Is this thing Art? (or Stop Destroying Western Civilization in the Name of Duchamp)

This week I went to Gagosian Madison Avenue to see one of the most disgusting shows of the decade.  Not that I purposely went to waste my time there, but since I was walking to the Metropolitan Museum I decided to head upstairs.

Three floors of dots paintings -- if you can call a stretched canvas full of dots a painting.  And I heard that the eggs are spread around in the world's Gagosian hen houses.  In the canvas defense:  The dots break the edge line in some of the works, making them wavy; in others the colors vibrate against the white background.  I remember talking to a security guard about one particular painting and saying to him that despite that fact the majority of the dots were vibrating one of them didn't because it was grey and thus the painting was a failure.

I'm an artist and I applaud when an artist's cunning and marketing skills make his career take off.  But what can I say when a con-artist's* skill makes him a multi-millionaire?  There was a time when true artists had to prove themselves to the world and to their collectors, either by God given talent such as Picasso, by perseverance and consistence such as Cezanne, or by unfettered passion and hard work such as Van Gogh.  But how can I react if after going to the gallery or the museum I am faced with an exhibition suited to Ripley's Believe or Not of cow heads and stuffed sharks? And the people who spend million buying those things, omg.

I've been holding my ire for years waiting for the best to happen, that the fashion finally was going to go away.  But it hasn't and its been a long time.  Does anyone realize the amount of damage exerted into society by imposing this stupid, mediocre "art" in the name of Duchamp?  How perception, taste, ideas of beauty, sophistication and refinement got so twisted in the social consciousness that mediocrity has become the model and the descriptive character of an epoch?  Is it not that what you see today as contemporary art is not merely a symptom but the great detonator of the collapse of the Western mind?

*The term con or conning implies substitution, something in place of the true thing.  The con-artist job is to replace perception.  In the case of those people who use other artists to draw, paint and sculpt for them they are replacing the perception of the creative individual artist as someone who doesn't need to do anything with his hands.

In classical art schooling the hand needs to be trained in order to catch up with the ability of the mind.  This presupposes that the mind is faster and swifter and that the hand has to be able to reach the mind, just as the athlete trains his muscles to be the first in the race.

Those artists who make people draw, paint, sculpt and even generate ideas for them are like untrained athletes.

Now imagine for one moment something impossible: an untrained athlete winning the gold medal in a race.

Or imagine something possible: A trained athlete using a banned performance enhancing substance to win a race.  It is illegal and its is unethical and if discovered he/she is stripped of his/her medal.

A so called artist who employs an army of artists to do the art for him/her is like an athlete using performance enhancing drugs.  Why is he/she celebrated instead, and given an honorary place in culture and society?

How can both untrained artists and performance enhancing user artists, unlike athletes, be allowed to win gold medals and trophies?

This is different than the genius in his workshop.  Peter Paul Rubens studio gyrates around the figure of the talented drafter and painter, the superb anatomist and perspectivist, the master crafter and artist.  It is the same with all the great figures in the history of art up to the moment in which the able and trained body became separated from the mind.  The mind went on a trip of its own, alienating the body.  To the point that the body was considered an unnecessary and superfluous attachment and deemed replaceable by another body or another instrument.

Perhaps this emphasis on the replaceability of the body started with the Industrial revolution, when it was discovered that the machine could do faster, better and more work than what the body could do.

So called artists who employ other artists to do their work are an expression of that moment in which the insufficiency of the body for the task at hand was replaced by the over sufficiency of the machine.  It is the moment in which the inhumanity of modernism was transported into and became the inhumanity of modern art.

I don't have anything against artists having the freedom to do whatever from chicken eggs to cow heads.  But what we are witnessing here is the imposition of an idea about art onto the rest of culture and society by a group of individuals who have the power to do so.  If you have lived in a totalitarian regime--as I have--you know that one of the means of control by the government is the limitation of information and communication. The individual, bombarded by a one sided and biased flow of information, has a limited perception of the world and a limited capacity to understand it.  If you live in a media advertising dominated environment--as we do--you know its influence on culture:  I am nothing without my deodorant.

Those who have the power to regulate information have the power to control the minds of the population.  There is no difference regarding art. When certain individuals and institutions have the power to decide what is to be shown and communicated to the people they provide a one sided, biased perception of art and culture that becomes hegemonic, thus creating the conditions for the people to construct a limited idea and understanding of what art and culture is.   A culturally engineered half human being is created.  A cultural dummy.  It is true, Wall Street is not the only institution that needs to be occupied these days.

Is this thing Art? (or Stop Destroying Western Civilization in the Name of Duchamp)

This week I went to Gagosian Madison Avenue to see one of the most disgusting shows of the decade. Not that I purposely went to waste my time there, but since I was walking to the Metropolitan Museum I decided to head upstairs.

Three floors of dots paintings -- if you can call a stretched canvas full of dots a painting. And I heard that the eggs are spread around in the world's Gagosian hen houses. In the canvas defense: In some of them the dots break the edge line, making them wavy, in others the color vibrate against the white background. I remember talking to a security guard about one particular painting and saying to him that despite that the majority of the dots were vibrating one of them didn't because it was grey and thus the painting was a failure.

I'm an artist and I applaud when and artist's cunning and marketing skills make his career take off. But what can I say when a con-artist's* skill makes him a millionaire? There was a time when true artists have to prove themselves to the world and to their collectors, either by God given talent such as Picasso, by perseverance and consistence such as Cezanne, or by unfettered passion and hard work such as Van Gogh. But how can one react if after going to the gallery or the museum is faced with an exhibition by Ripley's Believe or Not of cow heads and stuffed sharks? And the people who spend million buying those things, omg.

I've been holding my ire for years waiting for the best to happen, that the fashion finally was going to go away. But it hasn't and its been a long time. Does anyone realize the amount of damage is exerted into society by imposing this stupid, mediocre "art" in the name of Duchamp? How perception, taste, ideas of beauty, sophistication and refinement got so twisted in the social consciousness that mediocrity has become the model and the descriptive character of an epoch? Is it not that what you see today as contemporary art is not merely a symptom but the great detonator of the collapse of the Western mind?

*The term con or conning implies substitution, something in place of the true thing. The con-artist job is to replace perception. In the case of those people who use other artists to draw, paint and sculpt for them they are replacing the perception of the creative individual as someone who doesn't need to do anything with his hands.

In classical art schooling the hand needs to be trained in order to catch up with the ability of the mind. This presupposes that the mind is faster and swifter and that the hand has to be able to reach the mind, just as the athlete train his muscles to be the first in the race.

Those artists who make people draw, paint, sculpt and even generate ideas for them are like untrained athletes.

Now imagine for one moment something impossible: an untrained athlete winning the gold medal in a race.

Or imagine something possible: A trained athlete using a banned performance enhancing substance to win a race. It is illegal and its is unethical and if discovered he/she is stripped of his/her medal.

A so called artist who employs an army of artists to do the art for him/her is like an athlete using performance enhancing drugs. Why is he/she celebrated instead and given an honorary place in culture and society?

How can both untrained artists and performance enhancing user artists, unlike athletes, are allowed to win gold medals and trophies?

This is different than the genius in his workshop. Peter Paul Rubens studio gyrates around the figure of the talented drafter and painter, the superb anatomist and perspectivist, the master crafter and artist. It is the same with all the great figures in the history of art up to the moment in which the able and trained body became separated from the mind. The mind went on a trip of its own, alienating the body. To the point that the body was considered an unnecesary and superfluous attachment and deemed replaceable by another body or another instrument.

Perhaps this emphasis on the replaceability of the body started with the Industrial revolution, when it was discovered that the machine could do faster, better and more work than what the body could do.

So called artists who employ other artists to do their work are an expression of that moment in which the insufficiency of the body for the task at hand was replaced by the over sufficiency of the machine. It is the moment in which the inhumanity of modernism was transported into and became the inhumanity of modern art.

I don't have anything against artists having the freedom to do whatever from chicken eggs to cow heads. But what we are witnessing here is the imposition of an idea about art to the rest of culture and society by a group of individuals who have the power to do so. If you have lived in a totalitarian regime you know that one of the means of control by the government is the limitation of information and communication. The individual, bombarded by a one sided and biased flow of information has a limited perception of the world and a limited capacity to understand it.

Those who have the power to regulate information have the power to control the minds of the population. There is no difference regarding art. When certain individuals and institutions have the power to decide what is to be shown and communicated to the people they provide a one sided, biased perception of art and culture that becomes hegemonic, thus providing the means for the people to construct a limited idea and understanding of what art and culture is. A culturally engineered half human being is created. A cultural dummy. It is true, Wall Street is not the only institution that needs to be occupied this days.

Thorium: Pacific Nuclear Clean Energy.

Disruptive innovations or disruptive technologies are hard to adopt because they cause the ruin of what they render obsolete. The costs of switching from one platform to another (from Uranium to Thorium, see under-secretary of energy Peter Lyons at 21:00), plus the natural instinct of survival of bureaucracies (they prefer to self-annihilate than to self-renovate) make the adoption of Thorium and the replacement of Uranium for pacific energy purposes a most difficult, if not impossible, task.
As John Kutsch and Kirk Sorensen imply, some company or some government is going to sink its teeth into cheap, omni available Thorium and start the next revolution in nuclear energy. The benefits seem so obvious that it make you wonder why are we being so slow in adopting a different type of nuclear energy, based in fluid rather than solid fuel, clean, eco-friendly and low cost, Thorium.

Schumpeter on Marx (Chapter 1, Marx the Prophet)

I came to Schumpeter looking forward to forage in his theory of what is called disaster capitalism, of which I have heard and read about before but never from the primary source ( you may never know who is missing from the university curriculum). This a bullet point of Joseph A. Schumpeter take on Karl Marx, as in his piece "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy."

Passing the preface I was delighted to see that Schumpeter spend the first four chapters tearing Marx and Marxism down to shreds. Here are some of his gems:

       From "Marx the Prophet:"

• "In one important sense, Marxism is a religion. To the believer it present, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions, and secondly, a guide to those ends which imply a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which mankind, or a chose section  of mankind, is to be saved." (Schumpeter 5)

The former paragraph resonates much in me. I'm part of that section of mankind that was to be saved from the evils of capitalism by the plan put into place by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and that was called the creation of a New Man. The New Man doctrine as seen by Castrism is social engineering at its worst.

• "There is no paradox in saying that Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind. This was done, on the one hand, by formulating with unsurpassed force that feeling of being thwarted and ill treated which is the auto-therapeutic attitude of the unsuccessful many, and on the other hand, by proclaiming that socialistic deliverance from those ills was a certainty amenable to rational proof." (Ibid 6)

There is a scene in Mikhail Kalatozov's "I'm Cuba" in which Alberto, the revolutionary protagonist played by Sergio Corriery, is running conspiratorial errands around the city in his fashionable roadster convertible. Picture out a bunch of restless middle class and high class university students with a head full of dreams and good intentions executing the century long destruction of the country, their revolutionary concepts based on Marxian doctrine.

Another scene depicts a peasant who sets the sugar cane field of his labors on fire after being propagandized by Alberto. Making you wonder why if, after all, Cuban agriculture is in such a bad shape that "Cuban purchases from U.S. firms amounted to $4.319 million in 2001, $138.635 million in 2002, and $256.9 million in 2003. Cuba became the 35th most important food and agricultural export market for the United States in 2003, up from last (226th) in 2000. Actual purchases and pending contracts in the first-half of 2004 are at a pace to move Cuba into the top 20 most important markets of U.S. food and agricultural exports. Furthermore, because current U.S. legislation requires that all Cuban purchases from the United States must be conducted on a cash basis, the lack of credit risk associated with these sales makes Cuba one of the most attractive export markets for U.S. firms." (Alvarez, Jose. Cuban Agriculture Before 1959: The Political and Economic Situation.)

Kalatozov's film has been amply criticized by both Cuban revolutionaries and Cuban gusanos on the ground of being superficial, a "tourist film of sorts. What Kalatozov has paradoxically accomplished  is to portray the artificial and bourgeois essence of the Cuban revolution. There was no way for him to make another kind of a movie.

•  He (Marx) had probably a clear perception of what the masses are and he looked far above their heads toward social goals altogether beyond what they though or wanted." (Schumpeter 7 

I remember watching Dr. Fidel on national TV giving away Chinese electric fans of various sizes and types as awards to outstanding national workers. The absurdity and sarcasm of the situation stroke me as yet another example of the disregard of the Communist government for the working class. I mean, why not pay them better salaries (not the average 5 dollars a month) so that they can buy electric fans and air conditioners?

• "As every true prophet styles himself to be the humbly mouth piece of his deity, Marx pretended no more than speak the logic of the dialectic process of history" (Ibid 7) 

This feature of wolf disguised under a lamb skin is played time and again in the history of dictatorship. The Revolution of "the humble, by the humble and for the humble" is nothing more but the Revolution of the 1%, by the 15% and for the 1%.

Drawings for iPad

If you happen to have an iPad you should check my series of drawings on paper made between 1996 and 1998. They look so good that they seem they were made for the iPad. And if you don't have an iPad, well, chcck them out anyway.
Renelio

http://renelio-marin.com/blog/drawings/

Steve Jobs DaVinci

I'm through with the DaVinci Series. Started in 2008 (if I remember well). So far it includes 9 pieces of 48 x 60 inches and 3 pieces of 30 x 48 inches for a total of 12 pieces. Each of the 48 x 60 inches pieces has 720 painted squares or "pixels" Each pixel is taped, painted and sometimes under drafted. The total of painted pixels for the 12 paintings is 7560 pixels. That is a 7560 little squares in 2 years.

Diamonds and Heroin

Now we have discovered that there is a deep connection between diamonds and heroin or between diamonds and crack cocaine. One that has to do with two sides of consumerism, both of them, consumerism and drug addition, being forms of escapism.

So there is this hidden meaning to the Damien Hirst diamond skull (I'm sure he is not even aware of it) that represents dead by overdose. What is left after dead are the crystals of opiods sweated through the bones.

Elephant Man has a better understanding of the relation, arrived at not by a process of rationalization but by empirical grasp and existential experience.

Read more: Future Opiods

Information Fog

Here is an example of a "networked fact", As David Weinberger states it, "we’re seeing a different type of fact emerge on the Net as well. Traditional facts are still there. Facts are facts. But we’re seeing organizations of all sorts releasing their data, their facts, onto the Web as huge clouds of triples [another word for linked data]. They’re a connection of two ideas through some relationship — that’s why they’re called triples — but not only can they be linked together by computers, they themselves consist of links. Each of the elements of a linked atom is a pointer to some resource that disambiguates it and explains what it is." (Roger, Thomas. Are We on Information Overload?)

Information gathered through prosthetic cameras, sensors, gps, etc, constructs our view of the world and makes behave and make decisions. From the computer system analyzing the sign sent by a drone in Afghanistan and provoking a firing response over innocent people; to the suburban pedestrian straying around the city looking for an address by reading satellite recorded topography, we all are at risk of getting misled by technology, increasingly reducing use of our bodily sensors. The fact is we rely and make decisions based not simply on triplets of information clouds but also on triplets of information fog.

Whether this video is based on real life events or is only a LG spoof for a tv commercial, the one who conceived it, either a real thief or a creative director for an advertising company, knows what an information cloud, or fog, is. The security personnel at the store, accustomed to check every movement through the close circuit cameras, couldn't realize what was happening until last minute when the camera outside was able to transmit a lateral view of the situation, thus triggering a response.  Nobody was using their own eyes. Or said in a different way, their eyes were clouded by information fog.

Got Fashion?

Those couple of long sleeves that I bought at H&M a couple of weeks ago at a handsome price make me feel like throwing up after watching this video. I'm an advocate of globalization but man, I want to burn my clothes. Is it anyone else out there denouncing the hard conditions of child labor, exploitation and lack of future in these transnational factories? Any blog or magazine listing them? I hope so,

As  Paul Wellis say "The fashion industry needs to be held accountable for its actions. There’s only one way to do that effectively- hit its weak point, which is its bottom line. If the dollars stop, the abuse will stop. A bit of actual, not cosmetic, activism wouldn’t hurt, and would at least get some publicity, but the real hits are all measured in dollars. Don’t buy clothes from child exploiters and don’t encourage the industry to think it can get away with the very old, very stale “We didn’t know” routine. How could they not know?" (Paul Wellis. Op-Ed: New Worse than Ever Child Labor Exploitation).

Here is the article that appeared in the Phnom Penh News about the hundreds of fainting cases in the factory of Anful Garments Manufacturing, a supplier for H&M. Instead of recognizing insecticides and lack of ventilation as the cause of massive fainting, the authorities of the factory blamed evil spirits and held a Buddhist ceremony to clean the environment.

"Anful is owned by Gladpeer Garment Factories Cambodia, an Anful executive who identified herself as Miss Zhen confirmed yesterday. Gladpeer, whose more than 2,000 workers were among those who joined a massive strike in September last year for better wages, opened in Cambodia in 1997 and expanded by opening Anful earlier this year.

Its Hong Kong-based parent company, Gladpeer Development, lists Abercrombie & Fitch, Ralph Lauren, Giordano, Puma and Mango as its main clients. Global retailer H&M has described Anful as a “recent supplier”, but H&M is listed as a major customer of Gladpeer on the latter’s website." (Tep Nimoi and Vincent Macisaac. Spirited Reopening for Anful).

I don't want to leave you with a sour of bad taste in your mouth about fashion. If you are in the industry help the people who are in the lower side of the ladder; make the world a better place and make the people who buy these items not to feel guilty and worrisome about the consequences of their actions. I love fashion and I need fashion both in my life and in my profession but, we have to find the right balance here.

Read more: http://digitaljournal.com/article/316920#ixzz1ij2HFb33

Cam Simpson. Victoria's Secret Revealed in Child Picking Burkina Faso Cotton

Rachel Brown. Models Talk the Walk at 13

http://www.waronwant.org/campaigns/love-fashion-hate-sweatshops

Steven Green House. Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal , Officials Say

Jamie Elliott: Fashion Industry Internships: Exploitation or Experience?

Dennis K. Berman: Data Crunching and Decision Making

"Computer systems are now becoming powerful enough, and subtle enough, to help us reduce human biases from our decision-making. And this is a key: They can do it in real-time. Inevitably, that "objective observer" will be a kind of organic, evolving database.
These systems can now chew through billions of bits of data, analyze them via self-learning algorithms, and package the insights for immediate use. Neither we nor the computers are perfect, but in tandem, we might neutralize our biased, intuitive failings when we price a car, prescribe a medicine, or deploy a sales force. This is playing "Moneyball" at life.

It means fewer hunches and more facts. Think you know something about mortgage bonds? These systems are now of such scale that they can analyze the value of tens of thousands of mortgage-backed securities by picking apart the ongoing, dynamic creditworthiness of tens of millions of individual homeowners. Just such a system has already been built for Wall Street traders."

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203462304577138961342097348.html#ixzz1ihsBJbLQ

SOPA

What it seem is that the Cycle is not only repeating itself but this time at a much faster speed; the January 24th 2012 Congress vote on Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is not only an indication of how heated the debate on illegal content is getting but also may be an attempt by the government to crush the unrelenting grow of e-commerce monopolies, as well as a symptom of the power struggles between the new media and the old media, framed by one side as a the battle between the content producers and the free-rider information parasites and by the other side as an effort to censor the Internet.  

For more information see: The Supreme Court and the Future of Journalism.

David Weinberger: Too Big to Know

"In his new book, “Too Big to Know,” David Weinberger, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, attempts to answer that question by looking at the ways our newly interconnected society is transforming the media, science and our everyday lives. In an accessible yet profound work, he explains that in our new universe, facts have been replaced by “networked facts” that exist largely in the context of a digital network. As a result, Weinberger believes we have entered a new golden age, one in which technology has finally caught up with humans’ endless curiosity, and one that has the potential to revolutionize a wide swath of occupations and research fields."

Also: ""Ask anybody who is in any of the traditional knowledge fields, and she or he will very likely tell you that the Internet has made them smarter. They couldn’t do their work without it; they’re doing it better than ever before, they know more; they can find more; they can run down dead ends faster than ever before. In the sciences and humanities, it’s hard to find somebody who claims the Internet is making him or her stupid, even among those who claim the Internet is making us stupid. And I believe this is the greatest time in human history."

Yes, we have entered a golden age, I knew it and I called it the Creative Society and this book will provide me with a conceptual frame for it.

Thomas Roger. Are we on Information Overload?

MIT: The State of Twitter

"Researchers at MIT and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, modeling the diffusion of social contagion by studying the spread of Twitter from 2006 to 2009, have found that “the site’s growth in the United States relied primarily on media attention and traditional social networks based on geographic proximity and socioeconomic similarity. In other words, at least during those early years, birds of a feather flocked — and tweeted — together.”"



MIT Study Proves the World is not Flat.

Patrick Lin: Robot Ethics

Robot Ethics.

What Fresh?

Books, articles, essays, good reading is food for the brain. Fresh from the oven is not only an update of what authors are writing about also a thermometer or an anemometer or wind vane of the latest cultural trends in the social psychology of the region where I live.

Years ago, when George W. Bush started its presidency, I noticed in the non-fiction tables at Barnes & Noble the change in the cultural discourse of the intellectuality. All of the sudden the tables where filled with conservative titles and authors criticizing the liberal spectrum and its representative figures and theories. That made me suspect that the social-psychological change that had taken place in American society was not only being expressed by voting for the Republican Party and by the pro Iraq war and patriotic rhetoric but also by the current trend of ideas, concepts, theories and attacks on the intellectual opposition.

I realized that the books that are shown at the front tables of the bookstore were not only the ones that there were written but also the ones that people wanted to read. By going to Barnes & Noble and looking to what was for sale in the main spots I would have an idea of what was going on in the social mind of the U.S.

Unfortunately I don't have the means to look at what is being shown in each front table of at least one B&N in each state (Borders would have given a different picture but Borders is gone). I can only afford to look at my local bookstore in East 79th street and perhaps also to the one in Union Square, both in NYC (I will appreciate if you post in the comments sections what did you see at your local bookstore). But hey, something is better than nothing and I hope that my little reporting can generate an indication of in which direction the wind of ideas is flowing on in this part of the world.

Sure the are another way to this (although with the fun of going to the bookstore): You can check the New York Times best sellers list. Another surprise of this week: Bill O'Reilly's Killing Lincoln is in the 3rd place of the combined print and e-books non-fiction section and in the 2nd place of the hard cover non-fiction list, second only to Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs; While Glenn Beck and Kevin Balfe's Being George Washington is in the 8th place after being in the 5th place at the beginning of January.

If you want to check the current trends on the Internet you may help yourself by using Buzzfeed   and Redditt ;the last one featuring today's Al Gore's rant ( remember him?) this time against SOPA. For checking Twitter trends use Radiant 6, which allows you to a have live stream of twitter feeds while filtering topics, for a fee.

Fresh from the Oven: Tim Wu. The Master Switch.

Another book I saw at the front non-fiction table was Tim Wu's The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. Tim Wu, better know by coining the term Net Neutrality, traces the history of media monopolies such as AT&T from the invention of an isolated individual in tune with the latest technological advances provoking the genesis of a cultural or communication empire such as telephone, radio broadcast or film in Part I; to the consolidation and exclusion practices with state support of these empires in Part II;  to the breaking apart of these empires by a new disruptive technology (such as the Internet) or anti-monopoly measures in Part III; to the reconstitution of the shattered powers in uncannily similar fashion or in the guise of conglomerates in Part IV. Tim doesn't hide his enthusiasm and love for the wave of information utopianism that the Internet brought about at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century. We still have to see is the new Internet giants are going through the same stages of the Cycle, from freedom fighter rebels, to monopoly octopus, to shattered information plankton, to reconstituted conglomerates.

Three Schools of Economics

Trying to understanding macro- economics, the fluctuations of the market, unemployment and trying make predictions for the future? You may think that economics is all about doing calculations,  analyzing charts and being objective and rational, well it is not. Even Joseph Schumpeter way back in the 1940's recognized that he was not a mathematician and that he had to rely on sociology to build his ideas on business cycles, economic development and "creative destruction." Schumpeter's concepts where not in tune with Keynesian economics and if you want to have a better idea about how economics is indeed voodoo economics just follow this:

"Warren Mosler, an innovative carmaker, a successful bond-investor and an idiosyncratic economist, moved to St Croix in 2003 to take advantage of a hospitable tax code and clement weather. From his perch on America’s periphery, Mr Mosler champions a doctrine on the edge of economics: neo-chartalism, sometimes called “Modern Monetary Theory”. The neo-chartalists believe that because paper currency is a creature of the state, governments enjoy more financial freedom than they recognise. The fiscal authorities are free to spend whatever is required to revive their economies and restore employment. They can spend without first collecting taxes; they can borrow without fear of default. Budget-makers need not cower before the bond-market vigilantes. In fact, they need not bother with bond markets at all.

The neo-chartalists are not the only people telling governments mired in the aftermath of the global financial crisis that they could make things better if they would shed old inhibitions. “Market monetarists” favour more audacity in the monetary realm. Tight money caused America’s Great Recession, they argue, and easy money can end it. They do not think the federal government can or should rescue the economy, because they believe the Federal Reserve can.

The “Austrian” school of economics, which traces its roots to 19th-century Vienna, is more sternly pre-Freudian: more inhibition, not less, is its prescription. Its adherents believe that part of the economy’s suffering is necessary, an inevitable consequence of past excesses. They do not think the Federal Reserve can rescue the economy. They seek instead to rescue the economy from the Fed."
To continue reading: (Marginal Revolutionaries. The Economist. Dec. 31, 2011)

Fresh from the Oven

 I got to see at Barnes & Noble non-fiction front table today a bunch of anti-capitalism, anti-corporation, anti-liberal, even anti-Obama mad ranting. It is as if all of the sudden writers from economy to technology to culture backgrounds had agreed to write against the status quo. And the cries are loud, real shrieks of mad-mans in the desolation camp of occupy ideology.

Take for example Chris Hedges' Death of the Liberal Class; a passionate indictment of the moral bankruptcy and intellectual cynicism of liberal America. Mr. Hedges main point is that by ceasing to fight and put into practice the principles of classical liberalism such as individualism, egalitarianism, meliorism or improvability of life, liberal America has become only a myth and a tool of corporate America, a puppet of electoral politics, and a clown of legislative deliberation that has permitted the "pillaging of the U.S. treasure on behalf of Wall Street (and) laws (that) has suspended vital civil liberties" (Hedges 8).

Hedges sniper's bullet is aimed at the likes of the New York Times and media in general, the art institutions, the church, universities, labor unions and the Democratic Party, no wild turkey escapes his fire and justly so since they all "have been bought off with corporate money and promises of scrap tossed up them by the narrow circles of power" (Ibid 10).

By kneeling to corporate money, careerism and narrow political gaming, liberal America has forsaken its function as "a safety valve (that) makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It offers hoipe for change and proposes gradual steps toward greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with virtue. It also serves as an attack dog that discredit radical social movements, making the liberal class a useful component within the power elite.
But the assault of the corporate state on the democratic state has claimed the liberal class as one of its victims. Corporate power forgot that the liberal class, when it functions, gives legitimacy to the power elite. And by reducing the liberal class to courtiers or mandarins, who have nothing to offer but empty rhetoric, shut off this safety valve and forces discontent to find other outlets that often end in violence (Ibid 9).

Hedges goes on to give countless examples of how fair and transparent journalism have been tainted and corrupted, how universities have expelled critical thinking and debate, how labor union leaders and university presidents have come to enjoy the same income levels that corporate managers do, how the arts as well as the intellectuality and the media refuse to address the social and economic disparities of our time, how even Obama and the Democratic Party have offended liberalism by caving in to corporate power.

If you believe in the occupy movement and need arguments to build your conceptual points you should read this book. I recommended it along with another good book of the same kind  and by another Chris, but which I'm not going to discuss in detail : Chris Lehman's Rich People Things. If you are short in fuel supply to feed your hate of the rich and the corporations read Rich People Things: Real Life Secrets of the Predator Class. I quick glance to the index shows (again) the New York Times,  the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court, Ayn Rand, Damien Hirst, the Democratic Party (deja vu), Wired Magazine, the iPad, Social Media and many other system hares that would leave your mind-tongue licking the lips of your brain with fruition.

To better see this readings in perspective you may read today's Wall Street Journal's article by Andy Kessler The Rise of Consumption Equality. Mr. Kessler argument, in synthesis, is that lowering costs of former luxury items and widespread consumerism has narrowed the gap between the rich and the poor. Not the income gap but sure the consumer gap. But who cares about the income gap if nonetheless the poor and the rich are able to enjoy same quality level of things at different prices (from Ford Focuses for the poor and Bugatti Veyrons for the rich) and because Larry Page drives a Prius and we all have iPads and Motorola Droids. Well, we are equal. Uhum, are we? Nevertheless an enjoyable reading from a former hedge-fund manager turned writer.


Work Cited:

Hedges, Chris. Death of the Liberal Class. Nation Books, 2010.

Lehman, Chris. Rich People Things: Real Life Secrets of the Predator Class. Haymarker Books, 2011.

Notes on CSo.

As the name imply the Creative Society is a society of creative individuals. Forget the industrial model of the assembly line automaton worker who has forsaken his humanity to become a cog of the gear. Leave Taylorism and Fordism to China. Put instead individuals extending and completing themselves through work and materialization of their imagination in a creation fostering environment.

What are some of the implications of this production paradigm? Conformity is not welcomed. Governments need to locate, target and support creative individuals and innovative ideas. Enterprises are built around creative collectives (see Genius as Collective Enterprise). Merchandise and objects are highly individualized in order to satisfy the needs of a sophisticated costumer.  In a reversal of Adolf Loos' proposition, craft and decoration takes an important place in the final product.

The Creative Society

This is something that is haunting me from a while: Is the so-called First World entering in a new social-economic phase or a new mode of production? The symptoms are there: pleasure work (Facebok, Youtube, Blogger, etc), free information, art sales boom; but they are scattered and don't seem to be enough to announce the birth of a new paradigm.

I don't like to read on my interface for hours at a time. It doesn't make any sense to write a standard 25 pages paper with a bibliography of 20 authors minimum to build an argument that nobody has the time to read. It is not worth it, so here is what I propose: rather that making a sweeping argument about a new discovery, I'd rather put a bunch of factors and symptoms and try to order them as a list of related elements that would shed light as a whole about a new social-economic condition (Ufff, that sounds pretty pretentious anyway.)

To do research to support my point would take moons and months. I will present the examples one at a time and when I think I have enough of them I will write the conclusions (which is where my paper starts.)

The conclusion is: We are at the begginning of a new mode of production, a new social-economic stage, a new cultural paradigm that I will call the Creative Society (CSo).

Some of the symptoms of this new CSo are:

• Information is free
• End of manufacturing assembly lines as a production paradigm (Taylorism and Fordism). Substituted by individualized merchandising such as Nike and Burberry self-design. Googleism or the  creative idea first.
• Social media, networking and sharing allowing individual self-reliance and economic independence
• Blogging 
• Self-publishing, 
• Planning, branding, designing, and all the tools of marketing at one's reach. 
• Network economics.
• 3d printing
• Art sales boom
• Necessity of innovation, creativity (what I call the artistic mindset) in order to be able to survive in the harsh economic competition and relentless increase in the cost of living.

It would be useful to review the last attempts to theorize a new paradigm. It was a sad one and it happened about 30 years ago. Does anyone remember that discredited intellectual trend called "post-modernism?" I don't know who still believes in post-modern theory but the ones who still do, well sorry for you guys. I never truly understood what the point was. A building with a bunch of architectural styles one on top of the other? Las Vegas decorative shelter architecture v.s. modern and programmatic ducks? A aesthetic category? I'd like to think that buildings, books and artistic products are good examples and arguments, but do they are enough to claim the birth of a new social-economic paradigm? What about the failure of meta-narratives? The Cold War is long gone, but is it? I mean, there is still North Korea (there will be North Korea forever, trust me), China and Cuba; add to them Venezuela and Iran.  I see several Cold and Hot Wars around. When was the last time history ended as Francis Fukuyama would have us desire?

Nevertheless, although post-modern theory is despised in inner academic circles. I will start by reviewing its main conceptual points and saving what is to be saved, if any. That will provide me with a reference, a view of the last attempt a paradigm was tried to be constructed with the aid of a conceptual apparatus only.

I'm of the opinion that, if there is a new paradigm taking place out there, it is not one being built from the outside by a group of intellectuals. It is happening right in front of our eyes. It started with massification of the internet, cheap communications, trade and globalization. In tandem with the decentering, split personality, self-reliant "you are on your own" individual.

I will try to stay away from sweeping statements such as: "A new paradigm has been born" or "We are entering a new phase of capitalism, the Creative Condition." If I can provide enough examples and arguments to get you in a position to be able to judge by yourself if we have indeed entered the last phase of capitalism, the Creative Society, then I would have succeed it. I will mark off the examples listed to this cause with the  CSo sig. And if I find enough of them to prove that we are indeed entering into a new mode of production, a new social-economic stage or a new cultural paradigm, then I will state the conclusion. Otherwise I will be happy if somebody pick up into my line of thought and finish it. Or if time proves me right.

Got Euro?

The Wave

Add this to Philip G. Zimbardo's Stanford Prison (got to check Zimbardo's website; it is the rage) experiment and Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiment.

The Wave, a 1967 classroom experiment by teacher Ron Jones of  Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California. In 1981 a teleplay by Johnny Dawkins of the short story by Ron Jones was produced by Fern Field and directed by Alex Grasshoff.

I just watched the 2008 German version of the story, directed by Dennis Gansel and with Jurgen Voggel and Frederick Lau. It makes you understand how easy we can get sunk in the wave. Uniform never looked so beautiful.  By the way, the trailer doesn't do justice to the movie. Now, the long German feature is different than the American teleplay. You may want to watch both of them to compare. The questions that arise are fascinating and complex and they all have to do with the dichotomy individual/group.

If you want to go deeper into the philosophical political implications of The Wave you should read about Utilitarianism. To keep it short, utilitarianism measures happiness in society by the amount of members being happy, the more members happy, the more just a society is. We all love the ideals of community, discipline, self- control and power, but the problem with utilitarian thinking is that individuals who have a different idea of happiness are excluded, slavery arises and minorities are discriminated. That is the reason why democracy still is the best way of government.

Community, discipline and power are beautiful goals and that's why is so easy to get carried by the wave . How to navigate it without discrimination, exclusion and destruction of the other is the true ideal.