The end-of-year blah-blah-blah, in a more or less top-ten format, behind the cut. See you in ought-five.
Minimalism. From the bicoastal celebrations to the exceptional and comprehensive Dan Flavin retrospective, minimalism ruled 2004. The year also marked the deaths of Agnes Martin and Anne Truitt, losses that Miguel Sánchez aptly described as feeling "like a door slamming shut."
The Atlantic Monthly. The transformation of The Atlantic Monthly from a journal of letters comparable in scope to Harper's to a magazine of note in political affairs may better qualify for a previous year's review. It was editor Michael Kelly who set these efforts in motion before his early passing in April 2003. The new format saw its full fruition in this year—from its remarkable letters-to-the-editor section to issue after issue of relevant reads by a core ensemble of James Fallows, Caitlin Flanagan, Ken Pollack, Christina Nehring, and Mark Bowden, this is the single magazine I'd like delivered to my deserted island.
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America. It is not by any stretch Roth's strongest novel. But it is an excellent meditation on the bifabricated nature of political observation: that any one event (or administration) in America can spur two interpretations that are not only distinct but bear no common factual intersection. By the end of the novel, liberals will decry the fascistic policies of the Lindbergh administration, and neocons will see yet another instance of liberal paranoia expressed among the hate-America-first crowd as an eagerness to describe national security policies as nascent Nazism. Sound familiar?
Abraham the Patriarch. I'd say that Jesus Christ made gains in America during ought-four, and Mohammed certainly kept his ground elsewhere. But isn't it Abraham whose status is continually emphasized by religious politics and strife throughout the world? A significant global player, Abraham. All indicators show another big year for him in 2005.
John Currin. Some time ago, I saw Martin Amis speak on a book tour, and the question was raised to him regarding the direction of literature in the wake of postmodernism. Amis's answer struck me as weak and safe: that literature would return to its storytelling roots. There's an unfortunate assumption that art moves epicyclically, venturing forth in periods of experimentation but always doubling back to a home-plate style, be it representational painting or traditional literary narrative. Movements change, but art never moves in this way.
That was the sentiment I identified in Jerry Saltz's passing comment on John Currin: "I hope never to hear the following oft repeated, mind-numbing inanity again, whether it's applied to John Currin, Paul P., Tim Gardner, Delia Brown, Graham Little or whoever: 'They have such skill.'" I appreciate Currin and I like the renewed interest and emphasis on representation and painting, but emphatically not because I think it signifies a resurgence in craftsmanship after a wacky period of anything-goes art. But that's the debate, and whatever your opinion of (to quote Kim Levin) "our premier mannerist," Currin has to be acknowledged as figuring heavily in that conversation.
Hollywood Agendas. Fahrenheit 911 versus The Passion of the Christ. Your local cinema megaplex henceforth became the biggest megaphone of them all.
Sexy Art. Walter Robinson:
As for the guys, well, they like women, too. Funky fashion photog Terry Richardson took the art world by storm with a show at Deitch Projects of sex pictures that gave new license to the notion of licentiousness. Lower East Side erotic auteur Richard Kern, with his new kinky photos at Feature Inc., managed to point his camera down the blouse and up the skirt in the same picture. And Timothy Greenfield-Sanders introduced hard-core porn stars to polite society with his color portrait photographs at Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea. “Art in New York is obsessed with sex!” said German critic Barbara Weidle, after a month-long stint in the Artnet offices.Is it poor form to quote someone else's year-end review in your own?But the most radical artistic gesture of all -- and curiously, the most trivial -- belonged to Andrea Fraser, the “institutional critique” artist whose video at Fredrich Petzel Gallery chronicled a special kind of performance -- her having sex with a collector, reportedly for $20,000. In the end, Simone de Beauvoir was right -- “woman is sex.” Complain about chauvinism all you like, this kind of thing still represents eros, the life force, the one universal positive.
Dark Horses. From the awarding of the Pritzker Prize to Zaha Hadid to the entire list of candidates for the National Book Award. Only Bill Murray bucked the trend.
Post-Soviet Revolutions. From the Rose Revolution in Georgia to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the palette of 2004 was decidedly post-Red. (Here's hoping for a burnt orange victory tomorrow in the Rose Bowl to kick off a similar trend in 2005.)
The Cicadas. Which comes last because they swarmed so few regions, but if you missed out on Brood X, you really missed out on quite a phenomenon.
. . . and all of you. OK, so I'm out of pithy observations for the year. Truth be told, I think there's probably something to the claim that 2004 will come to be seen as the golden age of the blogosphere. (I'm thinking that even my parents will have one by this time next year.) But the internets have been a fun place this year and will still be so tomorrow, I hope. Thanks for stopping by and have some safe fun tonight.
I'm always extremely skeptical of any measure advocating a positivistic "whiteness"—a distinct racial class featuring identifiable tribal practices and a cogent cultural history in order to match the tightness of some American minority communities. While I wouldn't call white people a cancer per se, I'm skeptical of the political motivations behind any effort to rehabilitate the race that already owns everything.
Reading about critic-curator Maurice Berger's "White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art" at the National Institute of Photography, my alarms were tripped from the other direction: Whose work will be coopted into the service of whitey-must-pay? But Berger's clever introduction reassures. At the risk of reading too much into his words, he holds to a Stanley Fish-ian conception of race. (Fish wrote "You Can Only Fight Discrimination With Discrimination," an essay that condemns the liberal vision of a post-racial world as naive and the conservative conception of meritocracy as in itself a racial construct, favoring instead an aggressive egalitarianism.)
So now I'm left only with my skepticism over the show itself, which does coerce a lot of work into serving Berger's thesis. The works he selected all apply, certainly, but in such a superficial sense that the works seem diminished to the single concept. Sometimes I think it would be nice to see more heavy-handed, European-style curators working in America, and then a show like this makes me sympathize with the artists, who have been forced to join a coalition that they didn't necessarily entertain. Then again, art shows aren't for the artists, and this is a show that will resonate with a lot of people in a basic way. The observation is certainly valid that contemporary art, with its vast textual appreciation for diversity, is overrun by white people—that's a concern for a curator to tackle.
UPDATE: . . . it's not lost on me that as a blogger and an active admirer of contemporary art, my skin color is something approaching glare. So these things go.
From "Regarding the Torture of Others," an essay that Susan Sontag wrote in response to Abu Ghraib:
To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these images must seem, to those who saw some justification in a war that did overthrow one of the monster tyrants of modern times, ''unfair.'' A war, an occupation, is inevitably a huge tapestry of actions. What makes some actions representative and others not? The issue is not whether the torture was done by individuals (i.e., ''not by everybody'') -- but whether it was systematic. Authorized. Condoned. All acts are done by individuals. The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs such acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts likely.Andrew Sullivan mocked her for her thesis, but Sontag was correct. Her aesthetic analysis especially cutting given the news that Navy Seals photographed and subsequently published photographs depicting their abuse—torture—of Iraqi detainees:[. . .]
So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves but what the photographs reveal to have happened to ''suspects'' in American custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken -- with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. German soldiers in the Second World War took photographs of the atrocities they were committing in Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the executioners placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare, as may be seen in a book just published, ''Photographing the Holocaust,'' by Janina Struk. If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.
The story said the pictures appeared to show Sea Air Land force men sitting on hooded and bound detainees, holding a gun to a detainee's bloodied head, and placing a boot on a prone man's chest.Astonishingly, the Seals who photographed and then published pictures of their torturing Iraqis have sued the AP for broadcasting pictures available on the Internet. Without detectable irony they claim that the AP has endangered the lives of U.S. soldiers by showing the world what U.S. soldiers have done. The purpose of the Seals' lawsuit is to censure the AP for not censoring the images—while it is they who should be imprisoned. Their weak, mitigating failure to accept responsibility for their transgressions is reflected entirely by the public debate after the revelation of the Abu Ghraib incident:Others showed grinning personnel sitting on hooded prisoners in a pick-up.
The lawsuit, in which the plaintiffs are anonymous, says the photos were of regular special operations techniques.
It alleges that the pictures were shown on al-Jazeera, television and on anti-US billboards outside Guantanamo Bay, endangering the lives of the troops and their families.
It claims the photographs were taken from a navy wife's "personal digital photo album without notice or permission", a site she thought was password-protected.
AP said the pictures were discovered on a commercial picture-sharing site, Smugmug.com, and were not protected until after the reporter bought copies online and began making inquiries.
The administration's initial response was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs -- as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict. There was also the avoidance of the word ''torture.'' The prisoners had possibly been the objects of ''abuse,'' eventually of ''humiliation'' -- that was the most to be admitted. ''My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture,'' Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said at a press conference. ''And therefore I'm not going to address the 'torture' word.''"Words add, words alter, words subtract," Sontag advises, and she was proved right. How tragic that America has proved to be such a stifling place for a thinker who swears allegiance to truth over allegiance to country.
Lindsay Beyerstein also writes about Sontag's political criticism and the cowardice of American jingoism.
It occurred to me this morning that it's been a while since the District has heard from Ian Whitmore, a painter I came to greatly appreciate after his remarkable debut at Fusebox earlier this year. It turns out he'll be showing again at Fusebox beginning January 8. At the risk of a premature judgment, I think Whitmore is poised to claim the title of the District's smartest painter.
Ian Whitmore, Doris, 2003
Ian Whitmore, Mahler(ish), 2003
I can't remember whether I posted this before, but my friend Olya, a member of the great Orange revolutionary diaspora, painted a quick still-life tribute to Ukrainian President-elect Viktor Yushchenko. (Here's hoping Olechka doesn't mind my broadcasting it.)
Despite what Pravda reported two days ago, Viktor Yanukovich has not respectfully acknowledged Yushenko's tidy victory, and now the mob of Yushchenk-iacs has blocked Yanukovich from entering a government building where he was to address the Cabinet of Ministers. This may be the best evidence yet that Americans did not rig the revolution—there's no way we could muster the attention span to hang out in the cold for weeks just for the president. The cast of OC might keep people out for several days, but I have my doubts.
Tak is Ukrainian and Polish for "yes," and—according to my limited Russian, Google, and the (ahem) Russian Women Guide Message Board—there isn't a precise English translation for tak. It's one of those "prego" words that means however you say it. Phonically speaking, tak is totally hilarious to me, and the longer Yanukovich acts like a prick, the longer I get to keep saying it.
Died on December 28 at age 71. How to classify Susan Sontag's enormous contributions to American criticism and culture, to the position of the United States in global criticism and culture? I felt a personal pang when I heard about her death. From On Photography, In America, and I, Etcetera—the finest examples of her essays and literature—to "Regarding the Torture of Others"—her dauntless political criticism—Sontag was a model critic, a model mind.
To reflect Christmas loot and a recent trip to Half-Price Books—how I have missed that bookstore from DC, and how nice of them to welcome me home with an additional 20 percent–off sale—I've updated the sidebar with some new books and music. Two of those books in particular I'm anxious to crack: Mimesis, which has been teasing me for so long that I'm embarrassed that I never read it earlier; and The Adventures of Augie March, a novel that causes Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens to compete as to who can out-effuse the other in praising Saul Bellow for writing it.
A word on Half Price: It's a treasure no matter what, but may I submit that the Mesquite, Texas location might be less treasurable than some others. The "Philosophy/Religion," naturally enough, was more religion than philosophy—but by about a 4:1 ratio, I'd wager. Two walls of books on religion? that spilled over into an entire religious display island? and weren't theology texts, mind you, but advice books for bringing the spirit of the Early Church into your customer service department or whatever? It was a bit much. By the time I was at the front counter behind a couple with a stack of books including Ann Coulter's How To Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) and the like, I thought we had crossed over into parody.
It's important to check out the other side to a given story, and the pro-Yanukovich line comes today from Moscow's Pravda:
Viktor Yanukovich stated later that he was ready to regretfully congratulate his rival. He stated that he would establish a political opposition, which would require a special law about the opposition in Ukraine. Spokespeople for Yanukovich's headquarters say that thousands of violations have been registered during the election process.The noble face of the resolute democrat—Yanukovich, the loyal opposition. But the road to reform is long, especially when one of those registered election violations was when you chemically attacked the opposing candidate. Hey, you know, the perfect need not be the enemy of the good and all.
Elsewhere in Pravda headlines: "Olympic athletes compete in erotici*m."
The Internet is truly a vast place. So expansive, even, that it contains a Martian Manhunter apologist, who seriously asks why there are feature films in the works or being discussed for every member of the Justice League except J'onn J'onzz. (Courtesy of Charles Kuffner.) For anyone not consciously trying to be ridiculous, of course, the answer is obvious: Martian Manhunter gives the Mole Man a run for his money as probably the worst drawing ever committed to paper. But lords of the underworld are excused for being formed by their environment, right? We ask for a Martian, and we get J'onzz? That's a waste of pure potential.
He does raise a relevant question (relevant in the context of this post?): Where is my Green Lantern movie? I imagine the hangup has to do with bloody stalemates over which Green Lantern to feature, but this debate has been settled conclusively in my mind.
Kidding. I'll spare you the jeremiad—frankly, I'm somewhat agnostic on the great Hal Jordan/Kyle Rayner controversy.
But a vote for Guy Gardner will get you banned.
I had not heard the sad news that Anne Truitt died on December 23 at the age of 83. The Washington Post's obituary describes her recent rise in national esteem and her principal position among seminal Washington artists.
Some time ago I drafted a little something that never saw the light of day about art and writing about art, thoughts spurred from reading this line of Truitt's:
No one questions the fact that verbal language has to be learned, but the commonplaceness of visual experience betrays art; people tend to assume that, because they can see, they can see art.I'm half the nation away from my books right now, so the quote will go unsourced, but I think I came across it in Stiles and Selz's Theories and Documents. Regardless, Truitt's essays and diaries are spectacular and may be a contribution to the culture to match her art.
Anne Truitt, Twining Court II, 2002
The Western reading of Vlad Putin and Russia (and vice versa) has become so defracted by the lens of international political gamesmanship vis-à-vis one another that it seems difficult to arrive at an opinion about Russia without first staking a domestic political position. A principal example of this effect has been made clear in reactions to the Ukrainian election/Orange Revolution: political and media bodies (e.g., the Guardian's Jonathan Steele) have accused America of meddling on behalf of the opposition candidate in a way equal to the Russians on behalf of the incumbent.
This is far-fetched and absurd. First of all, the bodies engaged in on-the-ground democracy promotion in Ukraine (and elsewhere) hail from across the globe, not just the United States. More importantly, the Ukrainian incumbent party/candidate (Viktor Yanukovich) stole the election—with Russia's help. No doubt they will try to do so again on today's third-round election. Putin's defense of his support for Yanukovich, i.e., the United States will keep advocating elections until it gets the results it wants, is laughable. We've made clear that we'll push to restart the game until Russia (and Ukraine) stops cheating.
But worse news in Russia has yet emerged, for which I can imagine there are no apologists in the West. In brief: In October 2003, Putin arrested one of the nation's principal oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the CEO of a major private oil company, Yukos, for ambiguous charges regarding back taxes. Massive back taxes—in the neighborhood of $30 billion. The state announced an auction of a majority production unit within Yukos; at the same time (just this month), Yukos made an eleventh-hour emergency bankruptcy protection filing with U.S. courts, which decided for a stay in the auction and that Western financiers would likely be left holding the bill if Yukos were declared bankrupt.
After Russia announced its intention to go ahead with the auction, Western banks saw the writing on the wall. In a coordinated effort, Deutsche Bank, ABN Amro, BNP Paribas, Calyon, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, and J.P. Morgan froze a line of credit for Russia’s state-controlled gas monopoly, Gazprom. A massive line of credit, too—nearly $10 billion. The Kremlin was effectively blocked from participating in the auction.
So it seemed, anyway. When the auction was held, a previously unknown company, Baikal Finance Group, assembled the enormous $9 billion winning bid. Investors have not had to wait a week to see the worst come to pass: Baikal announced on Thursday that it is selling all its Yukos holdings to Rosneft, a state-owned company, which in turn is being bought by Gazprom. No sale amounts associated with these purchases have been divulged. It likely qualifies as the most significant state shell game in the history of democracy.
Coupled with Freedom House's decision to downgrade Russia's civic and economic liberty status to "not free," the long-term outlook for democracy in Russia is grim. As Russia's sphere of influence crumbles, with former satellites spurring the hub in favor of state nationalism, democracy, and/or the West, the Kremlin has become increasingly frantic. Putin sounds irrational in his characterization of 90s privatization, the Orange Revolution, the West, and even ostensibly neutral figures such as Poland.
Yet the White House has brought no pressure to bear against the Kremlin. A Dallas Morning News editorial captures the urgent need for a change of heart in DC:
Mr. Bush, who is scheduled to meet face-to-face with Mr. Putin in February, must make clear that the Russian leader is crippling the country's reforms and draining U.S. patience. If Mr. Putin truly embraces democratic and free market principles, he must protect property rights, defend the rule of law, tolerate dissent and give foreign investors a reason to believe in Russia's future. The United States placed a heavy bet on Mr. Putin being a new breed of Russian leader, one who understood the fallacies of his nation's past and who embraced the promises of political reform and free markets. So far, it's been a misplaced bet.I don't imagine we'll hear much more than lip service in the way of political pressure from President Bush, who, for all his unilateral bluster, has too great a need for an international ally to condemn Putin in the terms Putin deserves. And, tit-for-tat, Putin has avoided the mention of the United States by name even while condemning in harsh terms Western interventionism, and he has emphasized his pleasure with his relationship with President Bush. There is certainly a limit to the degree to which the two men can serve as a crutch for one another, and that may come for both in 2008:
[In a televised address, Putin] also indulged in jokes. By law Mr. Putin is limited to two consecutive terms, and he is serving the first year of his second term now. The possibility of a third term, either through a change in Russia's Constitution for the 2008 race or a return to politics in 2012, has been a source of steady speculation. Asked directly whether he would run again in 2012, he said: "Why not in 2016? I still hope to be fit."Don't we all.He added, somewhat cryptically, "I do think about how we will negotiate the landmark of 2008."
Shit. I'm joining Fresh Paint and Modern Kicks in feeling jilted—Art in America didn't ask me to dance, either. See you guys at the punch bowl.
From the prologue (lines 129–130) to The Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg:
Ein man ein wîp, ein wîp ein man,Those are some of my favorite lines in all poetry: elegant, economic, symmetric. In my mind it is a testament to the strength of the Tristan poem/myth and the work it did as effort to describe heterosexual love that a very similar (and similarly lyrical) theme emerges centuries later in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (Act II, Scene 2):
Tristan Isolt, Isolt Tristan.[A man, a woman; a woman, a man
Tristan, Isolde; Isolde, Tristan.]
TRISTAN: Tristan du, ich Isolde, nicht mehr Tristan!So I was terrified to read about the newest take on T&I—The Tristan Project, a new interpretation of Wagner's opera by director Peter Sellars, contemporary video artist Bill Viola, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's musical director Esa Pekka Salonen, and the artistic director of the Paris Opera, Gerard Mortier. Terrified not because it might work, but because the L.A. Disney Center performances this month were the only performances. But it looks as if it's coming to the Lincoln Center at some point. That's fantastic news—Viola's stills are stunning. I was hoping that Caryn from art.blogging.la might have a review, but it looks as if she missed it, too.
ISOLDE: Du Isolde, Tristan ich, nicht mehr Isolde
Bill Viola, Still from The Tristan Project, 2004
Died on December 16 at the age of 92. Tyler Green and Todd Gibson both have thoughtful words about the artist.
Agnes Martin, White Flower, 1960
I wrote my (undergraduate) thesis on Athena Tacha, so I was happy to see her name appear in Jessica Dawson's WaPo gallery beat, even if for only a blurb. I was thinking over the weekend about a crucial distinction in the way artists approach their work conceptually, a distinction that could be described in a binary way: inductive or deductive. Tacha's work is a fine example of inductive art. She identifies artistic first principles—say, a marking system in her drawings or a rhythm in her landscape architecture—that correlate with scientific concepts, specifically those associated with the quantum and cosmological sciences. One "variable" at a time she creates her work, and she has over her career identified patterns and isolated other variables within her art, and has thereby created a mimetic body of work that has evolved in the vein of a scientific theory.
The Shields project Dawson describes is a very deductive project, one which I chose not to write about:
A delicate counterpoint to her macho outdoor works, the wall sculptures on view are made from accumulated organic materials -- seashells of several types, feathers, cicada parts. For "17 Year Shield," she masses countless cicada exoskeletons into a round form more than 2 1/2 feet across. Several hundred glistening, ear-shaped abalones make up "700 Aegean Dives: Double-Sided Shield for Ellen." Tacha's works on paper, such as the exquisite "Singularity #6" composed of beads smaller than caviar, display a similar delicacy with man-made materials.The Singularity series, on the other hand, formed the basis of my paper, and is an excellent example of an inductive process: Making the smallest circular marks she could draw, Tacha marks with a silver pencil on black paper, starting at an origin point and moving outward in a spiraling direction (maintaining a circular pattern). Tacha works to create the marks with absolute regularity, but natural variations appear in the form of striations in the drawing: irregular patterns of matter accretion.
That's it! No more from my thesis. But if any reader's dying to know more about the Victory Plaza in Dallas, I'm your man.
It should be slow around here today and tomorrow, after which point I'll be vacationing in the exurban wilds of Texas (where blogging and Internet time in general will probably pick up enormously, I'm sorry to report). For now I thought I'd open a thread on a subject I've recently neglected—Social Security. If you haven't noticed, liberals are making a last stand on Social Security and the point that the impending crisis to which Republicans allude does not, in fact, exist. Social Security represents an essential, deeply embedded value within the Democratic Party, and my general sense is that Americans strongly identify SS with the Democrats. Complicating the GOP privatization scheme even further is the fact that, well, privatization is quite complex, and it would be difficult to imagine that even the message-disciplined Republican Party can explain the plan in such a way that no one can point out the simpler concepts of increased risk and decreased absolute safety net inherent to the plan. Given the enormous and inescapable transition costs, the loud wailing and gnashing of dentures one can expect from the senior-citizen crowd, and the not-insignificant lean on the Treasury called Iraq, it's easy to envision this as a GOP strategy to sink the Social Security program while transferring whatever can be expected in that purse in the future to the wealthy (i.e., market savvy). One doesn't have to read it that way—another take is that it's simply a bad idea that isn't going to work.
UPDATE: Another thought on party identity and Social Security: It wasn't too long ago that George W. Bush marketed himself as the compassionate conservative, which definitionally asserts that the leading conservative bloc of the day (Gingrich, Armey, et al.) and his opponent (McCain) were not compassionate. Indeed, this worked among Republican supporters of Bush—they agreed that the party need to become compassionate. Four years later, this theme had disappeared from Bush's campaign—too much ironic, negative potential in highlighting aspects of Bush's record in contradistinction to the compassionate conservative tag for it to really carry much currency with voters. The Democratic brand is far from perfect, but I think it still purchases more in the we-care-a-lot frame than the GOP name does.
UPDATE II: Also, is there any historical example of a crisis predicted for x years down the line spurring an expensive reform project to prevent the crisis? Things that worry me: Global warming, New Orleans sinking, the Y chromosome disappearing, the national deficit, the sun burning out, the trade imbalance. Strategies in place to prevent these catastrophes? Eh.
Much like its author, my blog has been experiencing technical difficulties on and off all morning—and I'm inclined to blame last night's DCist happy hour. As Cath and Tom explain, the night was a rout. It was good to see Kyle and meet Missy and several other folks, drink copiously, and sprint home only to decide I urgently needed to make 80s-country mix CDs for my coworkers for Christmas shortly before utterly passing out.
Until someone hands me a bloody mary, I won't be writing anything brilliant. I'll hand off writing duties to guest-blogger Kingsley Amis:
Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as loking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.He has no idea. (From Lucky Jim.)
I liked the article Steven Menashi wrote for the New York Sun bitching about the liberal, anti-Bush political leaning of the art world better when Steven Vincent wrote it for National Review—at least Vincent's harangue was shorter by a good 100 words.
I know that I'm sick and fucking tired of ideologues complaining that the monolithic body called "artists" doesn't lean in their direction, but I'll let guest blogger Pablo Picasso—you might have heard of him? Painter, sculptor, classy guy—explain why:
What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only his eyes if he's a painter, or ears if he's a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he's a poet, or even if he's a boxer, just his muscles? On the contrary, he's at the same time a political being, constantly alive to heartrending, fiery, or happy events, to which he responds in every way. How would it be possible to feel no interest in other people and by virtue of an ivory indifference to detach yourself from the life which they so copiously bring you? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.From an interview with Simone Tery, "Picasso n'est pas officier dans l'armee Francaise," Lettres Francaises (Paris), V, 48 (24 March 1945), 6, and which I found in Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art by Alfred Barr, Jr., a guy from this little deal called the MoMA. (Bullshit New York Sun link courtesy of the instructive The American Scene.)
How come they made the new twenties?
Cause I got all the old ones.
So I believe G.p eclipsed 1,000 unique visitors yesterday. I know, I know, you collected Ks back in your blogspot days. If you really want to marginalize my achievements, just note that 600 of those were probably spambots and at least a handful were looking to me to decode the "he's the Matthew Barney of LAC arts" namedrop from Six Feet Under. Those HBO writers—so witty!
If any of you non-spambot readers live in our fair nation's capital, stop by DCist's happy hour tonight at the Big Hunt near Dupont Circle. You need not be a blogger or art fan or even believe as DCist does that bubble tea is a phenomenon currently "sweeping the nation"—all you need is a taste for alcohol and an ID authorizing you to drink it.
Todd Gibson reports the art world–shaking news that Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light, has acquired Maurizio Cattelan. The hostile takeover comes just one week after Insurgent Muse noted the shocking rumor regarding a potential merger between Kinkade and Jeff Koons.
Art world analysts have taken notice—and so have world leaders. Pope John Paul II, who has expressed concern over the seemingly personal market pressure Maurizio Cattelan has brought to bear against JPII's organization in years past, is worried that the Kinkade acquisition of Cattelan may be an effort to reposition the Pope out of lucrative suburban markets.
Maurizio Cattelan, La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour), 1999. D'Offray Gallery (London)
Thomas Kinkade, Beyond Summer Gate, 19??. Every shopping mall (everywhere)
Gibson reports that work is well underway on the upcoming Cattelan Glade Candle; no word yet as to whether there's any substance to whispering about a Bidibidobidiboo Beanie Baby. . . .
Jonathan Padget in the WaPo writes somewhat dismissively of artist Linda Hesh's recent Art Ads project, for which she attempted to post ads, in both the WaPo and the NYT, featuring photographs of couples combined with text that addressed the gay marriage debate:
[Hesh] dubbed the project "Art Ads" and created two portraits of friends—a mixed-race couple and a male couple—taken at a Sears Portrait Studio, "a familiar format that you can instantly relate to." But Hesh wrangled with both the Post and Times advertising departments over their objections to the original phrases she chose to accompany the images: "At least they are not gay" for the mixed-race couple and "They could ruin your marriage" for the male couple.Information artists are an easy target for that second question, especially when they can't claim the stature or project visibility of, say, Jenny Holzer—she put to bed this question of whether sloganeering can be done as art. Maybe we don't like Hesh's work, but let's not kid anyone—Hesh is working in a well-established genre and medium.Ultimately, Hesh says she gave up trying to clear the ads with the Times. They were finally approved by The Post's advertising department with the phrase "Do you notice their race or gender?" for the mixed-race couple and "Could they affect your marriage?" for the male couple. Each image ran in a not quite two-inch-square space in the Post's A section in October, along with a post office box number to which readers were invited to send feedback.
Cost for the ad space? $2,828. Number of responses? Six.
Given the effort, expense and outcome, Hesh may end up inspiring more dialogue about issues much different from marriage—such as "Was the project worth it?" and "Do tiny newspaper ads with cheap pictures and generic layouts count as art in the first place?"
As to Padget's first question—was the project worth it?—I'm not sure he realizes what a strong case his august employer has, unfortunately, made for Hesh's work just recently. Some of you may recall that around the time when Hesh's art ads were originally run, one weekend, print editions of the Post featured an insert called "BothSides magazine," a multi-page, full-color pamphlet that proffered anti-gay propaganda targeted specifically at Washington, DC's black community. Courtesy of the outraged liberal blogosphere, BothSides is available as PDF documents (sections one, two, three, and four), so you can see it for yourself.
I have a few highlights. From section 2:
Proponents of the homosexual lifestyle argue that as race is merely a byproduct of inherited genes, so is homosexuality. The weakness of this position is that people of color reproduce and pass on the DNA that makes the skin brown; however, homosexuals cannot reproduce. If homosexuality were a generic trait and homosexuals were true to their orientation, the trait would die in their first generation. Nature does not perpetuate homosexuality.Amateur hour with Punnett squares! I'll assume for the sake of space that you're all sufficiently crafty armchair naturalists to navigate your way through the allelic mayhem implied in that paragraph. Next: the Church takes on the myth of red-heads!
Elsewhere the median age of mortality for homosexual men (discounting AIDS deaths, even) is listed as 41—a notorious statistic from a 1994 study conducted by the discredited anti-gay researcher, Paul Cameron, the meaninglessness of whose data ought to be readily apparent regardless of your scientific background.
Needless to say, Family Guy James Dobson makes an appearance in section 3 to explain that while being black isn't black people's fault, homosexuals can and ought to be held accountable for being gay. "Civil rights is the shorthand way of referring to the struggle to overcome discrimination based on unchangeable physical characteristics, such as skin color or ethnic heritage." Emphasis added—it's a theme the pamphlet reiterates several times. Who thought it would make for good copy to reframe the Civil Rights movement in terms of its applicability to the nature/nurture debate? Moreover, who goes around talking about the "changeability" of being black—what?—or thinks that this has any mitigating impact on the culpability of white, heterosexual Christian intolerance?
I've strayed far from my original thread to show what a cooky job these fundamentalists can pull off—low-hanging fruit, maybe. A better point is that recombinant art serves multiple functions; in the case of Hesh's work, as both art and media criticism. While her ads did not spark controversy qua art, the questions naturally follow from the latter aspect of her work:
Linda Hesh, Art Ad, 2004
UPDATE: Michael O'Sullivan discusses Hesh's "(In)visible Silence" show at Baltimore's School 33 Arts Center. O'Sullivan grants Hesh more than Padget:
But Hesh doesn't measure the success or failure of her work, whose costs were underwritten by donors (each of whom received artwork in exchange), on how many people wrote in. Her main objective, she says, was simply to put the pictures in front of the largest possible audience, not the art-world elite who, presumably, will come to School 33 to look at the supporting, after-the-fact documentation. Most gallery-goers, Hesh believes, are liberal to begin with, and support the cause of gay marriage.Fine, fine, but I still don't think you can discuss the piece in any valuable way without evaluating its context. You know, how does the piece work, not just is it important that people people didn't write letters. O'Sullivan's responding more to Padget than the piece itself.
Noted atheist thinker Antony Flew is casting off his athiesm in favor of the "fine tuning" defense of a Creator—i.e., were any of the universe's natural laws slightly changed, life would not exist, therefore the universe works just so in order for life to exist. (Among some circles, that sounds a lot like affirming the consequent.) It would seem that Habermas finally got to Flew, which is too bad—the holidays are such a terrible time for gloomy news. But Julian Sanchez is spreading some (I can't resist) xmas cheer:
What's befuddling is why any of these considerations are supposed to provide any support whatever for the God hypothesis. To think that they do seems to rely on a kind of ignotum per ignotius: We have no satisfying account of complex phenomenon X, so we explain it in terms of, even more complex phenomenon Y, a mind capable of consciously producing X. Why is this supposed to be satisfying? Why, in the absence of a culture in which religion is pervasive, would anyone resort to this kind of explanation? Indeed, why would anyone count it as an explanation at all?That is indeed one problem with the deus ex machina: the process by which universal preconditions leads to intelligence is no less insoluble with a Creator at hand. One eventually wants to come to terms with the mechanism by which the Creator Created, so there still exists a need for a scientific account of the process. Having arrived at that description, the need for a magical Creator will have been obviated, unless magic is a crucial law of the universe—which watchmaker theists reject. Problem A attenuates both the atheist and theist routes to explanation, but the latter introduces an even more intractable problem B.
Now, an intelligent Creator certainly makes for a satisfying parallelism between the rise of human consciousness and the natural origins of the universe (being intelligent as well). But again, a sufficiently descriptive account of the universe will proceed from natural laws to intelligent thought in a not-seamless way—the universe is a hostile quark soup for a long time before it becomes the seat of the genius of man—so this parallelism becomes less satisfying the more descriptive your account of the universe gets. Still, I really love that we have Christmas, so it's not all bad.
Speaking of the South: James Wolcott notes that the Oxford American is back in business. Before the magazine went ashore of financial shoals a couple years back, the Southern Magazine of Good Writing was the premiere Antebellum journal of southern letters. After having just moved to Little Rock, they've lateralled to another Arkansas headquarters; no one pushed for Wesley Clark like these guys did, so my guess is that they needed some time off to recover.
I'm sufficiently outraged by South Carolina's decision to appoint Ron Wilson—who formerly sold textbooks with anti-Semitic slurs to homeschoolers—to the state's Board of Education (courtesy of The Poor Man). But I had reason to pause when I read the breathless revelation that Wilson was "a high-ranking member of a Confederate heritage group . . . the Sons of Confederate Veterans." As it turns out, my own dear grandmother is a high-ranking member of several Confederate heritage groups. She's the (ahem) former National Security Advisor for the Texas Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a position whose duties include bugging me to find and send her U.N. "records" so that she can write sourced letters to various political officials voicing her passionate vehemence to the U.N. being headquartered on U.S. soil ("an occupation," I'm told). She was also a principal in the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, and she was instrumental in accepting Tony Ullrich's Ullrich-Deering Texas Banjo in honor of the Sesquicentennial back in '86. Add the Daughters of the Confederacy to the list of organizations for which she's held bake-sale leadership positions. (And yes—by blood, I'm a fax machine away from being a Son of all three. Kriston Capps: blogger, art critic, Son of the South.)
Look, so long as you're not a U.N. delegate lost in West Texas, these people are harmless. It would be wise for the journalist I quoted above, for all of us to an extent—God help me, I'm getting all blue state–red state reconciliation squishy here—to be aware that there are gradations to the South. Or at least to be more discriminating with our jeremiads. Attacking Southern heritage as an alien, vulgar proxy for our real frustrations with regressivism and Republicanism only feeds the bizarre martyr complex that allows elements like Wilson to rise. Just ask Save the Sons of Confederate Veterans:
The SCV is and certainly should remain more than a history club. However, the idea of an SCV member, who is also in the League of the South, "infiltrating" state government in order to bring about secession is not what SCV founders had in mind. The SCV constitution preamble states clearly: "In the name of a reunited country..." and with "An unquestioned allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America...." There have been plenty of opportunities to change that wording in the past 107 years. We haven’t done it.Huh, it almost sounds as if we have some middle ground. So if we're going to pinch someone here, we ought to put the pressure on South Carolinian state government officials—who are out of their minds—and not blame en bloc the South, Christianity, and families. (Unless, of course, it's funny.) The more we overexaggerate our differences, the more cemented they become as conventional wisdom, and the easier it becomes for a Wilson-Falwell-Dobson bigot to exploit those sympathies. The truth is that one core belief, a facet of American life that we all adore, binds us together and is stronger than any factor that might divide us—sex on television. I do believe that's what Howard Dean was trying to say when he extended his hand to the Rebs.Larry Salley, Ron Wilson and the rest of their crowd mislead everyone when they claim to be loyal SCV members and leaders. Their membership in, collusion with, or philosophical agreement with the League of the South and similar organizations should be an affront to every decent SCV member and patriotic American citizen. However, some SCV members continue to blame the press, politicians, the NAACP, and everyone else for our bad image simply because they have described Ron Wilson’s "reformed" SCV for what it is: a lie.
South Carolinians need to ask some of their lawmen and government officials if their fingers were crossed when they swore to uphold the Constitution.
To wit: Fuck Ron Wilson, fuck the simple majority of the South Carolina delegation that put him in office, and God bless the Texas Banjo.
Apropos of this discussion:
Courtesy of Sean Carroll of Preposterous Universe, which has become one of my regular reads. I feel like our respective blog mission statements would look pretty similar, but whereas I'm writing about contemporary art and politics, he's surveying contemporary physics and same. I think that means he gets the big piece of chicken. I don't think I've ever dovetailed topics so gracefully:
Apparently the worry is that handing out condoms with color and flavor (just like quarks!) will encourage people to have sex.It's the subatomic theory that gets me movin'!
The winner of the Britain's 2004 Turner Prize has been announced: Jeremy Deller. Of significant interest to at least two readers will be the fact that Deller was shortlisted for a video installation he did for ArtPace in San Antonio, Texas. You can find his works and a clip here; the work looks to me to be fairly politically charged but not condescending (something we liberal Texans are given to worry over what with the GOP and Texas being what they are).
Jeremy Deller, Cop With Flowers, 2003
Check out Brad DeLong and Mark Kleiman's discussion regarding which Greek hero makes the best liberal role model. I'd say that Kleiman's criticisms of Odysseus's liberal ideological purity would make an excellent launch for a case defending Aeneas, if we're able to nominate from epics outside the Greek. (Recognizing, of course, that Virgil's sociopolitical era was far closer to ours in time and resemblance than Homer's.) Virgil's Turnus, Aeneas's Etruscan enemy, is an adaptation of the complaints against Achilles that DeLong and Kleiman outline, and in defeating Turnus and rooting the long-suffering peoples of Troy, is a liberal improvement on the occasionally terrorist tendencies of Odysseus and war-mongering ways of Achilles. The family-values set really can't approve of the way Aeneas handled his outside-the-sanctity-of-marriage relationship with Dido, which only improves his liberal bonafides, right?
Liberal critics of America's noncritical support for Israel may pass on Virgil, however—Aeneas didn't exactly show up in Rome offering a two-state solution.
Marc Swanson, The Killing Moon, 2002
UPDATE: I don't mean discuss discuss. Come on, this piece is begging for your caption.
I was wondering what a fiery Russian nationalist might have to say about the 2002 Black Square auction crisis, when Inkombank nearly sold the "Samara" Square—which it had acquired from one of Malevich's heirs, who offered it as collateral for a $30,000 loan—before the state intervened. I think I stumbled upon that opinion (in Russia's version of Artforum, it would seem), and it sounds as if the Russian art literati found themselves disgraced by everyone involved. Really, what other position would a Russian take?
Tyler Green discusses Artforum's foray into the blogosphere—and though I like Artforum and don't think they're too brainy, I'm not sure their blog is my pace. It's Gawker (maybe People?) for the art world, which is fine, you know, so long as you live in New York. It doesn't much read like a blog, either, and I don't think it's a signal that Artforum or any of the other print mags will really invest much in bolstering their online presence, unfortunately. One of the reasons you don't see blogs operating for every magazine—or your local alternative weekly, for that matter—is that some publications actually depend upon and thrive in print. As Jay Z said, "So advertisers can give 'em more cash for ads."
But we'll give them a chance to find their sea legs before we judge. They do have one non–scene-centered post up on Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov, the art world's new Komar and Malamid. (Who were yesterday's Russian star combo. Russian realists, apparently, only paint in pairs.)
Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov, Night Figure, 2004
Dubossarsky and Vinogradov's submission for the Russian Pavilion at last year's Venice Biennale, a massive, sarcastic multipanel painting called Under the Water, is mighty easy on the eyes.
ARTnews has finally made available online their print article about the newest reclamation case brought forth by the heirs of Kazimir Malevich:
The fate of 14 works by Kazimir Malevich in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam may soon be decided in a Washington, D.C. courtroom. The heirs of the Russian avant-garde artist, who have successfully claimed works from the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Busch-Reisinger Museum of Harvard University, are now in pursuit of a significant part of the largest collection of Malevich’s works in the West. They say that the Stedelijk bought the works from someone who didn’t own them and had no right to sell them.As the article explains, Sandberg could hardly be blamed for being aggressive about acquiring the work once Malevich was locked in the USSR—Sandberg read the writing on the wall.As the 35 heirs and the City of Amsterdam, which runs the Stedelijk, prepare to face off in court, a Dutch journalist has uncovered new evidence about the museum’s 1958 acquisition of the Malevich collection. In two recent articles in the national Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, Lien Heyting charges that Stedelijk Museum director Willem Sandberg knew he was buying the works from someone who didn’t own them. Moreover, Heyting accuses museum officials of suppressing some of the circumstances of the purchase because they feared that Malevich’s heirs might someday emerge from behind the Iron Curtain to claim their heritage.
(left) Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism With Eight Red Rectangles, 1915. Stedelijk Museum.
(right) Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting, 1916. Stedelijk Museum.
Of course, after so many decades and Malevich's establishment as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, the writing on the well amounted to the plaques under Malevich's work. But there's no way to know whether the work would have survived otherwise—not to affirm the consequent, but frankly a lot of great art was destroyed, and it doesn't seem so bad to suffer some crafty art collectors their opportunism when the work survives. It's not even worth trying to untangle the Gordian knot that is the legal question, but my guess is that the heirs will get the works back— and it's not a terrifically encouraging thought, no matter how sympathetic their plight. In order to guide Malevich's original Black Square* from his heirs and various oligarchs' hands to the Hermitage, where it belongs, there was a coordinated effort involving $1 million and the passage of a rather capricious law entitled, "On Use of the State's Preemptive Right to Purchase the Painting of K. Malevich Black Square." Ahem. (Less objectionable than our preemptive strikes?)
* I can boast to having seen three of the four surviving Black Square paintings. If I find all four, I get . . . an empty feeling.
Red states and blue state got you all worked up over partisan geography? Maybe proper style can be the first step toward healing the political divide. I think I've seen most often the locution "red-state/blue-state" used as a modifer (first to describe "divide" before it was "meme," but that's another post). I maintain that there's a better (and correct) way to write the compound adjective: with the en dash (–).
CMS (14th ed.), 5.117:
The en dash is also used in place of a hyphen in a compound adjective when one of the elements of the adjective is an open compound (such as New York) or when two of the elements are hyphenated compounds:APA (p. 291) adds a nonpartisan connotation to the en dash solution:
[. . .]
quasi-public–quasi-judicial body
En dash: Type as an en dash or single hyphen with no space before or after. En dashes are used between words of equal weight in a compound adjective (e.g., Chicago–London flight).I think you can make a strong case that "red state" and "blue state" are both sufficiently well understood (ubiquitous, even) to qualify as open compound modifiers, so hyphens shouldn't apply. The preferred style, then, is:
red state–blue state divideAlong with the Microsoft Word method APA describes, en dashes can be created with HTML by typing [ampersand]ndash; or with ASCII by typing ALT+0150 or on a Mac by typing OPTION+hyphen.
Why not just use the solidus ("red state/blue state")? The APA and MLA agree that the slash has only a few applications in formal prose. It's overused as a crutch, often when more precise punctuation is available. (MLA (2.2.10) maintains that "the slash has a place mainly between two terms paired as opposites or alternatives and used together as a noun." Sounds right to me; good/evil is an example.)
It's a more complicated rule, but the en dash is also used to connect inclusive dates, time, and reference numbers. Give the en dash a try:
UPDATE: As for Holiday Bowl–bound Cal's complaints—don't hate the Longhorns, hate the game. Someone at Cal might want to point out to Cal QB Aaron Rodgers the contradition in his statements, "Nobody cares about West Coast football," and, "I just hope Southern Cal represents us well [as the top-ranked team in the Orange Bowl]." It's hardly Mack Brown's fault that an extra week isn't added to the season for a proper playoff system instead of the stupid BCS, but I don't begrudge Cal their frustration. And yet I won't think about Cal for one commercial-break moment while I'm watching Texas play one of my favorite non-Big XII teams in the nation. Hook 'em horns.
Peter Schjeldahl's thoughts on the MoMA finally arrived in the New Yorker and he does not disappoint. Schjeldahl makes the interesting case that the MoMA expansion finally proves the MoMA to be something of a conservative institution, in the sense that it has settled into a role that is less progressive than it has occupied in the past. And he doesn't mean by that MoMA qua contemporary art institution, but MoMA qua modernist museum—he judges it for what it is, unlike those who have noted in irritation that the MoMA isn't much of a contemporary art gallery.
It's reasonable to say that now that we've put the 20th century to bed, the MoMA has finally become a museum in some proper, capital sense. (A mentor of mine described a museum as the corner in which art cowers before it dies.) A similar idea struck me, but I have a different interpretation of one critical feature of the new building:
The building’s one exciting, though fleeting, eccentricity occupies the top floor: a cavernous, H-shaped space that evokes something between a gymnasium and a union hall. It has that socialist air, often encountered in Europe, of forbiddingly cold amenities for the masses, minus the scuff marks. Meanwhile, as a conspicuous consumption of midtown square footage, the room trumpets the prerogatives of imperial patronage on a par with Versailles. It will be chopped up to house temporary exhibitions. At present, it comes in handy for parking two wonderful, vast works: Ellsworth Kelly’s 1957 “Sculpture for a Large Wall” and James Rosenquist’s 1964-65 “F-111.”One of the wellsprings of modernist visual art was the artist's agonistic dialogue with the museum as a permanent facet of the experience of art. Culminating (arguably) with Walter DeMaria's Earth Room (though there are any number of superlative examples), this Kelly's Sculpture and Rosenquist's F-111 were both works made partially in the spirit of this strategy. Kelly's piece is a consecutive 65 feet in length; Rosenquist edges him out at 86 feet over multiple panels. Massive works, challenging for reasons other than size for certain, but given a real monumental edge. By creating a space to house these pieces—not just a space large enough but one in which these giants can hang comfortably and appropriately—the MoMA in a sense has spanked modernism, curbing one of its brattier aspects. I doubt the works are affected for the worse, but it seems as if the MoMA has stripped modernism of its impertinence.
A matter of time, of course. Once, back in the 1950s, a U.S. Senator actually introduced a measure to ban all visual arts "-isms"—modernism, minimalism, cubism, futurism—for their being vehicles for communism and fascism. (I can't recall the details offhand; the transcript is in Chipp's Theories. I'll dig it up later and copy a section of the introduction of the bill, because it's hilarious. Not sure you can squeeze even dread modern art by the Constitution, though he might've had something of a point about futurism.) It's hard to imagine that kind of energy and it's made more difficult now, I think, that the MoMA has given us the canonical presentation of modern art.
Kind of silly, but I'm genuinely curious: Is there a statute of limitations on allergies? Way back when I developed a medium allergy to bananas. That's right. Your quick and easy breakfast? Poison to me. But recently I nibbled on a fried plantain (cousin to the banana, of course) and I wasn't bothered. Could I be in the clear?
Apparently President Bush didn't peer far enough into Putin's soul:
Putin ridiculed the idea of a revote between Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich and opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko as a solution to the political crisis that erupted over the disputed Nov. 21 balloting. Putin implied that the opposition leader would never accept defeat.Ouch. It's funny to me that this minor edification over the number of rounds would stick in the Russians' craw as it has. Round one produced loud victories for both Yanukovitch and Yushchenko—it's like insisting that Nader and Buchanon be considered had there been a close call between Bush and Kerry. The potential for first-round siphoning of votes from Yushchenko (that being Putin's desired result) is laughable. So why make this a sticking point? Why give the West a finger over this technicality? I must be missing something."A revote of the second round may also produce nothing," Putin said. "And then what? Will it require a third, fourth, twenty-fifth revote until one of the sides gets the desired result?" [emphasis added]
In other We Are All Ukrainians–related news, this picture from the LAT's main page looks like something designed by Aleksandr Rodchenko, everybody's favorite Constructivist, and it makes me really wish I were there:
Who wouldn't? It looks like a Western-rigged rock concert.
UPDATE: I was talking this over with my roommate, and Putin's decision does make a great deal of sense if you consider that the Russo-nationalism plays well to his constituents. Also, Ukraine's election, if extended into two rounds, won't occupy its current lofty position in the news cycle for two months. Not even by the end of this month, with Iraq's election impending (or not), which gives the pro-Yanukovitch faction time for GOTV efforts and potentially, more rigging once the lamplight of international scrutiny has passed over.
Faith-based education at work:
Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person's genitals "can result in pregnancy," a congressional staff analysis has found.It's almost as if conservatives who put principles of faith about principles of science have a disregard for widely corroborated data or something. Not teachers, either, but curricula—that's a systematic approach to miseducating children. To refer again to Will Wilkinson's thoughts on public reason, the liberal fight for the classroom is not one of conservative science versus liberal, it's one of science versus no science. The hard religious right does not care about data except insofar as they can chip away at the fossil record or shield themselves with false equivalence stemming from a lack of respect for the authority of a scientific "theory." Abstinence education offers no theory, it has no theory—it lacks practitioners that meet standards of professionalism because the only standard that matters is the belief, to varying levels of literal interpretation, in the divine inspiration of the Bible.Those and other assertions are examples of the "false, misleading, or distorted information" in the programs' teaching materials, said the analysis, released yesterday, which reviewed the curricula of more than a dozen projects aimed at preventing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.
In providing nearly $170 million next year to fund groups that teach abstinence only, the Bush administration, with backing from the Republican Congress, is investing heavily in a just-say-no strategy for teenagers and sex. But youngsters taking the courses frequently receive medically inaccurate or misleading information, often in direct contradiction to the findings of government scientists, said the report, by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), a critic of the administration who has long argued for comprehensive sex education.
Several million children ages 9 to 18 have participated in the more than 100 federal abstinence programs since the efforts began in 1999. Waxman's staff reviewed the 13 most commonly used curricula—those used by at least five programs apiece.
The report concluded that two of the curricula were accurate but the 11 others, used by 69 organizations in 25 states, contain unproved claims, subjective conclusions or outright falsehoods regarding reproductive health, gender traits and when life begins. In some cases, Waxman said in an interview, the factual issues were limited to occasional misinterpretations of publicly available data; in others, the materials pervasively presented subjective opinions as scientific fact.
Are liberals waging a battle over "competing conceptions of truth and goodness" in the classroom? Conservatives think so, because liberals willfully blot out the minority "science" pushed in the form of Creationism and intelligent design. I still say no—definitionally, science is incompatible with religious-based education (minority hypotheses don't get equal billing with established theories). But if mandating science in the classroom in fact qualifies as using the state to enforce a worldview—something that I as a political liberal abhor—then we ought to endorse religious school vouchers immediately. Establish an educational caste system: one level that teaches science and will get you into college (call this one "blue" or "coastal"), and another level that teaches Sunday School everyday and spits in the face of the Enlightenment ("red," "flyover," or "for douchebags").
I'm finally reaching some middle ground with Christian conservatives across the aisle. Christians, it turns out, don't want to see commercials on television for denominations that invite gays and other persona non grata-types to practice; I don't want to see commercials for any church on televisions. Family conservatives didn't want people watching explicit violence in the form of Saving Private Ryan; I hope people avoid war pornography in all its forms. Sounds like the grounds for a beautiful relationship, though I'm far less enthusiastic than they about using the powers of the state to compel the airwaves to not show stuff I don't like.
But for the media to take an active role in censoring media content seems to put both Jesus and me out of a job. If Viacom won't run ads touching on controversial issues—in this case, a God-awful but tolerant megaplex church called the United Church of Christ—what will the two of us do? Big Jesus wants to complain about the fact that the UCC strays from the conventional homophobic readings of Scripture and I want to kvetch about UCC's mass-market tactics and Big Jesus's policy of intolerance and now neither of us have anything to work with, because, as CBS puts it, UCC's invitation to homosexuals is too politically charged.
Frankly, it's a worse hit for Big J—how will they know what the homosexuals are up to if they're not on television? Liberal CBS strikes again. . . .
