Something is Afoot

Replacing Feudalism with Capitalism is a process that took two to three hundred years. In reviewing the history and writing about it, historians identify and describe to us the broad trends unfolding. It is difficult, maybe impossible, to see such trends clearly in the history we live. This is the reason to study history. To get a perspective that gives us some ability to assess our times, identify trends and project those trends into the future.

Spirit-of-Gift

I have finished reading The Gift by Lewis Hyde. It was a very satisfying read. It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know or suspect on some level, but it deepened my understanding of the spirit of human creativity and how one needs to treat the gift of inspiration. It also firmed up in my mind the idea that there is human endeavor and expression and need fulfillment which does not fit easily into a market economy and is consequently undervalued or not valued at all in our society. The market has us so trained to the idea that only commodity has value, we have a hard time valuing and treating as important anything we can’t put a price tag on. It leaves an awful lot of what it means to be human desiccating in the deserts of capitalism.

Women have known for a long time what it is to have your production undervalued or not valued at all. More men are learning this too. Relational partnerships are coming in all sorts of configurations these days and increasingly men are having to deal with the power dynamics of not being the main bread winner.

According to Hyde, indigenous peoples have known for centuries how to value that which has no value in a civilized market. And this excerpt from The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck, is a remarkable description of the clash between an indigenous way of looking at things and a market-civilized way of looking at things:

And in our contacts with Mexican people we had been faced with a change in expediencies. Perhaps—even surely—these people are expedient, but on some other plane than our ordinary one. What they did for us was without hope or plan for profit. We suppose there must have been some kind of profit involved, but not the kind we are used to, not of material things changing hands. And yet some trade took place at every contact—something was exchanged, some unnamable of great value. Perhaps these people are expedient in the unnameables. Maybe they bargain in feelings, in pleasures, even simple contacts. When the Indians came to the Western Flyer and sat timelessly on the rail, perhaps they were taking something. We gave them presents, but it was sure they had not come for presents. When they helped us, it was with no idea of material payment. There were material prices for material things, but one couldn’t buy kindness with money, as one can in our country. It was so in every contact, and they were so used to the spiritual transaction that they had difficulty translating material things into money.

For the bulk of my life I have struggled to find a place in this market oriented world where money is power and any thing or any effort that can’t be commoditized is useless. I have always been more interested in the “useless” bits, the spiritual bits.

This past Christmas, inspired by The Gift, I decided I wanted to gift something I made with my own hands to family and friends instead of buying something and sending it. I am a photographic artist and my art is pretty good. I created what I call a photographic chapbook which is a short publication. I used high quality archival paper to print them and sowed them together myself. There were eight photographs in the chapbook, and a micro poem to accompany them. When I had shared the images with my photography salon the feed back was very positive. When I shared the chapbook with my Salon one attendee bargained me ur from $25 to $50 for it on the spot. I had reason to believe that most people would like my chapbook. I chose the book format because I didn’t want to impose my aesthetics on anybody’s walls. They could always ask me for a larger print if they wanted to have one on their walls. I gave a number of these chapbooks to a variety of people in my life. The only ones that were acknowledged in any way were the ones for which I was in the room when they were opened.

Spirit-of-gift means that when you send your product out into the world as gift, you are setting it free and shouldn’t expect a return, or that the return will come immediately or even be obvious. That’s the hard part of flowing with the spirit-of-gift. We are so deeply enmeshed in a society that expects an immediate return in every exchange it is hard to sit still when it doesn’t happen. I wonder though, if instead of gifting my chapbooks I had spent $50 on a market commodity and gifted it, what the response might have been?

Perhaps I am like the indigenous Mexicans, speaking a language hard to comprehend in my society.

I won’t give up on making and gifting. My new mantra is: “Make and gift, something will come of it.”

Nick Cave Vs. ChatGPT

This past week a musician friend of mine posted a link to a Guardian article in which Nick Cave takes on song lyrics written “in the style of Nick Cave” by ChatGPT. She quoted at length from it, as will I:

Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.

What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognizes as their known self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering. This is what we humble humans can offer, that AI can only mimic, the transcendent journey of the artist that forever grapples with his or her own shortcomings. This is where human genius resides, deeply embedded within, yet reaching beyond, those limitations.

Much as I admire Nick Cave and my musician friend for being the valiant and vibrant creators that they are, I think the argument that ChatGPT doesn’t feel and hasn’t experienced is beside the point. It doesn’t need to feel, it only needs to make human beings feel in this particular game. It only needs to predict what will bring tears to our eyes and laughter to our faces, what will draw us deeply in and help us transcend ourselves. I suspect that ChatGPT and other AI like it can and will get very good at that.

If you reject the idea that algorithms can learn to make us feel, then consider what has been said about Facebook (and other social media) algorithms that can suss out what is most likely to draw our attention and hold it. Consider how that played out in recent elections and how it plays out fueling white supremacy and hatred of the other. It turns out anger is a powerful motivation for people to coalesce around and AI has gotten pretty good at feeding us on a banquet of hatred of the other.

AI generated everything is inevitable and it will get better and better. The thing is, AI is a product of mass organization economic systems, capitalism in particular. It is doubtful it could have happened without capitalism or other equally disconnecting ways of operating an economy and, by extension, society. The key point to remember is that we don’t have to participate in that economy, at least, not all the time. I don’t know if we can completely eliminate capitalism or other mass organizational systems. I don’t know if we would even want to. There are some breathtaking benefits. But it does seem possible to organize parallel economies that are more local in scale, which is the scale at which the alternatives can thrive and be satisfying; the scale at which it matters that the song channeling our personal human experience and making us feel was created by another human being; the scale at which it matters that we go to hear that song performed by the creator and participate in the communal activity that live performance creates.

I have been reading about alternative economics. Two books are very influential to my thinking. Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein and The Gift, by Lewis Hyde. I have finished the first and am halfway through the second.

Sacred Economics helped me understand why growth is essential to capitalism—there is always more debt than value being created through production—and how capitalism fills the void between debt and product by converting the commons—that which should belong to everyone—to privately held resources to be exploited for profit. ChatGPT is another attempt to lay claim to the commons, in this case, the creative commons that all art product aspires to be part of. In Sacred Economics, Eisenstein argues that eliminating usury (the ability to make money on money), creating currency that devalues with time (not through inflation, but through planned devaluation over a specific time frame), and practicing a gift economy as tribal and other types of small communities have often done.

In Part I of The Gift, Lewis Hyde explains the history and functioning of the gift economy in great detail, as well as the history of usury and modern economies which have supplanted the gift economy. In Part II, which I have just now started to make my way through, he explains the relevance of a gift economy to the arts.

AI is a product of mass economic systems, capitalism in particular. AI couldn’t happen without these systems and will function best within these contexts. Human rendered art can and sometimes does function well within that mass economic context, but, when you get beyond the few giants and near giants in any creative industry human creative output struggles to function in that context and starts to require an economy built on community. This is the gift economy that Hyde and Eisenstein, drawing heavily from Hyde, describe.

My guess is that we need to relearn the gift economy if we are to have a satisfying way of being human creatives and connecting our creations with other human beings. I don’t presently believe that one excludes the other but we must actively and intentionally reclaim the gift economy if we are to benefit from it. There is much work to do in this direction.

This is all I can say about economic alternatives at present because I am still reading and thinking. The important point I am making is that it’s not AI vs human artists but an economic system that by its design breaks down community as against one that builds it. The choice is ours as to which one we want to labor and participate in.

”Make the work, something will come of it.”

Adventures in a gift economy…

I, like many of you, have come to the conclusion that Capitalism is killing the planet. Killing the planet means killing ourselves. We are engaged in species suicide. We don’t seem to be able to help ourselves.

For the longest time I have thought we needed a new system of managing ourselves and our resources, but I have had no idea what it should be. There have been inklings here and there. Buddhist Economics, an essay by E. F. Schumacher that wondered what an economic system based on Buddhist principals would look like. It offered a whole new way of thinking of things. It speculated that the well being of people should be centered. No matter how much capitalist economists try to tell us that capitalism centers the well being of people, that people’s living standards rise wherever its principals are adhered to, it just isn’t true. It creates the conditions it then claims to fix. It exploits people for the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few and leaves too many impoverished.

There were more inklings in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a woman with Native American ancestry and a American Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology. The book is steeped in Native American ways of thinking about nature. That nature is a commons we all have the right to enjoy and harvest as long as we do so respectfully, don’t claim any part of it exclusively for ourselves, and don’t take more than we need. The bounty of the commons is a gift we receive and share. She places this gift economy alongside the system of capitalist exploitation where the commons has been transferred to private ownership that we buy and exploit for our personal benefit.

Robin Wall Kimmerer knows in her heart that the system her ancestors had was better, but acknowledges that it would be difficult to organize people and resources beyond a tribal or local community level based on it. She delivered a message of hope to me, but not a clear pointer to where we should be going or how we might get there.

Then, a few months ago I read an essay she wrote about serviceberry economics, essentially making the case for a gift economy along the lines her ancestors practiced. In that essay she referenced Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein. I bought it. I read it.

Charles Eisenstein explained to me why Capitalism requires a forever-expanding production and consumption, aka, growth. We always owe more than we produce. The way money is created and distributed is based on debt. Debt that is collateralized by the ability of the economy to grow endlessly. He also showed me a viable way to create an economy that is not based on debt and the accumulation of capital. We create money that has an expiration date. It looses value over time. The incentive to accumulate is removed and the result is that money circulates more freely, which puts more goods and services in more people’s hands. It isn’t practical to horde what looses value. We also eliminate usury, the practice of loaning with interest. The practice of making money from money. We practice a gift economy, where it is more significant to give than receive.

Charles Eisenstein believes that capitalism is set to collapse under its own weight because we are running out of commons (that which belongs to everybody) to convert into private ownership. I am not so sure that is the case. We are exploring outer space and traveling to the Moon and Mars with an eye towards growth through privatizing that commons. Space is comparatively limitless and, assuming we find resources that can be valued, the potential for growth is also limitless.

Even so, Sacred Economics gave me the outline of a system that seems feasible. And Capitalism doesn’t have to fail or be replaced wholesale to achieve it. A sacred or gift economy, which values the commons and people, can grow up alongside the capitalist economy and channel human creative effort in ways capitalism can’t. It may in fact be a necessary adjunct to capitalism, its strength being the building of community on the local level which Capitalism is not at all good at doing. In fact, capitalism is anti local community.

Sacred Economics led me to The Gift by Lewis Hyde. I am five chapters into it and pretty sure it is a transformative text for me. It is an in depth look at the “Gift Economy” as it applies to the artist and creative labor.

Because of the above referenced books and essays, especially Sacred Economics and The Gift, I have decided to run an experiment this year with my art production and distribution. I am planning to make what I call photo chapbooks. Chapbooks are small books or pamphlets that, traditionally, contain poems, stories, ballads or religious tracts. My photo chapbooks will contain a small set of images and sometimes a poem or some relevant prose writing.

I am planning to do a series of these books that propagate and distribute only through a gift economy. That is, I will give them away to family, friends and acquaintances. They will have instructions explaining that the chapbook is a gift from the artist to the wider world. They will specify that the chapbook should never change hands for money, that it is the artist’s wish that they only be passed from person to person as a gift and any receiver of the gift is encouraged to gift it to another person if it doesn’t find a permanent home in their library. If it does find a permanent home, then the receiver is asked to gift something in their possession to someone they know in a similar way. In that way, the gift stays in motion as gifts are intended to do.

One of my favorite quotes is from, I think, John Cage, who told someone somewhere struggling with their creative product and how to live from it, “make the work, something will come of it.” I am interested to see what comes of this work.

Vivienne Westwood: Six Radical Quotes on Saving the World

What makes this set of “Radical Quotes” so interesting is that they come from the heart of the fashion industry and they make seem ripped directly from the book Sacred Economics, which I recently finished reading and highly recommend.

What Stood Out, Week 17

In this post I share an article on why Socialism is a turnoff for most of the people it might help.

I keep thinking that capitalism needs significant revision if not to be replaced by something altogether focused in a different direction. To me, it is obvious that the market capitalist system, built as it is on exploitation of resources and people, destroys as much value as it creates. Some form of socialism might help mitigate the situation and yet, working class and lower middle class American citizens have been taught that socialism is to their economic health as sunlight is to a vampire. Add to that the perception, not entirely unwarranted, that Democrats are elitist and out of touch with their issues.

Former Democratic Montana Gov. Steve Bullock has described the image of his party this way: “coastal, overly educated, elitist, judgmental, socialist — a bundle of identity groups and interests lacking any shared principles. The problem isn’t the candidates we nominate. It’s the perception of the party we belong to.”

In this post I share an article that explains the value proposition of capitalism, which is the pumping of wealth from “the periphery,”—cheap labor, undervalued resources—to the center where societies based on excessive appetite vacuum it up. The solution that is groped towards is to delink local economies by emphasizing the fulfillment of local needs with local and traditional production, while maintaining some international trade around things that might be unique to one place or another and of interest/value to a broader public because of its uniqueness, not a production cost difference.

It is important to note that delinking is often widely misunderstood to mean autarky, or a system of self-sufficiency and limited trade. But this is a misrepresentation. Delinking does not require cutting all ties to the rest of the global economy, but rather the refusal to submit national-development strategies to the imperatives of globalisation. It aims to compel a political economy suited to its needs, rather than simply going along with having to unilaterally adjust to the needs of the global system. To this goal of greater sovereignty, a county would develop its own productive systems and prioritise the needs of the people rather than the demands on international capital.

And then there was an article about the crisis of masculinity. What astonished me the most were the statistics about where women and men are, relatively, in the work force. It bares quoting again here.

Girls are now outperforming boys at nearly every level of education. They earn 60 percent of bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and comprise 70 percent of high school valedictorians. Women are also dominating many workplaces. Women today hold a majority of the nation’s jobs, including 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 54 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. As for men, they are dropping out at alarming rates. More prime age males are out of the labor force today than during the Great Depression.

That’s huge progress for women. It makes the blowback of the patriarchal structure even more comprehensible. Not only is the mostly white, male power structure under threat from minorities who collectively will be a majority in the country in the near future, but even more so by women in general who are overtaking men in every category. It is no surprise that there is a strong push by this patriarchal structure to overturn democracy, and to hammer women back to the dark ages where they had no control over their bodies. Thus, the increasingly draconian laws passed that criminalize abortion and the intention of the same conservatives in this crowd to outlaw birth control.

I posted one of my favorite Moby Dick quotes which I will re-quote here.

I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country.

It seems to me that this sentiment, I would say truth, underlies an awful lot of significant film making and literature. Think, the Wizard of Oz (there’s no place like home), or, fresh in the theaters, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. It also ties in with the delinking of local economies idea above. If the most important things are those that are close at hand, perhaps delinking is the way to go.

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Beyond Eurocentrism

Imperialist rent, for Amin, derived from extra surplus value. In other words, more value could be extracted from the workers through production in the periphery – generating an additional rent for the capitalist, when compared with workers in the centre doing similar jobs. Amin argued that, while low-paid workers in the periphery are no less productive than their counterparts in the centre, the value they create is less rewarded – and this is what creates such an (imperialist) rent.

… the nature of capitalism is to exploit value differences… the less developed world is the periphery… capitalists exploit the periphery, pumping the value difference back to the center, leaving little of the value with the periphery…

Amin changed the terms of the debates on unequal exchange. Until his work, the orthodoxy among economists was that workers in the periphery are simply less productive than those in the centre.

… and this seems, once presented, obvious, for, if the workers at the periphery were not as or nearly as productive as those at the core, there would not be the substantial value difference to exploit into profits at the core…

It is important to note that the idea of unequal exchange and of ‘super’-exploitation remains controversial among Marxists. In Das Kapital (1867), Marx himself discusses the futility of comparisons between different degrees of exploitation in different nations, and the significant methodological problems that arise. Many Marxists argue that the neo-Marxists such as Amin focused excessively on market relations at the expense of exploitation of labour.

… and this…

So, he proposed a new model of industrialisation shaped by the renewal of non-capitalist forms of peasant agriculture, which he thought would imply delinking from the imperatives of globalised capitalism.1

… and this…

It is important to note that delinking is often widely misunderstood to mean autarky, or a system of self-sufficiency and limited trade. But this is a misrepresentation. Delinking does not require cutting all ties to the rest of the global economy, but rather the refusal to submit national-development strategies to the imperatives of globalisation. It aims to compel a political economy suited to its needs, rather than simply going along with having to unilaterally adjust to the needs of the global system. To this goal of greater sovereignty, a county would develop its own productive systems and prioritise the needs of the people rather than the demands on international capital.

… it occurs to me that what the current conflict in Ukraine may be accomplishing is a kind of decoupling of western capitalist hegemony… as western nations turn to produce more at home, and be less dependent on regimes that seek to weaken them through destabilization, even while profiting from them… a kind of decoupling will be happening… as we learn to produce and pay more for production at home… we will to some degree decouple… also, China, Russia and other countries will begin to develop economic structures that circumvent the power of the dollar… all of this is leading to a realignment of capitalism’s ability to exploit the value difference between the core and the periphery… the problem with this world order emerging is that it returns states to being in tense competition for control as it abandons the interdependent, if destructive to the planet, world order of new-liberalism… is there some combination of small is beautiful that none the less interconnects with markets around the world?…


  1. This is what E. F. Schumacher’s concept of local economies is about. See Small is Beautiful. Couple this with where one should find their felicity in the eyes of many significant authors. There starts to emerge a new model that doesn’t abuse the planet so much. ↩︎

… in light of my earlier post on Francis Bacon and Bill Cosby…

The Dilemma of Brilliant Jerks, David Shaywitz, The Bulwark…

Perhaps, with the appropriate refinements, we can create the space for a new category of equally effective—and ideally, even more effective—transformative leader to emerge; this is the dream and what I’d wish for myself, my colleagues, my family.

But it’s also possible that, in our eagerness to minimize offense, we will instead condemn ourselves to anodyne leaders incapable of profoundly challenging the status quo. Worse still, such organizational stasis might even pave the way for a disruptive, malignant narcissist eager to step into the breach.

… i will set aside for the moment a question about whether the current ever growth goal of capitalism is a good thing, it is another interesting example of how genius walks hand in hand with darkness… is it possible or even desirable to have great creators that are as pure as the driven snow?…

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Artists Are Embracing the Power of Refusal, Billy Anania, Hyperallergic

Today, cultural institutions leech onto revolutionary movements while making grand public statements about social justice, particularly after the largest anti-police uprising in a decade. Compare this to Occupy, when museums were silent on their affiliations with white-collar criminals like the Koch and Sackler families. Rather than make any material change, they sought to absorb protest art, just as in summer 2020. But artists are now hyper-aware of the contradictions pervading the nonprofit-industrial complex, leading to mass withdrawals from corporate biennials and a resurgent culture of exposing institutional decadence. The art that has propelled political unrest at every stage, as it has since the dawn of civilization, loses its edge the moment it enters a vitrine. As COVID-19 withers away the veneer of capitalist society, artists are once again embracing the power of refusal.

… i have been having my own revolt and protest, mild as it is, considering, how do i refuse the capitalist art complex which serves the artist so poorly?… it’s a somewhat laughable question, because, by and large, that complex has only allowed me at its periphery… so my protest is of necessity a minimal impact on the system and myself… still, in the spirit of the Classical Greek concept of Excellence and the Buddhist Eight Fold Path, i wander at the edges wondering what to do with my compulsion to make photographs?…

… my art itself is not protest… my desire to make it and share it outside the complex perhaps is… my own small refusal…

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Exhibition: ‘Freedom Must Be Lived: Marion Palfi’s America, 1940-1978’ at the Phoenix Art Museum

… this article caught my eye straight off when i opened Feedbin… and as i read the opening paragraphs i knew i would be reading to the very end… the story of yet another woman who didn’t get the attention she deserved in the male dominated world of photography…

… as i read i encounter this:

“We talk about the poverty of the Indian, their poor health, their substandard of living – we cry – ! Who is responsible for this? The murder of the American Indian has stopped as such. No more Indian wars, but all kinds of schemes are constantly working to take still their last piece of land (we found oil, uranium, and other valuable minerals and there is fish, timber, etc.) and above all to wipe the image away – erase – “to change the Indian” – Into what? Into a middle class personality with all the ambitions and drives of our society. Competition and exploitation are the most important assets, we think. Foreign to all Indian thinking! What do we actually do? We destroy the Indian completely, mentally, psychologically, and spiritually. You might ask – so what? What is so good not to assimilate with the predominant society? Let me tell you what. Our society destroys lives – with our “know how” destroy all living. We pollute the air, the water, poison the plants and animal life. The Indian knew no money, but the Indian knew security, happiness – the Indian was a supreme conserver of nature – of life. The Indian worked with nature not against it.”1

… competition and exploitation are the core values of our society, western civilization, the capitalist world… we destroy lives and the earth as we pursue these values to their destructive end… could it be that this grand experiment of life and “intelligence” is destined to failure?… or could it be that as significant as we think we are, we just aren’t anything close to the main show?…

… but i digress…

… Marion Palfi’s life and work are amazing… it is a long post, as almost all of them are over at Art Blart… but in depth informative on a remarkable woman…


  1. via Art Blart: Marion Palfi. “Some Thoughts,” preface to the unpublished manuscript, “My Children, First I liked the Whites, I Gave Them Fruits,” in the possession of Martin Magner, pp. 1-2 quoted in Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock. “Marion Palfi: An Appreciation,” in The Archive Research Series Number 19, September 1983, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, p. 9. ↩︎

01 First Thoughts

… no middle of the night waking by either dog, but Chas is ready promptly at 4 AM… it’s ok, no alcohol last night and in bed more or less on time…

… the heat should break today… there isn’t anything abnormal about a few days of this kind of heat at this time of year… not like the Pacific Northwest where temperatures are breaking records, and in the case of British Columbia, setting an all time record… 116 degrees!…

… this morning’s Heather Cox Richardson is all about how the oil and gas industry are lobbying states for legislation that favors the fossil fuel industry and makes it harder to pursue green energy strategies… the problem with capitalism… money equals power and big oil and gas have lots of money… interests are entrenched… numerous states depend substantially on the oil and gas industry for jobs and revenue… we should be better at adjusting but the market capitalist system often makes it difficult to do what is beneficial in the long run…

a sweet story about Gertrude Tate and Alice Austin love affair in Brain Pickings… Alice Austin was a pioneering photographer… Maria Popova describes her work as brilliant, i am not as clear that it was, but she was both pursuing photography and loving a woman when both were difficult to do… i think her genius was in just getting out and doing it, recording people, in dignified portraits… here is an example…

Street-cleaner at 34th Street, New York City, part of Alice Austen’s 1896 series Street Types of New York. (Alice Austen House archive.)

… trying out Craft after a high recommendation from a Micro.blog community member… trying to see where it might fit into my workflow…

… the internet is so freaking slow this AM… that is what i hoped i was leaving behind when i came home… what gives?…

05 Work Won’t Love Me Back

an article on Sarah Jaffe’s new book, Work Won’t Love You Back… it is a little expensive, even in the Kindle version so i add it for now to my list on Amazon…

… as i read the book, i think a few things… i think that i tried to have a career where i loved my work, but it did not pan out in a satisfying way in the end… then i switched to being a photographic artist… i don’t have to make money doing it, thanks to H mostly, but it is nice when i do… yet, i am ambivalent about the gallery system, the gatekeeping, etc. which has me focusing my art in ways i would not otherwise… still, i have come to a compromise, where i make what i make and wait for opportunities to have something come of it… right now, i write a blog that i think of as part of my artwork… nobody reads it… i don’t publicize it much, i would rather people discover it and let me know if they liked it…

02 Regarding the Suffering of Others, Chapter 9, Susan Sontag

Space reserved for being serious is hard to come by in a modern society, whose chief model of a public space is the mega-store (which may also be an airport or a museum).1

… in a secular society, particularly a capitalist one, all public space is for the dissemination of goods, services and corporate/state propaganda… there is little sacred space… we are left to cobble together whatever sacredness of space we can in our own homes and find it in nature…

… Sontag has a point, what do we do with imagery that should have a sacred setting for interaction?… how do we facilitate a reverential response when setting is so much a part of that response?… Sontag posits that books may be a more appropriate spot for images demanding reverential respect, in that the book is a one on one experience…

_ IS THERE AN ANTIDOTE to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)_2

… one wonders if it is probable that there is an antidote and yes, a woman is more likely to ask the question… or, if probably yes applies to both?… punctuation suggests the latter, situation suggests the former… i used to be sure about the woman part, less so now… i think women ask the question as long as they have not gained the power to be war makers… as they acquire this power, it seems less clear that they will do something different with it…

… Sontag discusses Jeff Wall’s Dead Troops Talk (A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter of 1986),

© Jeff Wall

… and i think to myself, there, there is the difference, between me and some photographers, my subject is the mundane everyday, not historical tableaux, what every day is made of… not significant statements to be fully made in one image, twitter bursts, Facebook posts, etc…

… well, there i am, finished with Regarding the Pain of Others…


  1. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others (p. 119). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. ↩︎

  2. Ibid. ↩︎

06 We Should Abolish Museums Now

an article arguing not so much for the abolishment of museums, but their transformation into cultural institutions that serve the people, not the power structure of the white heteropatriarchy…

… museums exist because they are funded by the power that prevails and they purposely tell the cultural history in ways that support that power… is this another sign that the multiarchy is rising?…

The new museum requires an ethical reorientation from our old ways of thinking, a divestment from a conservationist and capitalist ideology, and a centering of voices previously silenced by the colonial project. People and art deserve a better form of art stewardship.1


  1. Baker, Hannah: https://hyperallergic.com/649011/we-should-abolish-museums-now/ ↩︎

05 Hearts and Minds

an art show at the Carriage Trade Gallery in NYC, curated in partnership with Rectangle, Brussels… the exhibition displays the critique of colonization by 12 artists… setting aside for the moment what John Berger told us about the capacity of the establishment to absorb critique and present it without doing damage to itself (art galleries are capitalist entities for the most part)… or can we?… how effective is the critique?… does it change anything?… or is it a PR campaign of its own, designed to suggest that Eurocentric capitalist culture is sensitive to its ill effects on the planet and its peoples?…

There is a common misconception that countries in the Global South are “developing,” when in reality, many of them are still recovering from centuries of imperial dominance.1


  1. Billy Anania: https://hyperallergic.com/648662/revealing-the-prickly-side-of-imperial-soft-power/ ↩︎