This mess has been festering for some time.
According to a NYTimes.com article this morning, the formal description of the relationship between Cristoph Büchel and Mass MoCA partaining to Büchel's installation Training Ground for Democracy consists of a single letter and some emails.
According to Büchel, Mass MoCA has been whittling away at his original concept and has spent too much on some components of the installation. He finally withdrew permission to open the show.
Mass MoCA, meanwhile, contends that it has spent enough on the installation to justify opening it.
The current standoff has the show opening, but its components covered in tarps.
I think that if Büchel had a final document drawn up describing his installation in detail, and had gotten Mass MoCA to sign off on it, I'd be able to go up to North Adams right now and see a pretty cool installation.
Last year an artist who exhibited in a major gallery in Chelsea told me that he had no formal arrangement with them, no contract, at all. A highly regarded art blogger who also participated in the conversation agreed that a lot of business is now done this way.
I've used contracts for a variety of purposes over the past twenty years, and they've never let me down. I think it's kind of nuts if artists, galleries and museums have gotten into the habit of bypassing this useful, if annoying, piece of administrative dreck.
Can I have an amen, somebody?
5/22/2007
Christoph Büchel, Mass MoCA
and The Contract
5/20/2007
Why I Might Just Forgive Al Gore
for Not Winning with a Wider Margin
and Why You Might, Too
There was a time perhaps only a few months ago when I'd have made a post like this with the intention of identifying a social need artists can fill. I badly wanted art to be relevant. I wanted people who never gave a damn about it to realize what it could do for them.
But I've become sick of art filling social needs. I don't think that's helped us much historically, I don't think it's helped society much after, say, the mid or late 1980's, and with regard to the needs of the art historical narrative, well, that hasn't taken food in decades -- not that someone doesn't wave a loaded spoon in front of its nose now and again to see if it twitches.
I'm thinking of art now as a self-justified phenomenon.
I realize this isn't terribly original -- after all, what is? -- but it has a hook in me right now.
I especially like its simplicity. It's one of those situations where I think I've been living this way for some time and I've only recently been able to notice and verbalize it.
I wrote this last night while working on the 4,861st draft of my artist's statement:
Your existence is perfect justification.If you're used to thinking of yourself in terms of the benefit your existence brings to others -- hey Midwesterners out there, you know what I'm talkin' 'bout -- then try these shoes on, just for laughs.
Everything outside you that you didn’t create is someone else’s direct or indirect attempt to exert power over you.
Your purest effort is the subversion of others’ power objects to your own purposes.
It's like taking off someone else's pair of stiff old clodhoppers cocooned in mud and strapping on a pair of Nikes.
Most people think of Al Gore as a Southerner, since as a senator he represented Tennessee. I always thought of Tennessee as a Midwestern state, even though it lies below the Mason-Dixon line. I've known a few Tennesseans and felt an affinity with them. Maybe in the accents of my Kentucky-Illinois ancestors there was a hint of Nashville.
Incidentally, I do a fantastic Al Gore impersonation. Call me today (Sunday 4/20/07) if you want to hear it. It will crack you up.
One of the reasons Gore didn't win strongly enough in 2000 was that he was too independent. He didn't use Clinton to his advantage. He came off as arrogant in the debates (but c'mon, people, who couldn't feel superior standing next to Georgie Boy Bush?), which I think was a reflection of his true attitude toward what he was trying to do: Al knows best and no one can tell him otherwise.
But from his latest work I get the impression of a somewhat humbled human being. The corners are knocked back a bit. There's still some arrogance, but it seems tempered.
I'm fairly confident his film An Inconvenient Truth will be redeemed by history as a loud and clear warning that was ignored to everyone's hurt.
Interesting to note how this contrasts with the Bush administration's incessant appeal to history's ultimate redemption of America's Iraq debacle, which, tragically, is not forthcoming.
Time Magazine's excerpt from Al Gore's latest book The Assault on Reason reveals a serious threat to another kind of ecology: the American ecology of ideas.
The threat Gore writes about isn't news; I could have written some of this, and if you saw the movie Idiocracy you have some idea of the issues he's addressing. But his coverage is thorough and extends these concerns further than I'd previously considered them, even though this is just a sliver of the entire book.
Some slivers of the sliver:
It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.
At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess—an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole.
While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness. For example, hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake. Yet, incredibly, all of the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right decision were available at the time and in hindsight are glaringly obvious.
Those of us who have served in the U.S. Senate and watched it change over time could volunteer a response to Senator Byrd's incisive description of the Senate prior to the invasion: The chamber was empty because the Senators were somewhere else. Many of them were at fund-raising events they now feel compelled to attend almost constantly in order to collect money—much of it from special interests—to buy 30-second TV commercials for their next re-election campaign. The Senate was silent because Senators don't feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much anymore—not to the other Senators, who are almost never present when their colleagues speak, and certainly not to the voters, because the news media seldom report on Senate speeches anymore.
...
The "well-informed citizenry" is in danger of becoming the "well-amused audience." <--We're seeing Al's Midwestern politeness here. This is already a fact.
...
In practice, what television's dominance has come to mean is that the inherent value of political propositions put forward by candidates is now largely irrelevant compared with the image-based ad campaigns they use to shape the perceptions of voters. The high cost of these commercials has radically increased the role of money in politics—and the influence of those who contribute it. That is why campaign finance reform, however well drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the dominant means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue in one way or another to dominate American politics. And as a result, ideas will continue to play a diminished role.
...
...McLuhan was almost alone in recognizing that the passivity associated with watching television is at the expense of activity in parts of the brain associated with abstract thought, logic, and the reasoning process. Any new dominant communications medium leads to a new information ecology in society that inevitably changes the way ideas, feelings, wealth, power and influence are distributed and the way collective decisions are made.
...
Voters are often viewed mainly as targets for easy manipulation by those seeking their "consent" to exercise power. By using focus groups and elaborate polling techniques, those who design these messages are able to derive the only information they're interested in receiving from citizens—feedback useful in fine-tuning their efforts at manipulation. Over time, the lack of authenticity becomes obvious and takes its toll in the form of cynicism and alienation. And the more Americans disconnect from the democratic process, the less legitimate it becomes.
Many young Americans now seem to feel that the jury is out on whether American democracy actually works or not. We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in—with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources—is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems.
Unfortunately, the legacy of the 20th century's ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a new cynicism about reason itself—because reason was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations. When people don't have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity of what they're being "taught" in the light of their own experience and robust, shared dialogue, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the experts know best.
So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.
Big Al goes on to talk about how the Internet can restore thinking and public involvement in political discourse, but only so long as it remains free.
Like me, Gore apparently foresees a time when our exalted leaders will determine that an unrestrained Internet is too great a threat to the public welfare. After all, don't terrorists >GASP!< use the Internet to communicate and to learn how to make OMBS-BAY (Pig-Latin employed to throw off FBI blog-sniffers)?
But it's only in your best interests, right?
But back to Gore's book --
As Barbara Kruger noted, "Abuse of power comes as no surprise." Gore points out in The Assault on Reason and in An Inconvenient Truth that American are being manipulated more than ever before, largely through the old Boob Tube.
If all the money being spent to sell Americans on the lie that global warming is farcical was being spent to sell Americans on the truth, not only would we very likely get a handle on it, as we did when aerosols threated the ozone layer during the 1980's, but we would very likely do so in a way that helps the economy.
Corporations spend so much to propagate lies because they fear change at the smallest increment of corporate existence -- the careers of the people currently in power.
So when the parents of everyone living in New York have to use rowboats to leave their third-floor condominiums in Miami, remember that it's happening for no greater good than the aggrandizement of a handful of guys working in fiftieth-floor offices.
Gore thinks the Internet can repair the damage done to America's ecology of ideas. I think the repair needs to begin at a deeper level, with the decision by every American to exercise a profound and tenaciously critical attitude toward all incoming messages.
I think this requires a reduction or elimination of some kinds of entertainment, because they're crammed full of messages; we're swamped with them. Entertainment is being used to confuse us, which makes it a kind of poison.
Turn off the entertainment and face the emptiness of life.
Pick up a book.
Go out alone when the sun is out, try to quiet your thoughts, and begin to pick up on the small details around you that you usually overlook: the texture of stonework, the things growing between bricks, color relationships of random trash on the ground.
Don't be a sheep. Break the hold others have on your mind and think for yourself. You don't need anyone else's approval.
Your existence is self-justified. Sphere: Related Content
5/11/2007
11 Republicans Berate Bush about Iraq?
I Smell a Turd Blossom.
Think Progress exposes the fact that all eleven Republicans who supposedly beat Bush about the face and neck over Iraq voted against withdrawal and against bills that would have held the administration accountable.
So it looks as though in spite of this story that they disagree with the president, maybe they're up with the Iraqi president's new "we might need American soldiers for another year or two" estimate.
Look at the timing: Bush wants to get his budget passed quickly. He wants to appear as though the "limits to our patience about Iraq" message is being sent to him, as though he's getting it, somehow.
He needs the Democratic Congress to believe that there are some sorts of time limits being observed, without actually saying so.
This story gives him all that, and it costs him nothing.
Don't know about you, but I smell a Turd Blossom.
Sphere: Related Content
5/06/2007
Philip K. Dick
When you nose into your work for days at a throw you can feel your grip on reality slipping.
You become aware of the upholstery of time and of the physical universe. Things that normally seem immutable suddenly have a little give.
Philip K. Dick is the prophet of this zone. For a 30,000-foot flyover of his career, check out this article in the NYTimes.com Review of Books about Philip K. Dick.
Then read The Man in the High Castle.
5/05/2007
Cargo Culture
Time out from insane studio bizziosity for this tiny feat of mental gymnastics:
Cargo Cults
1.
Indigenous tribal populations of Pacific islands observe white invader construction and operation of an air strip, quonset huts and small control tower facility.
They see the white man through the windows wearing big round things on his ears and speaking into a silver stick, they watch the giant winged gray beast swoop down from the sky to disgorge crates filled with magnificent gifts from the sky gods.
These gifts belong to them, the islanders realize, but these white devils have managed to intercept them using their strange methods.
Finally the white invaders leave.
The islanders are mystified that the giant winged gray beasts have stopped visiting. They finally come to the logical conclusion that they must prove their worthiness to receive gifts from the gods in the same way the white invaders did.
The islanders use their own local technologies to construct their understanding of an air strip, their impression of quonset huts, and their take on a control tower facility inside of which one of them stations himself, wears coconut halves on his ears and speaks words into a stick.
No gray beasts appear, even after days and days of reenactment of the white devil's ritual. But the islanders dedicate themselves to their reenactment, believing that ultimately the gods must recognize and reward their efforts.
They saw it work for others. Performing the same rituals absolutely must work for them -- eventually. The rituals are continued religiously, through generations.
2.
Now imagine that the Allied military of World War 2 is the embodiment of the Western art historical narrative.
Recall that this narrative has ceased, much like the world view of 1940's Americans.
Imagine that, outside this narrative, artists inhabit tiny islands scattered across a seemingly infinite ocean. We have no means of unifying; each of us is a culture to ourselves. In spite of blogs and friendships, in one true sense we never truly see one another, although occasionally the glittering objects on my island reflect bright flares of sunlight that leave you wondering over on your distant island.
3.
Invaders from the art historical narrative visit your island. Finding you friendly, they build a small air strip, they call in planes loaded with cargo, and they use your island to acquire goods of various sorts.
You watch and wonder, knowing that, since this is your island, those goods will eventually make it to you. Some, in fact, roll downhill to your studio: a bottle of shampoo, a delicious deep-frozen chicken, crates of paper with strange writing. You are delighted and inspired by these tricklings, which seem to energize your work.
But the invaders leave just as mysteriously as they once appeared, taking their goods with them.
It's not long before, in spite of yourself, you miss the trickle of tiny presents. You walk uphill to find the invader's facilities abandoned. Not one of their gifts remains.
You return to your studio and continue working, but a sullen mood has set in and it's difficult to shake. You wait day after day, week after week for the generous invaders to return, but they seem determined now to stay away.
Laying awake at night in the moonlight, you think about what you might have done to bring the strange invaders and their gifts in the first place. You wonder if perhaps doing the same things will bring them back again.
Your own eternal ritual begins. Years go by. Decades pass. Nothing changes.
4.
Imagine that all sides and aspects of the entire art market apparatus and infrastructure, including the desire of artists to gain societal recognition for their work, is a holdover from the art historical narrative era, and that it remains essentially unchanged from the 1940s.
Imagine that you no longer give a flying focaccia who knows or believes anything about anything.
Imagine that conjuring up forms reminiscent of the art historical narrative, with no apparent understanding or deference to -- and perhaps even mocking -- context and meaning, is a fun game, a trick to continually play upon yourself and an affront to the world of the invaders.
Imagine that, in the end, it's really all about keeping yourself amused.
5/01/2007
George Tenet Continues His Life
as a Bush Administration Stooge in
At the Center of the Storm
Far from being a salvo directed at the Bush administration, George Tenet's book "At the Center of the Storm" appears to me to be yet another attempt to direct America's attention away from criticism of the Bush administration.
As proof, note that the book provides no criticism for George W. Bush. Instead, Tenet's criticism is heaped upon those who have been targets for years now, and the criticism he offers has already been offered by others in abundance.
If Tenet truly intended to discredit the Bush administration in this book, he would undoubtedly have given up his Medal of Freedom, which would at that point have had no value to him.
The highly public returning of this medal would have resulted in a sales coup for his book. It's the kind of thing that a big publisher like Harper-Collins dreams of. Yet on Larry King Live we saw George Tenet adamantly insisting that he will retain the medal, as if the president who awarded it to him were entirely and knowledgeably justified in doing so.
Further, an abundance of news bites and interviews in broadcast, Internet and print has propagated the essential message of George Tenet's book to the point that no American needs to read it to feel its effects.
The result is this: Americans see and hear that an administration insider is finally giving major administration members their long-deserved flogging. We feel that sense of final justice that signals the end of Act Three.
And with that, America moves on.
Although pundits and politicians may continue to rail, Americans are for the moment pacified and their attentions are drawn elsewhere. Congressional Democrats, whose mandate is entirely reliant upon putting constant heat on the Bush Administration, ultimately find less support at home and in Congress for their ongoing War on Bush.
This could well be Karl Rove's master stroke.
