Lego's "Girl Problem" Hasn't Changed, It's Multiplied.

Viral ad campaign by Lego didn't do much to comfort those put of by Lego Friends.

I got in a bit of a dust up on twitter this week, which caught me off guard, because not only was I not looking for a fight, I wasn't disagreeing. But some subjects are thorny, they invite misunderstanding and defensiveness. Gender roles is one of those subjects. Lego's "girl problem." The problem is an old one: Lego can't figure out how to sell to girls; 90% of their toys sales are to/for boys - and I bet that that number is low. It's a problem for Lego because they have saturated half their market and can't break into the other other half - until recently, and that's where the new girl problem starts. A couple years ago Lego released a pink-washed line of doll-house themed building sets called Lego Friends, and according to NPR, has tripled their sales to girls. The source of yesterday's misunderstanding, was that I hadn't realized the "girl problem" had morphed from a question of how to get girls to play with Legos to one of how to get girl to stop playing with pink toys. But to my mind the original "problem" remains. Three times almost nothing does not a market share make. My guess the sales of the pink-washed Lego Friends sets don't reflect numbers of girls playing with the toys now that they are pink, but rather they reflect the fact that aunts, uncles, grandmothers, mothers, fathers, and girls themselves feel comfortable buying a toy for a girl that looks unambiguously like a girl's toy and comes from one of the most respected toy companies in the world. To my thinking, any marketing scheme built around structured-narrative sets (ie sets that come with instructions intended to build a specific narratives of firemen, spacemen, housewives or veterinarians) are going to be gendered, but they are also going to continue to fail with the girls and "outlier" boys who aren't playing with them now.

Mind The Gap: Art & Ethics

MEI Chart from Andrea Fraser's “L'1% C'est Moi” in Texte zur Kunst 83; Michelle Vaughan's Instagram of vandalized Damien Hirst

I was on two panels recently. One was on the question of Art & OWS, the other was on Art & Ethics - I found myself making the same point at both: that high art prices are not the problem, they are symptoms of a problem. Along with high rates of mental illness, violent crime, and lower life expectancy, high art prices are not symptomatic of extreme poverty or extreme wealth, they are symptomatic of extreme gaps between the very rich and the very poor. Here is the point that I made to the OWS activists in the audience of the first panel, and the would-be artworld movers and shakers in the audience of the second: wealth is not the problem and the wealthy are not the enemy. The gap is a problem, and it's a problem for wealthy as well as the poor. If you are the richest American your life expectancy is shorter that the richest Greek, your likely hood of mental illness is higher, and the likely hood that your life will be marred by violence is higher. Corporations are not the problem, consumerism isn't the problem; the problem that plagues us all is the gap.

Star Wars and Postmodernism

Boys and their toys, Then, and Now

Like most boys, I spent a lot of time playing war. But unlike American boys of the 50s and 60s, who grew up imagining themselves as patriotic GI Joes, my friends and I didn't play with army men. We were born into the rain shadow that followed the Vietnam War, during which, Hasbro stopped making soldier toys. We still played war, but instead of American soldiers,  played with Star Wars. Unlike boys just a few years older than us, we were no longer fantasizing about being grunts of the Greatest Generation defending American freedom from Fascism; our imaginary enemies wielded weapon of mass destruction and were fascists with a lowercase "f' (I spell out the difference I see between Fascism and fascism HERE). The story we were all reenacting was an upside-down fantasy of North Vietnamese-like space guerrillas battling American Modernism in Nazi drag. We were replacing the story of one kind of authority, with a new, very different story of authority. It looked like a childish fad, but, in the context of that particular moment, it was subversive. 

Art Then Technology (Part 7): Companionate Authority

Fat Bastard: end of fifth day of installation (2010).

(Return to Part 6)

I began thinking of Art as authority sometime after I moved to New York, and only began thinking of authority as a technology since reading Kevin Kelly's New book What Technology Wants. Kelly's conception of technology is far broader than most. In addition to our gadgets and industries he includes the entire universe of man-made things; everything from literature and art to abstractions like the rule of law and the scientific method. Kelly makes the case for technological (in its broad sense) Progress (with a capital "P") as inevitable. He largely avoids the cliches of his Modernist predecessors ("Better living through chemistry," "One word: Plastics," etc.), but he does unpack and and dust off the old narrative of "Every man is a King." Kelly tells how he and his daughter counted all the objects in their home (10,000 objects) and compares that with the average number of objects in homes in the developing world (127 objects), contrasting those numbers with King Henry the VIII (18,000 objects), colonial Americans and other historically representative common folk (40-75 objects). Kelly champions technological Progress in terms of Freedom, that innovation brings an increase in the number of choices we have available to us.

Art Then Technology (Part 3): Hitchhiking in Flatland

Fat Bastard: end of first day of installation (2010)
(Return to Part 2)

When I was 16 I hitchhiked from Chicago to New York during what turned out to be the worst cold-snap to hit the East Coast in 90 years. That sucked. It was an ill advised decision, made on the spur of the moment, by a much different version of myself (he was a bit prettier). In addition to returning home with walking pneumonia, I had developed a very restless thumb. Perhaps because I started riding the Chicago mass transit system in middle school (which was very near Cabrini Greene), traveling among strangers in circumstances most people would find dangerous was old hat. What I discovered on that first trip was that hitchhiking was safer than the 1980s era El. Add to that I was a  bit of a risk taker as a boy. My mother has told me she was relieved that at sixteen I showed so little interest in getting a drivers licence, but she would have much preferred I had done that instead of hitching. I think hitching was a safer choice for me. As it is I didn't get my licence until I was 24. I hitchhiked instead. The reason had nothing to do with risk or driving my ma nuts, I kept at it because I really liked the people I met.

Star Wars Highbrow: Thesis Antithesis Synthesis

Joshua Glenn's final revision of my Star Wars Klein group diagram 

Above is another variant on my Star Wars Klein Group Diagram. I heard from HiLoBrow.com's Joshua Glenn. turns out the first version of his Star Wars Semiotic Square I posted was pretty close to the mark, but I got some things mixed up. I left that first version up but guided by his corrections here is the final "fully functional" Joshua Glenn Star Wars Semiotic Square. 

In addition to describing the square above Glenn's original post also discussed his choices for the cardinal points at some length in terms of a "highbrow-lowbrow-middlebrow-nobrow-hilobrow schema." It is a scheme he has charted elsewhere, admitting that "aesthetic and lifestyle choices aren't entirely independent of social class." Until I read Glenn's criticism it hadn't consciously occurred to me to think about lowbrow vs highbrow in any systematic way. I suppose if I thought about it at all, I figured that what I have been doing with my Star Wars & Modernism project is some sort of highbrow take on a lowbrow film, or a lowbrow take on highbrow art and architecture. In his post however  Glenn calls Star Wars "George Lucas’ attempt to cobble together a middlebrow entertainment following Joseph Campbell’s template" and calls Lucas himself a sentimental middlebrow. Once he brought it to my attention, it made perfect sense, lowbrow is not the term of derision, middlebrow is. Posting on the middlebrow (Farting in Church) wet my appetite. The term turns out to be so loaded with connotations, not just of social class, but ideas about cultural and racial superiority left over from the waning years of the age of imperialism, and Star Wars is the perfect vehicle to unpack the biases shadowing the judgement of both high and low.

A  diagram I made according to Joshua Glenn "highbrow-lowbrow-middlebrow-nobrow-hilobrow schema."

The Killing Fields (Part 4/4): Rosalind Krauss is Dead

Valerie Jaudon, Yazoo City (1975); Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk (1963); Valerie Jaudon, installation photo (1977)

The feminist art historian Anna Chave is critical of Michel Foucault's idea of power and it is not hard to imagine why. For most of history, in most peoples minds power has been almost wholly associated with the masculine - up to and including Chaves own historic moment. For instance, in his widely read 1972 book Ways of Seeing, John Berger began an essay on the female nude in the European oil painting tradition as follows: 

According to usage an convention which are at last being questioned but by no means been overcome, the social presence of woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man's presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking. If it is small or incredible, he is found to have little presence... By contrast, a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her... One might simplify by saying men act and women appear. Men Look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

Judging by his tone, Berger seems to have sincerely believed he was outside the "usage and convention" he was commenting on, but all the same he comes across as very much a man of his time, when he writes, "If a woman makes a good joke this is an example of how she treats the joker in herself and accordingly of how she as a joker-woman would like to be treated by others. Only a man can make a good joke for its own sake."

The Killing Fields (Part 3/4): Killing Rosalind Krauss

Death and the Maiden: Rosalind Krauss, Ingmar Bergman,s The Seventh Seal, Clement Greenberg

The reason Clement Greenberg was inconsistent on the subject of sculpture is because in constructing his formalist theories he had conceptually painted himself into a corner. He insisted that the ideas in  Modernist Painting were never intended to be prescriptive, but he had successfully mapped a generation worth of artistic production, starting with Frank Stella's black painting (which he evidently didn't much like), right up through to the minimalist (who he down right disliked), and dribbling out among the earth artists (those guys were totally formalists - see PMD 2/3). That is no small achievement, even accounting for the mixed results (in Greenberg's opinion). His rejection of minimalism wasn't arbitrary - he clearly hoped to extend his influence for another decade or two.

The Future is Feminist

American Women: "There was no underwear in space."; Gail Collins

In the mania leading up to the millennial-new-years I heard someone (after a decade I cannot remember who) say that feminism would be remembered as the most important intellectual breakthrough of the 20^th Century, topping heavier-than-air flight, the nuclear bomb, and dwarfing the Internet for its impact on human history. Having grown up in the immediate wake of the second-wave feminism, it stuck me at the time as a solid commonsense truth.