Bulletin

On February 14th 1990 Voyager spacecraft looked back at earth from a distance of 3.1 billion miles and took a picture now widely celebrated as the “Pale Blue Dot”. It shows the earth as a barely distinguishable speck of dust surrounded by vast cosmic darkness. Carl Sagan a leading astronomer and philosopher discussed this picture eloquently in his series Cosmos. An excerpt is below

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner.

How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.

Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Both the Serpentine and the Tate Modern have big launches coming up over the next couple of weeks.

At the Serpentine, the (new) Pavillion and the Summer Houses both open on the 10th.

Currently, the exhibition is of the master Alex Katz's delicate, yet powerful paintings, done as he enters the final phase of

his life..

The upcoming launch of the extension to the Tate Modern by Herzog de Meuron is however, buzzing the entire artworld.

Go there as soon as you can to marvel at the ingenuity.

“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

Mohammed Ali was perhaps the greatest sportsman of the last century but to describe him as a boxer would be to do him a disservice. He was a fighter, a renegade, a poet and a civil rights campaigner. He was also a man of principle in a society in which celebrities and politicians manoeuvred their ideological positions back and forth to suit the prevailing mind-set at the time.

He refused to fight in Vietnam War because as he saw it “why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?”. As a result of this stance he was stripped of his title for three and a half years during what should have been the peak of his career. He spent the time instead touring around university campuses debating and actively campaigning for civil rights. An outspoken critic of the institutionalised racism that was prevalent in the United States during his life, he converted to Islam in what is still a deeply conservate Christian country when he was younger and changed his name from Cassius Clay to Mohammed Ali in order to reclaim his identity which he had been robbed of by his white oppressors. He went on to claim that Clay was his slave name and refused to be called by it thereafter.

Towards the end of his life he fought his hardest battle of all, finally succumbing to Parkinson’s disease after suffering with the disease for decades which he had done so with a dignity and resoluteness that characterised his persona. He was, by all accounts the people’s champion.