Corporations are not sentient beings, and they must not be granted the same freedoms as human beings!

The entire peculiar history of dealing with corporations as persons in the United States goes against the Jeffersonian notion of decentralized governance.

I lied. The ghost of Joe the plumber is still in control of this Art journal. And, he expands on a philosophical and legal argument about people versus corporations.

Before Chief Justice John Roberts' Supreme Court decision last Thursday, January 21st, 2010 corporations weren’t considered quite like real persons as far as free speech is concerned – actually for almost one hundred years - our nations courts had tried to restrict corporate spending in politics. However, on January 21st the Supreme Court decided that the first amendment protections of corporations were being violated, and that henceforth they will be allowed to spend as much money as they want to influence elections and our nation's politicians. The consequences of such a decision are, of course, to remove the first amendment protections, at least as far as our national politics are concerned, for all the merely human residents of this nation. In effect, we the people, became second-class citizens of our democracy.

The Court's 5 to 4 decision in favor of unlimited corporate spending on our nations elections is derived from the legal definition of corporate entities as persons for 14th Amendment purposes beginning in 1886 with the Supreme Court Case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. I would agree that corporations exist as a result of human endeavor, and at the same time they are the backbone of our capitalist economy. They are also a cultural force within the larger culture, and like all sub-cultures made up of sentient humans they conform to the processes that control the larger culture, some of which are beyond human control. However, no sub-culture including a corporation is a human being because neither is sentient in the sense that an individual person is sentient. Nor is a corporation capable of affect or conscience in the way a sentient being is. And, corporations are not like a group of human beings gathered together. Instead, a corporation is a process, more like a beehive, or even a mechanical device than it is like a person or group of persons. The primary purpose of the hive is to sustain the queen, and all activity of the hive is based on the imperative, to sustain the queen. Again, the primary purpose of the corporation is to make money, and all activity is based on the imperative to turn a profit for the various individuals that control(?) and / or own pieces of the corporation. The corporation will achieve its purpose (to make a profit) no matter the harm it might do to its environment as has so often been witnessed within the experience of this nation. A process does not have a conscience, nor does it experience emotion. A process does not have a motive, it simply is what it does.

Additionally, any rational that says corporations create wealth for everyone is based in the self-indulgent ideology of those in control (or those who would be in control) of corporations. In truth the idea of “trickle-down” wealth is absurd because those in control of corporations are riding a process that automatically corners more and more of the wealth because wealth equals more power, which equals more wealth, a circular and redundant process.

Yes, the corporation depends on the wealth of the larger culture in which it exists in order to create its own wealth. However, a corporation if unchecked will act, as our own recent and past history demonstrates, like a cancer destroying other components of the larger culture in which it exists.

Additionally, on a more practical level, the argument has been made that corporations are already represented by the individual voters who have corporate interests at heart; corporate officers, workers, shareholders and customers. Thus, granting corporations (these non-persons) additional first amendment rights doubles their free speech protection.

To reiterate, the mistake Chief Justice John Roberts' Court made is in defining corporations as being like persons. Instead, they are sub-cultures within the larger culture, made up of persons, just as is the larger culture. Cultures are processes generated by persons. They are not sentient. They depend on the sentience of the individuals of which they are composed to achieve direction, and that direction follows rules that are to some extent independent of the persons in control. To accord a process the same privileges, as human beings is not only foolish, it is idiocy of the worst kind.

The demon citizen who took control over this Art Journal will be exorcised, for he will be like a ghost, a spectral being whose performance upon the American stage, like that of all his fellows will be naught. Like a night mist suspended over dark waters, a cold wind blows and he will be dissolved.

And, we actually shall return to the concerns of Art next entry.


Reading

Fleck, Ludwig. The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Storey, John, Ed. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. New York: Longman, 2009

Chief Justice John Roberts' Supreme Court Deals the Death Blow to Free Speech in the American Political Process!

*

The Hell with the Death of Postmodernism! What about the death of Joe the Plumber?

*The artwork above was created by the hypothetical ghost of Joe the Plumber. The actual Joe is alive and well.

• The day before yesterday the Supreme Court handed corporations the right to outspend all of us put together when expressing their First Amendment Rights - reads advertising, publications, posters, bill boards,television, TV commercials, Internet blogs, videos, CD’s, motion pictures, phone banks, communications of all kinds and in all media both known and unknown – in the American political process.

• The future is clear, and there is no point for a private citizen of the United States to have political interests in his or her well-being or the well-being of the country. The simple truth is that the nations' Supreme Court confiscated any control Joe the plumber might have had in America’s political process yesterday. Instead, it handed over that process to the corporations of America and the world, because these entities (created solely to make money) are considered equal to, no superior to the merely human citizens of the United States.

• In truth, no matter how wealthy a human citizen or group of citizens might be, he/she/we cannot begin to match the most infinitesimal portion of corporate wealth. Thus, the right to free speech for human beings was crushed beneath the total weight and wealth of corporate America on January 21, 2010.

• This most conservative of Supreme Courts under Chief Justice John Roberts has turned us backward to the 19th century, and stolen the average citizen’s right to participate in the political process of the democracy. The United States of America is now the Corporate Oligarchy of America.

• Most amazingly, Chief Justice Roberts' Supreme Court has handed multi-national corporations the ability to control our political process. Al Qaeda or any brand of terrorist organization just has to infiltrate a multi-national corporation and they too can have instant access to our political process. God protect us from our own Supreme Court!

The demon citizen who took control over this Art Journal will be exorcised, for he will be like a ghost, a spectral being whose performance upon the American stage, like that of all his fellows will be naught. Like a night-mist suspended over dark waters, a cold wind blows and he will be dissolved.

And, we shall return to the concerns of Art.

Scott Brown? Hope Not.

We interrupt this Art Journal for a political statement.
I just couldn't help myself. I'm totally flabbergasted. Do all these dissatisfied folks in Massachusetts need to be put in a home and fed Gerber's beef and pea puree? Come to think of it, that won't work. We won't be able to afford the health care insurance to put them there.

A certain infamous historical French royal is reputed to have said of the masses, "Let them eat bread." I fear so many of us middle class on up, white American men, and - yes, believe it or not, women - have the same attitude about all other groups in our society.

The Death of Postmodernism #2

An entry in which the artist continues his rumination concerning the development of a new paradigm and his critique of Alan Kirby’s notion that Postmodernism is dead..

The “ISMS” in Art are part of a larger cultural pattern that includes the Arts, Humanities and Sciences. These cultural patterns surround and permeate the lives of the people that live in any culture. Most of us make use of those patterns through our diurnal participation in their maintenance without realizing that we do so. It has been my contention that there are those artists, scientists, and other creative persons who are able to do a bit more than perform the paradigms of their culture. These men and women actually predict, demonstrate and/or make change possible. However, at the same time paradigm shifts in a culture’s self perception and performance occur when several things happen at once, and I maintain that all of these are essential to such a shift. In other words, genius stimulates change during those times when the following conditions are met.

First, several subcultures within the larger culture must be in competition / conflict for dominance, as the Eastern, Mid-eastern and Western cultures are in competition for primacy today. Second, drastic changes in the distribution of wealth must be taking place such as the industrial explosion we are witnessing in China and India. Third, Sweeping technological change must be taking place as with the ongoing development of interactive technologies taking place now. If all three of these conditions exist, it is possible for a new ISM to arise generated by production of specific persons of genius within the culture. In other words, a paradigm shift is not something that is independent of individual human expression and experience. And that is a departure from the Postmodern in which the individual was so often lost in the prerogative of cultural omnipotence.

So, a new ISM may be developing at the end of the first decade in the 21st Century, though it is, I maintain, to soon to announce the death of Postmodernism. Instead, we are more likely in a period of transition between the Postmodern and whatever the next ISM will be named. Typically such naming takes place more or less by accident, and many years after such a transitional process has begun. It is only through hindsight that a movement is identified. For instance, Monet, Manet, Degas, Cassatt and the others didn’t wake up one morning, form a group and announce to the world that they would create Impressionism. Instead, each individual created new kinds of paintings because of the need and ability he/she had to see the world in a new and different way. It was only after Claude Monet exhibited “Impression Sunrise,” in a group show that critic Louis Leroy sarcastically coined the term by writing an article he titled “The Exhibition of the Impressionists” in the newspaper Le Charivari. The term stuck, and began to be applied to all those individuals that aimed to create the feeling of light and atmospheric color in their work rather than convey a sense of space and depth, as had most artists since the Renaissance. Thus, the paradigm shift was identified accidentally only after a number of artists had begun to work differently from most of their contemporaries.

to be continued


Readings:

Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
---. Writing and Difference. Trans./Intro. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Holly, Michael Ann. Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image. New York and London: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “What is Postmodernism.” reprinted as an
appendix to the English edition of Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 71-82. Harrison and Wood, 1008-1017.

Norris, Christopher. “Jacques Derrida In Discussion with Christopher Norris,” 71. In Papadakis, Andreas; Cooke, Catherine; and Benjamin, Andrew (eds.). Deconstruction. New York: Rizzoli, 1989.

Kirby, Alan, Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure our Culture. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd. (2009).
---------------- “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond,” Philosophy Now, No. 58, 2006. Viewed on line 9:-- AM EST, Wednesday, January 6, 2010.

Wilson, Fred, “What Comes After Post Modernism?” in his blog A VC. Posted June 16, 2008. Viewed 8:58 AM EST, Friday, January 1, 2010.

Native to Florida

Atlantic Sunset #1 will be at the Armory Center in the "Native to Florida" exhibit

I am so flattered to have been invited to a show titled “Native to Florida, at the Armory Art Center, 1700 Parker Avenue, West Palm Beach. It opens on Friday, January 15, 2010 with a reception from 6:00 to 8:00 P.M., and will continue through February 16, 2010. We should be back up to the low 70’s by Friday evening, and all attending should be able to visit the art without having to wear winter coats.

Yesterday my partner and I delivered the work to Armory Center in the Grandview Heights section of West Palm Beach. I was so impressed with the quality of the work I saw waiting to be installed in the exhibition space that I had to stop and pinch myself. How exciting to be included in that group. And, I was so enamored with Grandview Heights that I will do a journal entry about that after taking photographs of the area.

Thinking of Warmer Days

The above photograph was taken before Christmas 2009 during our December heat wave when we had several days running in the 90’s. So, during this January, 2010 longest cold snap in the recorded history of south Florida I’m staring at the photo, remembering how the sun and salt tingled on my skin, and pretending that it is like that outside today.

I’m not complaining mind you. I could be up north in sub-zero weather with my eyelashes frozen to my face. However, it is nice to anticipate the warmth of a normal winter returning to us hopefully a few days hence.

The Death of Postmodernism!

Whatever follows the Postmodern will include new technologies (NT) and processes, some that we cannot yet imagine, just as the Postmodern includes and makes use of NT.

I linked my New Year’s Day title, “Now that it’s 2010, What’s Next in Art” to Fred Wilson’s evaluation of Alan Kirby’s The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond.*1 Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view the prediction of the death of Postmodernism is premature, much less looking beyond. Our electronic participatory technology is not a step beyond the Postmodern. Rather, it is part of it because the Postmodern has witnessed the increasing participation of the reader / viewer in the process of making things, whether in the actual or the virtual worlds. In the Art World for instance, it is the viewer who is seen as the most important part of the creative process, not the creator, nor the artwork itself.*2 It is the viewer’s understanding of his/her reading/viewing/listening that matters, not the artist’s intent. At the same time, the culture intervenes in the reader/viewer’s understanding of the artwork. It is the culture that determines how the reader knows what he/she reads/views. My own artwork has made use of what I have playfully named the “cyber-void.”*3 Alan Kirby sees production in the age of new technology as trivial and uninspired compared with production in the old technological culture. “Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what people of all educational levels used to put into letters. Triteness, shallowness dominates all. The pseudo-modern era, at least so far, is a cultural desert.” The banality of so much of the participatory process in the cyber-world and television, cell-phone / texting, gamming electronics is generated by design and by the nature of us ordinary folk participating at the level of our diurnal existence. In order to find the “rich meat” of the participatory process, one must be willing to search, and search hard. And, that makes the late Postmodern no different than the Modern, Romantic, or any other era before. The ordinary has, is, and always will be everywhere and easily accessible. Instead, the extraordinary must be sought out. Whatever follows the Postmodern will include the new technologies, but they will not determine it. Rather, it will use them as part of the creative process to make new ideas, new possibilities and new ways of understanding the world, both actual and virtual.


Notes:

*1 Wilson, Fred, “What Comes After Post Modernism,” in A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC, http://www.avc.com/a_vc/about.html. Viewed 11:03 AM EST, Sunday, January 3, 2010.

*2 Holly, Michael Ann. Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image. New York and London: Cornell University Press, 1996.

*3 Google Isaac Stolzfuts and see where that leads you.

Now that it's 2010, What's Next in Art?

It is appropriate at the beginning of the second decade in the Twenty-first Century that a frustrated artist asks questions about the postmodern condition in which he finds himself trapped.

Okay, we’ve been muddling along with Postmodernism for about 50 years now, and that’s a long time as art movements go. We’ve been dwelling on the importance of the culture and the reader/viewer/listener above and beyond the artifact and its creator so long that it is a wonder artists continue to make art. After all, according to our art historians, the artist is just a mirror for his/her culture. And, the art object itself – well, it’s just a material thing – it isn’t important at all.

In my view we have succumbed to a reductionist Buddhist approach to Art – you know, the old saw – if a tree falls in the woods and nobody’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? If, that question be answered with a resounding, “NO,” then, it follows that the tree itself cannot exist without the audition of a living /(thinking?) person. Thus, nothing exists unless man exists. How Western is that? Lowly representative of the human race that I am, I must state the obvious.

Unfortunately, or fortunately the universe does exist independently of man and his various cultures.

Having done man in as the center around which the universe must function, it is time to look at the art object again. What about the creations of man – can these exist independently of their creator? What about the artist / creator – can he/she create art that once given up to the culture might actually contain something of the artist's original intent, and is it possible for that intent to exist to some extent, independently of the culture? In other words, can the artist and/or the artwork be more than a mere reflection of the culture in which he / she, and it exists? And what about the notion that Postmodernism is dead?*

*Check out the Title's link.


Readings

Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
---. Writing and Difference. Trans./Intro. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Holly, Michael Ann. Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image. New York and London: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “What is Postmodernism.” reprinted as an
appendix to the English edition of Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 71-82. Harrison and Wood, 1008-1017.

Norris, Christopher. “Jacques Derrida In Discussion with Christopher Norris,” 71. In Papadakis, Andreas; Cooke, Catherine; and Benjamin, Andrew (eds.). Deconstruction. New York: Rizzoli, 1989.