I can't tell who Tyler Green dislikes more feverishly, artist Elizabeth Peyton or the Vogue journalist who profiled her in October (Dodie Kazanjian), but figuring out is worth a click. That's some funny stuff. After reading that I'm ready to say that the visible Mr. Green has earned an abbreviated honorific title. (TyGr, TyGr, burning bright. . . .)
I also must second the notion that Elizabeth Peyton is a notorious hack. One consolation I felt when I left Austin is that 'round these parts I'd exposed to fewer goopy emo doodles of Elliott Smith done in the High Williamsburg style. So I figured—yet on the east coast, they laud this kind of stuff with accolades (a review from Vogue, ahem, notwithstanding). Back home we typically shoo the works and their auteurs away from the entrance of the bagel shop. Twists on conventional geographic seats of elitism aside, Peyton ought to be reconsidered.
Gizmodo notes that Gmail invites are being misdirected out of Hotmail and Yahoo! inboxes by spam filters. Gizmodo reports problems only with invites, and not only have I had that problem, but my regular correspondence is being blocked by certain e-mail service filters. My theory is that it has something to do with the cookie system Gmail uses in order to tailor advertisements to users' tastes, but consider mine an uninformed guess at best.
So if I haven't replied to your e-mail, well . . . most likely that's due to the fact that I'm awful at correspondence. But just maybe I did, and it was a thoughtful and engaging reply, and you threw it out with the garbage. What we have here is a failure to communicate.
Will Baude asks whether art is "tainted" by an artist's moral decisions unrelated to the piece of artwork. Probably someone with a more formal education in normative ethics—a more ethical person than moi, if you will—could cite and source the appropriate prosecutions and defenses of history's notorious artists. Will wonders about Adolph Hitler's art:
But the aesthetic/philosophical question is, should museums refuse to show his work (if it is good) since it was created by one of the most evil men in history? Or, contrariwise, should they agree to show his work (even if it is bad) since it might provide data about the mind behind the madness? What should art museums do? What should history museums do?Argument's over once you cite Hitler!
I actually don't think Will's example of Hitler is a great one, though, given the question—any historical museum would be stupid not to display Hitler's paintings. How fascinating would that be? But I can't think of a good reason why an art museum should. Even if his art did something unprecedented by the 20th century canon, which is a considerable if, his work would be too distracting for any reasonable curator to want to include. Hitler's paintings definitely belong in a museum, but not a show.
Hitler, of course, committed crimes against humanity, the sort that would seem to obviate the question as to whether he has any constructive observations to offer in the way of art. What about crimes against individuals? Still, I think that waging an artist's work against a larger consideration of the artist's set of morals is a slippery slope—not exactly persons of the cloth, the lot of artists whom we generally consider noteworthy. You shouldn't have to approve vehicular homicide (or adultery, or alcoholism, or smoking, or cursing) to like Jackson Pollock; enjoying a Carl Andre installation signals that you have fundamentally decided that he did not kill his wife, Ana Mendieta (which is something of a mystery).
You're probably best off if you take the line from Barthes's "The Death of the Author"—then your quibbles with the artist's moral fiber have no more bearing upon your enjoyment of the art than your opinion of the bankteller's hair-do affects the value of the money he hands you. As Barthes says:
The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.It's certainly a lot easier to address even Hitler's art if you're not asking What does the author want to say to me? but instead What information do I want to know?—in other words, discounting any theological cohesive Author in Adolph Hitler whom you're expected to accept or reject. You're the Reader, you're the principal actor in all this, etc.
That's the aesthetic gymnastics, but it's all a great deal more simple to me. It's a question principally over what you want out of an artwork. You can watch Roman Polanski—you ought to watch The Piano—and you should not let him near the women you care about.
UPDATE: Hitler the painter was in the news today. It turns out that his paintings (some of them, anyway) have been archived in government storage in Alexandria, Virginia, by U.S. military fiat. Who knew? You can probably find them next to the Ark of the Covenant.
This is an example of the sort of destructive activist literature produced by the scientific community that both conservatives and liberals will agree is detrimental to American values and must not be tolerated. I hope you'll join me in my family-affirming protest of these anti-calorists by having another slice of that sweet, sweet pecan pie. (Courtesy of Kevin Drum.)
Work sure does pile up over long weekends—regular policin' will resume once my head's above water.
Both candidates are named Viktor?
—Check.
At least one candidate's face has been horribly disfigured (and no one knows what the other one looks like anyway)?
—Check.
Small Eastern European Slavic nation?
—Check. (Smallish by Russian standards.)
Whoever wins . . .
. . . DOOM WINS.
Tyler Green links to a Guardian piece on interesting new contemporary art-related program activities by Baghdad sculptor Karim Khalil. About a month ago, artist Steve Mumford updated his "Baghdad Journal" (a feature for Artnet) with a profile of a number of artists in Iraq. There were two pieces in particular that will resonate with an American audience for sure:
Abdul Kharim Khalil, Man in Abu-Ghraib, 2004
Qassim Septi, [unknown title], 2004
These pieces were both displayed at Septi's Hewar Gallery in Baghdad in a show dealing with the Abu Ghraib atrocities. (Interestingly enough, both Agence France Presse and Steve Mumford report that Iraqi artistic outrage over the incident was otherwise limited. Freepers, of course, spazzed out on the subject.)
I found one piece in Mumford's report to be particularly inspired—a sculpture by Ahmed al-Safi:
Ahmed al-Safi, [unknown title], [unknown year]
Like an Arabic-script translation of the marking system Calder uses in his mobiles and sculptures. I'm in total agreement with Tyler Green: The Hewar show should be flown to Washington as soon as possible. Just don't give it to the Corcoran.
Another frustrating report suggesting that the Corcoran Gallery is, in fact, operated by government stooges:
Amid questions about the propriety of the event, the Corcoran Gallery of Art yesterday abruptly postponed a cultural program it planned to sponsor next week in cooperation with Cuban diplomats.I don't know whether de facto Cuban ambassadors have any illuminating connections to the Cuban art world. (For the money, I think the Corcoran would find a fantastic lecturer in Lenny Campello, judging from the brief conversation I had with him on the topic.)"The timing two days after the Thanksgiving weekend is not optimum. We are postponing it," said Margaret Bergen, chief communications officer for the city's oldest private museum. Even though the Corcoran had sold only 41 tickets, the event drew the attention of the State Department and several groups who have been fighting the government of Fidel Castro and its policies. Among the questions raised were where the money would go and the appearance of being open-minded about conditions in a country in which poets and writers are jailed.
Regardless, after aspersions were cast over the Corcoran Washington Project for the Arts' (WPA\C) decision to fire OPTIONS 2005 curator Philip Barlow—the DC government funded both WPA\C and the public arts project whose artists Barlow blacklisted from OPTIONS consideration, so the conspiracy theory dots are connected—shouldn't the Corcoran at least find a better scapegoat than Thanksgiving? Come on. You can't blame Thanksgiving.
UPDATE: Will the Corcoran stand up for Trading Spaces designer Doug Wilson?? He's scheduled to speak at 7 p.m.—but what if the State Department catches whim?
The National Terror Alert status has been raised to radiant!
Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko, pictured in 2000 and in 2004:
Susan has a different side-by-side comparison that would also seem to put to bed the notion that Yushchenko experienced anything but a chemical-weapons attack (he was, sources say, poisoned by ricin).
Washington is at odds with the Kremlin on this one, but I hope that does not prevent the US from signalling its vigorous support for the hundreds of thousands of protesters in Kiev. Tak! Yushchenko is the cheer, if you're wondering.
These fantastic textbook disclaimer stickers are a nice illustration of what Julian Sanchez discusses vis-à-vis public reason. Below the cut I go into longform about how the gods must be crazy, but the important thing is to click on those funny stickers.
If you ask me my opinion on, say, a preferred policy for taxation, and my response is, say, that I support a progressive taxation primarily so that public funds proportional to each tax bracket are set aside for the service of (that other Israelite god) Moloch, the Abomination of the Children of Ammon, to whom I insist that we pay tribute in the form of the daily, fiery consumption of toddlers, well, we probably won't come to a common decision about tax rates. We won't even have a shared understanding of even the components of taxation, because I'm unwilling to submit to a common vocabulary.
The Swarthmore professor who made those disclaimer stickers (all but the original that was mandated by some backwater schoolboard, anyway) somewhat angrily mocks the evolution/Creationism/ID debate; the scientific/Christian arguments in general make for a classic example of the utility of common discourse principles, because the whole science bag is about commonly agreed upon principles and shared evidentiary standards.
Yglesias notes how Christian policy arguments have successfully influenced the feel of the discourse. He gives as an example the gay marriage debate and the fact that both Jonathan Rauch and Andrew Sullivan make public arguments that gay marriage could, in fact, strengthen straight marriage, while their sub rosa, actual beliefs hold that discrimination against gay couples is wrong.
The absence of the empirical from the empirically begging threat-to-the-family position is astonishing—there aren't many data at all to be had on the subject, yet the anti-marriage crowd states conclusions as if they were widely supported by independently verified results. And completely confounding is the absence of the empirical from the public debate between evolution and Creationism, because there are no data to support Creationism and mines of data to support evolution—and this should, after all, be a debate that the empirically supported subject wins. And Creationists and IDers really are presenting their arguments in the guise of science . . . just, you know, science that is not based on data or the scientific method or labs.
I think that the rehabilitation of religious conviction, now granted equal and opposite status to whatever rational argument is at hand, fits under the larger umbrella of the definitive problem with the media: they've really fucked the discourse in the pursuit of objectivity. A Creationist with strongly held beliefs and a evolutionary biologist with a Ph.D. from an accredited university clearly do not sit at an equal table just by dint of their having opposing views. Would that media figures were professionalized (i.e., accredited), because then you'd have a shot at infusing the media with the Enlightenment principles upon which the nation was founded. And Wolf Blitzer would be out of a job. But so long as "sacred institution" makes for a legitimate public counterargument and isn't mocked off-stage, we may as well be asking ourselves "What Would the Ammonites Do?" when it comes to policy prescriptions.
Susan and I were strolling through the various postelection photo galleries at Sorry, Everybody (domestic anti-Bush), Apologies Accepted (foreign anti-Bush), and You're Welcome, Everybody (douchebags). While the sentiment expressed at Apologies Accepted was especially appreciated, that site arguably represents the segment of photoblogging opinionators who understand the U.S. electoral system the least. (Arguably.) To all those in Europe and elsewhere who have wished us better luck with George W. Bush in 2008—thanks, and I think we have it covered this time.
But anyway, come on, these guys?
Let's roll? To where, Accounts Payable?
Not just the Pacers/Pistons game, but also South Carolina/Clemson on Saturday and the Steelers/Browns last weekend. I only bring this up because some nominal authority is on NPR right now blaming beer for the state of fans/players aggression, and I want to put an end to that meme right now. To wit: Beer is part and parcel to a long tradition and regardless has historically never led to any violent incident, and I challenge any data showing otherwise. I believe that there are significant studies showing quite the opposite, in fact. Besides, I'm not sure that drinking the Blood of the Patriarch could get you more incensed than Ron Artest is on a day-to-day basis.
Also, a caller just said "the beatitude of the players," which is both the first and last time those words will ever be organized as that phrase.
Courtesy of Lindsay Beyerstein comes an important new online theological resource for the psychological lycanthrope: Molatar's Castle. Molatar, whose lycanthropy manifests itself in the creature of a dragon, has established a clearing house for information pertaining to "spreading the Gospel in the werewolf and furry communities." Rarely will you see that sort of good-faith, transmythotaxonomic evangelism in this day and age (though Molatar exhibits an unfortunately traditional dragon bias in disparaging members of the undead community). You'll want to bookmark this one.
Bad art, bad columns, bad jabs at spam protection—I'm tired of the trenchant stuff. Maybe it's the Thanksgiving spirit, but I could go for some the-schools-are-painted! positive material. So, if you haven't heard it already, I recommend that you check out M.I.A.'s "Galang," which is the dance-infectious single for the holiday season. I'm not, in fact, certain that the song isn't about Thanksgiving, since I have no idea what she's talking about (Sasha Frere-Jones transliterates the bridge to the song as "Ya ya heeey, woy oy ee he hay yo") but it sounds like it'll go well with pumpkin pie.
And according to Pitchfork, Prefuse 73 and The Books collaborated on an EP, which I hope is released in time to be located in my xmas stocking.
For my MT readers—If you've been hit recently by a major spam comment wave, one appealing to the prurient interest with "pictures[hyphen]movies[dot]org" (or some such), try adding this code to your blacklist:
(pictures-?movies)[\w\-_.]*\.[a-z]{2,}I don't speak computer but I was able to parse that general syntax from the examples on MT Blacklist. I'd suggest plugging in some variants, too: pics, videos, etc. And yes, I know, this is very funny if you speak code—I am just a simpleton playing in your world.
Steven Vincent's got an idea in the National Review: All these American artists so engaged with criticize-America-first art? Either they denounce some terrorists in their video installations or they give up the stuff that intersects with political topics. Such as human-to-state relationships, Enlightenment principles, ethnic identities, whatever. You might call that a limitation, but it leaves a lot on the table: dogs playing poker, portraiture of the cast of Seinfeld, Spirit Horse–themed watercolors—all topics just begging to be revisited!
It's hard to reconcile the knowledge that Sex in the Suburbs (Desparate Housewives, that is) plays on broadcast television but PBS won't air advertisements for the movie, Kinsey. The reason for the censorship is not questionable visual content in the commercials but rather Alfred Kinsey's research itself—as if today's society possessed all the same sexual phobias as Kinsey's contemporaries in the 1940s.
It's one severe sexual schizophrenia, isn't it? We're not afraid of fucking but we're terrified of sex. I think that the ability to morally differentiate between the sex that makes up primetime television and the sex that other people living in other places might possibly be having is a crucial value among the "moral values" set. Not seeing how homosexuality threatens families, how television content threatens children, or why parents can't just keep their kids away from televisions and gay couples, I suppose that I am down with smut in all its varieties.
UPDATE: The NYT concurs.
More blah blah blah on the clash over the NEA.
[I]t is absurd that a bureaucracy should be in the new art business. The avant garde should should take care of itself, and its own. State-supported art should be derriere garde (since bureaucrats are artists at covering rears, if nothing more.) State-supported art should have something conservative about it. Its proper objects should be aesthetic analogs to national landmarks and wilderness areas. The NEA should be the department of conserving cultural matter which lots and lots and lots of people have already pretty much come to accept would be a loss to everyone if it went away.That's more or less how the NEA operates. Whether this scheme is worthwhile is up for deate, but Chait is operating under a Gingrich-inspired misperception of the NEA.
Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1989
I get the feeling that Jonathan Chait stumbled upon Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, googled some Gingrich slander against the National Endowment for the Arts, and decided that eliminating the NEA is the policy that Democrats should support in order to win over the hearts and minds of America.
Were the NEA some sort of modern-day Medici agency created for the purpose of patronizing Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck, Tim Miller, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Serrano—that's the epitomal list of offensive grant awardees—Chait might seem to have a point. But to say that private agents are eager to fund these artists is a fundamental misperception of the contemporary art world. The degree to which private patrons—many of whom come in the form of corporations—shy away from writing checks to controversial artists is proportional to the negativity of the publicity that the art generates. The NEA exists, in part, to provide cultural insurance for unpopular but relevant art.
The other side of the coin, which Chait does not address, is that by and large the art patronized by the NEA is hardly from the shock genre that is so popularly associated with the agency. With just a few mouse clicks you can see that in 2004, the NEA allocated $800,000 in Folk Arts Infrastructure grants to various associations throughout the nation. If subsidizing Mapplethorpe offends the red states, equally repellant to me is the notion of giving $25,000 in tax dollars to the Idaho Commission on the Arts so that folklorists can conduct surveys in the rural counties outside cosmopolitan Boise. But I do recognize that no one else is going to cough up that money. The NEA exists, in part, to provide cultural insurance for popular but irrelevant art.
The question then becomes whether we ought to have cultural insurance at all. I believe that Rawls wrote that even an ideal liberal state should not fund the arts, because that entails a choice about "the good" instead of "the right." Maybe so, but access to the arts—a public interest—while not inalienable, is worth advocating. The market really has no great track record for providing for this public interest (Clear Channel ought to serve as a warning). While the elimination of public funding for the arts wouldn't devastate blue coastal states, where you can still get to the MoMA (for an exorbitant $20, but that's another story), I see a portentous future for the flyover country: a dark, vast pop-culture ghetto.
As for Chait's political point—no, of course not! Listen to Kevin Drum—this won't earn Democrats any votes. Newt Gingrich and like-minded red state voters aren't apoplectic when the Big Quilt Festival rolls through town; their beef isn't with the NEA. Liebermanizing the party will only work if you can adopt the rhetorical framework of sexual repression, homophobia, and fundamentalism that conservatives use—and then you'd have to do it better than Republicans. Is that where we want to go?
Alaska's sole member of congress, Don Young, voted for the DeLay Rule. Says Young: "Everybody says it's to protect Tom DeLay. That may be so. But it also protects anyone else from an elected attorney general, thank God Alaska doesn't have one, that can use their position as a bully pulpit and prosecute an elected official." [Except when it's Bill Clinton.]Emphasized editorial added.
The decision by House Republicans to change the rules for Tom DeLay stinks so badly that Republicans won't claim voting for it. No more pussyfooting around—we have all kinds of time for Elmo state/Cookie Monster state theory later, but we're an opposition party now—time to oppose! The Dems will have done the right thing when we see this item even on FOX News.
A west coast reader e-mailed to inform me that her organization's firewall has decided to block G.p, ostensibly because this site hosts pornography. My immediate thoughts were 1) Who's Los Angeles to chide anyone over prurient interests! and 2) Though I did draft a post on the whole Timothy Greenfield-Sanders: XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits exhibit/phenomenon, I'm pretty sure I never posted that or anything else that ought to set off the alarms. She wasn't the first to tell me; Susan can't get here, either.
I believe the problem lies in my Web host. As I understand it, a Web host that supports porn sites run the risk of getting its entire range of IP addresses blacklisted—and a skinflint who won't pay for quality Web hosting runs the risk of being assumed a skin Flynt.
I'll take this opportunity to again voice my support for an Internet red-light district: the dot-xxx domain. In the meantime, I guess I ought to look into an alternative arrangement for the blog or another solution if someone out there has one.
I saw Art-O-Matic last weekend, and I'm ready to say it—the show really is that bad. It's unfortunate, too, because there's enough good art, even great art, to make a fantastic community exhibition. But the good art is buried by the presentation crisis of more than 600 (!) artists screaming simultaneously for the viewer's attention, and I think it's a travesty that the local arts community is so set upon signaling to the thousands of visitors who attend this event as their annual local arts outing that DC's contemporary art scene is 85 percent garbage and 15 percent disorganization. It's emphatically not, despite what AOM may lead you to believe.
I didn't enjoy sifting to find the good work, but the good art is there, and for those who are interested, these are my top 10 finds (in alpha order):
To revisit WaPo chief artic Blake Gopnik's review: Gopnik, used to the World Fair—if you will—pulled no punches at the local carnival. (More like a circus.) What was he thinking? He knew all this going in and the event would not have been any worse off had he ignored it, and now the WaPo has even set up a forum for complaints (no doubt, to keep the vitriol out of editors' inboxes). My guess is that he was answering an outpouring of demand—in which case he would be doing area artists a disservice if he abided by lower standards to judge their work. Nothing could be more condescending than a critic who organizes art into tiers of professionalism—"actual" versus "provincial" art—and Gopnik deserves credit for not writing the review many people hoped he would, i.e., AOM is "good for what it is." In the end, though, as Lenny Campello has noted, Gopnik did the show a huge favor.
Still, my friend Genevieve and I are writing an antidote to the anxiety of so much art (so much of it bad): a scavenger hunt. Depending on how you want to read that, we might come off as a hell of a lot meaner than Blake Gopnik, but it was our unanimous agreement that it would be the best way to bypass all this critical stress and seriousness. Get a team and a digital camera—details forthcoming.
An addition to Susan's review of frequently banned books in America: Shirin Ebadi's memoirs, though, to be clear, Ebadi's memoirs weren't precisely banned. The human rights lawyer, gender-gap defying Iranian justice, and 2003 Nobel Peace Laureate is prohibited from publishing in the United States due to a trade embargo against Cuba, Sudan, and Iran. Whereas the exchange of, say, oil or munitions has done much to promote the cause of mutual understanding between our nation and the Axis of Evil, the free transmission of ideas would bring the house of cards to the ground.
Link (well, this post, more or less) courtesy of Laura Rozen.
Sidney Lawrence writes a fine review of DC art happenings, but problematically, leaves out the gallery shows that are happening this month. James Huckenpahler, Maggie Michael, Robert Lazzarini—great, but gone! Tucked away in the archives of October. You have to stay fresh with this stuff.
Sleepyheaded Miguel Sanchez has some thoughts on the prominent placement of Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk in the atrium of the new MoMA. Sanchez is right—Newman has benefitted from some new looks in recent years to a degree which other New York School artists have not. I don't know that I understand why, but I'm not the right person to ask—Newman's spirituality rubs me the wrong way. I'm definitely partisan to Newman's rival, Robert Motherwell, who sneered at Newman (he called Newman's style "reductio ad absurdum," which is pretty funny). Regardless, from the pictures it looks as if the Obelisk is a damned nice fit for the space.
Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk, 1963–69; in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium
In which Candy Crowley recalls a microcosmic episode from her coverage of the presidential campaign (courtesy of Political Wire):
In January 2003, when his campaign was still young enough that Kerry would actually sit down with reporters in a relaxed setting, he and Crowley met for breakfast at the Holiday Inn in Dubuque, Iowa.I do think that there is an aesthetic divide in this country, one that operates chiefly by dint of media reinforcement and political cynicism. But come on, this divide, are we supposed to believe that the nation's being torn apart down to the single teabag? You can buy green tea at every grocery store in the nation."I'd like to start out with some green tea," Kerry told the waitress, who stared at him for a moment before responding, "We have Lipton's."
Remember the ad campaign that the Club for Growth launched against Howard Dean back in the primaries?
[Farmer says,] "Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading ..." [wife interrupts] ". . . Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs."Which is a value system that no actual people cherish. ("Hollywood-loving?" Because, what, The Rock was too art-haus?)
It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that not only our values a matter contextually inspired constructs, so, I think, is our opinion of our values, other people's values, and the relationship between the two. While the Republican Party is busy cannabalizing itself (cf., Arlen Specter) and the Democratic Party is taking fire/advice from all quarters, both (but especially the Dems) need to consider some frame analysis. Both parties need new frames that allow the use of strong concepts like "homophobia" and "zealotry" to oppose shallow words like "sacred institution," "compassionate conservatism," "judicial activism," and "obstructionism"—which have been deployed effectively by the right to create frames to which people are sympathetic but, I think, not actually aligned. (Everyone loves lattes.)
Just a moment ago on the Kojo Nnamdi show, someone said that no part of the Lacy Peterson trial was ever televised. Is that actually true? It seems obvious enough to me now that the cameras would be prohibited in the courtroom—but is it possible that all that shit on the television was only courtroom buzz? I'm almost sorry in a sense that I blacked out this trial—I'd like to know what precisely the coverage consisted of. I would really, really rather not believe that this story colonized the media only by dint of a photograph of an attractive white woman.
Since I arrived a little late to that party, I'm trying to get ahead of the next wave. Will a relatively low yield of shark attacks provoke coastal hysteria? Will infected fowl transmit diseases to humans—or vice versa? My bet for 2005: The kids are going to like the "Hooking Up."
Another day, another logic board failure. That's three this year. Posting will be sporadic while I haul the dead husk of my iBook to Clarendon for the purpose of beating a few metrosexual Apple Store clerks into submission.
UPDATE: Macintosh fails to see how my being inconvenienced by the repair process is sufficient justification for their replacing my enfeebled computer with a juiced-up G4. They are also of the opinion that, in fact, this is only my second logic board failure and that the March repair involved replacing the whole hard drive, which I spun as even greater reason for giving me my new G4. Stupid Apple employees! Can't we outsource you already?
In other news, my Mood is best represented by a very distressed cartoon, I'm currently listening to NPR, and I'll soon be eating leftover dim sung. Sorry to get all LJ on you and I promise I'll post some relatively noteworthy stuff later.
E-mailed to me a moment ago:
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day theA wit and a prophet.
plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." – H.L. Mencken
I can think of nothing to add to Todd Gibson's thoughtful entry on the passing of architectural photographer Ezra Stoller. (You ought to do yourself a favor and read Mr. Gibson's post, as it would appear that just three articles outside the NYT marked Stoller's passing.)
Non-Stoller related stuff below the cut.
Apropos of nothing, it occurred to me that one point Gibson makes resonates with some ideas I have about the process of artistic adaptation:
Stoller was the sort of critic any creator would want. He spent time understanding the architect's intentions, and then he did whatever was necessary to translate the essence of those intentions into his own medium of communication—most often a black-and-white, two-dimensional medium.Well said. Creators often try to adapt the product instead of the process behind the product and that's a surefire way to make a flimsy adaptation. A particularly oppressive example out there today of this failure is the Ray Charles biopic, Ray. This movie infuriates me. Even for Oscar-begging, Hollywood schmaltz, I fail to see how this film could pass itself off as testimony to the art of Ray Charles. For one thing, it's a movie, hardly an appropriate way to portray blindness. Allowing that, cut-n-pasting Ray Charles's name into biopic boilerplate is surely no way to discuss an extraordinarily nonconventional musician.
I think that Charlie Kaughman's Adaptation stands at the opposite end of the scale. The book from which the film is adapted, Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, is an anxious book: Orlean gets this idea to go march around a swamp to investigate a criminal mystery, the subtext of which—obsession over orchids—at first foreign to her, consumes her. So Kaughman wrote an epiphenomenal story about the story: His anxiety about making a big adventure adaptation of a story about anxiety over getting too involved in a specialized mystery leads Kaughman to become engrossed in a big adventure. (That's game, set, and match for me; my cynical roommate thinks that the meta style made for a convenient subterfuge for Kaughman to tailor a conventional Hollywood thriller for Nicholas Cage and still keep his cred. No one usually beats me out in Hollywood cynicism—on the whole, I don't really like movies. I wasn't blogging when this movie came out, but I'd be curious to hear any strong opinions one way or the other anyone out there has.)
Much as I love Elvis Costello (or resemble him, depending upon whom you ask), I think he was dead wrong when he said, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Rather he was dead wrong when he meant this in a negative way—if you tranlate intentions and processes into new media you can discover new lights to an artwork.
I don't know if it's coming to your Xbox any time soon, but Beyond Manzanar looks like a pretty sweet game. Among other topics it details the experience of Japanese American detainees during World War II. I take it that it's not, in fact, headed for your platform, since it's being presented at the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival. (Link courtesy of Greg Allen.)
. . . mostly I linked to this to note that Michelle Malkin is awful for trying to lay the first bricks for Arab internment in the United States. I'm keeping tabs, and I'll let you know when she's over the fascistic rhetoric.
UPDATE: Hmm. When I hit "Publish," there was a great deal more to this post—all gone now. More or less I referred to David Neiwert as an excellent source for related but accurate history of the Japanese American internment experience along with thorough fact-checking of Malkin's work.
Blake Gopnik won't make any friends with his review of Art-O-Matic 2004, a District-oriented, contemporary art–themed revival of the pagan spring bacchanal rite. Anyone can participate in Art-O-Matic, and, well:
Here's a fine idea. Let's find an abandoned school and then invite local dentists to ply their trade, free of charge, in its crumbling classrooms, peeling corridors and dripping toilets. Okay, so maybe we won't get practicing dentists to come, but we might get some dental students, hygienists and retirees to join in our Happy Tooth festival. What the heck, let's not be elitists here: Why don't we just invite anyone with a yen for tooth work or some skill with drills to give it a go. Then we can all line up, open wide and see what happens.I'm with Gopnik—art without critical mediation trends toward craft. There are many ways by which the arts industry institutionalizes exclusionary attitudes—setting the admission price at $20, as the MoMA has done, being one.* But asserting professional standards—one of which being that art, like any industry, should be attenuated by laws of scarcity (of space) according to the needs of the community (aesthetics)—is neither undemocratic nor class warfare. As with ideas, some art is better than other art, and it takes some training—even if it's just the investment of time spent getting to know art—to differentiate between the good and bad.
Putting 600 artists in one space violates common-sense economic principles—that's really the biggest shame of it. I'm sure there's enough presentable work to put together a strong top-10 list, but who can stomach giving his full attention to more than 600 artworks? I like to judge for myself, though, so I guess I'm looking forward to some indigestion tomorrow night. But first I'll be stopping by the Fraser Gallery for the Cuban Artists: Three Generations show, which I don't doubt will be the highlight of the evening.
* Old news, for sure, but it's taken me a long time to formulate an opinion on the MoMA's decision. One of these days I'll even write it out.
As you see. My immediate thoughts: I hope that Palestinian terrorists do not move to fill the vacuum, I hope that Ariel Sharon does not move to fill the vacuum, and I hope that Colin Powell does create a vacuum within the Bush administration. I don't think it's a strongly partisan statement to suggest that the Bush administration has not been concerned with I/P—there have been no new negotiations brokered in over a year, Bush has made "unilateralism" a signature plank in his platform, and, well, all the ME hates America. (Stay put, Colin.)
I'm not sure whether I respect or condemn Arafat's decision to suggest no successor, but I'll be doing my background reading on Ahmed Qureia, Mahmoud Abbas, and Rawhi Fattouh. . . .
Regarding Tommy's comment to the post below on Ashcroft's successor, I've heard four names batted around for Ashcroft's successor: former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, White House chief counsel Alberto Gonzales, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Bush/Cheney 2004 campaign chairman and former Montana governor Marc Racicot. By far the best of these options is Giuliani.
Both Thompson and Gonzales tarnished their own reputations on the most crucial issues during the first Bush administration: Larry Thompson, Ashcroft's number two and a singular supporter of the USA PATRIOT Act, personally approved the extraordinary rendition of a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, to Syria for interrogation upon suspicion of his being linked to terrorist activities. Alberto Gonzales, of course, informed President Bush through a series of memos that activities perpetrated in the name of the war on terror may be judged war crimes—and then paved the legal avenue for beating the rap and prosecuting the war on terror without adjustment. Of these two, I'm not sure who's worse, but I suppose they both apply for "Ashcroftian."
Either Racicot or Giuliani would provide a kinder media touch than the first-term cabinet visigoths, Ashcroft and Rumsfeld. Given Bush's hubristic opinion of his new political capital, I guess this isn't a huge consideration. But if he at all wants to avoid reopening these files during a difficult Senate confirmation—which could be at least as nasty as Ashcroft's confirmation—Thompson and Gonzales are out. (I'm not at all convinced that Bush would consider a Senate confirmation battle a thing to be avoided; if anything, between now and a SCOTUS retirement, he needs to build up a compelling obstructionist case. But that's neither here nor there.)
Between Racicot and Giuliani, then, I think you actually arrive at a level at which you can rationally debate about experience, qualifications, etc., and I think Giuliani is a clear winner. It took me a minute to remember but when Racicot was appointed to chair the RNC, there was some buzz about ethical conflicts of interest—Jacob Weisberg helpfully supplies the details. Really, it's important to me that someone be appointed who's not evil, but it's also important that someone be appointed who's not incompetent. It's too bad, then, that Giuliani apparently won't take the job. I'm hoping this is simple political gamesmanship and that he won't turn the president away, since I'm as enthusiastic as I will likely be over the prospective cabinet so long as Giuliani joins—and I'm significantly less optimistic about the other prospects.
Fly free, mighty eagle. We appreciate that "[t]he objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved," although, I admit, I hadn't heard that recently, and some might potentially disagree. Vehemently.
He liberated us from the tyrrany of civil liberties and nudie statues. What else can I say but hats off to you, and strike up the band, friend—play us Johnny's number one last time.
A friend of mine in London keeps reporting about how amazing Bruce Nauman's Raw Materials show is, for which he's installed an "aural collage" in Turbine Hall. I believe it's the first time the atrium has been emptied entirely of visual works, the idea being that the volume (i.e., space) is entirely defined by your relationship to the various speakers/texts installed throughout. (If you have fast Internet, you can click the link to get an loose idea of the hall and hear the texts.) I was blown away by Nauman's 2002 piece, Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), and it sounds as if Raw Materials shares a similar treatment of space that made the former work so successful.
So I'm feeling somewhat tethered to the District, but in a show of conceptual synchronicity we've received something of an ambassadorial swap from Britain: This weekend, Rachel Whiteread's Ghost (1990) went on display at the National Gallery of Art. (Apparently. I was there on Saturday and managed to sail right past the Mezzanine, so that's another trip for me.) Ghost is the notorious plaster cast of the empty space within a blue-collar East End parlor, a piece that builds from the postminimal sculptural foundation to which Nauman contributed. Larry Gagosian and Jeffrey Weiss arranged the acquisition, and Mitchell Rales (for the Glenstone Foundation) dropped the scrylla for the "partial and promised" gift to the NGA.
[ Rachel Whiteread, Ghost, 1990 ]
I'd really like to hear more about the conditions of the purchase. Considering that Whiteread's YBA associate Damien Hirst's "Pharmacy" auction at Sotheby's, estimated at $5.5 million, cleared for a jawdropping $20.3 million, I imagine that Ghost cost a pretty penny. What the "partial" caveat implies for this magnanimous gesture, I couldn't say.
In his WaPo blurb, Paul Richard ties the piece to Nauman, Andy Warhol, and John Singer Sargent. The latter analogies, well, they escape me. As for Nauman, if you can't see his work in London, you can see a piece from London in DC that owes him a debt of gratitude.
UPDATE: Lenny Campello says that since the NGA is a public institution, the price paid for Ghost shouldn't be kept secret. I imagine that the "promised and partial" caveat somehow confers some transparency exemption, but it's worth asking. More curiously, Lenny was also at the NGA over the weekend and missed the piece. Maybe it's the fluorescent light burning our eyes. . . .
My prediction as to who would represent the United States at the 51st Biennale in Venice was Matthew Barney—when last I checked in, the State Department appeared ready to let the Guggenheim (owner of the American Pavilion) make that call, and I figured that despite the dwindling returns from the massive Cremaster 3 spectacular at the Gug in '03, Thomas Krens's partiality to Barney would rue the day. (You can read more about the Biennale scuttlebutt here.) But the forces of democracy prevailed and a panel of curators (including the Hirshhorn's Ned Rifkin) assembled and chose Ed Ruscha.
Around the time of his Whitney retrospective I wrote that Ed Ruscha deserved a more prominent spot in the pantheon than he's had. But I'm not sure that I feel he's right for the Biennale. It's kind of a hard proposition to say what is right for the Biennale since well over 90 percent of the work to be found there is dreadful, but I think the important thing is to contribute something unknown or unpredicted to the debate. My feeling is that some sexed-up painting (maybe Inka Essenhigh) would have done the trick, especially since painting will dominate the conversation if the Biennale at all reflects the larger discourse. Regardless, if I may be so bold as to judge from recent works displayed on the Barbara Krakow Gallery site, Ruscha promises to stand apart from the usual Biennale flotsam and jetsam. Maybe the Biennale would be a more successful venture if seasoned artists were invited to participate more often.
Ed Ruscha, You Will Eat Hot Lead, 2002
Ed Ruscha, L.A.S.F. #2, 2003
G.p got a trim last night—new links, new recs, and a bio of sorts. Click your morning away. Several weeks ago we hit 50,000 unique visits here and we're well above 56K now, and traffic's consistent and busy, so thanks for stopping by. As always, any recommendations you have regarding music and literary picks are always appreciated.
Apropos of nothing in particular: I recently reread Primo Levi's The Periodic Table and still hold it to be one of the greatest novels written in the mimetic1 tradition. Finishing that I picked up Levi's Survival in Auschwitz2 and read it almost entirely during recent long delays on the Metro's Red Line. It is not only an awesome meditation on Levi's experience of the Holocaust, but also a biography that is uniquely revealing of the man's mental processes: Equal parts chemist and writer, Levi analyzes the trauma of the Lager with a rigorous, scientific scrutiny. I highly recommend both.
. . . but I would advise against reading Survival on the Metro. I'm a sturdy reader, but I'm certain it was visible to other passengers that I was destroyed after I encountered a passage in which Levi tries to recount the Canto of Ulysses (26) from Inferno. Dante:
Think of your breed; for brutish ignoranceExcellent. It just becomes more incredible as you think about it.
Your mettle was not made; you were made men,
To follow after knowledge and excellence.
1 From the Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism: ". . . In modern critical parlance, mimetic may refer to the Aristotelian concept of imitation, especially when it is used in conjunction with discussions of criticism by members of the Chicago School, Kenneth Burke, or Erich Auerbach. Its most common use, however, is as a description of works of art that are understood to be reproductions of an external reality or some portion of it. A number of theoretical approaches . . . are known as mimetic criticism for their insistence on the representational relationship of art to an empirical reality, and on their positing of reality as existing, at some level, outside the mediation of discourse."
2 Outside America the book goes by its original and superior title, Se Questo è un Uomo (If This Be a Man). Who knows why publishers here changed the title—so American readers recognize it as belonging to some Holocaust genre, I suppose.
Mark Titchner, We Want To Act With Compassion, 2004
I'm nearly overdosing on the remorseful reflections written on behalf of exactly half the country (my own included), but I think that the 1972 Nixon victory still bears some meaningful implications today. Matt Yglesias, who thinks the incongruities between 1972 and 2004 are too many for the analogy to hold, surely would concede that it would be more apt had Howard Dean been the candidate.
While the Democratic Party is looking at itself, it's thinking about Howard Dean and the inspirational figure he was—probably as inspirational to the left during his campaign as McGovern was during his own time. More so considering Kerry's lack of personal charisma.
Dan Flavin, untitled (to a man, George McGovern) 2, 1972, warm white fluorescent light*
Howard Dean, of course, would have crashed just as hard as McGovern did, and only by appealing to centrism and triangulation was John Kerry able to soften his own landing—so the conventional wisdom goes, though there are a great number of factors besides "moral values" behind Kerry's bare loss. But in an important sense, 2004 is just like 1972—and more or less every other election since segregation in which a conservative beat a liberal. Thomas Frank explains the GOP aesthetic strategy:
Thirty-six years ago, President Richard Nixon championed a noble "silent majority" while his vice president, Spiro Agnew, accused liberals of twisting the news. In nearly every election since, liberalism has been vilified as a flag-burning, treason-coddling, upper-class affectation. This year voters claimed to rank "values" as a more important issue than the economy and even the war in Iraq.We've almost never lost for any other reason. That's why it's absurd for The Poor Man (among others) to flirt with ethical truancy by suggesting liberals give up on abortion rights. He'll attract exactly zero red-state voters with his initiative, because more dear to many of these voters than the "culture of life" is the aesthetic that promotes the culture of life. Democrats have been fighting it for years and will not win an inch by ceding an issue, or two, or ten. For the other segment of red-state voters for whom religious edicts truly inform their vote, one issue will of course not be enough, and since liberals surely don't intend to court Dobson's Focus on the Family crowd—for good reason!—that's a stupid direction to move toward. (I'm happy to see that Lindsay Beyerstein is writing in TPM's comments to correct him. She has a lot of great things to say on this.) Red-state voters who vote for an aesthetic of simplicity (i.e., "moral values") will not be courted on the issues, and compromising to reach them just leaves you compromised.And yet, Democrats still have no coherent framework for confronting this chronic complaint, much less understanding it. Instead, they "triangulate," they accommodate, they declare themselves converts to the Republican religion of the market, they sign off on Nafta and welfare reform, they try to be more hawkish than the Republican militarists. And they lose. And they lose again. Meanwhile, out in Red America, the right-wing populist revolt continues apace, its fury at the "liberal elite" undiminished by the Democrats' conciliatory gestures or the passage of time.
Insofar as the issues-compromise angle was again and always will be unsuccessful, was headstrong Howard Dean the preferable candidate? I didn't endorse Dean for a number of policy reasons, so I'm not the best person to ask, but I saw the spark and I think he would've resisted directly and forcefully the GOP aesthetic. In hindsight it's a shame that Iowa voters (by extension, the Democratic Party) rejected Dean because the GOP relished the opportunity to brandish its bullshit aesthetic. Coupled with the fact that the Kerry moved right and still took it from the GOP should indicate that you can't win against this aesthetic by giving an inch or a mile, and they know that, and they keep shoving it up our asses for a reason. Shocking to think that a liberal would suggest bending over for it next time.
* I assumed the loops represented each state that McGovern lost, but even he couldn't perform that poorly. This piece is part of the National Gallery of Art retrospective, but the photo wasn't taken there—notice the difference the reflective floor makes.
You'll notice that from now on, when you try to leave a comment, you'll have to hit the Preview button first and then Submit. (Special thanks to The Editors for the technical tip.) I know, waah waah, another hardship so soon after the election. Frankly, I was receiving too many of your comments—some of them jarringly off topic. I'd like to respond to a few of those now. I appreciate each and every one of you who graces my site with your own comment contribution. I am especially indebted to hypercommenters like "Absynth517," "oauateza," and "bill_gates," but as I've tried to explain to so many of you: I don't have a car, so I don't need car insurance. I can be a spendthrift, but while I'm still young and virile, I'll respectfully decline your Cialis coupons. I remain skeptically aloof when it comes to the Texas Hold'em craze, I have no need of a "hoam loan," and I definitely do not want to see your zoo porn. With all the generosity pouring forth from the Internets I ought to set up a charity or something, but for now please accept my apologies for the new hurdle.
I wholly reject this all-too-immediate concession to trending rightward on social issues within the Democratic Party. We did that already: I can't imagine swerving too much further right on the issue of (for example) gay marriage than John Kerry did. I hated that part of Kerry's campaign, but I was willing to deal because the GOP made an election victory out of demonizing homosexuals. (I think it's time that we put it that way, too: How many gay couples settle in the states that passed overwhelming anti–gay marriage proposals? Where is this extant threat that so clearly haunts them all?)
The new conventional wisdom—maintained by people I respect—says that we're going to have to push for equal rights for gays with less enthusiasm. I think this overemphasizes the status quo, underestimates the culture wars, and misprioritizes the blame.
First, while gay people in America are doing reasonably well, this election has made it clear the level to which they've been vilified by red-state Americans. Let's not forget that Lawrence and Garner v. Texas was decided in 2003 in a favorable light for gay couples—but might not have been were it tried in, say, 2005. The criminalization of homosexuality isn't at stake here ('cept in Texas); it's the pernicious side effects that prevent gay couples from seeking custody over children, adopting, i.e., joining and creating the families that we're all supposed to be sacredly promoting.
Second, yes, the bad news is happening. Ask the Republican Party—I think they've made it loud and clear. "Revolution." I suppose it's possible that the Christian conservative agenda will grind to a hault now that they have control of every branch of government, eminent opportunities to appoint Supreme Court justices, and a mandate. Really, it might be: Maybe the GOP just used the gay marriage question to drive a stake into the election. But at some point, if that much animosity is there to be tapped, and it tipped the balance in the election, it's already in your interest to act on it. . . . It's not the wisest plan for Republicans to keep gaybashing—I keep thinking they will court a public backlash, but they haven't so far, and probably will keep taking up this charge until they do. For now, the backlash isn't coming.
Finally, the blame. It obviously wasn't John Kerry's intention to have the Massachusetts Supreme Court levy a controversial decision on the eve of his presidential campaign; he didn't pick this fight. Though I agree with everyone who says that it's a fight you don't want to pick before an election (and we didn't; and too bad we had to fight it anyway), it's exactly the fight you want to pick now. Liberals need to get a better answer as to why we're right on this issue, and eliminate this permanent weapon that the GOP has in painting as the party that loves to watch dudes kiss. What we don't need to do is spend several years packaging tolerance as intolerance. It won't fool anyone: The GOP will still be serving intolerance a la tartare and painting us as the party that loves to watch dudes kiss. We spend the offseason thinking of ways to reach the hearts and minds. Better Living Through Federalism, or, Gays Don't Actually Live Anywhere Near You.
I'm as disappointed as the next guy that Americans have proven themselves to be very much not the people I thought they were. Still, I don't think progressives should start looking for premeditated ways to abandon the good positions we hold in order to meet these people. We have time. We need to persuade them that we're right.
Tom Coburn, newly elected Senator of Oklahoma, back in July:
"I favor the death penalty," Coburn told the AP last week, "for abortionists and other people who take life."And just last week:
If you die... If you're an African American male in this country, you die before the average... your average life expectancy is less than the retirement age of social security. How, what kind of plan is that that we're gonna take from those because they had a genetic predisposition to have less of a life expectancy. [emphasis added]As Tom and I were discussing last night, there's a lot of class issues at play behind a Coburn or Bunning victory, where emotional, base appeals almost entirely supplant issues of any stripe. Coburn conservatism, probably the most base and radically cynical strain in the nation, does not represent the informed decision of an electorate with the genuine access to or ability to assess the array of information available.
The same might be said about Kentucky, where another devastation came in the form of Jim Bunning's Senate win:
Bunning once compared Mongiardo's appearance to one of Saddam Hussein's sons, and made an unsubstantiated claim that his wife wound up "black and blue" after an alleged encounter with his rival's staffers at a political picnic.It's not one I followed too closely, largely because I thought it was a given that Mongiardo would carry the race easily—and yet, again, a clueless and probably incompetent candidate can invoke dudes kissing and reach hearts and minds. That's not something we need to adjust to, it's something we have to change.The senator also admitted he was unaware that a group of Army reservists had refused a convoy mission in Iraq, and said he hadn't read a newspaper in weeks and relied on Fox News for information.
[. . .]
In his only "debate" with Mongiardo, Bunning participated from the Republican National Committee offices in Washington, and the Republican's campaign later acknowledged he used a TelePrompTer for some remarks.
The personal attacks reached a flash point in the final week when two Bunning surrogates, both state senators, made comments during a Bunning bus tour that seemed to suggest that Mongiardo is gay. Bunning was present for the remarks and refused to disavow them.
I alternate between a hesitant hope in the internecine faults within the Republican Party and the more pessimistic, maybe even apocalyptic, conviction that with the real mandate the GOP will steamroll on an unimaginable agenda. They certainly could given the new political map, and I'm reminded to be terrified about how Americans might react to that agenda. That the single most dominant electoral issue in the United States just three years after a devastating terrorist attack turned out to be "moral values"—a scantily encrypted euphemism for anti-abortion and anti-gay rights sentiments—is eyebrow-raising, to say the least. As a British colleague said this morning, "America has chosen to go down a path." I can't disagree, but it's too early to say how far along we'll get under a second Bush administration.
Though the outcome of the election is still contested, should the likely come to pass, Mark Schmitt considers something that I think is a very apt description of how the next four years will treat a Bush administration:
But politically, it at least avoids a situation where Kerry would have borne the responsibility and blame for Iraq or for raising taxes. All accountability now rests with Bush and his party. Everything that's been swept under the carpet until after the election will come creeping out. And the best use of all the resources of people, brains, money, and coordination that's been built this year, in addition to developing a stronger base of ideas, is to find ways to hold Bush, DeLay et. al. absolutely accountable for their choices. I really believe that this will be like Nixon's second term, and thus the seeds of a bigger long-term change than could have occurred just by Kerry winning the election.The Pottery Barn rule of governance is unmitigatible for a second Bush administration, says Schmitt rightly. A Kerry administration means that Kerry surely takes the blame for Iraq and the economy; the GOP have just been struggling too long against the plain reality to paint a pretty picture there, and it won't keep through another administration. A second Bush administration means that Democrats will not be cleaning up the mess.
Can the GOP make drastic changes to American governance with their new mandate, thereby promoting a structural balance that favors the right? There's DeLay, there's the courts . . . it's all a little breathless to think about right now, but I think that the great energy the left has summoned for this campaign will probably go toward preventing those eventualities.
Ohio blogger Rick Perlstein says that Republican challengers throughout the state have not, in fact, been challenging voters. (Link courtesy of pub quiz teammate Jeff Dubner.) That's good news, of course, and it makes sense psychologically that it would be more difficult to challenge excited throngs of voters than it sounds. The poll challenger business had a thinking-on-the-elevator-about-what-you-really-meant-to-say vibe to it—no one acts like that in person. The registered mail–oriented voter registration challenges, on the other hand, were both very serious and easy to pull off from the relative safety of a word processor. Still a lot of voting to be done, and what with the Internets broken we may not hear news of events simultaneously with their occurrence. (Which will infuriate me to no end.)
More for my own sake, really; since we're all reading the same stuff and at this rate, 4:30 p.m. will see me refreshing sites for updates at a dizzying rate, I decided to post a few politically oriented artworks that I've either stumbled across recently or have found to be particularly relevant. I'll update as time permits. The function of politics in art is one of my favorite topics, but I think we have enough of a debate going on today without my introducing another one. Forgive me if I repeat some things you've seen elsewhere.
Also posted for your consideration: The Art Newspaper posted an undated collection of quotes from Eric Fischl, Hans Haacke, Art Spiegalman, Frank Gehry, and other art world bright lights regarding their feelings over President Bush. (It's a pretty even divide between neo- and paleocons. Really.)
Christy Rupp, Saudi Spangled Banner, 2001
Hans Haacke, Star Gazing, 2004
Maurizio Cattelan, Now, 2004
Cattelan is the topic of no end of discussion lately—Now is the art world's Plot Against America—and you may know well already that the sculpture is of Kennedy, barefoot in an open coffin. It's hard to say anything negative about an artist who is so playful, but he doesn't register with me. I think he strays too far from his sculpture into his environment and the audience, which might be fine were his work not so literal and titellating. I like looking at his art, for sure, but I don't like what it does. Now was but is no longer on display at the Carnegie International.
UPDATE: A slideshow of election-oriented photographs by Richard Avedon.
Atrios reports that people are receiving this GOP robocall:
The draft. The Democrats haven't pledged a thing. What are the Democrats hiding? Is the draft really their secret plan. Only the Democrats have proposed the possibility of a draft in this campaign. On Election Day vote republican and say no to the draft. Paid for by the Republican National Committee. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate committee. On the web at www.gop.com.Now I don't know exactly how dirty a trick this is, but doesn't it strike you as inept? Draft-age voters, for one thing, don't have landlines, and these sorts of calls can't be made to cell phones (as far I am aware). Moreover, staunch "draft doves" would crawl over broken glass to vote against Bush. Another thing—isn't the message a bit breathless? I can't say for certain, but I don't think that the undecided voter who picks up the phone only to hear Karl Rove whispering hotly about those Democratic hawks will probably get the message that the GOP is trying to send here.
I live across the street from a poll, and my neighbor in the blocks-long line to vote agreed to hold my place while I made coffee, so long as I brought him back a cup. I thought I'd take a moment to check in. Some guy set up a stereo that is blaring some rather loud regae (I can hear it inside my house); I'm not really sure if that's supposed to affect the election at all, or if he maybe just saw a large group of people that he thought he might inflict his music upon. I love democracy!
Anyway: The Common Denominator has a nice rundown of the DC election. Very quickly, I'll run down my list of endorsements:
Vote, folks!
UPDATE: In all honesty, voting would have been more satisfying if there hadn't been an hour-and-a-half wait and a stupid bee harassing me for twenty minutes, causing me to spill coffee on myself. Or if my name had appeared in the registry, in which case I would not have needed to cast an uninspiring provisional ballot.
Now, the sticker would have been proper purchase for my long suffering—but not even the sticker, man. Not even the damned sticker for me. Not my greatest civic moment.
