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What is the meaning of the enormous empty shipping container sitting in the Turbine hall of the Tate Modern? For Ian Jack, it is a journey into artistic nothingness; the experience of visiting it is an empty one. Another answer is suggested by Allan Sekula’s film The Lottery of the Sea, which opens with shots of shipping containers, shots immmedietly familiar to middle-class British people from the second series of the Wire, which, like Sekula’s film, deals with the effects of cargo containerisation. This process, beginning at the dawn of the neoliberal era in around 1975. has led to the moving of docks away from city centres with a huge loss of jobs, followed by attempts to redevelop waterfronts into exclusive residential and leisure zones. Part of the film focuses on the effects of this process in Barcelona, not just in the area around the former port but in the historical centre. He shows demonstrations from 2001 which attempted to prevent the process of gentrification of the area called Raval. The protests were not successful ;the area where they took place is now a gentrified zone which has as its centrepiece the gleaming sandstone and glass of Barcelona’s Museum of Modern Art.

The role of modern art galleries in the attempts to regenerate a poor area has been well documented, and is widely held to have been successful in cities such as Bilbao and Barcelona itself. British cities like Manchester, Bristol, Glasgow and Sheffield have all set off down the same path, not to mention the south bank of the Thames in London. Tourists both national and international flock to these iconic buildings in much the same way as they visit palaces, cathedrals: to admire the building itself and to marvel at whatever they find inside. The experience of the exhibition itself is often largely irrelevant; the building itself is a container, one might say, the meaning of what is on display either mystifying or immediately forgotten.

Regeneration through art is one of a set of very similar urban development strategies. Expositions are another. The Millennium Dome was an attempt to regenerate the Greenwich peninsula. Expo 98 in Portugal redeveloped a huge area of the West of the city. Developments such as these aim in essence to take an area of the city, away from the centre, which is widely considered to be underused and to leverage it into profitable real estate by building things which people with money are believed to want. The roll-out of a kit of oceanariums, museums of science and technology, spectacular apartment blocks, upmarket shopping centres etc etc has made large parts of a number of cities into identikit dead zones, rarely visited even by tourists or by the local people.

The Millennium Dome itself was widely regarded as a disaster in the making. It cost £700 million and it was clear from the start that nobody involved in the project had the slightest idea what to put inside it once it was finally finished. According to reports from the very few people who ventured inside, it hosted a mixture of mawkish, trite, bombastic and meaningless corporate-sponsored ‘experiences’ which illustrated perfectly the mixture of cynicism and vapidity of those involved.

In Sekula’s film a very similar event takes place: the Forum 2004 in Barcelona, centring on the perennial expo themes of Scientific Knowledge and Cultural Diversity. He interviews local people protesting against the loss of their homes as a result of the redevelopment of the site, and subsequently films the event for which their homes were sacrificed; it was, like the Millennium Dome, a total failure. Images of the site show a landscape strikingly similar to other former Expo sites in Lisbon, Seville and Valencia: a sterilized, dead zone, a non-place devoid of energy and interaction, ‘useless as a conduit of psychic energy’, in the words of Frederic Jameson.

But can these events be classified as failures? A useful and important analogy is that of sport, another focus and means of urban generation following much the same model. Portugal invested hugely in the Euro football championships, which were widely held to be a success. They were not, of course, a success for the Portuguese football team. But to what extent does that matter? New stadiums were built, the advertisers were happy; for a sporting megaevent these are more important measures of success. After all, if a football team such as Arsenal redevelops land into a stadium, and the football club and the developers all make a huge amount of money, and luxury apartments are built next to the stadium, and the companies who develop those apartments also make humungous amounts of money, what possible relevance could the result of the football match itself on any given Saturday or Sunday have? The stadium itself is merely the container; the medium is the message. Whatever goes on inside the stadium is of very little or no importance.

In the film, the developers of the Forum 2004 site themselves confirm this logic. The forum may have been a complete failure, but what matters is that the value of the space on which it took place has been leveraged exponentially, and so the developers themselves stand to make a killing. The Millennium Dome was sold for basically nothing and is now an entertainment venue surrounded by ‘luxury’ flats. No prizes for guessing where Cristiano Ronaldo has his apartment in Lisbon. As for the MACBA development, it has increased real estate prices in the area, bringing in people who have spending power and getting rid of those can no longer afford to live in the centre of the city. The MACBA itself is a container; the success, failure or indeed the meaning of whatever is inside is of little relevance in the grander scheme of things. One might say the same of the success or failure of any work of art in the neoliberal age; the debate over the success or failure of Anthony Gormley’s One and Other has ignored the reality that, for Rupert Murdoch, it has functioned as a very effective advertisement for his Sky Arts channel.

Which brings us back to the empty container in the Turbine Hall, the latest in the Unilever series of installations. Whatever meanings an educated elite may be able to find inside it, that particular one is very clearly signalled and communicated to all who visit. Public art in the neoliberalism era functions not so much as a Trojan horse, but rather like the joke about the man who smuggles bicycles. The container is empty; the medium itself is the message.

Surprised this week to get a leaftlet through the door which informs me that I live somewhere called ‘Stratford Village’, which somewhat disappoints me as I had prided myself on living in a capital city, with all the excitements and dangers that that implies. But no, a villager I am, which is puzzling, as I’m barely acquainted with any of my fellow villagers and I am only able to get to work with the aid of a vast metropolitan transport network. This seems to be another desperate attempt to ‘brand’ or graft some identity onto a particularly nondescript part of London; the idea of an urban ‘village’ is an estate agent’s ploy, nothing more. Any remnants of community that do exist in this area will be entirely wiped out by the monstruous monolith of a shopping centre that (the council) likes to pretend has got something to do with the Olympics (it hasn’t, except for the fact that it’s part of the same garguntuan land grab) and which will fundamentally transform the geography of London in ways that the council clearly have not considered and about which they clearly do not care as long as it fulfils their quota of 5,000 more crappy retail jobs before 2012. The other Elephant & Castle-style shopping centre that we are all funnelled through every morning and evening, built over the of the old market, has not exactly done wonders for the social fabric of the area. ‘World-class’ sporting and shopping facilities come at a cost: they are going to make things, worse, not better for the people who actually live here. Developers, on the other hand, stand to make a fortune, especially if they can manage to conjure up some purported sense of local identity, currently absent. It’s not that we have nothing in common: we share the status of London’s unhealthiest borough (must be worth a gold medal or two). If Stratford is a ‘village’ I’m a (fried) chicken (I’m not).

I was intrigued to learn recently that the former Department of Trade and Industry is now known as the Department of Business, Enterprise & *Regulatory Reform*, which rather indicates that the Government’s new found regulatory zeal – in the sense of being for, rather than against regulation – is only skin deep and doesn’t reflect their longer-term ideological objectives and commitments. Also, the Department formerly known as Employment is now the Department of Employment & *Welfare Reform*, which rather indicates that Mr Purnell & Co are serious about their resoundingly popular scheme to bring back the workhouse, revive chain gangs, force the sick to work in non-existent jobs, reduce the current £8 a day to £1.15 to be paid in the form of a voucher for one Gregg’s the Baker pasty, etc etc etc.

At the same time, this week’s Private Eye reports that the Government has recently boasted of increasing the time that ‘jobseekers’ are expected to spend travelling to potential jobs from 60 to 90 minutes each way; despite this, the Minister for the Department of Workfare and Eventually Abolishing the Dole (to give it its proper name) claims for a second home in Hammersmith, considerably closer to his job than his constituency home in Hayes, only 45 minutes away from parliament. I would suggest that anyone to whom the job centre forcibly offers a job which would involve any more than 45 minutes’ journey to work should invoke the ‘McNulty Defence’ and tell them where to stick their job.

The invitation for this year’s Evening Standard Christmas Party
It can be exclusively revealed by this correspondent that at least 85% of the staff of the London newspaper the ‘Evening Standard’ are regular users of the killer drug Cocaine.

From the junior staff to the upper reaches of management, use of the deadly narcotic is said to be widespread particularly among the editorial staff, with many prominent journalists ‘high as a kite’ during substantial periods of the working day. Traces of white powder, believed to be cocaine, have been discovered in the staff toilets as well as in the former smoking room, now openly referred to as the ‘Gak Chamber’. A routine inspection found substantial amounts of cocaine on ‘very nearly’ 100% of notes passed in the staff canteen – many of the staff are now obliged to pay in cash, owing to the fact that their credit cards have become damaged beyond use by constant hammering out of lines on every available surface throughout working hours. A source also revealed that keyboards are continually having to be replaced owing to the build-up of cocaine residue between the keys. On some days the fog of white dust in the air of the newsroom is reportedly so hazy it ‘looks like Beijing on a particularly misty morning’, making it difficult for journalists to actually see their screens and file their stories.

The influence of the evil drug is also to be observed in the often unorthodox behaviour of the paper’s journalists. One of the showbiz staff, sent on a high-profile assignment to interview Janet Jackson, returned with a tape which editors regarded as unusable, given that it consisted of the said journalist talking incessantly about himself and his car for over an hour, pausing only to ask Ms. Jackson if she ‘fancied a toot’. The use of cocaine is also said to have strongly influenced the paper’s coverage of the current Rugby World Cup.

Investigations into the source of all this ‘charlie’, as the highly dangerous drug is known amongst dealers and addicts, tend to point the finger in the direction of one individual: Paul Cheston – author, coincidentally, of the daring, acclaimed, hard-hitting, ground-breaking, Pulitzer Prize-nominated exposé of the suspected Brazilian terrorist Jean-Charles de Menezes’s own alleged drug use. Mr Cheston is said to ‘knock out so much of the stuff so he sometimes forgets to pick up his paycheck at the end of the month’. From his ideally-placed Docklands apartment he is reported to oversee the delivery of three barges a month shipped directly from Colombia, an amount which is still believed to be barely enough to satisfy the cocaine mania of the E.S. newsroom.

At the time of writing the editor of the Evening Standard, a man who has been widely praised for his couragousness and integrity for giving front-page prominence to the Jean-Charles de Menezes cocaine story, was unavailable for comment. He was said to be in a meeting with a ‘very important secret source’, and could not be disturbed. The identity of this source remains a mystery, but it is rumoured to be a somewhat infamous underworld figure, widely believed to have been killed by police in a gun battle in Medellin in 1993, although for substantially different reasons than those that led to the death of Mr. Menezes.