to the Tennessee State legislature in 1835, 1839, and 1841. After serving these terms he was elected to Congress in 1843. As a member of the US House, Johnson opposed government involvement in the nations economy through tariffs and internal improvements. "In 1852 Johnson lost his seat in the US House because of gerrymandering by the Whig- dominated state legislature." (Jackson) Following his loss he came back in 1853 to win a narrow victory for governor and served two terms. In 1857, Johnson was then elected to represent Tennessee in the US Senate. "While serving in the Senate Johnson became an advocate of the Homestead Bill, which was opposed by most Southern Democrats and their slave owning, plantation constituents." (Kennedy) This issue strained the already tense relations between Johnson and the wealthy planters in western Tennessee. Eventually the party split into regional factions. Johnson made the decision to back the Southern Democratic nominee, John Breckinridge. By this time the rupture between Johnson and most ...

Battle of Algiers Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Battle of Algiers - Essay Example Terrorist tactics are justified in the context of a war that is a product of colonization and when enemies cannot be differentiated from the masses, although it is not morally acceptable to use terrorist tactics when fighting a terrorist organization because it punishes combatants and non-combatants alike and uses technology to the detriment of the entire colonized people. The tactics of terrorism on both sides of the war are justified because of the nature of the socio-economic and political context of Algeria, where the minority is fighting the colonial rule of France, while France cannot discern combatants from non-combatants. The National Liberation Front or FLN only wanted freedom and autonomy for Algeria. The French, on the contrary, acted as the colonizer, so they aimed to crush the rebellion using all means possible. The FLN knew that it could not defeat the French with a heads-on collision, so it resorted to guerilla tactics, mostly terrorist attacks, to attain the mission of demoralizing the French and inciting the masses to fight their colonial masters. France retaliated to preserve its authority in its colony. It believed that the resistance was composed of the minority, so it felt justified to eliminate the rebels, even if it meant having casualties of non-combatants because of the difficulty of differentiating them from the rebels. It is not morally acceptable to use terrorist tactics, when combating a terrorist organization, because it does not differentiate combatants from non-combatants, thereby killing innocent civilians. The FLN bombed two French cafes and an airport because it knew that it could not conduct an effective offense using direct combat operations. Guerrilla operations would be more effective, even if they were stealthy and undermined the morality of their actions. This included hiding weapons in ordinary places and using women to hide guns under their burka and to launch bombing

Old Habits Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Old Habits - Essay Example My own family members have become the greatest examples of these phenomena in my life. To comprehend this procedure or perceive the power of the cosmic force which is beyond our comprehension, the trajectory of my life consisted of the actions which fell into close counter, begins with the story of my brother Matt. Matt is my sibling and he is a great lover of adventure. This love of his life suddenly changed his entire life. However, it was not his destiny alone that was shaped with the deeds for which he was responsible. There were people around him like my mom, Deb and my dad, Steve and me whose lives were greatly affected by the transition in Matt’s life. As a family the lives of each member is closely related and influenced by the actions and lifestyle of other members in the family. Actually, this feeling itself gives a feeling of coherence. A family is like a complete picture where each member and their life is a fragment of the jigsaw puzzle. A single fragment missing would never allow completing the puzzle and the story. Matt and my life are not an exception in this regard and the fate of our parents proved fatal for us to a great extent. There was a time when my mom and dad were almost on the verge of losing their job. Threat of financial crisis is greatest in today’s materialist world. ... I mentioned the fact earlier that every integrated bit, every single member complements and completes the picture of a happy family. One day we all went together for hunting and very unfortunately at the dusk, we lost one of our dogs and never saw him again. This is why I repeatedly keep stressing on this factor. I am well aware with the consequence of a missing member in the prevalent picture perfect concept. The three different stories evolve out from the same platform called family. The three different incidents might seem fragmented incidents of life. They may seem bizarre. But all these events are united at a plane which greatly effect, move and influence the lives of all the members of the family. I want to give a very clear and in-depth introspection to this very simple and mundane factor which often escape the attention of the human mind. But the fact that neither it is mundane nor is it unimportant attracts a close attention. And this fact at times can bring forth an entire different set of actions which can alter the fate of a family or a generation altogether. Matt was a victim of this socio-economic change. His actions were not guided solely by his own will. At times, I sincerely feel that external conditions were responsible to a great extent for the predicament which he had to meet. I watched Matt through the glass door made for the visitors to watch the critical patients at the I.C.U. Matt was lying on the hospital bed. His blue-colored uniform reminded me the fact time and again that he loved blue. He wanted to wear something blue at the prom-night in his high-school graduation party. He was fortunate to get that touch of blue; but alas it was the I.C.U uniform. Matt was looking handsome. I could see only his face but that vision was

Reading Reflection Essay Example for Free

Reading Reflection Essay At first, I think literacy has two meanings. The first meaning is culture or civilization and the second meaning is the ability to write and read. Both meaning are very similar, they are related to cultural knowledge. But in today’s society, literacy not only means culture. The concept of information literacy is people can effectively use and recognize the information. Besides, people can redefining and evaluate themselves in today’s information society. By reading Nunberg’s Teaching Students to Swim in the Online Sea, I think the concept of literacy is the discerning ability of people. Nowadays, much knowledge is deriving from Internet. These are second hand materials, not the primary sources. Some resources are not true. The way every people think of the Web is very different. It tests their discerning abilities. Like most people judge the credibility of a website by its outward. The information literacy means to be able to effectively identify, evaluate, and use the information. Also, the information literacy is expanding to include the map, media, and some electronic text. The information literacy has a deeper meaning. Students are highly familiar about website and search engine. They are effectively integrating the concept of information literacy into their learning programs. For me, I think the information literacy is good for college students. Because it can help them recognize when the information is needed, they have the ability to use the information. Literacy information is increasingly important in college life. Students faced with diverse, rich information every day. It was a big challenge for them.

Open Campus Policy :: essays research papers

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Students, you, as well as I, have always felt the strain of limitations brought upon you this and past school years. These past years, the school board has been closing students’ ability to do almost what they please to an oppressive detention in which you cannot even walk the hallways to get a sip of water. How many times have you or heard that someone has been given a detention for just walking around the halls? How many times have you been hassled for trying to go to your car and sent back into the school by a so called â€Å"rent-a-cop† and a new enforcer cop? All of these and more are related to the idea of a closed campus. I, on the other hand, am on the behalf of an open campus. An open campus gives the student more freedom and responsibility to make the right decisions. As opposition, the closed campus concept would argue that not all or any of the students should receive such trustworthiness from the school. I think that not all but a selec t group of students should have the open campus opportunity. Another matter with open campus is money issues in many areas in which I will discuss.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  As time goes on, each class of students gains and loses freedoms. An open campus freedom would not only just let students go where they please; it would also give the students a responsibility to manage their time. Many administrators on the board of education do not think that a high school student should have such a responsibility. They would tell us that we are too immature to be able to manage time during the school day. I think that students are mature enough to have such a freedom placed within their grasps. I can anticipate that the opposition will be outraged by all students receiving this freedom and responsibility. If such a concept as open campus could be arranged, there surely would be rules and regulations placed in effect to ensure that the school will not have liability of the student once off school ground.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The group of students that can leave the school can be very easily simplified from the current thought of all students being able to leave. First of all, a freshman certainly cannot leave the school grounds. A sophomore, even though more mature than the freshman, should as well not be able to leave the grounds.

Bean Trees Essay

Most authors convey an important message or idea throughout their noevls to give a greater understanding to their readers. In Barbara Kingsolvers novel, ‘The Bean Trees’, a strong idea that was developed was the possiublity of new beginnings. ‘The Bean Trees’ is the story of the protagonist Taylor Greer, who starts off on a journey from her home town of Kentucky to Arizona. Along the way she she is given an abandoned child which is the start to her learning about motherhood, becoming a women, the power of friendships and also learns to be capable. The idea of new beginnings is the ability for characters to start over and leave their past behind them. It was mainly developed through Taylor, Turtle, and also a Guatamalan couple Estevan and Esperanza. The first person who helped develop this idea is Taylor. At the beginning of the story Taylor was called Marietta before she decided that she wanted to have a clean break because she had never been crazy about the names which she had been called previously. I didn’t have any special name in mind, but just wanted a change’ this fitted into the theme of new beginnings because she was capable of leaving behind her old life and things that surrounded her name and had the opportunity to have the chance to create a new destiny for herself. As well as giving herself another chance to start her life and live it the way that she wanted through the changing of her name she also left her home town, house, friends, and mother all in search of somewhere new to live her life. She used chance to decide where she was going to stop with the use of her car. Wherever it ran out of fuel or something happened to it, she would stop there. With the ambition of leaving her old Kentucky life behind her, she started a journey which led her to Oklahoma. this just happened to be the place where she was given an abandoned child. This was another new beginning for Taylor. ‘Can you talk?†¦ What am I supposed to do with you tonight?†¦ What do you eat?†¦ ‘ This series of questions that Taylor asked the abandoned child showed that she had absolutely no idea what she was doing and still had to learn the first steps of becoming a mother. It was a new beginning for her to take on responsibility for someone else. She had to grow, learn and understand in order to take care of the child that she had suddenly gained to take on her journey. She may not have understood what to do or how to do it, or even truly wanted this new beginning, but all in all she was given the chance. Kingsolver suggests through the use of Taylor that often life presents us with unexpected occurances, but if grasped correctly can lead to a possible great change, and therefore future. Through the use of Taylor as a character Kingsolver helps to show us that around the corner, in every situation, if something as small as a car journey, can lead to amazing opportunities to start afresh in our lives. Turtle is another character that helps develop Kingsolver’s idea of new beginnings. Turtle is an abandoned 3 year old Indian child, who was abused when she was younger. After her mother died she was left to an unexpected Taylor who was just someone passing through the town, but turned into the receiver of a child who she had no clue what to do with. On later inspection of the child which she named Turtle she noticed that her body was covered in ‘bruises and worse’ as Taylor said. When Taylor realised that turtle was a girl she said ‘that fact already burdened her short life with a kind of misery that she could not imagine’. Through this you can picture just how horrible the life this young child must have had. However this was the end of her bad story and the beginning to a new one. Just like Taylor she is given a new name, but also a new mother, new friends, and a new chance. With the opportunity Turtle is now able to grow. ‘Turtle had managed to get through her whole life without a book, I suppose, and then she had two of them bought for her in one day. ‘ This quote shows the beginning if Turtles chance of recovery. She was a 3 year old stuck in an 18 month old body. She was a child with a horrible past, but a chance to start over. The development of Turtle made you understand that the majority of people are at some point given the ability to have a new beginning, no matter how terrible their life was before hand. Estevan and Esperanza are a Guatamalan couple who are also given the opportunity to have a new beginning and therefore helped develop the idea of new beginnings. Estevan and Esperanza are people who are illegally living in Tucson. Esperanza and Estevan live in Mattie’s sanctuary that she has set up for people like them. After becoming good friends with Taylor they decide that they need to move on from Tucson and constantly running from the law. With Taylor and Turtle they set off to go to a safe house in Oklahoma. They were considered ‘illegals’ and needed to be taken out of the country. however there should not be people judged as legal or illegal. There is only a difference between people who are good or bad. Because of this they are taken to a safe house where they are unlikely to be taken away. Instead of focusing on the negative once at the church Estevan says ‘don’t think of us stuck here forever. Think of us back in Guatemala with our families’. His optimism in their new ability to have a clean break and go back to their home country showed the idea of new beginnings in a different light. It'[s not always physically being somewhere that gives people their new beginnings. Sometimes it is just a chance that makes believing in what was, or what could be, possible again. This is how Estevan and Esperanza helped deleop new beginnings as an idea in the novel. In conclusion, everyone has a chance at a new beginning, whther big or small. Three different sets of characters showed this throughout the novel ‘The Bean Trees’. Taylor helped the idea become present in the story as well as develop in as not only the physical actions that allow the new beginning to happen, but also a state of mind. Turtle developed the idea so that it showed the readers that just because someone’s life starts out badly, it doesn’t mean their opportunity to have a new beginning wont come along. Estevan and Esperanza developed the idea so that you realised sometimes all that you need is faith to have the chance at a new beginning. In the end new beginnings was an idea that many characters showed their their own stories and therefore developed into their own way of showing the idea and allowing readers to understand it.

Arts Dissertation - Situationist Theory - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 30 Words: 9038 Downloads: 6 Date added: 2017/06/26 Category Statistics Essay Did you like this example? When Situationism evolved from the Letterist movement, in the middle of the last century, it set itself up in opposition to two other two other politically motivated groups: Dadism and Surreallism. Situationism, however, was only incidentally political, and rather than subverting the art world, aimed only to redesign its context, including the attitudes of the public, so that art could become something anyone could do or enjoy- something integrated into everyday life. Historically, arts efforts to bring down capitalist structures from within have been very ill-fated, with artists finding themselves ignored, scorned, crushed or perhaps worse- accessories to political agendas. Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Arts Dissertation Situationist Theory" essay for you Create order Artists and writers must work harder than ever to devise means of opposing or exposing capitalisms deceptions, but many commentators appear to have reached the conclusion that the battle is barely worth fighting. As we shall see, Jean Baudrillard argues that criticism of the status quo is no longer possible through art or literature and that the only efficient way of dissenting from capitalist society is to commit suicide, Modern art wishes to be negative, critical, innovative and a perpetual surpassing, as well as immediately (or almost) assimilated, accepted, integrated, consumed. One must surrender to the evidence: art no longer contests anything. If it ever did. Revolt is isolated, the malediction consumed. Thus the avant-garde movements in Europe put the artist under pressure to exhibit a certain individuality, while also rather contradictorily- being a producer, and as prolific, political and reactionary a producer as possible, There is a lot of talk, not about reform or forcing the Enlightenment project to live up to its own ideals, but about wholesale negation, revolution, another new sensibility, now self- affirming or self-creating, rather than a universalist or rational self-legitimation. This in turn suggests a tremendously heightened role for the artist, the figure whose imagination supposedly creates or shapes the sensibilities of civilization. In a sense, the avant-garde has been socially commissioned to forecast the future, to scouting out new intellectual terrain, Aesthetic modernity is characterized by attitudes which find a common focus in a changed consciousness of time The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future. The avant-garde must find a direction in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet ventured Early attempts to overthrow Capitalism In many ways, Dada and Surrealism represent the most successful artistic rebellions against capitalist norms, as they have attacked the conventional assumption of meaning itself, and in doing so drew attention to the ridiculous fact that such an assumption existed at all, Dada has often been called nihilistic and its declared purpose was indeed to make clear to the public at large that all established values, moral or aesthetic, had been rendered meaningless by the catastrophe of the Great War Dada preached nonsense and anti-art with a vengeance It is as though the Artist jumped before she was pushed. With its effort to close the gap between producer and produced by making everything equally alien, Surrealism also sought to negate its creator, using, pure psychic automatism intended to express the true process of thought free from the exercise of reason and from any aesthetic or moral purpose . Habermas, too, asserts that Surrealism poses a threat to arts existential rights, but still fails in two ways, First, when the containers of an autonomously developed cultural sphere are shattered, the contents get dispersed. Nothing remains from a desublimated meaning or a destructured form; an emancipatory effect does not follow. Habermas draws attention to the levelling affect of contemporary communication networks: networks which challenge the hierarchical assumptions of classical Marxism, and which have, in scale, surpassed what any postmodern commentator even in the 1980s- could have imagined. More so than ever, our media are democratic and interrelated, A rationalized everyday life, therefore, could hardly be saved from cultural impoverishment through breaking open a single cultural sphere art and so providing access to just one of the specialized knowledge complexes. Any active dissent can be transformed into a commodity, a product to assist the perpetuation of capitalism. Catchy slogans devised by revolutionaries are used to sell mortgages, paintings that challenge conventional assumptions about beauty and form are written about in books to be sold, and bought by galleries where their beauty and form can be admired and valued- bought and sold. As the Anti-Naturals recently wrote, on the subject, It is the nature of the Spectacle to transform all experience into a consumer commodity. It is no surprise, then, that so much of modern capitalist production should be focused on the authenticity swindle. It is not merely that we are told that our authentic self is only a credit card order away. We must be told what and how to purchase. Since, in the midst of the Spectacle, all experience is real only when it can be consumed, it is natural to follow the guidance offered by the array of products engineered to address each particular need. In reality, it is quite easy to mass market to hundreds of millions of individuals, since each quest is identical in its basic features. Any words spoken against can be turned into rallying support. Art, like any powerful weapon, can always be turned against those who use it. Whatever doesnt kill power is killed by it. In this way the Dadaists watched their anti-art works being systematically categorised as works of art, and were forced to focus their whole project completely on the evasion of this recuperation. Five years of agitation against capital, war and morality, brought them to an impasse of suicide or silence. Everything the Dadaists made, said, wrote or performed seemed to be turned against its critical purpose and used against them- and they abandoned the project. Effectively, they went on strike. The Dadaists left a legacy in the form of recuperated, commodified art works, and in multiple imitations of their style and attitude. Their advocation of collage and photomontage is now everywhere in advertisements, their paradoxically anti-art art surely at the very heart of current post-modernist critical theory. They were correct in their belief that this capitalist appropriation was inevitable while they were merely producing, and not controlling the means of production, but in some ways, they did in fact constitute a challenge to bourgeois morality. Dadaism questioned the philosophical assumptions which justified smug bourgeois attitudes, and uncovered the hypocracy of World War 1s brutality legitimising propaganda. In the end they felt that their subversions of established values were merely contributing too much to the culture they had been trying to undermine. The Situationist Asger Jorn was emphatic about the failure of Marxist theory, to liberate of art from commodification , Instead of abolishing the private character of property, socialism does nothing but augment them as much as possible, rending humans themselves useless and socially non-existent. The goal of the development of artistic liberation is the liberation of human values by the transformation of human qualities into real values. Here begins the artistic revolution against socialist development, the artistic revolution that is tied to the communist project . . . Debord and the Situationist reaction to Capitalism Debords 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, represented an attempt to articulate as fully as possible the Situationist philosophy. The term spectacle refers to the colonization of everyday life by commodity in late capitalism, an extension of alienation experienced between production and consumption. The spectacles subjective, one-directional effect requires a kind of non-participation, eventually resulting in a breakdown of communication between people. Situationism distinguishes between classical and modern forms of capitalism. Where classical capitalism demanded that wasted time describes any time not spent at work, modern capitalism actually reverses that, using advertising and other spectacular means to declare that it is the time spent at work that is wasted, and work is justifiable only because it provides the monetary ability to consume. Marx wrote that, the worker feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home The Situationists describe the spectacular society as a place where, the spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere . As Debord himself explains, So long as the realm of necessity remains a social dream, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is guardian of that sleep . However, the spectacle was not unique to capitalist society; the Situationists worked on a theory of the concentrated spectacle that would incorporate individual influences on capitalist regimes. This was principally contrived as a rhetorical framework to include the cult of personality in the dictatorships of places such as Cuba, the Soviet Union and China. The Situationists argued that the same tricks that society used to sell fast cars and kitchen appliances were used to promote and deify figures such as Chairman Mao. In anarchic efforts to subvert the spiritual and fiscal poverty of urban life under the tyranny of the spectacle, the Situationists developed a revolutionary art, departed from artistic convention. In their article Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program, Debord and the Marxist theorist Pierre Canjuers, assert, At one pole, art is purely and simply recuperated by capitalism as a means of conditioning the population. At the other pole, capitalism grants art a perpetual privileged concession: that of pure creative activity, an alibi for the alienation of all other activities (which makes it the most expensive and prestigious status symbol). But at the same time, this sphere reserved for free creative activity is the only one in which the question of what we do with life and the question of communication are posed practically and in all their fullness. Here, in art, lies the basis of the antagonisms between partisans and adversaries of the officially dictated reasons for living. The established meaninglessness and separations give rise to the general crisis of traditional artistic means a crisis linked to the experience of alternative ways of living or the demand for such experience. Revolutionary artists are those who call for intervention; and who have themselves intervened in the spectacle in order to disrupt or destroy it. Initially, the work the Situationist International produced was aimed at ridiculing formalist conceptions of the art object: Asger Jorn bought amateur paintings at flea markets and painted over them, subverting notions of authority and value. Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio invented a style of industrial painting where the canvas was over a hundred metres long, then cut strips off for potential buyers, thereby subverting traditional preconceptions of arts autonomy. In reality these processes were eventually absorbed by a capitalist art market bought, sold, exhibited, written about, and for the most part, politically neutered. In his 1974 book Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Burger points out that the avant-garde artists main goal is to shock the viewer, typically accustomed to organic or formalist works of art, in the hope that such withdrawal of meaning will direct the readers attention to the fact that the conduct of ones life is questionable and that it is necessary to change it He goes on to state that, Paradoxically, the avant-gardist intention to destroy art as an institution is thus realized in the work of art itself. The intention to revolutionize life by returning art to its praxis turns into a revolutionizing of art. This is the kind of logic that prompted the Situationists to agree to stop producing art in 1961, when they decided to cease considering themselves artists. Any remaining members unwilling to abandon traditional forms of art, including Jorn, Pinot-Gallizio, and Constant found themselves either being forced into ideological resignation or expulsion. It is a question not of elaborating the spectacle of refusal, but rather of refusing the spectacle. In order for their elaboration to be artistic and authentic in the new and authentic sense defined by the SI, the elements of the destruction of the spectacle must precisely cease to be works of art. Once and for all. . . . Our position is that of combatants between two worlds one that we dont acknowledge, the other that does not yet exist. In The Situationist City, Simon Sadler write that, in abandoning early Situationism, the Situationist International abandoned its imagining of utopia a devastating decision, surely unprecedented in the history of the avant-garde, and yet at the same time surely the situationists greatest contribution to that history: the recognition that in changing the world, avant-garde art cannot be a substitute for popular redistribution of power It seemed that the SI recognized that for any avant-garde to succeed, it would do best striving to produce artists, and not art. The Dadaists, too, were aware that both art and artist are part of the capitalist system, and consequently as guilty in their participation as any other commodity or worker. Marcuse and Adorno, in contrast, argued that the Dadaist project was misguided for its attacks on conventional art. They saw art as an autonomous entity, separate from capitalist interests, and something intrinsically apolitical that must be preserved rather than aggressively undermined. For Adorno, art bears an essential negativity derived from its peculiar Form; its rearrangements of reality are conducted according to a system quite alien to those of capitalism. This Form grants art a: refuge and a vantage point from which to denounce the reality established through domination. While Adorno and Marcuse criticised the anti-artists for attacking artistic Form, they agreed with the avant-gardists in their slightly utopic aspiration of abolishing the distinction that existed between art and the rest of reality. In fact, Marcuse wished to see a society organised around the aesthetic principles he believed resided only within art. Both argued that this integration could not be achieved if artists were allowed to participate. Art should be kept apolitical and protected, in a realm conducive to calm reflection that might remind us of the truth an authentic life can afford us after the revolution. So, although they expressed their rejection of this view in different ways, the Dadaists, Surrealists and Situationists all aspired to a collapse of the distinction between art and the rest of life in present: everyday life. Instead of waiting for the revolution, all three argued that the integration of art and life was in fact necessary for the achievement of revolution, a revolution made possible only by a combined cultural, ideological and economic assault on capitalism. Asger Jorn, again, on the failure of the socialist revolution, The capitalist revolution was essentially a socialization of consumption. Capitalist industrialization brought humanity a socialization as profound as the socialization proposed by the socialists that of the means of production. The socialist revolution is the fulfillment of the capitalist revolution. The one element removed from the capitalist system is saving, because consumptions richness has already been eliminated by the capitalists themselves Real communism will be the leap into the domain of freedom and of value, of communication. Contrary to utilitarian value (normally known as material value), artistic value is the progressive value because, by a process of provocation, it is the valorization of humanity itself. Since Marx, economic politics has shown its impotence and its cowardice. A hyperpolitics will need to strive for the direct realization of humanity. Walter Benjamins authentic opposition: the Crisis of Reproduction Walter Benjamin is probably Adornos most established opponent, particularly since The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a work that concentrated upon defining the aura of traditional art preceding 1900, and assessed the decay of this aura under the impact of new media and cultural technologies. Benjamin argues that art has lost its authenticity because of mechanical mass reproduction in our capitalist-orientated culture industry. He is concerned about shifting attitudes to art, which came about as a consequence of the introduction of mechanical means of reproduction. Formerly unique objects, located in a particular space, lost their singularity as they became accessible to many people in diverse places. Lost too was the aura that was attached to a work of Art which was now open to many different readings and interpretations Unlike his Frankfurt School colleagues, however, and especially unlike Adorno, Benjamin argues, this loss of authenticity is actually a positive thing, because it democratizes and politicizes art. Benjamins claim that arts loss of authenticity might actually help free people, not enslave them in a capitalist culture industry starkly opposes Adornos ideas. In addition, each stage of reproduction of an original work of art also contributes to its loss of aura. According to Benjamin, then: culture has been transformed into an industry; thus art has become commodified; contemporary culture is the machinery by which oppressive ideologies are reproduced and disseminated; new media technologies such as phonographs, film and photography, serve to destroy arts aura and effectively demystify the process of creating art, making available radical new access and roles for art in mass culture; the spectator has become a collaborator and participant, who joins the author in determining the meaning of the production of the work of art. Art is successful only when it enables the critical contemplation of a viewer. Benjamin happily equates authenticity with authority- the authority of oppressive institutions such as the church or the state- and history. As Benjamin explains, the work of arts authenticity is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced Until the 20th century, artworks retained their aura, their authenticity precisely because of their inability to be mass-reproduced, whether religious artifacts or one-off paintings commissioned by individual wealthy patrons. This conception clearly presents aura and authenticity as profoundly undemocratic, as the means of artistic production remain in the control of the rich and powerful, then able use such art to maintain control over the masses. The introduction of mechanical means of reproduction of art, particularly photography and film, caused the very foundations of this setup to be radically altered. For the first time it was possible for anyone to acquire the means to take photographs of a work of art, or at purchase an image of the work. However hard cultural elites in the late 19th century had tried to protect the aura of art works, the social advance of the masses and the invention of media such as film, which depends upon distribution to the masses, had led to the inevitable decay of the aura in the 20th century. Benjamin marks the distinction between manual and machine reproduction of art, The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical, and, of course, not only technical reproducibility, he states, Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis a vis technical reproduction Benjamin states two reasons this occurs. Firstly, machine reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction; secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. So mass-produced copies are able to engage with the wider world in a manner not possible for the original or one-off copies. Benjamin summarises his ideas concerning reproduction by asserting the technique detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. Many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. So to allow the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, is to reactivate the object reproduced, It is these processes that lead to the tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind In Benjamins conception, then, state and religious authorities have steadily lost the ability to control general access to such works of art, particularly since the 20th century began. This is most apparent in relation to the cinema, which destroyed the traces of aura with which art had been traditionally imbued; Benjamin cites arts historical value as a fundamental part of magical and religious rituals. In the process, capitalism strips art of its the idealistic, theological halo- to some extent a happy consequence and restorative, as it returns the art object to its non-utilitarian presence, its everyday reality. For Benjamin, an artworks aura refers to its uniqueness and the phenomena of distance, however close [an object] may be. He uses gives the example of distant mountains and a trees bough over head, both contain aura because they are images have not been effectively reproduced mechanically . Beyond the concepts of aura and authenticity, Benjamins concepts of reproduction and reversibility represent the core of his concerns about way in which arts role in society has been fundamentally altered in the 20th century. Benjamin proposes that the artworks aura of authenticity has withered away because of its reproduceability, and the process of reproduction brings art into closer proximity with a mass audience. However, paradoxically, as the authenticity erodes, the works essence becomes forefronted in the process, as it starts to become designed for reproducibility. As Benjamin describes it, for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. . . . From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for an authentic print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice politics. Benjamins commentaries on the effects of reproduction inspired other writers, such as Lechte, it is the process of reproduction as such which is revolutionary: the fact, for instance, that the photographic negative enables a veritable multiplication of originals. With the photograph, therefore, the spectre of the simulacrum emerges, although Benjamin never names it as such. The photograph as simulacrum by-passes the simple difference between original and copy Barbara Krugers Situationism and the Irresistible Collage of Society Barbara Kruger addresses the negative aspects of capitalist society as an artist, writer, curator, lecturer and graphic designer. Her art is displayed both inside and outside museums and in a range of different forms. Occasionally her prints are framed and hung on the walls of museums and galleries in the traditional fashion, but Kruger is endlessly inventive, and often writes text to be printed or projected directly on the walls or floors of a museum. In Picturing Greatness, a photography exhibition curated by Kruger in 1987 for The Museum of Modern Art in New York, text was printed in large black type across a central partition. Kruger selected photographs for this exhibit from the museums collection, and according to the words on the partition, the photographs were mostly of mostly famous artists who happened to be predominantly white and male. The text on the partition claimed the works can show us how vocation is ambushed by clich and snapped into stereotype by the camera, and how photography freezes moments, creates prominence and makes history. Krugers work continually questions the definition of art, artists and the ways in which great art should be exhibited. In this work, Kruger challenges the overwhelming dominance of male artists and draws attention to the females apparent invisibility in western art history. Just like the Situationists under Guy Debord, she has altered the meaning of art by recontextualising it. Crucia lly, the visitor to Krugers exhibition does not need to be familiar with the original photographs before seeing the show- even the uneducated viewer could read Krugers text, look at the original images and come to their own conclusions about the meaning. Thus the work achieves a kind of unique political democracy. Kruger has a background as a graphic designer, and as such creates effective bold images which are in many ways visually indistinguishable from advertisements, but rather than trying to sell a product, appeal directly to our social conscience. The subject of her text is always I, me, we, or you, as though Kruger engages in conversation with the viewer. Her messages probe the assumptions of the capitalist status quo: You are seduced by the sex appeal of the inorganic, When I hear the word culture, I take out my checkbook and We have received orders not to move. Similarly, Constant, of the COBRA group, proposed a city as a kind of physical expression of his utopia of free play which, in parts, bears striking resemblance to representations of the Internet, in books such as Mapping Cyberspace (with wild lines pouring out of the metropolis perhaps representing bandwidth and site traffic). Made with perspex and bike parts, Constants models and his diagrams for New Babylon demonstrate his yearning for future as something mobile, organic, animated, and self-celebratory. For Constant the city was a sort of perpetual festival of leisure. With its intricately connected wires suspending clear circular layers, ramps and walkways, Constants New Babylon recalls some kind of tensile organism. As Constant describes it, The unfunctional character of this playground-like construction makes any logical division of the inner spaces senseless. We should rather think of a quite chaotic arrangement of small and bigger spaces that are constantly assembled and dissembles by means of standardized mobile construction elements like walls, floors and staircases. Thus the social space can be adapted to the ever-changing needs of an every changing population as it passes through the sector system. Analogues with the Internet are irresistable. Equally, he could have been referring in a general way to those unique social structures which have grown from the anti-globalisation movement structures which, although provisional, pragmatic and short term, are nevertheless ideologically committed to social change and serve as emblems of the ongoing struggle against capitalism, a battle fuelled entirely from reserves of creativity. Constants is city as collage, similar to that celebrated by the less politically motivated group, Archigram, in the UK (many of whose members now design massive architectural features for megaband stadium concerts). In this time of desperate connectivity and complicated layering of urban cultures, with invisible webs of communication engulfing us, the need to understand the city as a place beyond work and production seems more pressing than ever. The Situationist reaction to capitalism is also excellently expressed through anti capitalist collage: for example that of the General Lighting and Power group, whose slick mock-advertising images of soft focus female forms in leotards and computer graphics of office interiors and car accidents, wryly annotated with entertaining aphorisms such as: Aerobics is necessary: progress implies it (I see you baby, shaking that ass) and God is in the retailing Comparisons to Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger are obvious. Charles Rice, too, has observed the oversized billboard signs now proliferating in major cities, arguing convincingly that they serve to perpetuate the distance between the real and the impossible,these spatial fantasies effectively deliver identification with the distant and the unattainable Many writers have noted the similarities between the Situationists idea of the derive (that is, the navigating of a city via means and routes other than those originally intended) and the experience of surfing the internet. Colin Fournier, architect and educator makes some potent observations on this area. It would seem that many of the characteristics of the internet reflect the S.I.s utopic city. The things considered prerequisite for their utopia: an ephemeral, negotiable type of city, where uses were determined by the population, surfing the web is like the idea of drifting or deriving, flaneur-like, through a city. The Situationist city and the web are uniquely flexible, anarchically dynamic: spacial relations secondary on any given route. The internet always seems to somehow recall the old Surrealist idea of using a map of one city to find ones way around another. Art as Capitalism: the Medias Re-appropriation of Images Increasingly, the media is becoming governed by imagery, and the average consumer is overwhelmed by visual information on a daily basis. Through sheer competition, the commercial sphere has been forced to use stranger, scarier, more extreme imagery to earn the attention of bewildered customers. Magazines such as Vogue have lured artists to their pages, where they are seen as innovative, visionary powers for re-inventing a complacent visual vocabulary. Thus, the traditional hierarchy of photography, in which the commercial and conceptual worlds were segregated, has been broken down into a fluid, integrated world- mutual respect has ensured that crossing the boundary either way no longer carries the taint or disrespect it once did. A new generation of artists have grown up with the rather cynical and postmodern idea that all things are commercially viable. Contemporary art school graduates are less likely to see their ventures into the commercial realm as contamination, and more as a necessary aspect of their endeavor. Commerce is incorporated into art at every level, from the means to the ends to the theme. That the common thread of art and fashion- the human body- has become such a commodity, seems like an obvious extension of this. Fashion spreads frequently borrow art photographers for their pages and mimic, in the case of Diesel and others, with considerable irony- the current art world trend towards narrative ambiguity and deliberately theatrical tableaux that recall theoretical artists like Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman. Russel Wong is one such new generation artist, his work strongly informed by todays cultural fascination with celebrity. Wong has become famous through striking portraits of personalities from sports to music and movies, famous for capturing moments of vulnerability, warmth and humor. A number of Wongs photos have been used on the covers of international magazines. My photos are never confrontational, he says, I want to bring something from the inside and not just show the pretty face, but I also want my subjects to look good. One of Wongs recent exhibitions, a series of prints, straddles the line between photography and fine art, and includes a commentary on celebrity that implicitly involves him with the commercial world. He has been painting, crayoning and etching on the photographs he works from, and uses this process to build a social commentary about the cult of celebrity. He explains, I wanted to look at how a stars identity is fabricatedEach image explores the relationship between the person, the entertainment industry and the public the cult of celebrity. Wongs print work is a little increasingly wry, showing a greater sense of self-criticality, possibly mocking phenomena of celebrity. In a work themed on the Chinese star Joan Chen, for example, Wong examines the manner in which publishers seem to critically view, censor or judge what is the right image before the consuming public encounters it as true. In this way, Chens picture is deemed too sexy, too demure and even too perfect, consciously pointing to the mechanics that operate within the celebrity media machine. Wong began taking photos of athletes as a teenager, having been a keen athlete himself and enjoyed taking photos of other athletes on the tracks. At only nineteen, he offered a photo of Sebastian Coe, to Nike, who, in an act of supreme arts/fashion crossover symbolism, paid him with a pair of shoes. The photo was published on the cover of the sports publication Track Field News, and Nike established a regular routine with the young man, regularly taking his work in exchange for shoes. Again, exemplifying the symbiotic relationship between art and capitalism, played out in the fashion world, Wong recounts, Soon I was running a shoe shop out of my dorm, Wong went on to develop a keen interest in portraiture, but has never explicitly acknowledged that even his sports photography was a form of portraiture: albeit a portrait of an archetype- or even a portrait of a brand. The move from portraits to celebrity portraits was a natural one, in Wongs case, a mere side effect of geography, in fact. The models started to bring their boyfriends. In those days it was the brat pack with people like Downey JrFrankly when youre living in L.A. and youre in this kind of business its bound to happen. Fashion as Capitalism: the Medias Re-appropriation of Gender In Fabulousness as Fetish: Queer Politics in Sex and the City, Cristy Turner suggests that the show may be really about four gay men. The show is set in the gay territory of fabulousness and that gay men hold all the cards both on and off screen- many of the shows writers are gay. The women in SATC are, on first glance, hardly a minority group. Yet, as Turner writes, Yet disidentification with mainstream ideals can also occur within the diegesis of a show; the women of Sex and the City could loosely be described as constituting one such minority group, as they consciously disidentify with bourgeois family values in favor of the dazzling, idealized notion of fabulousness embodied in their gay sidekicks. While certainly upholding and perpetuating many strongholds of normative US culturemoney, consumerism, heteronormativity, whitenessthe characters of Sex and the City also stray from certain conventions of femininity and tradition in favor of attaining this fabulous lifestyle and persona. The fabulous high campness that Turner describes hails from a tradition of black gay males that evolved as a defensive measure to create an impenetrable force-field of extravagant confection, both a protection and a distraction, it also served to underline the difference to the mainstream with an autonomic flourish that reclaims homosexual exclusion as a conscious choice of self-marginalisation. Yet the lifestyle and trappings of flamboyance require money, and capitalism will always ask subcultures to forfeit their marginalized chic, if they wish to survive in society. Hence underground culture is rapidly appropriated by dominant society as capitalism turns subculture into style. As Turner says, what began as a survival strategy for poor queer people of color eventually morphs into sly and discreet markers of fabulousness for the rich, white, heteronormative characters on Sex and the CityFabulousness exists merely as a free-floating marker of cultural capital, obscuring its subversive origins and capitalizing on a raced and classed cultural history without acknowledging the fierce politics behind it. Harzweski argues convincingly that sexuality has undergone increasing capitalization right across the board, and this is clearly reflected in the visual arts. She expands on the old discourse of female objectification, explaining how the culture of dating itself is an exacerbatory symptom of an increasingly commodified society. People of both genders have become a currency in a new society which pivots on the trading of love promises, where everything is accountable and where our commercial greed to earn more is mapped directly onto our biological desire to love and be loved. She cites a dating book which offers an up to 60 percent increase in the odds of marital likelihood, Featured guidelines specify that the shift from casual to monogamous dating should occur between the 1st and 4th month and that the 22nd month of dating marks a watershed moment as the statistical trend line for receiving a proposal begins to drop off. In late heterosexuality, capitalism levels heterosexualitys claim to naturalness in that successful heterosexuality is shown to be the product of labor or a resilient entrepreneurial esprit, Late heterosexuality, a term Harzweski coins, describes this particular social moment, where the desire to go get it has been transferred from entrepreneurial ambitions onto dating culture. Women today believe if they work hard enough, aim high enough, put enough effort in, believe in themselves enough, they are entitled to any man they want- or whichever men they want, however they want them. Laura Kipnis has called it labor-intensive intimacy the idea that if we work hard and network enough in our quest for a soul-mate, payoffs will inevitably yield, and the idea is also touted by a self-help lecture program that Charlotte and Carrie are seen to attend in Season 5 . Capitalising on Sexual Imagery: the Limits of Choice There is indeed much evidence that Sex and the City conflates sexual politics with modern business concepts and sales rhetoric. For example, Samantha asserts that the new dating field is all about multitasking and that the group ought to try to avoid falling into a one-man-at-a-time pattern. We are constantly reminded of the significance of Samanthas position as an efficient PR executive. She is clearly an expert at selling, and sells herself better than anything. Carrie, especially, appears stricken with a materialistic malaise, for example where she compares first dates to job interviews with cocktails in episode 69. She makes the point even more explicitly, in episode 75, as she types on her laptop, When it comes to finance and dating I couldnt help wonder why we keep investing. Carries capital is astonishing and apparently entirely expressed through an invented iconography of high-heeled shoes. There are occasional anxieties around the sheer amount of capital invested in clothes and shoes, after weathering all the ups and downs you could one day find yourself with nothing, and the time Carrie discovers that she cannot get a bank loan to buy her apartment and that she has, over the course of a decade, spent $40,000 on shoes. Theres your down payment, Miranda tells her. I will literally become the old woman who lived in her shoes, Carrie laments. Yet despite this Carrie remains constantly upbeat about her material situation: after all it is her job to wear style, to be style, and as long as there is consumerism she will be happy in her identity. The constant celebration of the material in Sex and the City is only hollow and exhausting if it is set against any anticipation of the women as three-dimensional characters. To the extent that show is a commentary, and surely this facet is emphatically underlined by Carries literal, post-modern commentaries of each episode, (including details of her friends lives she couldnt possibly really know)- the show is a commentary on the abstractions of modern living and modern loving. The message is that the privilege of capitalism is choice. We can choose which woman to be, which shoes we want, which words we write, which man we want to spend the night with. Every episode turns on an over-agonised choice around some consumable or other: most memorably in the case of the dress from the pages of Vogue, which The Russian buys for Carrie. Marxist academic Tim Fiskin has contrasted Carries function with that of Girls Aloud, the pop group chosen by the people and successful against the odds. Their appeal, for him, is their apparent stubborn refusal to choose, refusal to participate in the choices which will only fatten capitalist coffers and delay the revolution, Girls Aloud are unimpressed, which carries the pretty strong corollary that anything you do might fail to impress them (which would lead not to ridicule or punishment, of course, but simply more unfeeling boredom)their apathy is not in principle limited to any particular circumstances. In this sense, the Girls are the anti-Carrie Bradshaws. Carrie is obsessed with choosing, carefully organising her life so that no choice is completed. She inhabits the perfect late-capitalist world where the moment of choice is literally endless (that is, lasts forever). And note that this is not simply despite her choice being of no significance whatsoever, but precisely because of that: the more indiscernable the alternatives then the more the choice is a pure exercise of will; that is, the more it is, ideologically, a free choice. Girls Aloud have no truck with any of that. Their aporia is a quite different one, not an endless deferral but a tactical refusal (sometimes to not choose is not a choice , its something much better) According to Tim, the refusal to choose will bring about freedom- and Carries insistence on frolicking delightedly in her capitalist playground only reinforces the fact that she exists in a perpetual state of choice, with infinite options. The human moments in Sex and the City, undoubtedly the best moments, arise when choices are denied the characters. When Miranda has a baby, for example, or Samantha is diagnosed with cancer. In fact it is only Carrie, the lynchpin of the series, who is never denied choices, whose aporia remains infinite, and who must remain a dehumanized logo, a letter or symbol, for the abstract messages of the show. Late heterosexuality is the selected heterosexuality, as opposed to the heterosexuality by default as feminist writers have characterised femininity. It is a desire for men that arises from an initial desire to choose. Harzweski calls it post compulsory sexuality , and, in her terms, it always involves a humiliating displacement of the male romantic lead. In the same way that Alfie calls his girl friends It, the female characters in Sex and the City barely seem to remember their lovers names, replacing them with impersonal classifications, Big, The Russian. It is almost as though the boundaries between man and accessory are no longer relevant. Males and products are interchangeable in Sex and the City: a shoe often appears to be as good as sex, a vibrator often better. For example, when Smith Jerrods genitals are represented by a vodka bottle in a billboard advert he becomes a minor celebrity as the Absolut Hunk. While he struggles with his new identity as commodity, Samantha strives to keep him anonymous for her anxiously anonymous sex games. After learning his name, she swiftly changes it back, as Harzweski writes, merging the girlfriend role she resists with a more familiar and powerful position as public relations manager (Lights, Camera, Relationship, episode 79) Carries relationships with men take second place to her wardrobe, obviously, yet since her desires seem to be an extreme shorthand for female narcissism, she must be presented as traditionally feminine around men. Carries ultimate desire is to be owned by the Russian; she revels in his attentions, his cooking, and most of all the way he can literally make her dreams come true (buying that dress for her, right out of the pages of Vogue). But while she frets to her friends that he is too good to be true, her real complaint is that he is crossing a line of imagined desire. If he is able to make her dreams come true, and in this very literal sense (she is a literal girl, and her dreams illustrate the pages of fashion magazines) then she will run out of dreams as soon as the magazine is finished. It is imperative that her desires remain slightly elusive, or that any man smart enough to recognize them from the pages of the magazines they are written in, must at least pretend he hasnt notic ed and play along for her sake. She is forced to continue deferring her choices indefinitely for her capitalist paradise to be sustained. Carrie loves the Russian, however, because he is tuned into her materialism and represents a very real extension of it. Barishnikov of course- carefully cast as he represents asexual elegance and performance rather than humanity, reality. Carries extraordinarily dandyish image casts her as a female flaneur of some sort. Her lover is Big, clearly an abbreviation for Big Apple, almost- and characterized as a symbol of classic New York. His rival Aiden is a country lover and opposite, but the men are virtually emasculated and obscured by the emphasis on their styles. Capitalisms Postmodern Apologists If Sex and the City is a postmodern production, we are left wondering whether postmodern approaches to art production can ever really challenge the capitalist status quo. As already seen in Baudrillard, postmodern writers have reacted to contemporary arts efforts to disrupt capitalism in different ways. Jurgen Habermas, the Marxist theorist, perceived postmodernism as reactionary because of the way it promoted industrial modernization on one hand, while criticising the art that emerged alongside. Habermas seemed open to the possibility that art might have a positive influence on social change, believing that modernism still has theoretical value. Habermas views modernism as something in a constant state of change, something that enjoyed the avant-garde as a force working continually against tradition, Modernity revolts against the normalizing functions of tradition; modernity lives on the experience of rebelling against all that is normative. Lyotard, too, saw the anarchic potential in postmodern paradigms, because they enabled a critique of meta-narratives, i.e. philosophies and ideas that had been taken as truths. He saw these meta-narratives, such as the Enlightenment and even modernism as representations of dominant modes of thinking that, since late capitalism and postmodernism, could be called into question. Lyotard, like all the voices of postmodernism, questioned our assumptions about origination, authority, expression and universalism. Images which appeared to present an illusion of reality were disdained, since they fallaciously aimed to present an incorrect notion, that is, the impression that reality could be presented in art. Although his experience of the student riots of 1968 in Paris gave made him doubtful about whether social change was still possible, he did hope that postmodernism harboured potential to counter the capitalist regime, We can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return to terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be the witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name. Meanwhile, Barthes viewed representative, deceptive pieces of mimetic art as text, and found liberation in the opportunity for engagement, even discourse, with art objects that had been opened up by postmodern theory. As he writes, the Text participates in its own way in a social utopia; before Historythe Text achieves, if not the transparence of social relations, that at least of language relations: the Text is that space where no language has a hold over any other, where languages circulate. An explosion of experiment expressionist works and collage in the first half of the twentieth century had serious implications for art theory. The absence of an artist as the authorial presence, and as a person with a high level of training in a particular area allowed for a levelling of any perceived hierarchies between viewer and artist. It suddenly became possible for viewers to engage with the work without being intimidated or alienated by it; to contribute, affirm and create it, and to participate in the determination of meaning. Jean Baudrillard, by contrast, remained dubious about the merits of contemporary art, seeing the late capitalist trends towards mass reproduction as a damaging to the integrity of culture. The 1960s, in Baudrillards view, entailed a crisis of representational art due to commodity cultures reliance on reproductive methods. Baudrillards understanding of the post-modern centres on this notion of reproduction and the crisis, deriving from late capitalism, was symptomatic of an increasingly weak connection to reality- authenticity. In the place of Real ideas and objects, substituting originals, was a preference for a certain kind of simulation- a copies which had lost their originals altogether. Baudrillard labelled the new societical dominance of simulation hyperreal, a state where the copy is taken to be more real than the original. Conclusions: Arts Impossible Struggle for Authenticity Conceptual Artists have always tried to undermine capitalism. More so than ever before, artists in the late 1960s and early 70s saw their role as social mouthpiece, giving voice to ideas that attacked the limitations imposed by the economic autocracy of late capitalism. It was of course an impossible role to fulfil without contradiction. Artists aimed to overcome one set of limits- the social and political constrictions capitalism suggested, but at the same time their work had limits of its own. Art works had their own restrictions, assumptions, and biases, based on gender, class, and race. The art world was still laden with assumptions and unwritten rules about the kinds of ideas that were valid or appropriate for conceptual art, and most artists still had a vested interest in maintaining a sense of other worldly transcendence, maintaining a distance between the art object and the viewer. This is very clear from the writings of Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth- both of whom were writers as well as conceptual artists. Concept is so important to artists like these that it becomes the only aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. Conceptual artists were interested in studying the growth of simulacra as a means of critique on the growth of commodity culture. Conceptual art favoured ideas to objects, however, adhering to ideas reflected more a modernist attitudes of universalism, the humanist renaissance man ideal, that opposed the post-modern insistence that viewers ought to participate in art making. In actual fact, conceptual art suffered from airs of elitism- generally considered to be too narrow or beyond the intellectual range of the public. Conceptual art echoed modernism in many ways, then: it specified artistic criteria that, while obfuscated and draconian, were in reality extremely subjective. Its assertion that the work should be mentally stimulating recalled modernist ideas of transcendence far more than any real moralistic protest against the pressures presented by the capitalist society. 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