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Tom McCarthy will be delivering his “Red Paper on Terrestrial Art” to the Alien Affairs Committee of Mars at the Barbican on 20 March (6.30pm, free). Using the form of a White Paper, it’s an irreverent report on the art world and its follies, written by a Martian. It was published in the book accompanying the current show, Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art which Adrian Searle reviews in today’s Guardian (picture gallery here):
“The Martians make a stab at understanding and interpreting human art, and have had their Martian anthropologists and cultural commentators give it all a thorough going-over. They have applied systems and taxonomies and a series of thematic rubrics — Kinship and Descent, Magic and Belief, Ritual, and a section devoted to Unclassified Objects. Earthbound novelist Tom McCarthy, posing as one of our slithery-skinned interplanetary cousins, has written a Red Paper on Earthling art — in which he gets the metaphysical point, sort of, of this bizarre aspect of human culture, including its grooming rituals, its love-hate relationships, the drugs and the deals”.
(Picture: Tom McCarthy in Paris by Andrew Gallix.)