Not Possible IRL: On Artists and their Patrons

Not Possible IRL: On Artists and their Patrons

Many Thanks to Larry and Bettina for bringing this many layered subject to the fore. To save space here I have posted my response to Larry's views here.

Cheers!

DC Spensley whois DanCoyote in SL

Assessing the Assessment of ISEA 2006 / ZeroOne San Jose

I am moved to write this evening by questions about Access and the Indended Audience for the ISEA/ZeroOne event.

Both questions (access and audience) were characterized as "dangerous".
(is this ideological encoding?)

Why is it dangerous to discuss the intended audience of an art presentation? Does it call into question the definition of "public"? This may be problematic, but dangerous?... and what kind of access was spoken of?

Real, practical regional access? Theoretical/ethical universal access? Cultural access? (can any cultural product be universally accessible?) Everyone has a different take on what access is. One speaker's point was that the bulk of peoples all over the world don't even have access to basic technology, and are therefore denied access to "technophilic" cultural production.

This begs the question who was the audience for the ISEA/ZeroOne art exhibition? Here's the dangerous part: We were. The elite art world, the regional public with practical and cultural access to what constitutes "cultural production" in the art sense. It could be said that the art world is a cadre of elites, collectors, academics, curators, educators, institutions and last on the food chain: elite artists. There being of course, a distinction between elite art practice, elite art presentation and elitism for its own sake, right?

Every panelist at the Assessment spoke the words "cultural production" or "culural producer" at least once during the discussion. However when the question of "who is the intended audience" came up, the response was that "this is not a marketing study".

If artists are cultural producers, this literally means that they are "producing" products. Many of these products, as one panelist put it, "would never exist in a for-profit system". However, non-profits ARE required to market their products, just like artists, museums and conferences. ISEA/ZeroOne had plenty of marketing, and this means there was definitely a target audience. Further, arts conglomerations like ISEA/ZeroOne are mediators of the cultural production of artists. They get to decide which artist's work is seen, who gets funding for projects and who gets in to see the work on display. If the institution does not consciously make these decisions, they by default protect the status quo. The ethics of institutions are reflected in decisions and while many of the players of an institution might aspire to widen the circle of the art conversation, the institutional interest is to foreground a certain part of the conversation and speak to the elite audience culturally conditioned to appreciate and support the products it has to offer.

It is clear that the presenters of ISEA/ZeroOne conferences were genuinly interested in widening access to the cultural production of artists, but at the same time every institution must serve the interests of core constituents and funders. The ramifications and availability of this indenture differ from region to region.

However this raises another dangerous question: Why should the wider audience be interested in accessing these cultural productions? What is their incentive to become involved in the conversation? Do they care? Who are they? (and we're back to the audience question again)

This evening's Assessment barely begun before it was waylaid by troubling ideoligical issues that loom large in the western cultural context. Do we as artists, art educators and academics have more or less responsibility to adress serious issues when our voices already speak through the work we produce, the places we exhibit and the institutions we inhabit? Notably absent from the Assessment was discussion of the ethical content, social advocacy work and humanistic voice of the artists at ISEA/ZeroOne.


-dc

Comments on A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

While I strongly support free speech of every kind and support the spirit of the "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", I do find some of the simplifications and assumptions of this "mini-festo" to be problematic. The following are my comments on A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:

1.0 A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

1.1 Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

[dc] Mr. Barlow lives in the meatspace and speaks from meatspace, his voice is "mediated" by a telecommunications protocol, created and maintained by entities existing in meatspace. How can mr Barlow portend to speak for a future that has not even happened yet and represent a concensus of people, let alone say who is welcome or not welcome on a communications medium? It is patently untrue that governments, in particular the US governement have no sovereignty over a communication medium they created for the American people, with taxpayer monies. It is their job, and their mandate to manage the network they have created for our benefit.

1.2 We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

[dc] While it is agreed that governments do not have moral rights to impinge upon free speech in any sphere, they do in fact have methodologies for enforcement and ultimately the power to pulll the plug if even by force. I am also of the opinion that governments WILL pull the plug by force if necessary if they feel that this medium of commuincation threatens their survival. The sad fact is that cultural conflicts over sexuality, obscenity will inspire many well meaning people to support this possibility.

1.3 Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

[dc] It is a debabable point where governent derive their power in practical terms, however if that much is true, it IS the governments job, given to them by the people to regulate industries in some ways otherwise the FCC would not exist at all. Cyberspace lies on servers, all of which exist within some governmental border. However true wirelss peer to peer networks are a different story. While "cyberspace" is a recent form of commuinication, it is populated by the same human beings with the same issues they have had since the beginning. All human social development is an act of nature and grows organically even if attempts are made to manage that growth in certain directions. People always dream up ways of using any tool that the inventor never could have predicted.

1.4 You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

[dc] Governemts whether in service to the people or not, are accustomed to framing the conversation and so called democratic governemnts provide for mechanisms in which smaller groups or individuals might participate in conversation with government. These would be the legislative and judicial branches of governemnt and the electorial system. So in essence, edicts like the the CDA ARE governmental conversation in effect. It is another debatable point how intertwined the government is in busines in this country, and whether the fact that government programs (funded by the people) that created the possibility of "cyberspace" share in the credit to disown this is to disown the power of the people over this region since business has moved in and made its voice heard. Further, the unwritten codes that govern net society vary just like all cultural speech and performance, once again in a free society we elect/appoint people to intervene for the collective good, to not do so is to leave individuals open to an even greater evil that posesses no incentive to respect the rights of individuals, that being free market capital. Do not forget that the open environment the author suggests by definition is a liberatarian world where business has the same open rights to exploit as they see fit.

1.5 You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

[dc} There is only one world, that is seen differently though differnt eyes. We all live in it and simply communicate through different means. The net is only one means of commuication and the more I think about it, the less the "new world" with "new rules" constuct fits. The net is not the only means of communication that should be free and this new social contract should be with all citizens, not only ones who posess the luxury of internet communications. It is anthropomorphisizing to imbue a communication medium with "worldhood" and serves to further divide humans instead of unite them. What the author is suggesting is that net citizens are somehow exempt from intervention of the world onto a very exclusive communications medium.

1.6 Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

[dc] Telepresence, pseudonymity and other benefits of a communication medium are not indicators of a new world, but a form of communication part of a whole. Making a differentiation between where bodies live and where minds live is self defeating, further divisive and removes the onus of physical accountability for individuals employing a more advanced communications medium.

1.7 We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

[dc] This is simply not true. Only the priviledged few can communicate with high technology, which itself is a product of military technology and economic incentive. All of these things, like human social organizations, have prejudice built into them.

1.8 We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

[dc] once again, these are some (like myself) that hold these rights to be basic human rights regardless of what medium of communication.

1.9 Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here.

[dc] another bogus statement. Property does not have to be connected to matter at all. Intellectual property is a great key to prosperity in modern times. Identity may metamorphosize but still remains a key tool for relations and context does not become a null concept just because something is translated into http protocol and put over a wire. Eliminating the individual right to property in this means of commuication is tyranny of another sort. Does the author suppose that business is going to cede any property to this new network? I think not. So why should individuals not have the same rights inside and outside of a communications tool?

2.0 Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

[dc] Agreed about the "solutions" but everything else is idealistic nonsense. Ethics and governance do not simply appear spontaneously for a communications tool. Enlightened self interest is right next door to avarice and neither of them are really all that comfortable with ethics. Governance should exist to regulate and help define the difference between enlightened self interest, fervent selfish interest and harmful monopoly.

2.1 In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

[dc] this act was repealed in part in March of 1997

2.2 You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

[dc] This may be true in some ways but it has always been true in those ways. Here it is used as hyperbole, sheer emotional propoganda. None of these challenges are new to network communications. They are a symptom of the human condition.

2.3 In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

[dc] I hope the author is right here and that freedom of expression in all mediums is too strong to be bridled by repression forever.

2.4 Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

[dc] The communication industry are the parents of the network communications industry. Of course they are going to lobby to increase their marketshare and protect their assets from threats, but this is no different than the silent film industry trying to dismiss the advent ot talking pictures. Further, there is plent of cost. Computers, software, networks bandwidth etc all cost money. What planet is this guy from where these things are free?

2.5 These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

[dc] More emotional hyperbole. The government's job is to do our bidding and regulate industries that might otherwise spin out of control and abuse people for profit. We dont want to be immune to the beneficial aspects of government interention, in fact, somebody needs to be an ally of individual rights in a world where slavery is the pureset form or capitalism. Previous lovers of freedom in America held slaves but it was an enlightened government that outlawed it finally.

2.6 We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

[dc] This author suffers from a bad case of nihilism in their monomaniacal instance that government is imposing something on people that they dont want or need. I the US the governemnt is supposed to work for the people. Ostensibly we elect political tools to do our bidding. The author indicated in so many words that he does not believe this is true, and he might be right, but that is beside the point.

The "we" he refers to in cyperspace is the same we that votes and the same we that calls the police when their store is getting robbed or Exon is dumping chemicals into the gulf of Mexico. The "we" he refers to does not exclude the government, because "we" are supposed to BE the governemnt.

It is silly to expect that this "we" speaks with one voice, and that until we settle issues in meatspace, that "cyberspace" will be any different in how it serves the needs of humanity.

DC Spensley
San Francisco 2006

Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996

Critical Studies week 7-8

Critical Studies week 7-8

Musings on a deluge of information and riding on the train...

Compare the pace of the increasing volume of information available to someone with reasonable access to modern communication technology to the changing view of the rail traveler in (citation here). The rail traveller's viewpoint is changed by moving through the world while isolated from it within a container.

The pedestrian travels at the pace of life, and notices more of the world while walking immersed. The rail passenger is passively witnessing the world changing, outside of the train, outside of themselves and therefore receive a more generalized impression of the world.

To be a pedestrian is to pay attention to the specific details of something, to get close to it and exist with it inside a common space.

To ride the train is to gain a more diffuse understanding of the landscape more of a "lay of the land" kind of thing.

Once upon a time information was limited and pedestrian. Our consumption habits were developed to handle the pace and volume of information available. This lead to a study of fine details and specifics not possible from the train of modern communication.

The question is whether our information consumption habits can evolve to suit the increasing pace and volume of information and derive understanding while sitting in a coach watching the landscape go by, unable to focus on details in the foreground.

The information train passenger:

This person has a phone, a TV, Cable, Satellite etc. and significant creative lesisure to fine tune information consumption habits from a vertical to a horizontal model.

Perhaps this is not you personally, but the frequency of this person is increasing as more and more generations are born into the situation of information quasi-omniscience. It follows that new habits of cognition will be necessary to cope, and even thrive within this increasing information awareness, because the key to information is understanding, regardless of the sources and volume of the information.

The value of information in terms of understanding/wisdom is not proportional to the volume of information but the reception and understanding of the right information, at the right time.


The reading:

Boxcar Bertha,
276-280
Seems dropping out of typical middle class life is not new to the 1960's or free love for that matter etc. (funny SE highlighted exactly the same points in class)

While there were somen hobos the lifestyle choice to ignore bourgeois life for the low budget travel life somewhat equalized women and men in SOME ways. Reflecting back on Walking after Midnight where women are disallowed to walk by themselves, the hobo people seem egalitarian by comparison. However like the hippies of the 1960s I suspect that it was still an overwhelmingly misogynist arrangement, as the women cooked, and performed other personal servitude to maintain their slim freedom. I suspect that men and women hobos were equally untouchable and that bourgeois society wanted to ignore them.

284

It warms the hackles to also realize that anti-war and anti-militarism it would seem were also not solely a 1960's phenomena either. This provides me hope that the pendulum will swing again to the left.

Walking after midnight
279
Two casts of women are apparent here. Women were compelled to trade respectability for mobility.
298
Patrilineal (new word for me with old roots)
298
The view that architecture contains within it's basic intent to control the sexuality jibes with Boxcar Bertha's open sexuality of the road.

Critical Studies week 5-6

Critical Studies Week 5-6

Comments on class:

It was a good thing to get the readings ahead of time so we can have a comprehensive look at the material we might use for our research assignment.

Mention of Bathes' "Camera Lucinda" with regard to how photographs transform banality. I'll have to believe it when I see it. If Barthes is involved I have some faith that this will happen, however I see a lot of banal photography that never transcends anything. Not knocking Photographers, but I believe that it is just as difficult to take a brilliant photograph as it is to paint a brilliant painting. In the case of photography I suppose context might be more important though....

Sorry if some of my notes are fractures....I brought my computer in this week to enable me to take notes faster and more accurately. Truth is I can hardly read my writing when I am taking notes longhand.

-Object of Knowledge? Historically, geographically, define an OOK

-I am so conflicted about the whole "Journaling" idea and dislike these kinds of "irresolute" projects because of the lack of structure. I suspect that my critical analysis of the class might offend, so I cannot really journal, not really. Self censorship drags on my train of thought and sours the moment. I also don't want to offend, and don't mean to. It is that my ideas are often wrapped in opinions (as you can tell from class participation). For instance during this class the instructor "revealed" certain journals and commented positively on them, and then made them available for the entire class. I could not help but notice that half of the class retrieved their little books before anybody could read them.

Perhaps the word journaling has connotations not in keeping with the intent of the exercise. I am gratified that I am not the only one who assumes that journaling is "revealing". Some don't want to reveal what they are thinking. It wrankles. However my journal is published in public, but somehow that is not as daunting as the instructor reading my thoughts. There is a certain anonymity in being so public.

More fractured notes:
Semiotics
-empty - recuperation of the object
- re-find older historical
-invent

- jargon - empty cliche
- language of the other?

Metaphor
One thing stands for another, an implicit comparison or symbol. Something that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another. "a sea of troubles"

Metonomy
One word stand in for another. Washington DC is used in speech to stand for the entire US Govt.


Stories as a means of transportation.

-Place is static, a location
-Space is something moved through. it is dynamic and is described as the intersections of mobile elements actualized by movements. Space is a practice.

-Discussion of the penis.

It was discussed in class regarding the reading "Imperial Leather" how the fetishistic chronicler Arthur J. Munby obsessively and anthropologically catalogued working women of his era while engaging in cross dressing seductions with his partner. This is all pretty much none of our business really. If one applies the values of the San Francisco Bay Area in the present day to Munby he seems tame and rather private. I think that he should be respected as such even after his death. This is not to say the material should not be available, but that the intent of the writer interested enough to find and distribute Munby's story is in question.

However to do so is I suppose tit for tat since Munby studied working women, why shouldn't Anne McClintock study him back?

What are the ethical questions about one's privacy when they are dead? I think the assumption that your privacy is void and everything is fair game after you die is ethically questionable within a less-than-ancient span of time. I wonder who Munby was obsessively documenting for? I suspect that it was for himself and that he would be horrified to know that his private business was used to justify a discussion about the insecurities of human beings endowed with a penis.

While this is a simplification of the discussion, it is an accurate one. The general gist of the discussion was that dominant heterosexual men are essentially afraid of being castrated, emasculated and essentially losing the traditional power that having a penis symbolizes.

While it is impossible to not deny that this is a part of the story, it is far from the only, or salient part of the story of persons born with a penis. Rather this seems like an analysis made by thinkers who do not have penises. How could they know that having a penis is not so much a matter of worrying about losing it as, a responsibility to use it wisely. Like any tool the penis is sometimes the right tool for the right job. The trouble begins when the penis is expected to perform out of its useful range.

For instance a penis should never be allowed to be a head of state. This does not mean that someone in possession of a penis should not be allowed to serve the people, as long as it is not to exclusion of people who do not have penises. It's also important that the head of state who might happen to possess a penis not act as if the penis is in posession of the person. There is some precedent for this unfortunately.

However back to Munby. I am afraid that too much emphasis was placed on an indictment of Mumby's prurient intentions and too little on the service done in the anthropological realm. Is it not true that the story of humanity is overwhelmingly obsessed with stories about people with penises? How then can it be so bad that someone with a penis puts their heart and soul into life long research into the conditions of life of people who never, ever get to populate the pages in the story of humanity?

Having a penis comes with its own extensive set of "heavily encoded" sociological requirements with no operators manual save parental council (god help us). Imagine an overwhelming drive to use a crescent wrench but with conflicting accounts of what crescent wrenches are supposed to be good at. The person with a crescent wrench MUST use the wrench because their core programming requires it as an expression of being.

Do we have any choice how we are born morphologically speaking? Not at this time. So it makes sense to avoid assumptions about someone's character based on their morphology. This also means that people who are born with penises can be as unenlightened and misinformed about people without them about the other.




3-1-06 Critical Theory B
Notes from class discussion of Spatial Stories

The distinction between place and space is interesting in another way.
There are people who might suggest that one "know their place" which is a figure of speech in opposition to the definition of place as a fixed location. Nobody ever says "know your space".

Parse the journal in clumps named, reading notes, class notes etc, make coherent.

First draft of the research paper is due on April 5th.

I need to work out my research project via email with SE.

Notes from class 3-1-06

Journal is due again next week (week 7)

Re: Travel Narrative of Mary Louise Pratt and Postcards..

The veil works to the advantage of the person wearing it. Photographers were freaked out about it. The veil thwarted the male gaze and despite assumptions of the west ALSO empowers in a way. It is interesting that the eastern culture seems aware of the intrusive character of the male gaze. Men aware of the ramifications of the male gaze associated with desire long before Western discourse.

Here's my question for the class regarding the Imperial Leather reading:

Mumby's prurience is not surprising at all (given that we live in San Francisco and all sexual expression is ok) What is surprising is his comprehensive expression of desire.

Based on the reading we can be somewhat sure of Mumby's intent. What is the intent of the person writing about his prurience? How is a detailed treatment of Mumby's particular expression of sexuality useful?

Freud's conscious, unconscious
Dreamwork Metaphor and Metonomy two forms of displacement Lacan says your unconscious has a language. Psychoanalytic theory is a tool.

Freud left open stories for people to go back and re-read.

Borders of gender and sexuality as travel narrative.

"Naturalization" of traits as rationalization for social piegonholing morays.

Denial - how can people block out violence and historical wrongdoing? Nostalgia is a form of denial.

Fetish - theory tries to describe a dynamic. Derived from African fetish objects. Marx and Freud borrowed the term. Marx = commodity fetish

Freud = protection from the fear of castration, hiding Fetish economy and theater crossing borders of gender and sexuality. This economy denaturalizes these tropes. Because it is private it doesn't effect the larger picture. S and M appears as a symptom of cultural anxiety.

This is the moment when private and public space came into being. The Mall is contested space.

bell hooks = looking back

response to Feb 10 Tutorial

Meeting with SE and SG on the subject of strategic documentation and conceptual representation of my career to date in the interest of sharpening message, boradening appeal and obtaining public exhibitions in museums internationally.

How does one pursuasively represent the career of someone whose art is so varied and oftentimes arcane that it defies definition as a work of art? Not a new question of course, but like the question "which museums do you see yourself exhibiting in...." it IS new for me to think about it in these terms and to realize again that the how and where questions are connected.

The purpose of the meeting was to get started on a brainstorm session on how to upgrade my exibition prospects, and create a conceptual construct that provides relevant tools to help this process. We began the discussion looking at the portfolio I used to gain entry to SFAI and discussion about a redefinition of my practice as it is presently. and on the way establishing rational for why my research is revelant to a museum format (if it is at all).

Throughout the discussio SG and SE acted as sounding board and identified key words like honor, shamam, invoke, conjour, polymath and charlatan which are ironically mutually exclusive.

While I am attracted to some of the more antiestablishment aesthetics of "the charlatan" architype, I don't think it is a perfect fit because the negarive connotations are too offputting. However romantic the notion of the 18th century snake oil salesman might be, it's hard trust the rogue.

Do I appear this way to people? If so, I am WAY off message. (there's always the pulpit I suppose, or Maoist revolutiona...)
Thomas Paine was a great promoter, and critical to the American revolution, but was never to earn the respect and benefits in the new government he helped realize. Was this because he, himself was limited in potential, or was it simply his aspirations that were limited?

While discussing terms like honor, we might have easily substituted the word ethical most of the time. Charlatan doesn't jibe with ethical, which is certaily an overiding requirement for a useful construct.

Synonyms for charlatin include crank, quack, grifter, confidence man, swindler...certainly not the best of light to cast onself in which leads me to the other (and opposite) word:

Polymath. Here is a word that fits better (and feels better) but is of course forbidden to be used as a self description....While it is a compliment to be called a polymath, it is a little odd to call yourself one. " A person of great or varied learning"

Polymath suggests a prodigious ability, but doesn't necessarily infer great insight, and wisdom. Knowing things, understanding things, and being conversant with them conceptually are all different levels of awareness. Lots of people have knowledge, fewer still possess comprehension, and even fewer have the perspective to actively participate in their own story. Polyartist is better, but stale, and also rings a little vain as a self description.

I can appreciate the "subversion of language" strategy of "charlatan" and the pretense of "polymath" but a viable construct might have more than two causal influences and I think the construct (in terms of a strategic definition) needs elements of charlatan, polymath complimented by an affirming humanity, intellectual generosity, ethical courage, cleverness and ingenuity. Folly is ok too because it relates to the folly in us all.

I like (and have been employing) the humorous irony of Don Quixote as a metaphor for the human condition, and a rich symbolic cosmology that allows for human imperfection. Was Don Quixote aware of his own folly? I certainly am... but I suppose I don't need to emphasize this to my audience.

Nobody trusts a charalatan.

In context of the art spectacle it is a good idea to use drama and surprise as a technique, however a charlatan goes further and deliberately misleads for selfish profit, even condescension. A dark showman indeed, a character bound by the shackles of a petty profit and prurient gratification. Way too cynical a construct ...

1=1

Dystopia is not a foregone conclusion in my cosmology.

The western cannon is packed to the rafters with dystopian narratives about the gritty side of being human. Writer and reader in a psychotic feedback loop of prurient indulgence, the sociological eqivalent of rubberneckinig a hideous accident on the freeway. As a creative person I feel an obligation to do my small part to reverse the trend of dystopic overemphasis on the desperation of the human condition in the art works I produce and I always aim to be aware of, and responsible for their effect on the viewer.

The sky is not falling.

---------
Note to SG and SE: Please feel free to make use of the comment function on this blog if it suits you.

Critical Studies week 3-4

Critical Studies Journal
[weeeks 3-4]
On Roland Barthes' The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies:

RB, ever the urbane travel writer discusses what must be his all-time favorite subject: Paris.
The discussion is couched in a sweetly flavoured travel prose about the curious object/subject condition of the Eiffel Tower.

Reading this article was like sitting next to RB on the bus headed for an entertaining table and a number of bottles of respectable wine at a local cafe. If there is anything RB knows about it is Paris, The Eiffel Tower and Mythologies, having written a book by the title.

RB's Eiffel Tower article could easily have fit into "Mythologies" and I am impressed at how RB doesn't seem to fall into the same "moments of incoherence" as some of the other writers I (we) have been encouraged to get acquainted with lately. While RB does pry open our awareness of a subject and discuss it's semiotic dimensions he does so very smoothly, and even when he delves deeply, following a thread to a mere wisp, he safely deposits you back to a familiar bus stop.

RB rationalizes that Paris has become "nature" as observed from a high place. This "empty" monument to modernity functions as a provider of a natural vistas like the side of a mountain would to a valley below. The tower is a real force of semiotic nature to RB and like a mountain an imutable and ubiquitous sight on the Parisian landscape.

Critial Studies Week 1-2

Critical Studies Journal

[weeks 1-2]

The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art

First of all I really love Vermeer, despite what the artless heathen Hockney has to say about it. I could give a crap what the master used to create the work, if Dali says Vermeer is the best painter, that is enough for me. Also engaging is the continuious return to more and more detail about the Vermeer painting "The Art of Painting".

From a knowledge point of view I appreciate being enlightened about entymoloogy. Thus the origins of words important to me like picture (pictura, schilderij) and graphis (graphikos) are very interesting to my and will likely be of use in the future.

Also of interest to me are Hooke, Huygens, Newton and all the progenitors of modern scientific research. This interest began while reading Neal Stephenson's sweeping novel Quicksilver which is a work of the most amazing historical fiction taking place around the time of the great fire of London.

However it worries me that Prof. S.E refered to Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" as full of great ideas but that he is not a very good writer. This is patently untrue in my opinion. It all depends upon what you consider good. (like everything) Could this be a kind of intellectual chauvinism? I am accustomed to "literary types" disparaging speculative fiction out of hand, but this is a little different. Guilty pleasure perhaps? Statements like this make me wonder what actually the professor considers "good" writing. (and can students measure up?)

Cervantes possibly, the obfuscator Joyce? Certainly not Svetlana Alpers, our first assignment from the reader. I would counter that "The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art" is so dreadfully dry and pedantic that it bordered on boring. If not for the inclusion of Vermeer, I would never have bothered to read it further after the first five pages. This is writing without passion, without any handle to criticize,(neutral) without any flair or contemporary context, written for the few.

What is good writing? Does good writing emerge from academia? From the legions of Iowa MFA grads who pump out the sad fiction that dwells on the same sordid events of the human condition with a perverse fascination? What is required to make "good" writing? In my opinion Svetlana Alpers would NEVER have an audience past a few academics if it was not required reading in this and other courses. Neal Stephenson's ideas (and riveting prose) are enjoyed by literally millions of people all over the world.

In my cosmos, someone who writes in simple prose understandable to most readers WHILE putting out amazing ideas is as good as it gets. The author not only gets the word out, but inspires and expands the minds of the reader. Svetlana Alpers inspired me only to fight off the wall of sleep. Her observations are too finely grained and obscure to be useful, and too dry to be entertaining. What purpose could this serve other than academic prurience, and surely the same material could be presented better?

Regarding "The World as Foreign Land"

This chapter was much more to my liking, but fraught with vagaries (I have notes on specific citations), incongruencies and outright bias. Passion!

I love it, even if it does deliberately attempt offence to half the readers by villifying the masculine personal pronoun in favor of the feminine. This is oldschool, and what exactly IS the purpose of this strategy? I suppose the writer has to be forgive for being oldschool because the article was in fact written in 1991, and we all know that was a different time.

Also... who is this writer anyway? On nearly every page there are vague statements and out of context quotes. If this writer was a student in ANY class I have ever been in that required writing, they would be hammered to pieces by the instructor. Their pages would literally bleed with red ink! I have learned enough in my writing classes to know this. Definitely third string compared to the writers of my last semester: (Barthe, Butler, Foucault, Harraway etc.)

And another thing....While many were studying Western primary sources, I was studying the Sufis. Does this writer think that there would be nobody reading the chapter that would recognize Idres Shah? Having read many of his books, I can tell you that the quotes the writer uses seem quite out of context with the sprit and intent of Sufism, and fail to substantiate the ideas or the writer. This incongruency bothers me because I think Indres Shah presents significant spiritual memes to the world and I am shocked to witness knowledge abusing wisdom being hawked as understanding.

I could go on, but I know the reader has other things to do do than to indulge my rant.

My only concern in keeping "critical theory" log is that I might be misunderstood, and that my intellectual exercises could be taken in a negative way. A journal by it's nature is a candid thing. I reserver the right to go back and edit what I put publish, one of the many advantages of the medium. Ideas can have real life in blogosphere, they can evolve.

Cheers!


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