Anglo Spring: Why We Fight

Love in the social network free riots of Vancouver; Hate at the Twitter and Facebook fueled UK riots.

When the riots broke out in Tottenham this summer two very different stories leapt to mind. One was Jonathan Franzen's commencement speech tirade in which he warned a group of freshly minted BAs against, consigning themselves "to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources." He was warning them against being - "in the most damning sense of the word" - consumers. Franzen railed against the shallow narcissism of "liking" on social networks and triumphed the greater depths of real world "love" (giving the example of the un-commodifiable love of bird watching). "Sooner or later" he explained about love, "you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight."

Anglo Spring: Sociopathocracy

Wisconsin's "unseemly circus"(2011); Gustave Courbet, The Burial at Ornan (1850)

When Gustave Courbet showed his painting, The Burial at Ornan, in 1850 it upset his Parisian audience. The historian TJ Clark explains that Courbet refused to depict peasants at pious and simple, instead he "painted worship without worshipers." But more maddening still, Courbet painted the peasants fashionably dressed, undermining the Parisian's patronizing vision of country people. Adding injury to insult, Courbet's massive canvas rubbed his audience wrong because of their own diminished prospects, burial had become a privilege that most Parisians could no longer afford: "Thus burial took on barbed and complex meanings; it became an institution, a privilege, a matter of envy and dispute." It now appears escaping justice is and institution, a privilege and a matter of envy and dispute. Those are the conditions that Socrates branded the "justice of a band of robbers."

Anglo Spring: It is time for this unseemly circus to stop.

Downton Abbey (2010); Irascables (1950)

The painter Jasper Johns famously observed that, “artists are the elite of the servant class.” What Johns fails to note however, is exactly which servant artists most resemble. In the BBC series Downton Abbey we are reminded how clearly the roles of butlers, footmen and maids were defined. Each has very particular expertise and places within very old and explicit hierarchies. The only premodern equivalent to role of the modern artist meanwhile is a class of servant that withered away at just about the same moment as the first modern artists were appearing. Artists are jesters.