http://minimumsecurity.net/blog/comics/2009-11-27-employ-dialectical-materialism.jpg

I have to admit that despite having the very choicest of art school educations I rarely step foot in a museum. Practically every thing I like is comics.

I will paste some comments from another board about this article.

[div class="excerpt"]It is so difficult. I have been blackballed and run out of every yuppified folkie venue for speaking out and having a "bad attitude."

"The system exerts tremendous pressure to create art that is not only apolitical but anti-political."

People do not appreciate the pressure - relentless, omnipresent. It goes beyond merely not being political, if you want to work. It has to be yuppified, it has to be commercialized, or else. I chose to play in poor neighborhoods, poor rural areas, minority communities and to speak my mind wherever I went. But that prevents you from ever "advancing your career" and people refuse to take you seriously if you are NOT advancing your career, now matter how talented you are, no matter how popular you are with audiences. Most of my fellow musicians instead play the game, kiss ass to the people in the business - all of who do everything they can to suppress anything that is not kept within strict gentrified tastes and has an over-riding commercial angle - in order to be able to work. They are creatively frustrated and neurotic as a result of having made this devil's bargain, and I personally know hundreds of the moist talented musicians in the world who are blackballed and unable to work because they refuse to suppress themselves and be silent.

"When the dominant culture spots political art, it sticks its fingers in its ears and sings, 'La la la!' It refuses to review it in the New York Times or award it an NEA grant. Political art is vigorously snubbed, ignored, condemned to obscurity, erased. If it's too powerful to make disappear, then it is scorned, accused of being depressing, doom-and-gloom, preachy, impolite, and by the way, your drawing style sucks."

I could tell you 40 years of stories about this. In fact, I do tell the stories to audiences, and audiences know exactly what I am talking about. But that further enrages the presenters, promoters, agents, managers - the army of sharks empowered by Capitalism to destroy artists who try to put the art and the public above the almighty dollar.

"You can't make a living if your work's not vacuous, cynical and therefore commercially viable, so go starve under a bridge with your precious principles."

See what she is saying there? You can't make a living UNLESS you neuter your work and yourself. Why? Because that is what audiences want? No! Because that is what the handful of people profiting off of the art want. Audiences are desperately hungry for authenticity and we packed the seats and brought the house down everywhere we went. But the business people in the industry hate people who tell the truth, who work for the audience and the public and not for the suits and the parasites - the Capitalists in the industry and all of their yuppified wannabes looking to make a killing off of performers.

"We take sides. We fight back."

We always did and so have thousands of other musicians, and we have paid a price for that.

I have been talking to people in the industry the last couple of weeks about going back in the studio and back on stage. ALL of them are saying "this time don't rock the boat, don't get political, you have to play the game if you want to work, you can't offend people - you have to learn to eat shit and like it, or you will starve, and if you persist and do it on your own you will be hated by the people who matter, by the people who control everything."

Then I think about what Michael Moore said to me recently. "I am under constant vicious attack, and while people will come to my movies they do not have my back, they will not join me in the fight. I am lucky, I have had enough success that I can keep working, but the problem is bigger than me. The point is not that I work, that I make money, the point is that we have an impact."

"The world cries out for meaningful, combative, political art. It is our duty and responsibility to create a fierce, unyielding, aggressive culture of resistance."

Absolutely. That is what we have found everywhere we go. More so in Hazard Kentucky then in Ann Arbor Michigan, by a long, long shot. The people - the liberals and artsy and educated people - do not have the artists' backs. They are either meek and passive, and quick to throw artists with "bad attitudes" to the wolves, or are in the business of exploiting artists. They have completely bought in to the whole gentrified free market model for art, and actually think that the "cream is rising to the top" through the "free market system" and that those artists who are not successful must have something wrong with them. It is inhuman.[/quote]

[div class="excerpt"]
When we say "political" we don't mean narrow partisan junk of Democrat versus Republican, nor "issues."

Political commentary is social commentary - criticizing social conditions. That means talking about who has what and how they get it, how all of our social relationships are impacted, how the country is organized socially, who has status and who does not, how the few are prospering at the expense of the many suffering.

On stage (though audiences love it and respond strongly) you are not to talk about social conditions (other than in the most narrow charity activity sense), not to criticize the "winners," not to "bite the hand that feeds you," not to question social structures and attitudes, or you will be run out of town on a rail.

I say the same things on stage that I say here, and those things make some people uncomfortable, anger some people. But when you have played for hundreds of thousands of people all over the country, it is easy to see and it is beyond any question that 90% of the everyday people out there have no problem with what I say. But a few do, and those few dominate the management, ownership positions, and are the agents promoters, presenters, publicists, media people (public radio is the absolute worst by far), record industry sharks, etc. Those few dominate every aspect of our lives, as far as that goes, and that is the problem.

I can't tell you the number of times I have had an agent or promoter scream at me "you will never work again!!" and the like. I can't tell you how much musicians cringe and crouch in fear - "these are the people who will make or break your career. These are important people. Don't you want to advance your career? Why do you keep saying those things from stage and pissing them off?"

What must you do to have the people with power help you "advance your career?" You must be gentrified. You must accept that it is the people with the bucks who run the show, and not the artists and not the audience. You must kiss ass. You must observe all forms of upscale and gentrified social convention.

What you cannot do is draw a huge blue collar following who will then invade the nicey-nice folkie venues and rub elbows with the enlightened people and hoot and holler. You cannot tweak the noses of the people in power, cannot talk about the ongoing destruction of music and culture by the suits, about the upper class bias, about the exploitation of the musicians, about the expropriation of traditional music by the upper class, about the time when the music and art belonged to the people - all of the people - and was not all placed in the service of the wealthiest few for their profiteering.[/quote]

[div class="excerpt"]It is gentrification we are up against, and it is deadly. That is the way that social conformity is enforced everywhere at all times, and the enforcement of social conformity creates the social conditions that enable economic destruction of the working class - all of us who have to work for a paycheck and who were not lucky, not born with advantages, or who are not willing to stay silent and go along to get along with the bosses and owners and their shills and lackeys and apologists. It is the liberals who are leading the demand for gentrification of all things, the enforcement of social conformity, not the conservatives and not the Palin lovers.[/quote]

I think the middle one is particularly strong

Are there any other professions where you have to kiss the ass of the wealthy to get anywhere? Most of my friends who actually succeeded were trust fund kids. (Sidebar: arguing with trust fund kids about the realities of money is one of the most surreal experiences of my life. When they get their feelings hurt and insist that they are oppressed by worry as well and that there is more to life than having enough money and you have to be nice to them about it or they cry is one of life's little adventures. Now that I'm older I doubt I would bother to be nice.)

I'm not familiar with the music scene at all. I'm not sure how it works in other art schools, but I'm sure they're all pretty much alike. There's never any pretense of creating a popular audience or something you could sell to people who might like it. You are expected to appeal to museums and gallery owners and that means fitting into the most current critical theory. This was more evident in grad school. There are people who go political in their work, but it's usually heavily encoded or so conceptual that it passes. Making fun of the wealthy is tacitly discouraged since your teacher is probably rich and successful herself. (You'd have to be to survive on the salaries there.) By the time you get out, you've either bought the whole enchilada and have teachers there grooming you to be the next (fill in the blank), or you've realized that you are going to have to go the do-it-yourself route and work in the salt mines to support yourself. Once they smell the desperation on you, forget it.

I'm kind of rambling. You can see a good example of liberal treachery in the demonization of Ted Rall. Everybody on the "left" loved him when he was making fun of Bush. His work about Obama? Forget it. We hate him now. In fact we always hated him. :crazy: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x8439638#8440790 I wonder how his new book is doing.

edit to add: I think that sucks that you got blackballed. I hope some day you will perform out here if you can. LooseWilly and I would most definitely come see you play!

Last Sunday I drew a self-portrait, first in years and years. I looked at it and thought, wow, I look sad, tired, and old. Showed it to several people, some said I didn't look that old in reality (my vanity appreciated this), but the reactions from the kids ran the gamut from you look too sad to you look like you wanna kill someone...(I'd taken it in as the kids were working on self-portraits and they were interested in seeing my work).
Later I was thinking about whether drawing myself had any real value other than student inspiration (some true value there), and I remembered too that my reply to many had been that I went to draw because the world had me too blue, too angry, too sad, and too tired, which lead to some discussions folks and kids tend to avoid, a good thing. Still wondering the value of doing a self portrait, especially in reference to your article, but, it opened conversation, it was a reaction to the world situation, and my fucking weapon is dull and needed honing; Still and all a sharpened weapon it made for cutting, if I do another self portrait it might be screaming...

Might have to reprise Goya's atrocities of war...something...Thanks for this TA, I seem to suck at this discussion stuff, but I speak ok with color, shape, and line...

Editor believes editorial cartoons are for amusement only
Saturday, November 21st, 2009 by Stephanie McMillan

Hi, I’m Stephanie McMillan, creator of the comic strip “Minimum Security” and the editorial cartoon “Code Green” (you can check them out at stephaniemcmillan.org).

Ted has invited me to contribute to his blog. Thank you Ted! Here’s my first entry:

Editor & Publisher has an article about some people protesting an offensive cartoon. That’s great — I love protests against offensive things.

But this sentence gave me the chills:

“Newsday issued a statement saying,’we expect the cartoons we publish, many of which are nationally syndicated, to amuse, stir and entertain, but never to offend’.”

Wow. What an extraordinary, horrifying statement. I loathe the cartoon, but that’s not the point — this statement makes it clear that the trend toward blandifying papers has not only not slowed, but that editors freely admit that they’re okay with it. They’re afraid of their readers and afraid of editorializing. This fear of offending anyone is stultifying and so dangerous. Does anyone still think we live in a free society?

I think that as the economic, environmental and other crises increasingly worsen, Americans will become more polarized (that’s already happening) and will demand sharper opinions in all areas of the culture. We see the success of those who start to speak out more openly on tv and online. I hope newspaper editors start to understand this emerging trend and figure out that their readers want controversy and strong opinions, not bland meaninglessness.

The whole *purpose* of editorial cartoons is to enlighten, expose, inspire and offend! NOT to “amuse and entertain.” Those are secondary. As Mike Lester (a cartoonist who often seriously offends me) correctly stated, non-offensive cartoons “are called greeting cards.”

http://www.apoplecticpress.org/Card%20Doubles%20Large/012.jpg

What you are describing about art shool, galleries and museums, etc., sounds analogous to the classical music world - I have a lot to say about that as well.

We worked the afterglows for the Detroit Symphony for a while - get togethers at a fancy restuarant after the concerts and we would do a performance for the orchestra members and the angels and gliterrati and whatever they are. That was always a hoot. Of course I would go on and on from stage about how the upper class stole all of the music from the common people and embalmed it, and that is how we got classical music, Brahms was a fraud, etc. lol. We would always throw a table up near the door and hustle our albums and pick up a few bucks. The first time we did that some of the orchestra members wandered over (God bless them they are such gentle and naive people) and I said "hey don't you guys have any albums?" lol. "Oh, yes the orchestra just made a new recording." "Well did ya bring 'em?" One of the trumpet players said yes he had some in his car, it so happened. "Well go get 'em and we'll sell some for you!" That idea had never occured to them. So we put their album out with ours and sold a few dozen of them for them. The look on the guys face when I handed him a wad of bills was memorable.

One gal, a cellist, said to me once "you guys are really great. Have you ever thought of doing something?" I cracked up. Think about that question. My bass player said "well we sort of thought we were already 'doing something.'" So she says "no, I mean something serious." Now isn't that interesting? She was not trying to insult us. I told her that what we were doing was deadly serious.

No, no, no starry, it does not suck that we got blackballed. Fuck 'em and I mean that very sincerely. As my 4 year old niece always says "I'm not kidding! I 'm really serious!" It is an honor to get blackballed by the folkies and the music business people - I wish I had seen that sooner. The hell with them.

I have been thinking about this all week after having talked to all my old friends in the biz. We got to a certain level of success at one with airplay, album sales, national festivals, opening for "big" acts and such, but I was always booking all of these out of the way places - spaghetti dinners in poor parishes in Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago and other cities, Grange halls all over the Midwest, Black churches and Gospel festivals, all sorts of goofy venues down south - small towns, a lot of churches. We also played hundreds of nursing homes and ethnic halls and schools. There was always this tension between that world and the "approved career track" - there was a lot of pressure to not do "those ridiculous gigs Mike keeps booking" and to kiss the right asses and play in the right places. Fuck 'em. I am sorry I ever listened to that shit, and that I ever paid any attention to career advancement.

The poor people, the rural people, the inner city people always took great care of us.

A story...

Around the holidays we would take some local work to stay near home, and there was a week when we had these two gigs that show the contrast between the two worlds. Some hotshot hired us for the Christmas party at the big fancy Episcopalian church out in the suburbs where all of the GM execs and wealthy people attend. "These are people who can really help you" blah blah and then the guy calls me several times trying to talk us down on our fee. We get there and have to use the servants' entrance, they don't feed us, etc., etc. the usual humiliating bullshit. We came away with a couple hundred dollars and a lot of bad memories.

The same week a guy calls from Hamtramck, poor region in Detroit, Polish neighborhood. "Yeah hey, Mike, this is Joe Wiesnowski, don't know if you remember me. Listen the folks here at our church really love you guys, and they wanted me to call you. I told them hey those guys are professionals, they are out of our league. Anyway they said hey call 'em it can't hurt to try, and I am kinda embarrassed to call you because but we have this potluck dinner on Wednesday, a Christmas get together, you know..."

I interrupted him and said "Joe I will be there." (I could never get the guys out with me to do things like that.) He says "but what would you charge? We can't afford much." I told him not to worry about that, I would be there and we could just pass the hat for gas money, no problem.

Great evening, a few hundred folks in the basement of this big old church. Fed me, of course, and everything was great. Did about an hour and a half show, great response. When I first got there, Joe said "did you bring your albums? maybe I could sell a couple for you" and I gave him the keys to the van. Big mob scene and I didn't see him again 'til I was leaving. At some point in the middle of my act, Joe gets up and says "now listen up folks, Mike came all the way down here to be with us tonight, so I am going to pass the hat, and I have his albums for sale here at the back of the room."

As I was leaving Joe gave me the keys back, he had loaded the van all back up, and stuffed an envelope in my coat pocket. All the way home I am in a good mood, because it had been such a great night. I get home, put my feet up and light a smoke and think back over the great evening, and then remember the envelope. There was $1700 in that envelope. The rich fucks had just coerced us to play a few days before at their fancy church for $300 - and my guys fell all over themselves to be at that gig and turned their noses up at the gig in Hamtramck.

We did gigs like that one in Hamtramck all the time back when we were starting out 35 years ago. You could be yourself, you didn't have to cater to fucking yuppie sensibilities. You didn't have to prove anything to people - the music spoke for itself, and the audience came out. The people were good, the money was good. But as the whole business got more and more gentrified and the fucking liberal folkies took over, the pressure to "get somewhere" was enormous - "you guys should be blah blah blah you guys could be blah blah blah." Whatever - get a recording contract with so and so, hook up with this asshole, kiss this person's ass, and on and on. What a fool's errand.

Fuck 'em. Never again. Fuck "careers" and fuck "getting somewhere" and fuck what the beautiful people think. Fuck recognition, fuck fame, fuck success.

"Intellectual property rights" is the worst form of property.

Nobody wrote those things, and nobody will be heard, all of the nobodies will be heard.

to teach me how to draw

I am tempted to upload a sketch or something just so you know how a daunting a task you've undertaken :)

Hey Kid, buy the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards,( its only about 15, you can almost always find it in used book stores, I always look and buy them when I find them to give away) and do the exercises in order, if you have a scanner you can send them to me and I'll check them out and give you feedback. Its far better to have someone right there with you to say "look here, see how its different" and stuff like that, but you are smart enough to be able to do it to some degree...you could even mail them to me! and I'd make notes for you. Nicolaides "the Natural Way to Draw" is also a good book, a standard for decades. Let me know!

were really looking for something new, original, and not knocking off the latest trend (are there any trends these days??), in fact I recall brutal critiques where artists were accused of too closely following an artistic style. Social-political commentary of some kind was expected even if it was as simple as a self portrait, audience was supposed to be the primary consideration...

My mentor was a wonderful man, I remember going to a show of his work. He was selling stuff dirt cheap. We all told him he could get much more, but he said he wanted almost anyone to be able to buy it...that hit me...

I stayed in the Ceramics department because it was the least conformist. But we all had to take a few required seminars with some teachers who were trying to gear us towards "the art world". It was strange. You could definitely see them pick students to be "the political artist", "the feminist artist", "the abstract conceptualist", "the craft guy", etc. It was more about branding. The school later went on to expand its programming in commercial arts and actually rebranded itself, so I guess that was just part of the philosophy that was brewing at that time.

The grad school also had a system where you could work with individual teachers for a number of units. The more students a teacher worked with, the more money they earned because they get paid by the unit. So there was kind of a sick need for teachers to have something to sell to students to attract them. It was a private school, so the salaries were tiny to begin with. The seminars were what some teachers used to woo students. When you have a series of class visits by famous artists and gallery owners who are the personal friends of the instructor the message gets sent out loud and clear: "I am connected. You need me."

I didn't go that route, but several people in my class did.

I did a week long "artist in residence" thing once at a college and lectured several classes of freshmen a day.

The theme of the program was "of what value is art to society?" After hearing their pitch I translated it to "we thought it would be interesting for our future MBA candidates if we dragged some artists in here and forced them to explain why we should allow them to eat, or even exist." I changed the program to "of what value is society to art?" and used it as a chance to make some biting social commentary. I didn't get invited back, even though by the end of the week word had gotten around campus and my lectures were SRO, and even though the students voted my presentation best of the series.

That brings me to another point. There is this pervasive myth that the better you do the more you will be rewarded, and if you don't perform well you won't be rewarded. Then there is all this "do what you love and the rest will follow" bullshit floating around. The opposite is true. The better you do the more you will be punished, and the worse you do the more you will be rewarded (and how else can we define "doing well" other than as providing value for people? Since "providing value to people" and "making money for the assholes" are mutually contradictory and only rarely overlap and even then in a very limited and restricted way, the better you do the more they will try to destroy you.) The more you love what you do, the more the control freaks and domineering trolls under the bridge will be violently hostile and attack you.

I'm surprised they let you live. :grin: I would have loved to have heard that lecture.

That "do what you love and the rest will follow" crap pisses me off too. It's a notion that came out of the New Age movement.

edit: oh barf. I was looking over the website for my old school and now they offer a joint MBA/MFA! Damn, I'm glad I got out when I did. Insane!

were paid a flat salary, but I never thought about whether my grad professors were paid for independent studies, and all studio courses were independent study with one professor. Man, if they were paid per student, I hope they were paid extra for having to have me!!

By the way: ceramics major, we don't mind being really dirty!!

It gives us subject matter! ;) Great stuff, TA!!

Artists: Raise Your Weapons

In this time of escalating exploitation, poverty, imperialist wars, torture and ecocide, we don't need a piece of art that consists of a mattress dripping orange paint, cleverly titled "Tangerine Dream." In this time, as countless multitudes suffer and die for the profits and luxuries of a few, as species go extinct at a rate faster than we can keep track of, we don't need an orchestra composed of iPhones. In this time, when the future of all life on Earth is at stake, spare us the constant barrage of narcissistic tweets juxtaposing celeb gossip with quirky food choices.

If we lived in a time of peace and harmony, then creating pretty, escapist, seratonin-boosting hits of mild amusement wouldn't be a crime (except perhaps against one's Muse). If all was well, such art might enhance our happy existence, like whipped cream on a chocolate latte. There's nothing wrong with pleasure, or decorative art.

But in times like these, for an artist not to devote her/his talents and energies to creating cultural weapons of resistance is a betrayal of the worst magnitude, a gesture of contempt against life itself. It is unforgivable.

The foundation of any culture is its underlying economic system. Today, art is bullied to conform to the demands of industrial capitalism, to reflect and reinforce the interests of those in power. This system-serving art is relentlessly bland. It is viciously soothing, crushingly safe. It seduces us to desire, buy, use, consume. It entertains us and makes us giggle with faux joy as it slowly sucks our brains out through our eye sockets.

The system exerts tremendous pressure to create art that is not only apolitical but anti-political. When the dominant culture spots political art, it sticks its fingers in its ears and sings, "La la la!" It refuses to review it in the New York Times or award it an NEA grant. Political art is vigorously snubbed, ignored, condemned to obscurity, erased. If it's too powerful to make disappear, then it is scorned, accused of being depressing, doom-and-gloom, preachy, impolite, and by the way, your drawing style sucks. Also by the way, you can't make a living if your work's not vacuous, cynical and therefore commercially viable, so go starve under a bridge with your precious principles.

We're taught that it's rude to be judgmental, that to assert a point of view violates the pure, transcendent and neutral spirit of art. This is mind-fucking bullshit designed to weaken and depoliticize us. In these times, there is no such thing as neutrality -- not taking a stand means supporting and assisting exploiters and murderers.

Let us not be the system's tools or fools. Artists are not cowards and weaklings -- we're tough. We take sides. We fight back.

Artists and writers have a proud tradition of being at the forefront of resistance, of stirring emotions and inspiring action. Today we must create an onslaught of judgmental, opinionated, brash and partisan work in the tradition of anti-Nazi artists John Heartfield and George Grosz, of radical muralist Diego Rivera, filmmaker Ousmane Sembčne, feminist artists the Guerrilla Girls, novelists like Maxim Gorky and Taslima Nasrin, poets like Nazim Hikmet and Kazi Nazrul Islam, musicians like The Coup and the Dead Kennedys.

The world cries out for meaningful, combative, political art. It is our duty and responsibility to create a fierce, unyielding, aggressive culture of resistance. We must create art that exposes and denounces evil, that strengthens activists and revolutionaries, celebrates and contributes to the coming liberation of this planet from corporate industrial military omnicidal madness.

Pick up your weapon, artist.

- from cartoonist Stephanie McMillan

She creates the daily comic strip "Minimum Security," and the weekly editorial cartoon "Code Green." She has a graphic novel with Derrick Jensen, "As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial."
Her website - stephaniemcmillan.org.

Came up with what I thought was a great battlecry as she was talking; in our conversation she said "need not greed", I said, oh that's fantastic, it would be a great sign; she said, "oh, I guess it is good, well its my idea, so be sure to tell others who's idea it was."

I still really like the phrase "need not greed"...the source? not too much...

Lots of folks would get this...

;)

Did you see the Bageant essay about "intellectual property rights" - can't wait to go after that one vis a vis the university licensing out a copyrighted trade-marked apple variety to a prvate concern, could use your input on that by the way - and the commodification of ideas and art, the commercialization of our experience, our lives?

Will look up the Bageant thing, TA, not sure I saw that one, I have him bookmarked.

Intellectual property rights is really convoluted, attribution is not out of line at all times, I don't think, but am considering it. Besides people being selfish, however, as in the woman in my last post, one thing that pisses me off is when others make a profit on another's labor (with no compensation for the same), especially my students!! There are all kinds of contests that one can enter a student's work. I will never enter one that the sponsor says that they own the image (usually in very small print), even if the person doesn't win. Frequently these are used for ads, free labor for the contest promoter (sometimes its a not for profit, and then I ask the kids whether they want to or not, I try to research that group first).

That apple thing is very scary, I remember you were discussing it before, it opens up far too many cans of worms, like the seed thing you've mentioned before.

Commodification of ideas and art, makes my brain hurt, but I'll work on it, its in the pan anyway...

Throwing a pot... :)

Artist like Reginald Marsh, Dorothea Lange, and Philip Evergood (among many others), really helped document the depression, Social Realists they were called. I think its interesting to compare Philip Evergood's American Tragedy 1937, with one of the greatest social statement paintings, Picasso's Guernica (image will be added on edit). I think to look at a lot of the art is helpful as inspiration...

http://msustudent.com/phics/American-Tragedy.jpg

Evergood's painting was about the Republic Steel contract dispute, cops killed 8...one woman in the back. Evergood researched closely.

http://terresdefemmes.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/guernica.jpg

Nuff said about this piece...

http://msustudent.com/phics/Madonna-of-the-Mines.jpg

I have a thing for Madonnas...on edit, this piece is called the Modonna of the Mines...

Consciousness Capitalism: Corporations Are Now After Our Very Beings[/b][/size]

Capitalism has raped the resources of the world. Now corporations are left to strip human experience from life, then rent it back to us.

Joe Bageant

A few years ago, compliments of the George W. Bush administration, I got an education in political reality. The kind of education that makes you get drunk at night and scream and bitch at every shred of national news:

"Do you see how these capitalist bastards have made so much money killing babies in Iraq? And how they are have brainwashed us and gouged us for every human need, from health care to drinking water?" I'd rage to my wife.

"It's just the way things are," she said. "It's only a system."

My good wife often thinks I have slipped my moorings. But she never says right out loud that I'm crazy because, let's face it, honesty in marriage only goes so far. Furthermore, I'd be the first to proclaim that she's right.

I have slipped my moorings, and am downright ecstatic about it, given what the collective American consciousness is moored to these days. Anyway, I am, as I said, ecstatic. When I am not utterly depressed. Which is often. And always, always, always, it is because of the latest outrage pulled off by government/corporations -- the terms have been interchangeable for at least 50 years in this country, maybe longer.

Grab a cross on your way out.

For all its pretense and manufactured consent, our government is just a corporate racket now, and probably will remain so from here on out. This is a white people's thing, an Anglo-European tradition. Moreover, we no longer get real dictators such as a Hitler, or a good old bone-gnawing despot like Idi Amin. We get money syndicates in powdered wigs or Seville Row suits, cartels of robber barons and banking racketeers.

The corporate rackets of European white people, especially banking, have a venerable history of sanction, dating back at least to when William the Conqueror granted the corporation of London the rights to handle his English loot.

For all his cruelty (he skinned the people and hung their tanned hides from their own windows, and if that ain't the purest kind of meanness, I don't know what is!) William, just like Allen Greenspan and Bernie Madoff, understood that the real muscle hangs out in the temples of banking and money changing.

Even a thousand years before that however, nobody in their right mind dared mess with the money cartels.

[div class="excerpt"]DATELINE JUDEA, A.D. 26 -- Pontius Pilate to Jesus: "Look you seem to be a nice Jewish kid from ... where izzit? ... Nazareth? But you gotta quit fuckin wid da moneychangers, cause I get a piece of dat action, see? So stop dickin' with 'em. And especially you gotta swear off this Son of God, King of the Jews shtick. Ain't but one king aroun jeer, and you're lookin' at him. So lay off that stuff, and we can put this whole thing behind us, you and me. On the other hand, I got a couple of thieves I'm gonna do in tomorrow; and you can join 'em if you want. Your call kid. Now whose yer daddy?"

"I am the Son of God."

"Grab a cross on the way out."[/quote]

The sheer magnitude of capitalism's crushing drain upon humanity -- for the benefit of the few -- is all but invisible to most.

On and on it goes. As the bailouts of the bankers recently proved, even Barack Obama, who descended to earth from Chicago with 10 gilded seraphim holding up his balls, doesn't screw with the corporate money changers. Or the banking corporations, or the insurance corporations, or the medical corporations, or the defense corporations ...

We cannot see beyond the corporate manufactured reality because, to us, it is the only possible reality.

Corporations are now, for all practical purposes, the only way anything can get done, made or distributed, or even imagined as a way of anything coming into being (except babies). Look around you. Is there anything, from the food in the fridge to the fridge itself, from the furniture to the very varnish on the floors or the clothes we wear that was not delivered unto us by corporations?

Our dependency on corporations at every level of the needs hierarchy is total. We cannot see beyond the corporate manufactured reality because, to us, it is the only possible reality. We cannot see around it or out of it from the inside. Corporate reality is all permeating. Air tight, too. Each part so perfectly reinforces all of its other parts as to be seamless. Inescapable. In that sense, we are prisoners for life.

The corporate-government-media complex that manufactures our mass consciousness (hereinafter referred to as "the bastards" for clarity purposes) is simultaneously unknowable, yet easy to believe in.

With its millions of moving parts, seen and unseen -- financial, media, manufacturing, technological, material -- no one, not even its most elevated masters, can conceive of the system's entirety, or even in the same way. This great loom of ideation, with its many spindles, flycocks and shuttles, can weave any fantasy one desires and certainly sustain any individual's commodity or identity fetish.

At the same time, the sheer magnitude of corporatism's crushing drain upon humanity -- for the benefit of an elite global few -- is all but invisible to most Western peoples participating in its sustaining rituals.

Corporatism's rituals are as reverentially and unquestionably observed in daily behavior as those of ancient Egypt's theocracy or the blood sacrifice of the Aztecs. The Aztecs thoroughly believed their world would end if the gods were not fed enough still-beating human hearts. We believe that the world turns on employment figures, stock prices, our jobs, productivity and consumption. Hourly, we receive reports from the media priesthood on the health of an aggregate god known as the economy. The masses pause to listen, then ask inside their heads, "Will my job, my only source of family sustenance, disappear? I must try harder."

We have been transfigured into performers behaving the way we are expected to behave as productive citizens.

And so, fearfully, we render tribute to Moloch in the form of increased toil, more sheaves of what they alone produced (for it is labor that produces all authentic wealth) in the form of bailouts and sons sacrificed on the altar of war.

High and low, we have been transfigured into a society of performers behaving the way we are expected to behave as productive citizens. Production as measured by the bastards. And we cannot expect to find any Gandhis or Simón Bolivars among that high caste. One does not get there by leading salt strikes, nor does one appear in their boardrooms on behalf of the masses wearing beggar's cloth.

"The masses, the masses, the masses. Whatever are we to do with them?" laughed a political adviser friend, only half-jokingly. True, we've always been such a herd, always been given to self-imposed blindness of the whole. But now we are blindfolded. There is a difference.

During earlier times in this fabled republic -- and much of it has always been just that, a fable -- there were somewhat better odds of escaping such blindness. Now it is considered the normal condition; we see it as in our best interests to embrace such national blindness. In doing so, we all but ensure a new Dark Age.

[div class="excerpt"]Oh, quit bitching you fart-stained old gasbag. The next Dark Age is sure to have a wireless connection and an RFID sex hot line locator chip in your neck. The boys in Tyson's corporate are already doing it to chickens in the poultry market for a couple cents per bird. Just be glad you were born in America![/quote]

Never underestimate the dark bastards at the helm.

For sure it will be wired. Because the next phase of history's greatest ongoing screwjob, capitalism, depends on it being wired. With the demise of first mercantile capitalism, and now with industrial capitalism on the ropes everywhere, and after having wasted most of the world's vital resources, you'd think the whole stinking drama of greed and mass exploitation would necessarily draw to a close.

You'd think there would be nothing left to huckster after having pissed in most of the world's clean drinking water, gutted its forests and jungles, leveled its mountains for coal and minerals, and turned the atmosphere into a blanket of simmering toxins, well, you'd think it was time for the bastards to fold the game and go home with their winnings. No such luck.

Enter yet a third phase: Consciousness Capitalism! The private appropriation of human consciousness as a "nonmaterial asset." Or cognitive capitalism, in nerd and pinhead speak.

Which goes to show you can never underestimate the dark bastards at the helm. Yes, these guys are good.

Essentially, we're talking about stripping the human experience from life, then renting it back to humans. So how does one do that? Through the same Western European historical process used to fuck over the world in the first two rounds of capitalism -- propertization. Denying access to something because it's MINE-MINE-MINE-MINE!

Charge rents for your monopoly on the access. Manufacture artificial scarcity, even of human consciousness and experience by redefining and reshaping it. The tools here are legal means such as intellectual property rights, patents softwares ...

Cognitive capitalism by definition requires that mass consciousness be networked at all individual nodes. Each node is its own experiential realm of service relationships, entertainment, travel and the multitude of experience industries that are rapidly coming to dominate the global economy. Life as a paid-for experience, with none of the hassles of ownership.

Rent a Life, Inc.

(Actually, we've always rented our lives from the bastards, under such things as the pretense that mortgage payments were not just another gussied up form of rent, and so forth). If you've got the money to pay for access to their networks, it's great. I guess. If you're too poor, then you are left to fight it out in naked barbarian streets of the unwired. Given the choice, most of us would rather be inside the gates, not on the streets. But any rational person would fear the gatekeepers.

The new extortion is conducted through creation of a state of artificial scarcity, which is done by turning the dials of your patents, softwares and intellectual property rights machinery, which is protected by your corporate legal goon squad.

Already we are seeing cognitive mutations of our relationships with our homes, our communities and our idea of what the world is. I had an absolutely brilliant young man visit me in Belize, well known as a futurist on the Internet and avid player of Second Life. By his own admission, he could not find anyone in the entire country he could communicate with.

Community and the world are becoming concepts, images and ideas ungrounded in the earthly "thingness" and the attending husbandry and respect for such, and replaced by the ultimate purchased commodity, the experience of life itself. Each person becomes an experiential Empire of One. Occupant of a single node in the network, seeking personal validation through paid-for personal experience and free from the bonds of human cooperation and responsiveness. Free from material boundaries.

Experience products, compared to those of industrial capitalism, are dirt cheap for the bastards to produce. The hard costs, land, factories, labor, are outsourced (dumped) in China. Let the Mandarin capitalists own those burdens.

The Mandarin capitalists are deliriously happy to accept 'em. Because they can offset those costs in a million ways they'd just as soon not talk about. Like burning the cheapest sweat-labor coal in the dirtiest power plants they can build to power their workhouse chip factories. As in, Hey Chang! It's quitting time. Go beat those goddamned peasant workers back into their chicken cages for the night!"

Meanwhile, back here in the land of free, we are, as always, at least one water buffalo step ahead of the Chinese when it comes to enterprise. Consequently, we have moved on from Proudhon's property-as-theft model, to extortion.

The new extortion is conducted through creation of a state of artificial scarcity, which is done by turning the dials of your patents, softwares and intellectual property rights machinery, which is protected by your corporate legal goon squad.

The time for extortion through consciousness capitalism is ripe in both senses of the word. People in developed nations, America especially, are ditching material goods, the veritable mountain of Asian techno-junk, sweat-labor clothing, and gewgaws, not to mention the now-worthless, overpriced suburban fuckboxes they purchased to store all that stuff in.

Nothing is stranger, or sadder in a way, than watching the monolithic suburban yard sale that is now America suburban Saturday morning. Material assemblage might be a better word than sale, because there are almost no buyers, not even many "for free" takers. Just sellers. Everybody needs cash to pay down the plastic. Or eat. It's broke out there. (Although Europeans and North Americans don't really know the meaning of the word broke yet. Ask folks south of the equator).

I'm blaming the bosses, not the people, because first off, they've got all the power; and second, they've become obscenely rich off it; and third, I don't like the fuckers to start with.

Meanwhile, at the Twilight Zone Café, in Winchester, Va., Ernie, the retired backhoe driver takes another pull on his Old Milwaukee beer and says: "Now tell me this perfessor, didn't we bring all this on ourselves? Ain't we got some personal responsibility for what happens to us?"

Good question. Did we create this catastrophic system, or was it created by the bastards, and in turn re-created us?

How much is attributable to the smallness and ratlike sensibilities of ordinary men such as ourselves? Has human ingenuity and ability to mass replicate goods and information provided nothing more than a theater of operations for some macabre and prolonged last act in the human drama -- ecocide?

"Oh, science will come up with something," observes Ernie. "It always does."

I bite my tongue and don't say that I believe human ingenuity is much overrated stuff. But even assuming it isn't, and that we all get issued solar-powered houseboats during the global-warming meltdown, we're still gonna need oxygen.

Maybe Ernie is right, though. Maybe we did bring all this on ourselves by not accepting that new "personal responsibility," the Republican Party proffered a while back. But I'm blaming the bastards anyway, because first off, they've got all the power; and second, they've become obscenely rich off it; and third, I don't like the fuckers to start with. And it's not because I am jealous of their wealth either. I leave that mediocre sort of animal jealousy to realtors and super-striving dentists.

After a rather short stint in "the ownership society," material products are now increasingly replaced by immaterial licensed experiences. We will no longer "own" anything, much less attempt to own everything we can lay hands on. Which is good. But the bastards will finally own everything. Which is bad.

Certainly cognitive capitalism will relieve stress on the world's resources to some degree. A nation of cyber-vegetables trying to get laid or get rich in a Second Life-type experience may be easier on poor old Mother Earth, though she's probably be gagging at the thought of what we'll have become.

Malcontent that she is, Mother Earth has been unhappy with man's behavior for a long time. And after being, bombed, mined, poisoned and generally molested for so long, who can blame her for her opinion, which is that, "On the sixth day, God fucked up."

Three beers and a couple thousand words later, it's hard to disagree.

http://www.alternet.org/story/141668/consciousness_capitalism%3A_corporations_are_now_after_our_very_beings/?page=entire

"Most of my friends who actually succeeded were trust fund kids. (Sidebar: arguing with trust fund kids about the realities of money is one of the most surreal experiences of my life. When they get their feelings hurt and insist that they are oppressed by worry as well and that there is more to life than having enough money and you have to be nice to them about it or they cry is one of life's little adventures."

Yes, very surreal. My last employer was an example. I didn't realize that I was going toi work for trust fund babies, and thought they had actually built a business. A year ago October when customers stopped coming, they stopped paying the help. That didn't stop them from going on a cruise, however. When I confronted them about that, about how their "help" was really suffering and desperate, they said with a straight face "we need to pay ourselves first. We have more to lose."

The music biz is packed with trust fund babies. They think - "I know! I'll start a recording studio! That would be fun."

Some of our worst adversaries over at DU are trust fund babies - "I know! I'll move to Vermont, buy a "farm," and get involved in political causes!" (hint hint that should be enough to identify one of them.)

anyway came here to give you this regarding commodification of art, the article he's responding too is linked at the bottom (along with what looks like an interesting list (any recs on those here?)...Between these three articles my brain has a day's work, and I'm not ready to comment too much; I hope this might help you anyway! (What are moorings? ;) )

http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj82/nineham.htm

Art and alienation: a reply to John Molyneux

CHRIS NINEHAM

John Molyneux's article in International Socialism 80 is of course right to defend the validity of modern art against anyone who rejects it outright as a fraud or condemns it all for being unrealistic. Marxists have always taken maximum freedom of expression as a precondition for authentic art. In Trotsky's words, 'Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence cannot tolerate them'.1 But as well as preserving a fierce defence of freedom of expression we should not lose the habit of lively criticism and discrimination in the arts. The problem is that in his haste to take on right wingers like Roger Scruton who oppose anything modern by instinct, John ends up presenting a one sided analysis of art in capitalist society. In the process his defence throws up some arguments which have doubtful implications for Marxist theory.

To start with John overstates the level of mainstream hostility to contemporary art. He says much, if not all, modern art 'is regarded as a dubious or perhaps downright fraudulent activity by a substantial proportion of at least four groups of people'.2 Judging by media coverage of the arts, the massive expansion of the art market, and the figures he himself gives for exhibition attendances, I suspect modern art is all the rage among at least one his groups, 'the educated/cultural middle class', and hardly controversial in another, 'the philistine bourgeoisie proper'. Even the media's attitude has changed dramatically from the days of scoffing at 'the bricks in the Tate'. John's judgement here is not accidental; for him art is fundamentally counterposed to capitalism. In his conclusion he says his argument leaves socialists 'defending art for its rebelliousness, its creativity and human values, while recognising that art as a privileged sphere of these qualities is the other side of the coin of a society which denies the vast majority creativity and humanity in their daily work and lives'.3 Surely our job is a bit more complicated. Isn't the fact that art exists in this 'privileged sphere', separated from the life and concerns of the vast majority, going to have some fairly devastating effects on the art itself? And doesn't this have implications for our attitude to art?

At the heart of John's argument is the contention that art can be defined as unalienated labour. For Marxists, the root of alienation lies in capitalist exploitation, in the fact that the capitalist owns the means of production in society and runs production for profit. Labour becomes a means to create maximum profit by maximising output. In the process the worker loses control over the finished product and the nature of the product itself is determined by the dictates of the market; 'the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else's, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another'.4

The worker ceases to recognise himself in the product of his labour; 'he is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object'.5 Worse still, by losing control over his own labour the worker is separated from his own essential powers; 'How could the product of the workers' activity confront him as something alien if it were not for the fact that in the act of production he was estranging himself from himself?'6

It seems rash to suggest that artistic production is in a simple way immune from such powerful processes. Marx certainly didn't think so. He argued that 'capitalist production is hostile to certain branches of production, in particular, art and poetry' and 'the bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers'.7

In early capitalism, art was regarded as distinct from commercial production. Adam Smith, for example, regarded artistic labour as unproductive from an economic point of view.8 Indeed, it was only under emerging capitalism that art began to be considered as something separate from the craftsmanship associated with religious institutions or the court. But with the spread of commodity production into every nook and cranny of social life, a straightforward distinction between commercial and artistic production becomes extremely difficult. John's definition of art as unalienated labour runs the risk of favouring in advance the work of the individual fine artist in their garret who appears to control their productive activity over the collective work of musicians, technicians, actors and so on who produce in the undeniably commercial and therefore alienated fields of film, architecture or popular music. He counters this objection by arguing that, in cases of artistic achievement in such spheres, 'what makes them art is the non-alienated labour contributed by directors, composers, soloists, designers, architects, etc'.9 Apart from being a rather circular argument, as well as potentially elitist, this begs the question whether non-alienated labour in John's usage is a spiritual concept, a state of being true to oneself, or an actual description of a relationship to the means of production.

Either way, I would argue that this uncertainty points to a more complicated and shifting relationship between capitalism and artistic production than John's basic position suggests. As capitalism has developed, the social role of artists has changed. Commodification of art has shaped artistic production itself and, far from being immune from it, artists have grappled with alienation since the middle of the 19th century at least.

The Marxist cultural historian Ernst Fischer argues that 'artists in precapitalist societies were on the whole integrated with the social body to which they belonged'.10 In the early bourgeois period artists were still valued for the ideological and spiritual weight they could bring to an emerging class. The proud subjectivity of the artist neatly tallied with the ideology of the bourgeoisie; the unification of the country and of humanity in the spirit of liberty, equality and fraternity. The French painter David, for example, was not only the official painter of the French Revolution of 1789, designing festival sets, painting posters and recording scenes from the revolution, he was also active as a legal expert and as a politician in his own right.

During the 19th century this organic relationship between the most advanced artists and the bourgeoisie began to break down. The promises of the bourgeois revolution were being betrayed. From Goya in Spain to Beethoven in Vienna, artists expressed bitter disillusion with the high handedness and cynicism of the Napoleonic armies. In France many artists took to the barricades against the government during the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. By the second half of the century the official artists of the academy were churning out empty sentimentalisations of rural life and cringing portraits of government officials in pseudo-classical get up. Courbet, the great mid-19th century realist painter who was later involved in the Paris Commune, refused a Cross of the Legion of Honour from the Minister of Fine Arts: 'At no time, in no case should I have accepted it. Still less should I accept it today, when treason multiplies itself on all sides and human conscience cannot but be troubled by so much self seeking and disloyalty... My conscience as an artist is...repelled by accepting a reward which the hand of government is pressing upon me—the state is not competent in artistic matters'.11

At the same time as the state run academy was losing its credibility and the practice of commission was on its way out, a growing market for fine art was emerging amongst the growing middle classes. Walter Benjamin claims that the French poet Baudelaire was the first to notice these changes:

The bourgeoisie was in the process of withdrawing its commission from the artist. What steady social commission could take its place? No class was likely to supply it; the likeliest place from which a living could be earned was the investment market... But the nature of the market, where this demand was to be discovered, was such that it imposed a manner of production, as well as a way of life, very different from those of earlier poets.12

John Molyneux quite rightly accepts in his article that no one can escape the effects of alienation in their everyday life, but I want to go further and argue with Benjamin that capitalist relations increasingly shaped artistic production itself. Ideally, artists control their output, they create objects in accordance with the laws of beauty, humanising the natural world by transforming matter in a way that expresses their own human essence. The activity of the artist attempts a self expression that is denied in alienated labour. But once artists are at the mercy of the market alienation is reintroduced. The market separates producer from consumer. Ours is a social species that emerged precisely through co-operative labour. The fact that an artist must present a finished product to an audience who passively and privately consume it disrupts the free flow of ideas that are essential to real creativity. Success is judged in terms of sales and prices. In this situation there is massive pressure on the isolated artist to second guess the market, especially if their subsistence depends on sales. Once their work is produced even partially in response to external neccessities, the artist is no longer in control of their own creativity. Many artists must recognise this dilemma. Some admit that potential buyers are very much the focus of their attention. Britart hopefuls Tim Noble and Sue Webster describe in an interview how they bombarded art speculator Charles Saatchi's office with faxes and oddball art objects for months before they finally lured him to their studios where they watched his (favourable) reaction to their work through spy holes they bored in the walls.13

In an important sense the capitalist market also denies artists an audience. By robbing the mass of the population of control over their own labour, and therefore over production generally, the market robs us-—the potential audience-—of much of our artistic or aesthetic capacities. At the same time the market, by atomising consumption and reducing value to a quantitive measure, reduces consumption to mere 'having'; 'Private property has made us so stupid and one sided that an object is only ours when we have it-—when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc-—in short when it is utilised by us'.14 It hardly needs pointing out that questions of ownership and quantitative value dominate in most mainstream consideration of art. Paintings most often make the news because they have broken price records at an auction, or because they have been bought by particular famous (and millionaire) collectors. Meanwhile thousands of key artworks are kept in private homes, government buildings or in cold storage, sometimes to try to lever up values of particular artists. Those of the rest of us who have the time and money are left to catch what glimpses we can of our favourite artists in packed galleries on the weekend or make do with reproductions which drastically diminish any art's impact by removing it from a meaningful context.

All of this has inevitably had a massive impact on artists themselves. The French artist Cézanne, often regarded as a founder of Modernism, fled Paris in the 1860s and became a virtual recluse, railing against the values of the capitalist world of his father who was 'unable to understand anybody except people who worked in order to get rich'.15 The Impressionists had ambivalent attitudes to the new situation. On the one hand they spent much of their time recording the leisure pursuits of their new clientele, the urban middle classes. Their technique of painting often small canvasses that quickly captured similar scenes in different light was ideally suited to an expanding middle class market. On the other hand the movement started out with a rejection of the stilted and irrelevant classicism of the academy. Its obsession with fleeting appearance was partly a response to new technology, partly a response to rapid social change, but also an expression of isolation:

Impressionism, dissolving the world in light, breaking it up into colours, recording it as a sequence of sensory perceptions, became more and more the expression of a very complex, very short term subject-object relationship. The individual, reduced to loneliness, concentrating upon himself, experiences the world as a series of nerve stimuli, impressions, and moods, as a shimmering chaos, as 'my' experience, 'my' sensation.16

Later the more radical fracturing of the plane of illusion initiated by the Cubists suggests a deepening crisis in the artists' relationship with their subject and uncertainty about their role in society. There were many other responses to the same crisis. Some artists defiantly raised the banner of 'art for art's sake' in an attempt to distance themselves from the establishment and from the art market. The Surrealists tried to find refuge from commodification in the pure subjectivity of the subconscious; the Russian Constructivists looked outwards, trying to bind the future of art to mass production. One Marxist critic suggests that 'modern art, in its most heroic moments, is the attempt to escape the reification of existence'.17 Of course the Modernists were responding to a tremendously turbulent, changing world but their attempts to escape or challenge reification were so radical precisely because art itself was under threat, because artists felt strangled by commodification. Once the bourgeoisie had championed art as a virtuous activity, a token of its commitment to freedom of expression and individuality within a harmonious society, now their own system was threatening to undermine art's very basis.

Throughout the 20th century the struggle for artistic control and authentic expression has continued. From Diego Rivera and Orson Welles to the Sex Pistols, the most challenging artistic products are often the results of a struggle with the hostililty of the culture industry, and all too often, as well, a destructive struggle of the artist with themselves. As a result the commodification of art and the resulting alienation of the artist is a theme running from All About Eve to Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons. The story of the artist 'selling out' to the system has become a commonplace. However well they handle it, artists cannot escape their contradictory situation; however much they struggle to conquer a scrap of production for humanity, their product will itself be commodified.

Why does all this matter? First, I think we are deluding ourselves if we believe that any aspect of our lives completely escapes the alienation imposed by capitalist relations. Despite our best efforts, everything from our health to our personal relations is deeply affected by our lack of control over the central social processes. Certainly it is key to socialist politics that under capitalism no part of the production process can escape the alienation imposed by the capitalist market. The priorities of a co-operative or a state run industry or a whole national economy run by the state will ultimately be distorted by the needs of competitive accumulation, and in the process genuine popular control will be lost. It is not the formal ownership of the means of production that matters, but the real relations of production. John's example is a case in point. The man building his garden wall may own the bricks and the garden, but his labour is not unalienated or freely chosen, it is imposed by a system based on the absurdity of privatised domestic life.

Secondly, the idea that artistic production is unalienated could easily encourage an uncritical attitude to art. It could even lead us to accept the simplistic and elitist distinctions between 'high' and 'low' culture so beloved of the right. As well as encouraging critical artists and cultural work we need to be aware that under capitalism a great deal of cultural production in the galleries as well as on TV is quite simply pap, pandering to the most backward ideas generated by the ruling class, reflecting rather than challenging the artist's own alienation.

Finally, it is important to treat art historically. As I have tried to suggest, John's definition of art as unalienated labour tends to take art out of historical development. John points out that Marx warned against crude reductionism when tracing the link between social and economic developments and cultural production. But this warning has to be seen in the context of Marx's repeated insistence that society must be seen as an interrelated totality. This is the very core of his historical method. It would be wrong to argue that art is in long term decline, but John's statement near his conclusion is also unsatisfactory: 'The record of human creativity being what it is, we can reasonably expect to encounter late 20th and early 21st century masterpieces just as there are masterpieces from every century and half century since Giotto and the beginning of the Renaissance'.18 If only by omission John implies here a trajectory for artistic development separate from the rest of society. Of course, we should avoid oversimplification; human creativity is highly unpredictable, but all art is a product of real people living in concrete circumstances, and wider social developments must impact on it. To see the great period of Modernism in the first 30 years of this century or the late 1960s as cultural high points is not to say art is in terminal decline, just that it thrives on discontent.

Notes

1 L Trotsky, On Literature and Art (New York, 1977), p106.
2 J Molyneux, 'The Legitimacy of Modern Art', in International Socialism 80 (1998), p71.
3 Ibid, p97.
4 K Marx, Early Writings (Penguin, 1975), p326.
5 Ibid, p324.
6 Ibid, p326.
7 K Marx, The Communist Manifesto (Phoenix, 1996), p8.
8 A Sanchez Vazquez, Art and Society (Monthly Review Press, 1973), p218.
9 J Molyneux, op cit, p83.
10 E Fischer, The Neccessity of Art: A Marxist Approach (Penguin, 1963), p51.
11 Quoted ibid, p72.
12 Quoted ibid, p69.
13 The Guardian, G2 section, 7 December 1998.
14 K Marx, quoted in I Meszaros, Marx's Theory of Alienation (London, 1970), p205.
15 Quoted in G Mack, Paul Cézanne (New York, 1989), p160.
16 E Fischer, op cit, p75.
17 A Sanchez Vazquez, op cit, p117.
18 J Molyneux, op cit, p97.

Your story is one of the worst case scenarios for dealing with their type. They live in some alternative universe where no one is ever actually poor. (Which is funny since they claim to be such "realists".) I had to explain to one friend that I couldn't go to the opera with her because $80 was pretty much my entire food budget for the month. It was like talking to a labrador retriever, her head even tilted to look at me. "But it would be so fulfilling! You shouldn't let something like money get in the way!"

I know who you mean, though she's been pretty quiet lately. She dared question the war escalation and she got the full treatment from the shock troops. Hopefully it was a humbling experience since she's claimed all year that "sensible" criticism would of course be tolerated on the forum. lol

"The activity of the artist attempts a self expression that is denied in alienated labour. But once artists are at the mercy of the market alienation is reintroduced. The market separates producer from consumer. Ours is a social species that emerged precisely through co-operative labour. The fact that an artist must present a finished product to an audience who passively and privately consume it disrupts the free flow of ideas that are essential to real creativity. Success is judged in terms of sales and prices. In this situation there is massive pressure on the isolated artist to second guess the market, especially if their subsistence depends on sales. Once their work is produced even partially in response to external neccessities, the artist is no longer in control of their own creativity. Many artists must recognise this dilemma."

"In an important sense the capitalist market also denies artists an audience. By robbing the mass of the population of control over their own labour, and therefore over production generally, the market robs us-—the potential audience-—of much of our artistic or aesthetic capacities. At the same time the market, by atomising consumption and reducing value to a quantitive measure, reduces consumption to mere 'having'; 'Private property has made us so stupid and one sided that an object is only ours when we have it-—when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc-—in short when it is utilised by us.'"

"We are deluding ourselves if we believe that any aspect of our lives completely escapes the alienation imposed by capitalist relations. Despite our best efforts, everything from our health to our personal relations is deeply affected by our lack of control over the central social processes. Certainly it is key to socialist politics that under capitalism no part of the production process can escape the alienation imposed by the capitalist market."

This is the sculpture at Dachau by Nandor Glid. Glid was a Yugoslav partisan in World War 2 who spent time in the camps. The sculpture is from 1968. He did other, equally powerful, pieces at Mauthausen and Subotica. Glid died in 1997.

The subject matters: People as barbed wire.

http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/gifsf2/dacb03.jpg
http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/gifsf2/dacb04.jpg
http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/gifsf2/dacb07.jpg

I was told as much some time back when railing against growth from an ecological standpoint.

Gotta stripmine somethin'.

art differ from any other kind of work? If my name is Christo and I erect a three mile fence of canvas across the Nebraska countryside, it is called "art" and everyone "Oohs and Ahs". But if my name is Bubba and I erect a three mile fence of wire to keep my cows in - nothing. If one person "creates" a painting of a barn, and another person builds a barn, why are these two things held in different classes of "things"? Someone has the talent and training to carve a statue, another has the talent and training to tune an engine - how are these things different? I think that too much is made of "art". I love music, I love paintings, I love movies and I love to read, but I also love a good pair of shoes and a smooth-running car and a leakless roof. I understand that art is supposed to be that thing that can express the human condition and all that, I just think that "art" is defined too narrowly and it is not "all that".

Alright, I am ready to have it explained to me how much of a philistine I am. It's OK, I have had this explained to me so many times, I answer to "Phil"...

http://www.shirari.com/blog/img/cheapartmanifesto2.gif

http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c395/chlamor/rotate-1.jpg

artisans. I have some familiarity with the florists business, the days of the petit bourgeoisie, much less workers, giving or receiving the work of florists on any but the most socially mandatory occasion are gone. Ya sit around waiting on marriage, misfortune or artificial holidays but that doesn't make the nut. It's the richies that get ya over the top, you know it and they know it too. They are often arrogant and demanding and beat you to death on the price, but what ya gonna do? Piss off a couple of them, mebbe just one, and your year will be in the shitter.

I have no problem with what you are saying here.

There once was a "middle" for musicians and it was just work, not "art." Now you are a superstar, or you are a bum. It is no different than any other work, just more extreme ("canary in the coal mine" is the way to see our laments, which is what Moore was saying to me - "I am not whining when I say that I am under attack and that people don't have my back. When they attack me they are attacking all of us, when people don't have my back they don't have anyone's. It is not about me, it is about all of us.")

You can replace "artists" with nearly any other worker and the story is the same.

Covered a lot of ground there Mike. Hat's off.