Rank - Picturing the Social order

Well my defence is that I was cornered. I'd been wanting to go to see this exhibition (http://www.ngca.co.uk/exhibs/default.asp?id=147&prnt=18) since I learnt about it on Radio 4 when it was in Leeds. Now with it finishing tomorrow, I had only today as Saturdays are generally pretty difficult. So off I went, justifying by saying that I'll catch up tonight and tomorrow morning and failing that on Sunday

It was worth it, a well structured and varied exposition on class, status and income mainly in the UK. The older pieces were particularly good with some like William Booth's summary of research presented as maps.

Overall and this is probably as much as criticism of all such exhibitions is that I felt way too passive. I need to do something. My second comment is that there is something missing with the implied statistics. A bit more on how the numbers do stack up. How social patterns continue to be replicated. It doesn't take a great deal of insight to realise that each generation's rich and poor are likely to live in the same areas as the previous. There is a huge amount of embodied wealth in environments. Also we live in continuums by and large. We haven't had anything approaching a true disjunction since the Civil war. The last perturbation was the second world war when certain areas were levelled and there was a significant realignment of status and income.

So seeing a cake with segments representing the wealth of the top 1%, next 4%, next 5% etc is never likely to change much (although some of the personnel may) over a relatively short period of 20 years. When a more international perspective was taken then things became more interesting.

I've ordered the book!