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.

Twinkle Fingers Are No Way To Decide A Death Match, or: Why I Won The Flux Factory Art & Occupy Debate

I couldn't find a picture of my Deathmatch opponents, so I tried to approximate the best I could (I imagine Hrag is Master)


This past week Paddy Johnson of Artfagcity, Hrag Vartanian of Hyperallergic, the artist Bill Powhida, and I were invited to debate the topic of the art community's place within the Occupy Wall Street movement. The debate was hosted by Flux Factory and organized and moderated by Douglas Paulson & Christina Vassallo. The debate is now available as podcasts. As I told my fellow panelists, the debate format made this the single most enjoyable panel I've ever been on. It helped that I know and like everyone else on the panel, respect their work and opinions, but I really enjoyed that there was no pretense at agreement, no impulse to reach a consensus. It made for a fun night of arguing with a group who all enjoy arguing. Perhaps because it was billed as a "Deathmatch" I swore like a sailor (or maybe because I always swear a lot), so by that metric I clearly won the debate (except the method actually used: twinkle fingers).

Freedom Towers and Political Fear

David Childs presenting his "Freedom Tower" design (2006); Occupy Wall Street protester being bodily removed (2011)

Recently I was asked to contribute a piece for a group show in Hong Kong about the "ways objects produce space." Rather than contribute a sculpture and hope for some sort of latter-day phenomenological experience between ‘object’ and ‘subject’ however, I decided to revisit an urban design project that I had not worked on for over a decade. In addition to recreations of three architectural counter-proposals I originally showed in March of 2001, I added a fourth that has been gestating for almost a decade, but has suddenly taken on new relevance. I proposed building nine “Freedom Towers” arranged in a tight grid formation and completely occupying the available open space of Tiananmen Square. I wrote a post for Rhizome about the entire project, but in review my thoughts I returned to a video of talk I attended by David Childs, the Chief Architect of SOM's "Freedom Tower." Child's 2007 talk was called "Building and Fear", and while the fear he was addressing in his talk was the fear of terrorism  - a fear he calls "anti-urban" - it is interesting to note that he reports that the push to close of the streets surrounding the New York Stock Exchange began before 9/11. My project is concerned with an older fear that has been shaping of cities, the fear of political protest. A fear I might call anti-civil. Modernity is city life. Civilization and civility both draw their meaning from the same place, the ways we have learned to behave by living together in cities. 

Seeing Red: Fabian Protests

George Washington on Wall Street; and an OWSer who didn't get the memo

I'm aware that, due to the Tea Bagger's tricornered pinheads, looking at OWS in relation to George Washington's Continental army is a mixed metaphor of sorts. And while I am more than happy to cede the Boston Tea Party to the Neoliberals, Libertarians and their flock of rasist retirees, the OWS movement, and its admires, would do well to consider the lessons of the long war of attrition that followed that initial tax revolt. According to the historian Joseph Ellis: "Washington did not believe he was weak, and he thought of the Continental army as a projection of himself." Clearly OWS movement has no reason to imagine itself as weak, it imagines itself as a projection of the 99%, but like Washington, there seems to be an urge for symmetrical confrontation: to shut down the G8, to demand that the Whitney Biennial cease and desist, and to call for a general strike on May 1st. Like Washington however, OWS can't win frontal assaults, they need to make what Ellis calls, a "Fabian Choice."

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

Tory author Lewis Carroll and, presumably, a more progressive Occupier.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

My father, who made his living as a psychologist, warned me to beware anyone who speaks nonsense words. "They're up to something" he'd say. "Their up to something that they are ashamed of." His example was always the conservative author, and likely pederast, Lewis Caroll: "All that cutsy shit is cover for what he really wanted, but was ashamed to say clearly." He told me. "Straight shooters shoot straight." Occupy Wall Street has to start talking strait or they are going to be mistaken for perverts and are not going to get what they want.

See Red: W.A.G.E. Asks "Why Are Artists Poor?"

Damien Hirst Spot Glasses (2012); Kyle Petreycik, Introspective Glasses (2010)

On the heels of recording a conversation about ArtPrize and social justice I was invited by the artist William Powhida to a lecture titled Why are Artists Poor? by the Dutch economist/artist Hans Abbing and sponsored by an organization called W.A.G.E. - a group that is seeking to certify nonprofit arts organizations as artist friendly. I commented on Ben Davis account of the lecture, and Bill and I posted both our reactions to the lecture on Rhizome a couple days ago, but following the lecture we also took part in on a meeting for W.A.G.E. and then, along with the photographer Chris Verene, the critics Ben Davis and Martha Schwendener ended up finishing out the night discussing economic justice and the arts over a few beers. Of the group, all of whom, to some degree or an other have been involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement, I am the least engaged (I am not involved in W.A.G.E. or OWS, beyond joining a couple of the large marches and publicly denouncing the early hi-jinx of Occupy Museum), but one of the things that has come up over and over since Zuccotti was first occupied, is what is the lesson artists should learn from OWS.

Star Trek: A Future Abandon to Clowns & Rubes

Trekky; Trotsky

When I was in my early 20s all my friends were returning from trips to Europe telling stories about what rubes American tourist were and how universally Europeans hated them. The strategy everyone I knew seemed to have adopted, and I was instructed to use if and when I ever 'crossed the pond', was to pretend to be Canadian. I remember thinking that if all the cool, well-mannered Americans posed as Canadians, and only rubes and clowns admitted to being Americans, then who could blame Europeans for thinking Canadians were awesome and Americans crass? "Up to a decade or two ago," wrote Slavoj Žižek in his 1994 book, Mapping Ideology, "everybody was busy imagining different forms of the social organization of production and commerce (Fascism or Communism as alternatives to liberal capitalism); today" he then-continued, "as Fredrick Jameson perspicaciously remarked, nobody seriously considers possible alternatives to capitalism any longer." If only rubes and clowns admit to wanting a better world, dystopias will be the only futures serious people will know how to think about.

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. 

White Walls, Consumerism (A Conclusion)

Consumerism's carrot and stick: Jobs vs. no jobs.

(Part 10)

This summer, as I watched the DSK prosecution stall and collapse, Right-wing ideologs turn the debt ceiling debate into a crisis that cost American tax payers billions, and the riots in England, I found myself experiencing far more than my usual level of disgusted with capitalism - but perversely defensive on the part of consumerism. Capitalism is nothing more than a bundle of mechanisms for distributing wealth: markets, property and financial instruments are a part of a group of technologies that have been developing over the pst few hundreds of years. Proponents of capitalism like to think of it as a meritocracy, but capitalism only promises enormous wealth to the lucky few and that is because it is a creature of Malthusian economics - the bedrock of its logic is scarcity. Capitalism favors the creation of mega-wealth and super-elites. Consumerism meanwhile, is a creature of the Industrial Revolution, and more particularly of Postwar America - it is an ideology built on the experience of post-Malthusian economies of scale - it's bedrock is abundance: the very modern promise of wealth that increases the more it is shared.