Had enough of Michael Jackson's afterlife here on earth? I sure have, and I tuned out 99% of it. But some 31 million people watched his memorial service on 19 channels, and Chris Hedges explains why that's scary in a brilliantly written column at Truthdig. Yet Hedges' accounting falls a bit short in a way that's as dangerous as the choreographed swooning he so rightly condemns:

"In celebrity culture we destroy what we worship. The commercial exploitation of Michael Jackson's death was orchestrated by the corporate forces that rendered Jackson insane. Jackson, robbed of his childhood and surrounded by vultures that preyed on his fears and weaknesses, was so consumed by self-loathing he carved his African-American face into an ever-changing Caucasian death mask and hid his apparent pedophilia behind a Peter Pan illusion of eternal childhood. He could not disentangle his public and his private self....

“RECORD > AGAIN! – 40yearsvideoart.de – Part 2” is dedicated to the history of German video art from its beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s through to the early twenty-first century. Shown will be numerous discoveries, unavailable for viewing for decades. Many tapes had to be laboriously restored in the ZKM Laboratory for Antiquated Video Systems in order to make them at all playable. Another special feature will be the presentation of the material on screens from each video’s original era.

“RECORD > AGAIN!” presents about fifty videos from the past forty years that exemplarily reflect the diversity of the German video scene. Shown, for example, will be the famous boxing match that Joseph Beuys fought at the documenta 5 in 1972 the reconstruction of the work Schafe by Wolf Kahlen, shown on six monitors, which was last screened in 1976; early video synthesizer works by Walter Schröder-Limmer; Medienhaus by HA Schult from 1978; a virtually unknown work by Ulrike...

A massive surge of trade union militancy; fears about the state of the economy; a government under pressure from employers; harsh sentences delivered using archaic legislation in an effort to intimidate workers.

This may sound like the 1970s, but it also applies to a period of revolt and repression that occurred long before, in 1834, when six agricultural labourers, three of whom were Methodist lay preachers, were sentenced to transportation to Australia.

Every year they are commemorated by the Trade Union Congress, at a festival in Tolpuddle in Dorset, as the founders of the trade union movement. Yesterday, to mark the 175th anniversary of their trial, the festival screened Bill Douglas's epic, long-lost and finally rediscovered film Comrades: A Lanternist's Account of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Having attained almost mythical status since its release in 1986, the film is now being reissued by the British Film Institute (BFI).

By 1834 trade unions had...

Totalitarian art commonly associated with the Communists and Nazi Germany, has its roots in early modernist avant-garde (around 1920-40). The National Gallery of Fine Arts in Sofia presents a very interesting exhibition that displays 45 paintings and 21 sculptures created by Bulgarian artists before the collapse of the communist regime in the country in 1989. Al artworks depict or praise Bulgarian and Soviet communist leaders. You can visit the show until September 6, 2009.

The exhibition comes as a surprise, twenty years after the dramatic political events that followed the Fall of the Wall in Berlin. Finally, the socialist art appeared from the underground, where it was diligently forgotten. Pathetic realism, noble faces of party leaders, pioneers, red carnation and lots of nation-wide joy –these are some of its recognizable signs- became once again the word of the day. Thankfully, not in real life but in the spaces of a musum for a period of two months.

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Sound sets the scene. When you pass through the doors, you are assailed by the bone-chilling noise of howling winds, and the crepitation of ice. Welcome to an exhibition about the fabled North-West Passage, a source of endless, greed-driven fascination, and often fruitless and tragic endeavour, for centuries. Was it somehow possible to travel by sea from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific, passing through the ice-bound waters of Alaska? Many tried. Many perished. John Cabot, sailing in 1497, believed that it would give him access to the fabled riches of the Far East. There then followed five hundred years of failure. Yes, it was not until 1906 that a Norwegian called Roald Amundsen achieved the near impossible, threading his way through, quite modestly, in a small herring boat.

This pleasing, intelligent, compact show at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich – and what more fitting a location could there be than this museum? – tells the story of some of the most...

There is, as yet, no instructed estate agent, but should one come along, their marketing pitch will for once need no over-egging. ‘For sale/rent: 80 presidential palaces, average unit living space half-a-million square feet. Attached gardens featuring disused swimming pools, personal zoos/nuclear bunkers etc. Rooms fitted with thrones and gold lavatories, en suite torture chamber optional. Some bomb damage. Suit megalomaniac or similar.’

Welcome to what its previous owner would no doubt have termed the Mother of All real estate portfolios – the personal palaces and second-to-82nd homes of President Saddam Hussein, High Excellency, Struggler Against Zionist Imperialism, Field Marshal and Commander of All Iraq, to give him just a few of his self-adopted monikers.

Unlike his collection of personal titles, however, the late Baghdad leader’s hoard of property titles has bequeathed a rather more lasting legacy for those who took over when he was deposed in 2003....

As a child in America’s Deep South in the 1970s, Kathryn Stockett was not really aware of the racial divides around her. Now she has written a novel about the community in 1960s Mississippi from the point of view of the black servants.

The British cover to Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help – about the experiences of black maids in Mississippi in the early 1960s – is a period photograph of a little white girl in a pushchair flanked by two black women in starched white uniforms – the 'help’ of the book’s title.

The photograph, which was found in the National Congress archives, was deemed too controversial to be used on the American cover. The spectre of racism in the South is still raw and political correctness works overtime.

When Stockett was first shown the photograph, which was inscribed Port Gibson, Mississippi, she sent it to a friend of hers, who, in turn, forwarded it to his mother. Back came the reply, 'Why, that’s just little Jane Crisler Wince on the corner of...

Oscar Wilde, whose flamboyant homosexuality shocked Britain in the 19th century, won an unlikely endorsement from the Vatican on Thursday.

In a surprise act of reconciliation with the playwright, the Holy See's official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, praised the poet as a "lucid analyst of the modern world".

Wilde, who was sent to prison for acts of gross indecency with Lord Alfred Douglas and later converted to Catholicism, has been regarded by the Roman Catholic Church in the century since his death as a dangerous degenerate and dissolute nonconformist.

While acknowledging that Wilde, who died in 1900, was a rebel who delighted in shocking Victorian England, L'Osservatore said he was a profound thinker who spent his professional life asking "what was true and what was false".

Museums are increasingly becoming like theaters, their once-staid display cases giving way to extended narratives and elaborate special effects. But now, after nearly two years of renovations, a theater has become more fully a museum. It is being incorporated into an expanding multibuilding exhibition that will recount a tale as resonant and dramatic as any ever staged: Lincoln’s presidency and assassination.

In February Ford’s Theater, where the murder took place on April 14, 1865, reopened as a fully functioning theater doubling as a memorial exhibit. The presidential box where Lincoln sat with his wife, Mary, watching a comic play as John Wilkes Booth put a bullet through his skull overlooks the stage and has itself become a permanent set, draped with flags and decorated as it was that evening.

On Wednesday a 7,000-square-foot exhibition space opens — Ford’s Theater Museum — through which visitors will proceed before emerging into the theater itself. Before...