The Horse Your Ethos Rode In On

Journal entry for 19 Jul 2010 | Link

Left Behind

Last week I received an invitation from the artist Richard Haden to join a Facebook group in favor of plugging the oil leak in the Gulf with the works of Ayn Rand. I presume Haden did so knowing that I'm a libertarian, and thinking I would find this upsetting. In fact, I thought it was pretty funny. (I joined the Facebook group in favor of plugging the leak with Sarah Palin. The current favorite of the genre, according to the number of members, supports the use of Rush Limbaugh, who I admit has the advantage of mass over Palin. Or, for that matter, the combined volume of all the Rand novels ever published.)

Checking in with Richard's wall, I found that he had posted a quote attributed to one John Rogers.

There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.

Again, this is pretty amusing. I read Anthem back in high school, but that's the extent of my exposure to Rand. I could never get into Tolkein, although I absorbed quite a lot of his universe by proxy as a Dungeons and Dragons player. But I've been arguing with folks online long enough to recognize bait, grab it, and pull the fisherman into the water. I posted this comment on the remark.

"If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being." - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

I found this quote via Google. I never read Atlas Shrugged and likely never will. This is what Rand is good for, ultimately—a few brisk, strident lines, serviceable as inspiration and entertainment for the individualist. Objectivist ideas about art are so stunted that I never felt inclined to explore its other facets, which may be brilliant, but I doubt it. There are better novelists out there, to put it gently. But I find nothing objectionable about the above quote in isolation.

At any rate, it worked. Haden proceded to lecture me about the shortcomings of Objectivism, at times cogently and honestly, at times not. None of it disturbed me except his rejection of Descartes, but I was recently reading Alfred North Whitehead and got caught up in his retelling of the thrilling development of coordinate geometry, which was not germane to any of his points. Ultimately, the revelatory bit of my exchange with Richard, who describes his politics as left and green, was his conflation of Ayn Rand, Ron and Rand Paul, the Tea Partiers, and the right wing in its entirety. I have seen the same view expressed by other liberals, namely that the Tea Partiers, Objectivists, libertarians, and conservatives are subsets or supersets of one another. As a libertarian, having to explain the difference between my views and conservative views is a tiresome burden made necessary by other peoples' unwillingness to take even a moment to research subjects they've already made their minds up about, but I guess I signed up for it by embracing a minority position. As a person, it's dismaying to see guilt by association, fuzzy logic, shrill point-scoring, disinformation, ethical and rhetorical bars that move up and down depending on the political sympathies of the perpetrator of the opinion, the substitution of easy beliefs for complicated facts, and other techniques perfected by Fox News pundits now being embraced by the left. I understand the necessity to hit back, but it indicates that political discourse is in this country is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. In the meantime I'm going to have to edify otherwise informed people to the effect that, for instance, the Cato Institute is explicitly pro-immigration, or that Ron Paul and Alan Greenspan have irreconcilable and fundamental differences, or that having philosophical problems with the use of force behind certain acts of civil rights legislation does not make you a racist.

But the above has been noted by other people. My contribution to this discussion is that in Ayn Rand, the left has found its Andres Serrano: a perpetrator of middling art based on half-baked politics who can be held up as the epitome of everything that's wrong with the other end of the political spectrum. Al d'Amato ripping up a catalog containing Serrano's Piss Christ on the floor of the Senate in 1989 and the current drollery over the idea of using Rand's novels as a giant oil sponge are sentimentally equivalent. Put into words, it might say, "Take your ethos and shove it." Saying this presupposes the existence of people who embrace that ethos. They hardly need to exist, if at all. There are probably as many people who would defile a crucifix as would make Objectivism the law of the land. They need only represent some kind of moral failure that can spray upon nearby targets when you rhetorically torpedo them in public. Indeed, I plugged "ayn" into the search box on my Facebook page and it looks like Richard has been busy in that regard.

That Rand Paul (Ayn Rand clone) won the GOP primary and is running to be a senator from Kentucky is a little embarrassing for me. Being from Kentucky is great but now that Kentucky is home to the Creationist Museum and Rand Paul it is looking like the Kentucky Derby is going to turn into a thorough(ly) bred unicorn race sooner or later.

Once again, this is clever. But I challenge you to find any connection between the two, much less cloning. Paul is on the record quoting the band Rush, not Ayn Rand, but even then I promise you that he doesn't want to base policy on ideas in the seminal prog-rock album Moving Pictures. And this is not to say that I agree with Paul on all matters, but that he deserves judgment based on what he says and does, just like everyone else on the planet.

That discussion segued into another about monetary policy with Chris Rywalt. As it happens I'm halfway through Peter Schiff's Crash Proof 2.0, which I would like to think is needlessly alarmist and I'm afraid is just as prescient as the 2006 edition, which predicted the Great Recession down to the detail a year in advance. Schiff, who is running for Senate in Connecticut and has been mentioned in the journal before, wrote:

As Detroit yielded its status as the automotive capital of the world, I predict New York by the end of the next decade will be replaced as the world's financial capital, probably by a group of centers such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, London, Stockholm, Frankfurt, and perhaps others. When the United States became the center of the world's capital markets, we were its richest country. We were the one investing our surplus savings all around the world. We had a lot of capital to allocate and it was done in New York. People who wanted to list their companies came to our markets because that's where the investors with money could be found. Capital should be allocated where it's being accumulated. ... Why should other countries outsource their capital allocations to the United States, especially given prior results, or American companies try to raise money here when we're all broke and they could raise it more easily in Shanghai or Tokyo?

This jumped out at me because of its similarity to an essay written Ross Neher sent in by Edmonton painter Duncan Johnson.

Whereas most see a permanently shrunken, but still familiar art world (fewer galleries and art fairs, less elaborate installations, etc.), I see an art world so radically changed it's bound to impact the very definition of art and what it means to be an artist. ... Wall Street, once synonymous with the capital markets, will exist as nothing more than a street sign. Yes, a stock exchange and some banks will remain, but profitability will be low as enforced prudence trumps risk. Few employees let go as a result of downsizing, mergers, or bankruptcies, will be rehired. The collapse of the financial system has already devastated the New York real estate and restaurant industries and small businesses are reeling. In Chelsea you can see the collateral damage; each month there are fresh reports of gallery closings. (There is even a blog called “Deathwatch” where artists post rumors of their demise.) Without Wall Street playing Daddy Warbucks to New York City, many segments of the local economy will remain weak, even after a general economic turnaround.

This was a refreshing read after encountering a couple of things like Ben Davis's late-late-Marxist 9.5 Theses on Art and Class and while ultimately some matters are not given to men to know, I find myself gravitating away from whatever trend seems to be ascending at the moment. As Pretty Lady put it in her Dear John letter to the art world:

"Art," as practiced by the self-styled elite of the global art scene, is a giant confidence game. I used to think I could either change it or create a niche for myself within it; now I think that my values are incompatible with its founding principles. Continuing to sacrifice my time, money and attention to this cynical game doesn't make me a dedicated artist, it just makes me a chump.

Even as I persist at it, for now, I sympathize with this sentiment. I continue to adore the real artists, the ones motivated by love. But I've begun to assume, barring immediate and convincing contrary evidence, that artists are on the wrong track. If the scene has become interested in something, I develop interest in an orthogonal direction. The scene hooks to the political left, and I become curious about Austrian economics. The scene gets into theory, and I wonder about math. It gets all bothered about a television show whose title rhymes with Shirk of Smart, and I seek out real competition and real sportsmanship in roller derby.

Roller Derby?

Yes indeed. This past Saturday on the flat track at the Shriner's Auditorium up in Willimantic, MA we watched the Cosmonaughties trounce the Nutcrackers, and then our own Boston Massacre go up against Madison's Dairyland Dolls in a good, even match (which we won, naturally) dominated by the remarkable Krush Puppy. Roller derby seems to be undergoing a revival and I encourage you to seek it out if your town has a league going. What a fine time we had.

A Busy Fall

At the moment I'm scheduled to be in three shows this fall. The big one is a solo exhibition entitled "The Talk That Walked" at Main Library, Downtown Branch in Miami. We have definite dates: November 4 - December 19, with an opening reception on Thursday, November 18. I may elect to come down to Miami and stay for three weeks rather than go back and forth to Boston, especially if the alternative is shipping work and flying twice. The reception takes place during the Miami Book Fair and we're hoping to have a suitably literary event at the opening.

Warren Craghead has invited me to participate in an as-yet untitled show at The Bridge in Charlottesville, VA. This will run from October 1 through the end of the month, maybe into early November. We are discussing a public talk of some kind, which I would very much like to do.

Kristen Thiele has likewise invited me to participate in "Good and Plenty," which will take place at Artcenter/South Florida on Miami Beach and feature work by ACSF alumni. Dates are TBA but it will take place opposite Art Basel Miami Beach during the first week of December.

If my application for the Governors Island Art Fair comes through, I'll be exhibiting solidly from September to December this year.

Readings

Eric Gelber writes an attentive, thoughtful piece on Roberto Juarez.

His show at Davis of small oils on cardboard and canvas was a welcomed opportunity to exhibit more intimately scaled works. New York City galleries typically want big work for exhibitions, making this the first opportunity to show small works, which he has made since childhood. "I think that’s why I’m an artist, because I really love painting. It something I experienced very young as a child. At the Art Institute of Chicago I remember going and seeing a Van Gogh exhibition during my very first visit to the museum and buying a book of the Sunflower paintings. Taking that home was just unbelievable. I remember thinking that this was what I really care about. Not even knowing what that meant, but knowing that everything else that was going on in my life wasn't as important as that experience I had in front of those paintings."

Carol Kino on the Marine Corps combat art program.

The program is not the only one of its kind in the United States military, but many regard it as the one most deeply committed to its artistic mission. Like those in the other services, it began after the attack on Pearl Harbor and scaled back after Vietnam. Somewhat unusually, however, it has kept at least one artist in the reserves ready to deploy. And while most of the services have reactivated their art programs since the start of the Bush administration’s “global war on terror,” the Marine Corps’s has been the only one to cover most of the major conflicts.