I met Steve at a quarter past seven and we found our 8 o clock meeting easily - at Hatton where the Grand Union goes up to the Birmingham plateau on a flight of locks. The meeting was at the top of a refurbished Victorian manor house with a great view across to a little church on the edge of a coppice. Both were on the watershed which created the lake which King John made around Kenilworth Castle. We left just before 10am and went and had a coffee at a hotel/conference centre a bit further up the watershed to work out some of the implications. B52s on the muzak. Then back to the office.

The Gracyk 2nd volume on the theory of rock was waiting for me in my pigeon hole plus an invitation to a lecture at Warwick�s London pad just near the ICA on Industry and Commerce in 2045. I also had a paper on the UK�s emerging view on the future of manufacturing from the Manufuture crew at Loughborough

Gracyk posits that mass media are determining factor in understanding rock. Rock exists as recordings for dissemination through mass media and artists embark on a rock project with that understanding. In other words they know that the work will be reproduced identically on a large scale and that (if it succeeds) many many people will hear the recording. This means that a variety of interpretation is likely to be applied to the work So in rock the work is offered on that understanding - as an open entity - relative (say) to a painting which is singular and offered to the much more circumscribed �art world�.

This is a good sociological theory - but what about art-rock? Is it is possible to offer a work constructed using rock techniques as if it were to be understood by a sophisticated community - say the art-rock-world?

Not surprised to see that Minimalism is yet again the style of official commemoration of horror. Good C4 programme on the history of political marketing in the UK. The thesis is that in using marketing techniques to target floating voters - a minority - the parties lose authentic connection with their heartland.

This week we are hammering though the large multi-programme project and trying to get some shape into one of the programmes.