Innocents Killed by Police on the Front Lines of the Drug War

Click here to access a map and list of botched police raids, published by the CATO Institute.

Use the search function below the map to select raids that resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians.

Get your mind blown.

Then come back here and tell me that somehow it's worth it. Tell me that we're getting sufficient payback for this incredible and ongoing sacrifice of innocent blood.

Convince me as best you can that regular American citizens extract an irreplaceable benefit from our decades-long War on Drugs.

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This Time Boston Police Managed Not to Wet Themselves

Remember the Mooninite LED sign promotional gimmick that temporarily shut down Boston tunnels and bridges, because the police thought they were bombs? You may recall that the authorities mistook a row of 9-volt batteries seen in the x-ray images for plastic explosive.

On the anniversary this rather brilliant guerrilla ad campaign, a group of Boston artists duplicated the stunt. This time around the subject matter was more accessible: Osama Bin Laden, Bush, Jesus -- characters well beyond the imaginations of most cartoonists. And, wouldn't you know it? No panic. Hardly a blip, in fact.

Looks like Beantown's finest are faster learners than the Bush administration, not to mention most of the current crop of GOP presidential candidates.

Check out the details over at Makezine's blog, which tipped me off with a terrific article and images, including this apparition of LED Jesus.

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Connecticut State Supreme Court Joins Newtown in Rejecting the Pleas of the Dwindling Cambodian Buddhist Community

Among the list of six reasons Newtown gave in originally rejecting the application of the Cambodian Buddhist Society of Connecticut to build a temple on 10 acres they own in Newtown was this gem:

...the Asian architecture would have a negative impact on property values and was not in harmony with the area's traditional New England architecture.

In other words, "You're not WASPy enough to have a church here."

Their application was rejected, not because of this ridiculously bigoted objection, but because Superior Court Judge Deborah Kochiss Frankel determined that the Cambodian Buddhist Society should have already invested time and money to obtain septic permits for a project for which they did not yet have approval from the state.

In other words the State Supreme Court said, "We agree that you shouldn't be allowed to build in Newtown because you didn't get the permits that you would ordinarily not get until we approve that you can build there."

Let Newtown keep its plain vanilla WASP-ness, Cambodian Buddhist Society! If they want to deny their kids and their culture the richness that you bring, shake the dust off your saffron robes and scoot along over here to Canton. My house almost kinda-sorta looks like a Buddhist temple already. I could show you a property that desperately needs to be purchased and made-over, and while it wouldn't hold 400 people, it might hold a good 100 or so, with some effort.

Now that I think of it, there's also a former llama farm nearby that would offer lots of space and seclusion. Might be the very thing. It even has a pond...

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TODAY, Sunday 4pm - CANDLELIGHT VIGIL-PADLOCKING OF THE ARTISTS' COMMUNITY AT 475 KENT

This just in from Smack Mellon, on the closing of 475 Kent -- details at Winkleman's -- if you're in the area, show your support.

TODAY, Sunday 4pm - CANDLELIGHT VIGIL-PADLOCKING OF THE ARTISTS' COMMUNITY AT 475 KENT

DO NOT POST ON THE 475Kent.com WEBSITE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE!!!!!
OBSERVANCE OF THE PADLOCKING OF THE ARTISTS' COMMUNITY AT 475 KENT & PRESS CONFERENCE

At 4:00pm Sunday, January 27, 2008 the doors of 475 Kent Avenue will be padlocked. Please join us for a solemn observance of the shuttering of a great arts community.
Come and show your support for the 200+ displaced tenants of 475 and the live/work community as a whole.

There will be Press Conference at 4:30pm

This is not a protest. It is a witness. Bring cameras. Bring Candles.
It is a peaceful demonstration of solidarity and proof that the world is watching the City of New York's attitude towards its creative citizens.

THIS NOT A PROTEST THIS IS A CANDLELIGHT VIGIL

Where:
475 Kent Avenue (corner S.11th Street)
South Williamsburg
Brooklyn, NY 11211

Please do NOT congregate at the front door. Gather across the street.

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Sarah Brightman Dances Into Philip Straub's Painting Nightmist

Big ups to my friend, illustrator Philip Straub, on this superb association, as well as on his upcoming book, Utherworlds. It's awesome to see this guy's star ascend. He's a class act all the way.

Find more lush, amazing artwork on Phil's website.

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Museum Administrators and Staff --Common Thieves?

As if the good people who keep art museums humming didn't have enough on their plates -- handling endowments and donations, managing the gift shop, leasing space to wealthy corporations, ensuring the decency of docents -- they're now forced to deal with the iron grip of John Q. Law's mighty and somewhat capricious hand.

This from today's NYTimes.com:

Affidavits related to search warrants executed at four Southern California museums on Thursday say that staff members at two of the four museums worked closely with the main targets of the investigation, visiting a storage locker maintained by a smuggler of stolen antiquities and meeting with the sellers of stolen goods — even while acknowledging that the artifacts headed for the museums might be tainted.

We're talking about the keepers of the canon here, people, the high priests of our cultural temples, the grand poo-bahs of humanity's heritage, meeting with common crooks in order to keep the larders loaded and the rotund rubes rolling through their gates. To what Mariana Trench-like depths have our most cherished arts institutions sunken, and, most important of all, how can I make this work for me?

Worse still, and as you might guess, museum staff make absolutely terrible criminals.

All the activity is said to have taken place even after the emergence of high-profile investigations into the sale and acquisition of stolen artifacts to museums around the world, including the J. Paul Getty Museum here. The picture painted in the warrants suggests that none of this deterred the participants in the transactions, which were the subject of a five-year undercover investigation by federal investigators before being made public this week.

Did you get that? FIVE YEARS the feds followed these dotards around, scooping up evidence, tapping their phone calls, leaving cigarette butts and coffee cups on their doorsteps, and the museum people missed it. They didn't even try to lay low after someone dropped dime on the Getty. It's pretty funny to think of them blasting "Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangster" on the drive over to Sticky McFingers' U-Store-It space in sag-busting khakis, blunts alight and shouting witty thugspeak repartee peppered with art history jargon over the banging bass-line, thinking their getaway is guaranteed.

Wonder how a pair of cuffs looks over a TAG Heuer.

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John Morris: Paintings on Panel at Damelio Terras

Looks like a fascinating group of works from earlier in the 2000's, which are being shown now for the first time. I'm particularly interested in John's use of wax. If I understand the web shots, it looks as though it's been drawn out into lines, but I could be wrong. Check the press release, also blogs of visits by Roberta and Libby and Brent Burket.

I'll definitely be checking this work out in the next week or two. The show closes February 9.

Image from Damelio Terras' website.

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SELLOUT: Deborah Fisher on Artists and Money

Here's Deborah's description of her latest online nexus:
SELLOUT is a dialogue about every single practical aspect of
being a visual artist. It is more than a professional advice aggregator
and hot-tip provider. We want any information we provide to be fleshed
out as anecdote or called out as bullshit. We depend on your insight,
and welcome your ideas, comments and emails.
A much-needed, long-overdue resource.
Thanks, Deborah!

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Aviva Stone1948 - 2007

I just received word that Aviva Stone passed away. I was among those privileged to draw her at Pratt Institute during the late 1980's. She was a planetary exploration, always charming and proud even when she came in covered head to toe in hives. Her posing range was somewhat limited by her weight, but she made up for it with frequent banter, almost befriending some of the art students, it seemed.

According to Chantel Foretich's email,

The Art Lab, located at Snug Harbor Cultural Center
on Staten Island, hasmounted the Aviva Stone Memorial
Exhibition from Jan 5-27.  The exhibition consists of
over 30 works, mostly from Staten Island and New York
City artists.

There is a reception on Sunday Jan 13, from 2 to 4 pm,
with a Memorial Gathering from 3-5 pm.

You can find drawings and video of Aviva at this website.

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I-Be Area, a Feature-Length Narrative Video by Ryan Trecartin

Sometimes it seems to me that art video gets a free pass. Maybe there's something about surreal film that's easily mistaken for depth or richness. At times it can be so strong -- Bill Viola's super-slow-mo swimmers come to mind, works of operatic virtuosity -- while at other times, poor craft is rescued by humor or by compelling concept, such as the video at Betty Cuningham's a while back, two women in LA, one wears a Viking helmet and schleps around a jelly donut -- remember?

Ryan Trecartin's I-Be Area (this clip's rated R, kids -- go play WoW) is different for a number of reasons. First, unlike much art video that I've seen, Ryan's shows an embrace of contemporary entertainment culture. I note influences from YouTube, MySpace, MTV's Real Life and even Cirque du Soleil. Its structure lies, apparently, within the realm of popular cinema, even if its editing and some scene compositions are more art-film-ish. It's still surreal, to be sure, but that comes more from gaudy decor and costumes than from anything else, at least as far as this brief clip is concerned. And, as with its art film antecedents, the acting runs from adequate to terrible.

Holland Cotter's article in today's NYTimes.com article Video Art Thinks Big: That’s Showbiz, discusses some important recent developments in art video through his observations on I-Be Area. Here's a snippet:

Art video still has a funny reputation, left over from the 1960s, of being a serious medium, made for function rather than pleasure, as opposed to film. Yet “I-Be Area” was pleasure all the way. It was nonstop visual razzle-dazzle. It drew on every cheap-thrill trick in the digital graphics playbook.

More radically, it was the length of a feature film. More radically still, it told a story, one with dozens of characters and multiple subplots, which is what entertainment, not art, is supposed to do, if you assume there’s a hard and fast difference between the two.

Mr. Trecartin, apparently, does not assume this. He is not alone.

During the past decade, how many distinctions have blurred or dissolved entirely? It's almost a culture-wide homogenization, and perhaps that's one aspect of our time that will make it into the narrative by which we are remembered. Note the dissolution of boundaries between news and entertainment, fact and fiction, government and faith, science and faith, the electronic effacing of boundaries of distance and nationality, Starbuck's in Miami, Bangalore, Shanghai and Fiji.

Note the growing number of artists who describe themselves as artists, rather than painters, sculptors, printmakers, filmmakers.

It's exhilarating, this boundary-less-ness, wouldn't you say? I'm reminded of walking flat, open fields just as big, fat snowflakes filled the air, making visible the vast open volume of space surrounding me. My instinct was to hurl myself into it, almost as if somehow I could inhabit all of it. As if that was my natural state.

I'll have to see the rest of I-Be Area, but I'm very intrigued by the clip. Trecartin most definitely seems to be on to something.

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Establishmentarians, Fundamentalists,and the New Narrative

I don't think it's too great a stretch to suggest that everyone wants equilibrium. Without a sense of stability, a gut-level assurance that one is roughly at the center of extremes in one's world, life must be constant tension. Don't even daredevils need long stretches of calm to balance out their moments of extreme tension? Don't soldiers, having spent too long in harm's way without relief, suffer greatly for years afterward?

Along with equilibrium, I think everyone also desires a sense of progress. Everyone wants to feel like they're headed toward some sort of perfection. This year I want my work to be stronger, clearer, more sophisticated than last year. I want to sell more paintings, visit more places, meet more people, get involved more in things that matter to me.

Within the incredible diversity seen in contemporary visual arts I've begun pairing off opposite sides of the compass, considering potential underlying impulses and attempting, anyway, to track these same impulses throughout history.

For example I see ultimate kinds of refinement in minimalist-inspired art, and the complete opposite, a kind of Neo-Baroque, in various forms, both abstract and representational and various admixtures of the two. For me this particular pairing calls to mind the much older opposites of Calvinist simplicity and Catholic pageantry, and the complex cultural issues underlying them. Each characteristic is reflected in the macro and micro scale, in the popular and 'fine' arts, as well as in decidedly non-art spheres.

In a different pairing that interests me still more I see tendencies toward intellectualism and its opposite, or perhaps its near-opposite, a kind of emotionalism. Some art proceeds primarily from intellectual device, after all, while some proceeds primarily from intuition. Both may be highly informed in a variety of ways -- classically educated, culturally savvy, and so forth. Both rely on a fundamental experience, one of the brain and the other of the heart. Each may call the power of its opposite, although usually at a secondary level.

One might describe the experience of each as moving, although I believe they would be describing two altogether different experiences.

Religion is like this, is it not?

The more ancient systems posit hierarchical structures inhabited by the faithful. The adherents' places within these structures are assured by means of liturgy, sacrament and other prescribed practices. One need never have a personal experience in order to ascend the lofty towers of holiness; one need only learn and adhere to rules set out centuries prior. And the faithful do find authentic fulfillment within such structures.

At the extreme opposite are the fundamentalists, who invoke the importance of personal experience above all else, and who dream of bringing down the ancient hierarchies, sometimes as a means of restoring a golden age which may have no existence in historical fact.

The excitement of fundamentalism is twofold. It brings the thrill of a personal experience that transcends and even threatens the ordinary, and it carries with it the sense of imminent progression toward a utopian goal. Christian fundamentalism -- the easiest example for me to consider -- carries the thrill of experiencing an indwelling, miracle-performing deity, and holds Heaven as the long-run goal, with a Rapture, in which believers are bodily taken up into Heaven, as a short-term goal that, so the story goes, can literally happen at any moment.

Within the wide spectrum of flavors offered by Buddhism I see reflections of the same tendencies displayed in the Calvinist /Catholic disparity noted earlier, with perhaps more notable intermingling. Tibetan Buddhism is filled with deities, ritual, pageantry, liturgy, books upon books of scripture, and an ascent for the faithful that, interestingly enough, is intertwined with aspects of personal experience. Zen Buddhism, to my understanding, is a stripped-down version that focuses on the one ritual, if it can even be called that, of meditation, with the ultimate goal of a satori that may lie a single breath away. Establishmentarian and fundamentalist tendencies are seen in both Tibetan and Zen buddhism, but to radically different degrees, with Zen appearing as the more fundamental of the two.

The strength of fundamentalism is that it can bring a powerful sense of moment-to-moment relevance to mythologies that can so often seem distant and unearthly, and for which so many faiths expend inordinate energy writing excuses. But the fundamentalist emphasis on the miraculous and on utopian goals sometimes implies the deferment of responsibility, and, in my estimation, can confound healthy skepticism.

Some of the contemporary art I see in galleries corresponds to the ancient religious systems, in the sense that its intended experience is reliant upon a place within an established narrative, or on sometimes dense philosophical or historical underpinnings. If you have any doubt as to which these might be, you might simply ask people to describe the appeal of a piece of art they're lingering near, and listen for answers centering on historical or philosophical issues. Context is obviously important; some responses would be more prevalent in a museum than in a contemporary art gallery, and vice-versa. Obviously the interviewee's education, or lack thereof, would play a strong part in their response.

It’s been very encouraging for me to find a great deal of contemporary art that seems to proceed from an approach that might be characterized as fundamentalist. References to history, philosophy and other structures may or may not be employed, yet somehow the artist seems less to be participating in a decades- or centuries-long discussion and more to be dancing into an eclectic experience that he or she is happy to share, whether it’s an experience of the physicality of materials, or of colors, textures and other art elements, or of a very arcane perception of what art-making is about in the first place.

On each side of the establishment / fundamentalist disparity I’d wager that you will find not only artists, but curators, gallerists, critics, philosophers and writers of all kinds. The degree to which they belong to either side is often easy to determine through their work. Nonetheless the degree to which each may borrow from the other -- the potential for boundary fuzziness between the two camps -- shouldn't be understated. And I find this fuzziness to also be very encouraging. Sure, it's fun to fuel pointlessly entertaining arguments by playing off each side against the other and to suggest the primacy of one. But ultimately each side needs the other to exist in any meaningful way.

The establishmentarians, the structuralists, provide an important function as keepers of the canon, propagators of the scriptures. They carefully tend narratives past and offer them up, usually but not exclusively in museums. You'll often find them in Artforum or Art in America, sifting through the work of previous generations, gleaning new information from the old that benefits everyone in the visual arts food chain. On those occasions when I need a sense of equilibrium, a feeling that what I'm doing has a basis in anything that remotely resembles bedrock, I return to the work of the structuralists.

However it bears noting that, in the structuralist's camp, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that no new progress is possible outside of a hefty pedigree. Perhaps an overabundance of this kind of thinking was one force behind visual art’s alienation. The message to the greater populace, intended or otherwise, has too often been you're just not smart enough to benefit from this, sometimes appended thusly: but we're paying for it with your tax dollars just the same. Thankfully as regards the question of accessibility, we also have the fundamentalists.

Fundamentalists keep us reminded of the holy fires that ignited art in the first place, of art's life, its reason and its contemporary relevance. They challenge artists to make work that makes a difference, whatever that difference might be. Fundamentalists tantalize us with the sense that progress is possible, that our own work might be moving someplace, and that it might even take everyone along its trajectory. We're stoked through their work to challenge our own perceptions about everything and to believe in the maddeningly ephemeral potential of throwing original siege works up against the massive iron fortresses of everything ever made by humans over the past fifty thousand years.

Emotional highs and lows are easy to come by in the giddy low-oxygen atmosphere of the Fundamentalist base camp, but so is true insanity. They're not always happy to hear healthy, equilibrium-inducing questions such as how far is too far, or what could possibly constitute progress in a narrative with so many tendrils extending in so many dizzying directions? At some point nearly every Fundamentalist needs to descend to the flatlands to recharge, rejuvenate, and reconsider.

Perhaps the prevalence of fundamentalists is a long-overdue balance to the hyper-intellectualism that may have flattened out some of the visual arts of earlier decades. But for my money the greater significance of all these disparate fundamentalist voices lies in the possibility that they signal the authentic development of a new narrative, distinguished from all previous narratives by its breathtaking multi-dimensionality.

Yet for all its energy, I can't say that I'm hearing a great deal of thunder. This is not the fundamentalism of the raging evangelist who consigns all who disagree to eternal hellfire. Its most prominent voices, the ones who I'm sure would like to be identified as the lightning-strike Elijahs, turn out to be the silliest, in spite of the market's exuberance for their work.

I think the fundamentalism that appears to have propagated most successfully has antecedents in the quiet meditative spaces of Quaker churches, Zen temples, Trappist hermitages, the back rows of high school classrooms, beer-can-encircled fire pits deep in the woods.

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