My Man Kimmelman

Here's man after my own heart. Michael Kimmelman in the NYT (December 16th, selected excerpts):

"Notwithstanding the recession, art-worlders insist smart people still pay good money for great art. (Really? Smart? Hirst?)

The current art world, in the form of art fairs like Frieze, as well as the ubiquitous biennials and other festivals, is without debate succeeding at something now. It's succeeding at providing relatively cheap forms of mild distraction for ever-larger masses of fashion-conscious people whose budgets cover dinner at PizzaExpress, but not works of art.

...the art world, having become almost entirely an extension of the fashion and entertainment industries, offers its own version of bygone Hollywood's outlandish riches and loopy entertainment. Instead of Esther Williams, it's Jeff Koons. Instead of Tarzan, there's Olafur Eliasson.

If this were all that art produced, the era's legacy would look dire. But it would also be grim to contemplate the arts being serious and important all the time." 

He hems and haws a bit there, but he's got a dozen editors and Sulzberger Jr. looking over his shoulder.

"Culture of Recession? Or Vice Versa?"
by Michael Kimmelman
The New York Times, December 16, 2010

Ireland

The shell game continues. Countries hike debt to rescue banks, which then threaten their rescuers with bankruptcy by shorting their bonds. Blackmail: countries in okay shape but with a plunging bond rate must accept to be rescued in exchange for ditching the Welfare State and imposing Libertarian Capitalism, i.e. every man for himself. Unemployment jumps, real wages drop, everyone is screwed, and the rich get richer. After Ireland comes Portugal, Spain and all the rest of the little duckies. The US too: this is like Brecht: when they come for you there will be no one left to object.

Everything, absolutely everything in the financial markets is a scheme to rob the working wage earner and create the conditions for Third World bliss: 1% of the population with 99% of the wealth. Check out how far along the US is on this road, and you have the country's history of the last 30 years in a nutshell.

The little man revolts but he hasn't a clue: there is a grass-roots movement by Spaniards to withdraw all their savings from banks on December 18th. Good luck. But if this goes on, the little man could get really angry and start thinking. Let's hope so.


Photo: Favela Morumbi, Sao Paulo
From Treehugger

Campaign Lessons from Catalonia

Note to the wary: the links on this post are not for minors, even if they are in Catalan. And they are not for your Aunt Minnie either.

American politicos can learn something from the election campaign in Catalonia, the autonomous region whose capital is Barcelona. Videos by different parties have added some spice to the process, always welcome in bringing out the vote.

First the youth division of the Socialists came out with a video in which an attractive young female voter gets a little heated up on entering the polling station, and then has a rather sublime time of it introducing her ballot into the ballot box. See it here (sorry about the ad).

Then a fringe party (Alternativa de Govern) did a video with its leader, Montse Nebrera, appearing on camera wrapped in a towel after sounds of sex, and saying something like, "I could go further but...."  The video is a little long, tracking through a disheveled bedroom and some political messages in Catalan while the soundtrack plays out to its conclusion, but Montse is worth the wait, even if she must be some kind of political kook (she is backed by the Opus Dei, altho I'm not sure if they previewed her campaign material). Judge for yourself here.

This was all very fun, but then the conservative Popular Party's youth brigade sent out a video game where their candidate avatar gets points for shooting down illegal immigrants and symbols of Catalan identity such as paellas and butifarra sausages  (stand-ins for those pesky Catalan indepentistas). But there was a fuss and  they had to withdraw the game and come up with some plausible excuse. Here's a couple of screen shots someone got before they pulled it, where you can appreciated the campaign's graphic skills:

There she is, up in the left hand corner on the back (or neck) of a seagull, a party symbol, whacking away at immigrants and butiffaras with her light bulb missiles (get it? -- bright ideas). Note the apocalyptically silhouetted homeland, with Calatravian doodles in ruins, a beseiged cross, and a burning glow on the horizon....

With only 40% of the electorate expected to turn out, anything is worth a try.

Tea, Anyone?

The New Yorker has been doing a quick intensive course on the new right wing and its been a lot of fun. About how Wm F Buckley worked to keep the John Birch nutcases from taking over the GOP, to keep the party in the center of the road, from Goldwater to Reagan. About the Koch Bros, descendants of John Birchers with reasons of their own to be rabid libertarians and anti-regulators (oil and gas pipelines), secretly financing the tea takers to the tune of millions. On the origins of the Fox news guy Beck's rants and raves (John Birch again and worse, and all based on fictionalizing history, the Constitution and so on). 

My new theory: Yes to a weak federal govt, yes to states rights. If the east coast and the west coast want health care, pass it state by state. If all the rest of the middle of the country wants to prohibit abortion, jail homosexuals, throg immigrants and worse, let'em go back to the Stone Age on their own. And while Idaho, Texas and Colorado are busy with these pressing social issues, who cares about foreign affairs? That will be the beginning of the end of the military-industrial dictatorship (I admit, a rather remote possibility) and give the rest of the world a rest from American foreign policy. I mean, Iraq, where's that? What we have to worry about now is Massachusetts!!

Now that the cat catches mice...

A new quote for the new China: Xi Jinping, Chinese leader-designate, cited in El País from a speech in Mexico in 2009:

"Some foreigners, with their stomachs full and nothing better to do, dedicate their time to pointing the finger at us. In the first place, China doesn't export revolution. Secondly, it doesn't export hunger and poverty. And thirdly, it doesn't go around looking for trouble. What more is there to say?"

 Translated from the Spanish by JS

Photo from Chinesehour Blog

Xi's wife is a popular singer

Madrid is Bankrupt

Zap is putting the screws on municipalities so they can't keep increasing their debts. He's been especially hard on Madrid (PP), with the biggest debt, and the Mayor was seen literally begging the Pres for a break at the Spain Day parade on October 12th.

He owes trash collection and street cleaning companies over 250 m euros, hasn't paid them in 9 months, and they are threatening to cut services (total debt owed by Spanish municipalities to the big trash haulers (spin-offs of once-rich construction firms) are over 2 bn euros).

The Mayor (Alberto Ruiz Gallardón) owes money to everyone. He put Madrid thru two Olympic bids (2012 and 2016), buried a highway under the Manzanares River, a 10 km underground six-lane salaam course with countless interchanges and extensions, that cost about 6 bn (the best work of interactive installation art I've ever seen, I must admit), built a Dominque Perrault tennis stadium that cost 300 m (double the budget) and that really sucks (The roofs slide up and down but so what? Its a big Kemedy-Center box (Ed Du Stone, Washington DC) finished in galvanized steel and concrete), and uselessly moved city hall into the old post office at Cibeles for a cost of over 100 m, not to mention a lot of other things. When he was Pres of the Madrid regional govt. he sunk another big chunk in a regional subway, underground, that connects all the southern suburbs. A total waste.

It would be great if Madrid forecloses. Its the only thing that might hurt this idiot's popularity -- he is by far the most popular politician in Spain, altho his own party hates him -- they think he's a socialist, because he's not exactly a Francoist. The PP puts up with him because he's unbeatable. And municipal elections are coming up next May -- let's see if he can hold his load until then.

Above, M-30 underground salaam. photo from Wikimedia Commons by FDV; used with permission.

Koons the Collector

Don't miss the New York Times piece on Jeff Koons and his art collection, hidden in his bedroom in his Upper East Side apartment. A portrait, as true as any, of the present moment. History is made by the new rich, and so the most successful striver in American art of my generation, an aw-shucks kid from York, Pennsylvania,  has staked his claim on the Upper East Side -- Park Avenue, surely-- and any Old Masters within reach (he started off on Lichtenstein but now he's on to harder stuff). Does this betray his contemporaneity? Hardly. He just puts himself up there in the best company he can find.

Koons on his own work: "With an ever-present warm smile and the comforting tones of a guidance counselor, he has spoken about how art 'lets you kind of control physiology and the secretions that take place within the body,' how his art operates in 'a morality theater trying to help the underdog,' how his balloon-based sculptures, at least sexually speaking, 'really try to address whatever your interests are.' "

This guy is money in the bank.

Free Association a la FBI

Spain got an official apology from the American Embassy in Madrid after a newspaper revealed that an FBI "most wanted" photo of a digitally-aged Bin Ladin used parts of the face of Gaspar Llamazares, former leader of the Izquierda Unida Party -- a coalition of Communists and left-of-the-Socialists leftists. Some hack at the FBI admitted he had picked Llamazares' face from a campaign poster. Nice to know the FBI is still keeping track of dangerous leftists, and puts the information to good use.

Update 10/20/10:  Not long ago the target of the FBI hunt --not Bin Laden after all, it seems-- was blown to bits by a missile from an unmanned Predator. Don't know if this helps Llamazares sleep better at night or not.

Ever Higher

Did you catch the fireworks show at the inauguration of the Burj Dubai? Pretty close approximation to what a controlled demolition might look like, or a crippling orgasm.

Performance Art by the Hyper-Rich

First I caught up with a "food installation" by Jennifer Rubell, of the real estate family, for New York's Performa, a three-week performance-art festival, reviewed last fall in the Talk of the Town section of an old New Yorker. It featured a dessert course consisting of "three large apple trees, which will be chopped down, brought to the gallery, and laid out on the floor, so that guests can eat fruit from the branches." (October 26, 2009)

Now I find another Talk of the Town piece from the November 30 issue, on a benefit for MOCA in LA featuring Lady Gaga in a Frank Gehry hat, a Steinway decorated with butterflies by Damien Hirst (auctioned and sold to Hirst's dealer, Larry Gagosian, for $450,000), and three heiresses "in matching gold diadems" doing a "visual art act." “We’re a cross between the Spice Girls and Burning Man,” [Margherita] Missoni said, dissolving in giggles." Etc. All presided over by the Russian art promoter and billionaire's daughter Dasha Zhukova.

It's about time real idiots got in on the scene. Maybe now art can move on to something else.