2025 RI Y6 GP TP P2_INSERT

Raffles Institution 2025 Year 6 Timed Practice General Certificate of Education Advanced Level Higher 1 GENERAL PAPER 8881/02 Paper 2 21 May 2025 INSERT 1 hour 30 minutes READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST This Insert contains the passages for comprehension. This document consists of 4 printed pages.

2 Passage 1. Michael Lewis explores why art has lost relevance today. 1 In 1971, the performance artist Chris Burden stood against the wall of a California art gallery and ordered a friend to shoot him through the arm. That air rifle shot was the opening salvo of a movement that came to be called ‘endurance art’ —an unnerving species of performance art in which the performer deliberately subjects himself to pain, deprivation, or extreme tedium. Try as he might, Burden never quite matched the shock of his spectacular debut (and he did try, once letting himself be crucified onto the back of a Volkswagen Beetle). 5 2 I recently showed my students the footage of Burden’s shooting. Curiously, the clip did not provoke them as it had their predecessors in my classrooms in decades past. No one expressed any palpable sense of shock or revulsion. One student pointed out the legal liability of the shooter; another intelligently placed the work in historical context and related it to anxiety over the Vietnam War. This refusal to judge or take offence can be taken as a positive sign, suggesting tolerance and broadmindedness. 10 3 But there is a broadmindedness so roomy that it is indistinguishable from indifference, and it is lethal. For while the fine arts can survive a hostile or ignorant public, or even a fanatically prudish one, they cannot long survive an indifferent one. And that is the nature of the present Western response to art, visual and otherwise: indifference. 15 4 In terms of quantifiable data —prices spent on paintings and photographs and sculptures; visitors accommodated; funds raised; and square footage created at museums—the picture could hardly be rosier. A recent Christie’s auction set several records, including the highest price ever paid at an auction for a work of art: USD179.4 million for Picasso’s Women of Algiers. Clearly, the art market is robust. One can expect more such record-breaking in the art market over the next few years as it is bolstered by Hong Kong dollars, Swiss francs, and Qatari riyals. 20 25 5 But quantifiable data can only describe the fiscal health of the fine arts, not their cultural health. The picture is not so rosy. A basic familiarity with the ideas of the leading artists and architects is no longer part of the essential cultural equipment of an informed citizen. Fifty years