Gagarin was born in the Russian village of Klushino, and in his youth was a foundryman at a steel plant in Lyubertsy. He later joined the Soviet Air Forces as a pilot and was stationed at the Luostari Air Base, close to the Norwegian border, before his choice for the Soviet area programme with five different cosmonauts. Following his spaceflight, Gagarin grew to become deputy training director of the Cosmonaut Training Centre, which was later named after him.

More recently, thinkers influenced by Martin Heidegger have interpreted art because the means by which a community develops for itself a medium for self-expression and interpretation. Larry Shiner has described nice art as “not an essence or a fate but something we have made. Art as we now have usually understood it is a European invention barely 200 years old.” Art on designboom surveys inventive happenings and actions, and contemporary exhibitions taking …