Baghdad: free market utopia

Thanks to skippy for directing all of us to the Naomi Klein article that came out in Harper's a few months ago that is finally available on line.

In it she describes the Bush regimes ambitions to turn Iraq into a model for "small government' and "free enterprise," or the BS we've been served up for years about the optimal economic conditions of deregulation and free market competition. I'll give the ending away and tell you that Klein says Bush, Bremer & Company have failed -- and in the process Iraq has spiralled into the state of catastrophic chaos in which we find it today. But the story of the failure is devastating because according to Klein, there are an opening when a more civic minded, more responsible set of policies that respected Iraqi institutions as legitimate rather than as chunks of real estate to be auctioned off -- would have made an enormous difference in the winning of "hearts and minds."

But how can we expect the Republicans to respect Iraqi institutions when they don't respect American ones?

Is the MFA the new MBA?

Is the M.F.A. (Master of Fine Arts) the new M.B.A.? Drifting across the blogosphere, I came across that arresting claim, next to this quote, on (of all places) tompeters.com:

"People who are learning the design technologies are the ones who will be creating the visual images (thus stories) of our culture."

This amidst entries in a messy blog of shoddy thinking and bad prose... I'd love to start discussing whether the MFA is the new MBA - and whether that's a good thing or not (the earlier post on this blog on artists as real estate developers, and art critics as their realtors, comes to mind) - but certainly the business of creativity is not restricted to visual culture. Story telling, of any kind (including the kind that is part and saddlebag of any decent sales training and marketing), is not exclusively visual: you need to be able to paint pictures with words - and so to use them well means not just (but at least) using them correctly, efficiently, coherently, interestingly. That's not creative yet (and beware of the phrase "creative writing" that is so carelessly bandied about) - but it's at least more than the lazy thinking-in-images that is the vacuous domain of bad advertising, bad marketing, and bad television...

On a related note, this helps explain why television is allegedly dying, as in a quote from the Washington Post people have been mailing around:

"In fact, just one of the 13 shows that divvied up the 27 Emmys attained, in the course of the TV season, as many viewers as did Sunday's Emmy broadcast. That one show was ABC's own broadcast of February's Academy Awards ceremony, which clocked nearly 44 million viewers; it was named best directed variety, music or comedy program."

Once you realize that the biggest TV audience went to the show about the shows, and tally this with the fact that the Emmy award show had the second lowest ratings in recent Emmy history, you might want to jump to the conclusion that this kind of award cannibalism spells the end of TV history. However, just as a search engine tends to have a far bigger audience than any of the sites it points to, these shows are visual guides to what succeeds in the medium these days. In short, just as many people will vote for the candidate who seems to be winning anyway, they will watch what other people are watching, and not bother to think what others aren't bothered to think. What is smelling funny here is not the TV medium, but the critical capacity.

f*** the poor+ the middle class, up with money, down with taxes

Bush gets his tax cuts, because Republicans play to the greed and misguided idenfication of their base with the interests of the rich, while Democrat lawmakers cave and play the nihilist card by passing tax cuts that are impossible to pay for. "We're not going to let them cast us assupporting higher taxes," say our beleaguered incuments.

You did not hear it here first: the poor are screwed, public services, public institutions undermined. The more money one makes, the more one will benefit from these cuts: the broad swathe of the middle class will be screwed because these tax paying classes depend upon public schools, public universities, public institutions more than their rich ego ideals.

It is time to offer reasoned argument to the middle class for the importance of taxes -- for the cultivation and the protection of PUBLIC institutions and PUBLIC spaces. Hell, paying taxes is patriotic. Public should be a good word -- but anyone supporting public institutions is seen as being a raving communist.

The radical grassroots transformation of our understanding of how vital the public sphere is to our democracy is what is we desperately need. Big media is not going to do it. As Eric Alterman has proven, the journalists are paid enough to send THEIR kids to private schools. Just as health care has suffered AND become more expensive because of "free market" permissiveness and deregulation, all other public services are undergoing the same processes. In Minneapolis where we lived this past winter, snow removal services were radically cut back because of city budget deficits. This is directly related to irresponsible tax cuts, not irresponsible management of public funds. But if you're driving a Hummer, what the heck right?

Back to the Shanghai Wildlife Park: we don't actually like to see the poor and the disenfranchised get it in its grotesque actuality. In the US, the ethos of the right does seem legitimately sadistic: we'll f*** you. They realize the poor don't vote. And leftist intellectuals cannot spend their time identifiying with the marginal. It is about time we spent a little time defending the Enlightenment values upon which we depend, unless you think neo-feudalism is cool or something, or you're writing dissertation on masculinity in panic and you think this is what it's all about.

shanghai wildlife

I read in City Weekend ,the expats' guide to Shanghai and Beijing that the Shanghai Wildlife Park is not for the squeamish. I quote from Namrita Sharma's article (that I can't find on line), "Be forewarned though: the bus park is not for young children or those with a delicate temperament. Before passing into the second enclosure, men with chickens board the bus, tie ropes round the chickens necks and hang them from the window. the bus drives at speed and tigers leap at the vehicle to grab the chickens. Occasionally they only manage to bite off half the animal, a gruesome sight." (You can contact Sharma for confirmation of this vivid story at shguide@cityweekend.com.cn) It's
the kind of spectacle that we in the West are loathe to endorse: we have become too prudish about the vicious competitiveness and predatory violence that simmers underneath our modern bureaucracies and our fabled free markets.

You can buy your haute couture items at Xintiandi
, which is comprised of fastidiiously restored "Old Shanghai" residences turned into beautiful retail space for Armani Exchange and Chloé etc., and then head out to watch hungry tigers tear apart chickens hanging from the windows of your safari bus. Watch out for the flying gristle! But don't worry, they've got great dry cleaners in this town too. Some body will know how to get that blood stain out of your kid's MiuMiu top!

Downward facing dog! Were those chickens still alive?

80s Theory

Michael Bérubé named Douglas Crimp as an admirable practitioner of cultural studies. In the spirit of the controlled rant against the half-baked nature a certain kind of “80s Theory,” I beg to differ: I would say that Crimp’s critique represents yet another failed attempt to confront the cultural politics of the past two decades. In his influential 1993 book, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). Crimp actually declares that “theory” would change the world. He wrote that the kind of AIDS activism in the art world that demanded “and end to the AIDS crisis” married practice and theory. Crimp really does insist that “post-modernist practice” and AIDS activism were critical antidotes to the institutionalization of an "exhausted" aesthetic. In the midst of the 80s and 90s theory euphoria Crimp writes, “It is as if the creative powers of modernism had migrated into theory and come to full self-consciousness in the poststructuralist text—the owl of Minerva spreading its wings at the fall of dusk. Poststructuralism offers a theory of modernism characterized by Nachträglichkeit, both in the psychoanalytic and historical sense.” (Crimp, p. 23).

Wow. Can THEORY wash out stains and keep my colors bright? Leave my hair feeling shiny clean?

Crimp’s argument had a certain appeal in academia and as the discussion on Bérubé’s blog reminds me, to would-be leftists, tired of unfulfilled promises of the rebellion of the masses: BUT Crimp’s account fails to confront the way in which the modern museum has always been an institution involved with nation building, urbanism and most recently financial speculation. Right under his nose, the museum was morphing into yet another arm of financial speculation and business triumphalism. Museums such as the Tate, the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art in New York welcomed a class of new trustees onto its boards as Reagan and Thatcher cut public funding in order to promote government financed private donations in the form of tax cuts for the very rich. Museums became places where companies like Phillip Morris (today known as Altria) could improve brand appeal as their CEOs received insider tips on their collections. The new class of the very wealthy was entrepreneurial, interventionist and used to financial speculation. I’m getting this from Chin-Tao Wu’s fantastic book on the corporate sponsorship, museum culture and market speculation during the Reagan and Thatcher years. Chin-Tao Wu does the dirty work of understanding how the eighties and nineties saw the fading of the semi-feudal model of art patronage and state sponsorship and the rise of the government financed and backed marriage of art and finance.

Theory, as Crimp understood it, could do little to understand the kinds of forces at work in the new “synergy” between museums and business. And the AIDS crisis moved to sub-Saharan Africa.

I’m not blaming Crimp and Act-up for not putting an end to that crisis, I’m just wondering if in setting up such high expectations for both theory and direct action, Crimp, like many 80s theorists, completely lost sight of the bigger picture of history, economics as well as politics. (This is a very modified, blog-ready excerpt from a forthcoming article, “Art Escapes Criticism or Adorno’s Museum” to be published in Cultural Critique.)

More on this later.