Archive for May 7th, 2012
I DON’T GET “ART”. And I’M SICK OF PRETENDING
You think that you are an artist, and a few friends artists, or not, think that you are indeed an artist…and I don’t comprehend what’s so artistic in your “production”…Does this situation prove that you are no longer an artist, or that there is no chance for me to learn to be an artist if I put my mind into that domain? For example:
1. Let’s consider how Seth Godin understands art. He posted “How being artistic can be taught?”:
”All artists are self-taught. Techniques, skill and a point of view are often handed down, formally or not.
Of course, it’s easier to get started if you’re taught.
But art, the new, the ability to connect the dots and to make an impact–sooner or later, that can only come from one who creates, not from a teacher and not from a book.” End of Seth quote
And if we are taught the wrong way? Can we recover with bad practice? The theme in Seth piece is that there is the Genes factor that is the determining element…Actually, if not a single member in the extended family nurtured you in one field of art, it is doubtful that you’ll consider art as a field to pursue. You have not been initiated and exposed to an artistic field as kid, and the odds are that you failed to practice enough in art to become an acceptable artist…
2. Glen Coco has another approach to art. She wrote 11 months ago:
“You know what? I’m sick of pretending. I went to art school, wrote a dissertation called “The Elevation of Art Through Commerce: An Analysis of Charles Saatchi’s Approach to the Machinery of Art Production Using Pierre Bourdieu’s Theories of Distinction”. I have attended art openings at least once a month for the last five years, even fucking purchased pieces of it.
The other night, after attending the opening of the new Tracey Emin retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, I’m finally ready to come out and say it: “I just don’t think I get art”.
I’m like, 99% sure that nobody’s ACTUALLY into art and it’s just some exclusive club you can only join, if you’ve got more money than interesting things to communicate to the rest of the human species. Just as nobody wanted to be the first one to go up to the Emperor and say “dude, I can see your arsehole”, nobody wants to be the one to go up to the lady in the above photograph and say “you are at least 50 years old. What the fuck are you doing?”
Look at these fucking guys! Just to be clear: They are in the process of spending three minutes looking at a photograph of a woman they don’t know sitting on a chair. Can you imagine how quickly they’d be skipping over this photo if it was in their mum’s holiday snaps?
This video, for the minute that I watched, was literally just what you see in this picture. Tracey riding a fucking horse. What you can’t see from this picture is the room full of people staring at this with one hand on their chins and super serious expressions. One girl was even taking notes!
There are times I wish I possessed the requisite attention span to absorb endless amounts of totally pointless bullshit.
If that film isn’t ridiculous enough for you in its current format, how about watching it while hunched over on a teeny-tiny chair so you look like a complete twat while you’re doing it?
Are you fucking kidding me? Just in case you can’t tell from the picture, this is a photo of Tracey rubbing money against her vagina. Which people are going to pay money to look at. That’s like a Zoolander joke that the writers rejected for being “a bit transparent”.
This piece deals with themes of “making kids who have been dragged to the exhibition even more pissed off than they already were by presenting them with something that would be fucking awesome to play on, but that they’re not allowed to touch”.
“God, people that don’t get why this shelf full of car boot sale crap is meaningful are so crass and uncultured.” Imagine having to explain this exhibition to an alien or a medieval time traveler. Bet you can’t.
According to the exhibition guide, this piece is one of a number of small pieces that “can easily be missed or walked past – but you have to read them, give them time.” I think perhaps I need a little more time to read this one.
I have never wanted to do anything more than Catwoman the fuck out of this room.
After saying “fuck everything about this place”, I started to head towards the exit, where I ran into noted Brummie horsewoman Janet Street Porter. After reading recently Janet’s fantastic and thought-provoking piece in the Daily Mail about what a travesty it is that the English language has gone from the beauty of Shakespeare to a series of senseless emoticons and hashtags, I was surprised to see her looking at such unskilled art. She must have been researching a piece about the devolution of art from this:
To this:
Alright, I’ll Do It – I’ll Give Art a Second Chance
This Pseudo-State is bleeding its chattel dry (Lebanon)
I have expanded on the social/political structure of the pseudo-State of Lebanon in many articles, and this post means to go to the nitty-gritty of how the government gets richer and the chattel not receiving a dime in return. The only expenditure on infrastructure is on asphalt to cover a few roads at election times (see note 1).
The main theme of this post is to describe the Independent Municipality Fund in Lebanon, and I have to explain a few other economical and financial problems first in order to set the social environment straight.
In 2006, the government of Seniora PM instituted the TVA, a tax collected on every product or service the “citizen” purchase. The TVA rate was 10%, with the promise that product manufactured or produced internally will be exempt from TVA (that was the biggest joke ever)
It turned out that TVA was applied to every level of the trading chain from importing to wholesalers to intermediate chains…to retailers. Not only the government got richer from the successive TVA collected on the intermediate level, but the hapless “citizen”, whom I call chattel,ends up paying about 25% TVA rate!
Another example, the citizen has to pay TVA on gas, and the government collect TVA on the gas distributors too. The gallon of gas for cars has increased in price three folds in the last 4 years to about $8 per gallon.
Mind you that the citizen has to pay twice for electricity: The bill of the government and the bill to the private providers. The government spends $2 billion to subsidize electricity because it intentionally refuses to upgrade and build new power plants…On the ground that:
1. Private providers are primarily owned by the sectarian militia leaders of the civil war and still running the country…
2. The government wants to privatize the power sector and doing what is needed to bust the already shaky power infrastructure…
And Lebanon, the only country that receive any rain in the Middle-East (800 mm), scarcely has potable water, even during the rainy season. And what the chattel do in the 7-month dry season? They pay for water trucks at the rate of $75 per transport, every two weeks…
Mind you that Lebanon governments never submitted a budget to the parliament since 1993, and is not about to agree on a budget even this year, or the next year.
And during all these years, $11 billion vanished into thin air, and no a piece of accounting record or paper scrap to show how all that money was spent on.
What of this Independent Municipality Fund in Lebanon?
A law was enacted in 1979 that has been changing almost every year since 1993 in order to figure out how to siphon the 11 kinds of taxes collected from municipalities and mismanage the money back into the pockets of the sectarian militia leaders of the civil war who are still running this pseudo-State.
For example, the theoretical detailed protocol for distributing the municipality Fund read as follows:
1. 75% of the Fund goes to the municipalities and 30% to the union of municipalities in every district.
2. Out of this portion supposedly re-distributed to the municipalities by the minister of finance, 70% goes to cover the running budget and 30% for development projects.
How the Fund reserved for the running budget of municipalities are supposed to be allocated?
1. 60% are allocated according to the number of “registered inhabitants” and Not based on the effective people residing in the municipality.
2. 40% are allocated based on the average taxes collected in the last two years.
There are 42 municipalities in Lebanon with actual residing people at least double the number of registered inhabitants. The total residing people is about 916,000, compared to 230,000 registered.
There are 324 municipalities witnessing the reverse trend: The total of registered is over one million, compared to 336,000 effective residents
Since taxes are mostly based on the “rental value” of properties, the towns oriented toward tourism receive far higher shares than the agricultural villages.
The evaluation of tax collected does not consider the improvement effected in the collect. Thus, municipalities have no incentives whatsoever for going the extra mile into improving the collect system and programs: The larger municipalities are biased in the share they receive, though they are the worst in efficiency in tax collection…
The main problem is that the successive pseudo-governments, particularly after 1993, have been changing the law for the allocation and distribution of the Independent Municipality Fund.
Worse, the money is to be distributed in September, but the municipalities had to wait years to get any fund, distributed on election periods.
Obviously, no citizen expects any development from his municipality. The obvious purpose is that the governments have been diverting the Fund into covering the government budget deficits, primarily spending (50%) of the “budget” on paying interests on the over $60 billion loans.
The latest two ministers of communication (cell phones…) decided to retain the money generated (and not deposit it with the finance minister) until a steady and reasonable protocol is agreed upon to redistributing the money to the Independent Municipality Fund
Note 2: The part on the Independent Municipality Fund was inspired from a piece by Sami Attallah submitted to the daily Al Nahar
Adonis Diaries 