Socialism and Abstract Art vs. Capitalism and the Street Art/Uncommissioned Art Movement

The revolution has not been televised.

In an interview in Juxtapoz magazine, Michael Gondry (artist, filmmaker) talks about growing up in France watching Bulgarian/Russian cartoons, how communism was good for art and that the free world doesn’t make very good art because they have to be so concerned with its commercial aspect. He points out that they have to sustain their viewing audience, whereas in the communist world the audience has no choice of which cartoons to watch. This gives the artists more creative freedom.

Concerning the art of our time, this poses a conflict. It’s now 2011, and Capitalism is the dominant socioeconomic system of our global society, not Communism. In this system, artists can only create what sells. In contrast, the role of the artist in society is to show people the way, to uncover the future. More precisely, they focus the zeitgeist, presenting it in a way that can be understood by the non-artist citizenry. Art is a coping mechanism, a medicine. If this is so, then how can artists give people only what they want if what they deliver is that which people do not yet know they need?

In a socialist society, people do not choose their art. Instead, the governing body takes care of the funding, and the artists do their job. Only in such a system could Abstract Art have been born. There is no way the people would have chosen such an insane premise as this: Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915). If this is so, then how does a revolutionary art movement take form out of the Capitalist ether?

Perhaps some discourse on Abstract Expressionism is in order; but that is too easy, and becoming less relevant to the real question at hand. Instead, we turn to the street art phenomenon of the 21^st century. The 1990’s suburban American youth still had to trek out to New York City to get graffiti magazines. Then Nicholas Ganz publishes Graffiti World (2004), a graffiti artist’s bible. What was more impressive – the art within or the fact that such a compendium could be published in the first place? Street Art From Five Continents? Then Bansky. He redefines (or perhaps succinctly defines for the first time) the Street Art movement we now know. He releases Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010), and writes the preface to Trespass (2010), a 320-page fullcolor book by behemoth art publisher Taschen. What’s happening here? Artists are straightup tagging canvases, putting them in galleries, and selling them to celebrities. Shepard Fairey will probably have his own reality TV show by the end of this year. We’re saturated.

Street Art has taken over as the dominant art form of the young 21^st Century just as Abstract Art had done in the 20^th, but this time Capitalist society is the breeding ground. Restating the original question: How can artists, whose role it is to give the public an understanding of a world which they have yet to comprehend, how can they deliver in a Capitalist society which requires investment based on speculated success and consumer demand? The answer is simple. Street artists are forcing a quasi-socialist system upon us by creating the art for free.

That’s it. You won’t invest? You won’t take our medicine? No problem (just remember what happened to Nurse Rached). And so, here comes art, like it or not, just as it always has, in your face and against your will. The empty space left by the fallen wall of Berlin was first shown to us as a Black Square. “Do you want to fall not knowing who took you?” (That's more of a threat than a question).

NOTES:

“Do you want to fall…?”, Jenny Holzer, Inflammatory Essays in Trespass…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Holzer

Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art

Carlo McCormick (author), Marc and Sara Schiller (curators), Ethel Seno (editor)

Taschen 2010, 320 pages

http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/art/all/05719/facts.trespass_a_history_of_uncommissioned_urban_art.htm

Exit Through the Gift Shop, 2010

http://www.banksyfilm.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_Through_the_Gift_Shop

Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents, Nicholas Ganz. Abrams, 2004.

http://www.amazon.com/Graffiti-World-Street-Five-Continents/dp/0810949792

Michael Gondry interview in Juxtapoz magazine, Jan 2011 n 120 pp 66-75.

http://www.juxtapoz.com/

The Game of Life: Virtual Entities in Collectively-Simulated Environments

In response to a recent TED video on gaming, I had a vision. The presenter mentioned things like how the gaming industry is huge, and as a form of media, its use/consumption has been growing at a rate four times faster than any other. Also stated was the fact that games are designed to take maximum advantage of the human psyche in regards to motivation. I recall also an article on microtasking – the act of breaking menial tasks into microchunks that could then be crowdsourced.

I imagined a future where everything we do is reverse engineered into a game – by us, for us. Somehow, taking out the garbage becomes more like flying a dragon to a secret floating mountain cave. I imagine, as our lives become more automated, that many of the things we manipulate physically today, will tomorrow be done via some other system independent of our physical actions (in other words, a practicable psychokinetics). Yet, we will always have those menial tasks and chores that seem to do nothing but take the time out of our day. Also we will always face the challenges and adventures that make life worth living.

In this automated future we create an interface which is immersed in the virtual world. Why would GoogleEarth show you the way things really look when you can instead recreate your entire neighborhood into a 15th century medieval village? Why wouldn’t you put on a mask (or, more feasibly, intercept the connections between your eyes and your visual cortex via some less cumbersome apparatus) that superimposes your virtual world on top of the real one in real time, real space.

But furthermore, you could program virtual entities, ones which could respond to you via kinetic controls. Virtual entities could pop up to remind you to pick up a gallon of milk (a golden amulet) from the corner store (the dragon’s lair). Characters interact with you, and you with them, via your virtual entity interface. Situations which are virtual representations of pre-programmed errands, tasks and ideas would take the mundane out of your daily chores.

But this future would never happen this way. In the extremely abstracted, transformed and reverse engineered world, you would not exist alone. Every person would bring with them every other virtual entity until the whole world, yours included, would interact with each other. You would, in the course of a singe day, engage in, struggle with, and triumph over the very obstacles and unfinished business of the rest of the world.

Seth Priebatsch: The game layer on top of the world

TEDXBoston, 2010

http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_top_of_the_world.html

Jesse Schell: When games invade real life

DICE Summit, 2010

http://www.ted.com/talks/jesse_schell_when_games_invade_real_life.html

When the Assembly Line Moves Online, RANDALL STROSS

NYTimes October 30, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/business/31digi.html

Chaos is Illusion

Chaos is an illusion.

It is but order disguised in complexity.

When we thoroughly understand a system, we call it order. Yet there are always parts of the system that we fail to understand and in those parts, we see only chaos. Through organization, through knowledge and understanding, we lift the veil of chaos, to reveal another layer of our ordered system. But like so many layers of the onion, we, as if trapped in an ever-expanding sphere of our own protection, shed one skin only to find another blurring our view.

No matter how big the system, it will always be surrounded in chaos. Chaos is the fertile ground of knowledge, the ground from which knowledge grows to understanding, and from which that understanding grows into the increasingly symbiotic relationship between the inside and the outside, the organism and its environment. As life accelerates on its path towards more life, it crystallizes the unsure footing of chaos that lay before it. The firmness upon which we stand is built out of thin air.

You're not. We are.

I come to you

from a star.

I bring you light.

With this light,

you will grow.

You will grow

until you make

your own light.

And you will shine

your light back

to me.

In a world without time,

this has already happened.

You do not exist;

we are the same.

High Yield

People, over all other alternatives, yield the highest return-on-investment.

People I’d Like to Meet: Neanderthal Man

Late last spring I was camping alone in the woods along the Delaware River and was forced to bed early by a vicious migraine. When I woke up twelve hours later and in a hypnopompic state, it was unseasonably cold and my dreams and thoughts mixed together. I snuggled into my sleeping bag, peeked through the small hole towards the rising sun, and I had a vision – that is to say I couldn’t tell the difference between my dreams and reality.

A caveman stood at the mouth of a cave, and I somehow with him, yet not, both of us looking out towards the morning sky. I became the cavemen and felt his steady, nervous patience as he waited at the mouth of his cave for an enemy that never came.

I waited with him for what seemed like hours and hours, muscles taught, mind focused, paranoid and waiting. I thought to myself how difficult it must have been to live the life of the caveman, to have that one and only thought roll back and forth across your mind – life or death, life or death. You must be ready at any given moment to face that question. You might spend the whole day waiting at the mouth of your cave, at the ready, waiting for fear to materialize suddenly.

And then I thought to myself – I’m so glad I’ve got this cave, and I retired deep into its warm, protected recesses to rest.

I don’t know if it’s in line to say I’d like to meet this man; technically, for that morning at least, I was him.

Karmic Channels: Preparation-thought, processing-thought, and fossilized thought-growth

Akin to adjusting the karmic channels that influence our chi, thought sets up the conditions for future understanding.

Thought, as much as it is necessary for the acquisition of knowledge, is used also in the preparation of the mind in anticipation of knowledge. In thinking, we are sowing the field of the psyche, planting seeds in some cases, and in other cases, letting the seeds fall where they may.

Knowledge can be called the growth that follows this preparation-thought, and thus a different kind of thought, the reaping, processing-thought, is what we use to register this development to knowledge (i.e., “fossilized thought-growth”).