I lived in China for about 4.5 years, and when I turned 45 there I realized that one in every ten days of my life I’d awoken in China. I lived in small cities by Chinese standards, and there were so few other Westerners in those cities that I knew them all, and could count…
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We humans are really flubbing this new decade. It’s moving a little beyond just being insulting and enervating. Now it’s starting to hurt. Above you can see the prognosis for the next 5 days in terms of pollution where I live, juxtaposed with a close-up of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the COVID-19 disease. The…
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[Note: I’m just calling it the “wuflu” for convenience, rather than the “Novel Coronavirus 2019”. Also made the graphic above for fun.] At this point there’s nothing I can do other than wait for the inevitable spread of the virus — if science is correct — to the city where I live. I’m too close…
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It’s no surprise that people are misinformed, dis-informed, misled, or that their priorities are skewed. We can thank the media for much of that, and our postmodern, post-truth world where subjectivity trumps truth at every turn, and narratives are more important than science. It’s also nearly impossible to get accurate information out of China, because…
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[I wote this yesterday morning when the power was out. My info on the Wuhan-flu is thus a little behind in numbers, but otherwise still relevant.] Within a minute of waking up this morning the power went out. Turns out something happened to a power cable by the superstore around the corner. That might have…
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Suddenly I realized how ridiculous it is to expect people to care. People are too subsumed in their own lives, responsibilities, worries, and so on to be expected to even have the wherewithal to care about you or me or this or that person, or group of people. Asking people to care is like asking…
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Gotta’ love me some pollution! I’m an expat who’s lived in Asia for about 15 years, and in some of the more polluted parts. I’m also rather health conscious and trying to level up my diet and exercise regimen. I feel like I’ve got some obstacles that might be making that a bit more of…
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If you can’t beat ’em. Ban ’em! While Facebook and Instagram ostensibly banned “far right extremists”, banning people one doesn’t agree with itself resembles a “far right extremist” tactic. Banishing the opposition grates against my more progressive sensibility. Censorship is a tool historically associated with abuse of power, silencing dissent, and squashing the underdog. The…
Read MoreA few days ago MoMA uploaded a video of their “salon” on the topic of “White Male”. It could have been called “White Male: The Enemy” and the content would not have needed to change. I find this sort of thing in 2019 not to be the more enlightened, open-minded, generous, just, and progressive…
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A radical new approach to chess. Deciding winners by jury instead of by checkmate? I’d probably stick with the old version. The new variety, outlined in the blog-post I’m sharing below, seems be a bit nebulous for this old dog. Somehow this reminded me of the art world, but don’t mind me. I shall shuffle…
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Just going to share this without comment, which doesn’t mean I’m endorsing it or taking any side for or against. I think I’m afraid to formulate an opinion. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve slipped into some parallel dimensions where, well, everything seems backwards or like a parody. I am perhaps softening up to the idea…
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What makes my runaway rants rants is that I write them in one go, initially without editing. I will go back and fix my more egregious typos, misspellings, and so on, but not change the flow. The ideas come one after the other, without an outline. It’s a way to keep it simple, but also…
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I’d sooner get my news from The Onion or The Weekly World News than from Alex Jones, but his sudden disappearance is cause for alarm. The underlying and inescapable message is that anyone can be scrubbed from social media without accountability. Your on-line existence can be ERASED, and we must simply have blind faith that…
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There are 2 inconclusive conclusions I’ve recently come to appreciate. One is that nobody’s perfect. Two is that nobody lives in reality. These aren’t grand new observations, but just the kind of thing one grows to understand more over time. It helps me deal with other people and with my relationship to them. We’re all…
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I like to stick to talking mostly about matters of art, but politics has so infiltrated the art world that you can’t be an artist without being clobbered over the head with certain ideas; and your work and career are evaluated, bolstered, or derailed in accordance with them. One of the biggest, most contentious and…
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How serious of a crime is a foul tweet, and what should the punishment be? The Crime Roseanne tweeted something stupid and offensive. Agreed. She said someone who is part black looks like a cross between the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes. It’s not just sophomoric, it’s elementary school recess time bullying —…
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I’m doing these rants – and by rant I mean getting down my thoughts in one go without much editing – because I will have ideas I’m mulling over and want to share, but don’t have time to do one of my more thorough blog posts. Social engineering is huge these days, especially once you…
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Almost every day I am disgusted by politics and ideology. Recently I wrote about how you can never have all the answers, or most of them, because your relation to those answers is perpetually in flux. No hard fact has any import except in relation to a subjective, vulnerable consciousness. We can all agree on…
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QUOTAS FOR ART MUSEUMS Are quotas a good idea for art museums? Should museum collections be based on race, gender, and sexual orientation/identification? The Baltimore Museum of Art is doing something very similar to that: selling off works in the permanent collection by white males, and replacing them with new art by marginalized persons. Some…
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Matt Damon suggested that the punishment should fit the crime, and for this thought-crime the public deemed the fitting punishment to be the end of his career. This is the sad story in which an actor is forced to apologize for reminding us that we shouldn’t exact extreme punishment for minor transgressions. The irony being…
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Teaching should be like medicine, in that teacher’s should take the equivalent of the hippocratic oath: to do no harm! In a recent article in Hyperallergic a veteran teacher, Anthony Hawley, discusses the sort of bitter medicine he prescribes to his students in a Color and Composition class. I would be shocked if I didn’t…
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When I started chipping away at this topic I didn’t realize how enormous it was. I’ve written about censorship and highly political cases made against certain artists, but those issues are mere TIE fighters – morality is the Star Destroyer. You can vote in the poll before I have a chance to influence you one…
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[RANT ALERT!] It would be more accurate to say, “get art the F out of politics”, because politics has engulfed art and not the other way around, but then it sounds more like art is meddling in politics, which it is, but that’s a lesser problem for me. I want to free art from the…
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You can have free speech without violence or oppression, but censorship requires force, which means at least oppression, and violence if necessary to enforce it. [Note: Here I am talking about ideas or arguments as free speech, not slander, malicious gossip, or plans to commit a crime, and not actual crimes such as snuff films,…
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Apparently, we now live in a climate of dastardly deeds for noble causes. There are elaborate arguments to justify suppressing this or that person in the name of morality, and it is supposed that we will be sufficiently wooed or intimidated by these arguments to not notice the tactics themselves are sinister. If you pan…
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It’s a bit odd seeing the would-be avant-garde belaboring an orange piñata without a blindfold. There’s been a strange phenomenon in the art world of an assumption that all artists were, pre-election, unified in a pro-Hillary, anti-Trump position [as opposed to being, say, for Sanders, and then Jill Stein as the next best alternative], and…
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A lot of people, and I mean really a lot of people, including my graduate school art instructors, firmly believe that art is a vehicle for political and social change, and that is its primary and highest purpose.
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