The Factual Age

John Sharp says that we’re leaving behind a “visual age,” shifting from a culture of aesthetics to a culture of play, interaction, and discursive collaboration.

In his On The Media appearance (and in the book he was there to plug), David Weinberger points toward another, equally important historical shift: we’re moving from a culture of indisputable facts and “stopping points” (the culture of books) to one that “includes difference and disagreement as a part of knowledge itself.”

With the Internet, Weinberger argues, “we finally have a medium that is big enough for knowledge,” allowing us to worry less about the place of things in “the order of the universe” and more about the act of constantly, incrementally contributing to collective human understanding. Knowledge has moved from something fixed and immutable to something that necessarily, constantly, and explicitly contradicts itself, “a huge mass of contradictory connections that you travel along forever.”

This new epoch has its drawbacks: nowadays, “facts are not going to settle the issues we want them to settle. There is no conceivable additional evidence to convince Americans that our president was not born in Kenya, yet a sizable percentage of Americans continue to believe that. Facts are not going to settle our disputes.”

But then, the factual age had its share of epistemological bugaboos, too: because the platypus fit so poorly into contemporary taxonomy, it was entirely possible to look at a platypus right in front of one’s own face and say “This cannot be!”

Do give the piece a listen if the above sounds interesting.

Where’s Evil?

This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country—the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

He didn’t have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

-Rick Santorum

 

“I’m not your destiny, or the Devil, either!” I said. “Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that’s all the glory you deserve!” I said. “That’s all that any man at war with pure evil deserves.

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,” I said, “but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

“It’s that part of an imbecile, ” I said, “that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Intellectual Property Thought Experiment #1

Tim has been out of school for several several years. When Tim was in school, he hated the high prices of textbooks. So Tim decides that he wants to hurt the textbook industry, and he decides to do so by pirating as many textbooks as he can find.

Tim goes to a BitTorrent tracker, and he downloads 10,000 textbooks. Neither the authors nor the publishers get a cent of Tim’s money, and now Tim has an extensive, interdisciplinary library at his disposal.

But Tim has the sinking feeling that he hasn’t struck much of a blow against the textbook industry.

As we’ve said, Tim isn’t in school anymore, so there’s a fairly slim chance that he would have bought many (if any) of these books. And if Tim does go back to school, he just might get charged for books upfront, regardless of whether he already has the texts he needs. And by the time Tim does go back to school, if Tim does indeed end up going back to school, there will very likely be new editions of the books he needs, and his professors will very likely require those new editions, which may or may not be available to pirate.

So in other words, what Tim has done is acquire for free a bunch of things that he would probably never have paid for, and that he just might end up purchasing anyway, in the end. In short, Tim has failed completely in his attempt to hurt the textbook industry.

Tim has succeeded, however, in disproving the ridiculous notion that an instance of piracy necessarily represents a lost sale. Is there any rational way to argue that, by pirating 10,000 textbooks, Tim has cost someone 10,000 sales? or 5,000? or 1,000? or 10?

Without ignoring the ethical dimension of piracy, we can recognize that what Tim has done here is quite different from, say, stealing crates of textbooks and then hoarding or reselling them. We can recognize the significant differences between piracy and theft, and further, we can recognize that having one’s work pirated 10,000 times does not mean that one has lost 10,000 sales, or even 10,000 potential sales.

Next time, I’ll go into more detail about that last point.

What We Mean When We Say “Art”

This is the fourth post in a series on the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here, Part Two is here, and Part Three is here.

So. When we say art, and we are not referring simply to paintings and sculptures and stuff, we usually mean one of the following things.

1. Art is something that takes skill to make or execute well

When Julia Child wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she probably meant that French cooking was an art in the pre-Renaissance sense: pies and crepes as “well-crafted functional objects.” We all need food (which the functional part), but it takes an accomplished chef to make truly great food (which is the part that makes it art).

But contemporary readers tend to understand this usage as a metaphor, and indeed, Child herself might have meant it as one. It’s not that French cooking is an art, this argument goes, but rather that if you’re sufficiently good at French cooking, the results can be like art.

2. Art is something that seeks meaning and explores the human condition and does nothing else

When we say that French cooking is like art, but not actually art, this is the kind of art we’re saying it’s like. As discussed in a previous post, this is an extraordinarily and pointlessly restrictive definition.

It also makes very little internal sense. Operating on this definition, we often try to separate art from entertainment, despite the great number of things that explore the human condition while simultaneously entertaining us, from the Shakespeare canon to The Colbert Report. A skilled writer can find time for high-minded ruminations on morality and numerous dick jokes.

We could say that some entertainments contain art, or that they contain art-moments, but at that point entertainment and art are officially intermixed anyway. It’s too late to take the chocolate out of the milk–and what would be the point of doing so, anyway?

3. Art is something that well-educated people respect, and that people of good taste enjoy

I have several friends who become angry when they see conceptual art of pretty much any kind, and I suspect that their anger stems from this definition. They always want to say “That’s not art!” or “You’re telling me this is art?” because they have internalized the idea that art means something they have to respect (which is a hard sell where stolen urinals are concerned, which was sort of Marcel Duchamp’s point).

As I’ve said before, this makes it impossible to talk about bad art, dumb art, art that tries and fails, or art that you can understand and even respect without liking. If only the really successful attempts get to be included in the conversation, then we miss out on a whole lot of really interesting work, and that’s a shame.

4. Art is something that is meaningful and important without being enjoyable

This is appreciating art as a synonym for eating your vegetables, and the arts as a blanket term for those entertainments that we should probably keep around even if no one really finds them entertaining.

It’s this definition that leads people to sit quietly with their hands folded at the opera, nodding off occasionally and glaring at anyone with the audacity to applaud too often–despite the fact that opera was as rowdy and lowbrow a popular art-form as any in its heyday. The more you respect opera, the less you expect to enjoy opera.

And in galleries, when visitors encounter visual art that is overtly playful, or layered with historical meaning, or salacious and moronic, they tend to regard it all with the same sort of uniform, glassy-eyed seriousness. Nothing sufficiently respected has the opportunity to mean much of anything.

So enough with all the stultifying respect already.

Art has to be something that we all have permission to love, hate, kinda-like, kinda-dislike, laugh at, cry over, intellectualize, or engage viscerally on a case-by-case basis, or else there’s very little point in talking about it.

What I’m trying to ask is whether the word art is really worth hanging onto, given all of the above. It’s a term that means at least five different things, none of them all that useful, most of them highly problematic, and at least one of them actually nonsensical.

But even so, I think we’re sort of stuck with the word, at least for the moment–and in my next post, I’ll discuss how running an online art gallery has lead me to that conclusion. If we can understand what makes the word necessary right now, we can better address the goal of making it less necessary in the future.

The Visual Age

This is the second post in a series about the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here.

In his appearance on the Brainy Gamer Podcast, art historian John Sharp suggests that we are “leaving a five-hundred year period that [was] dominated by visual culture, and moving into one that’s much more about systems.”

Prior to the Renaissance and the dawn of the visual age, Sharp argues, “the whole idea we have of art today did not exist.” Before that, art referred to what we now call design. “These well-crafted functional objects–that’s all there was, really. There wasn’t such a thing as these objects that we created simply for enjoyment, for aesthetic appreciation, and so on.” The Renaissance signaled a cultural shift toward the visual, toward using our eyes “as the primary filter for thinking about the world.”

Painting, sculpture, print media, and eventually photography were not just the predominant forms of Western art. They were art as such. So much so that, as cinema and television came to be considered worthy of aesthetic contemplation, so too did they come to be categorized as primarily visual media, despite the inclusion of sound in the majority of cinema and virtually all of television.

Just as the idea of autonomous art-objects (and artists as a special creative class) has a specific historical context, so too does the oft-cited idea that the sole function of true art is to converse with the sublime, or to explore profound truths about the human condition. “That’s this very Romantic 19th Century notion… a bit of cultural baggage” that tends to limit our understanding rather than expand it. Just because that’s what Vincent Van Gogh (or rather, our posthumously mythologized version of him) was up to does not mean that all artists must necessarily live and work along similar lines. To think of commercial art, or bad art, or disposable art as oxymorons is to take an unnecessarily narrow and restrictive historical view of the terms involved.

Knowing that, we can easily understand the past century of “is x art?” hand-wringing. It’s not that a stolen urinal or a guy getting shot in the arm isn’t art (whatever that would mean), but simply that those things aren’t addressing themselves to the tradition of visual perfection that has been art’s perceived aim since the Renaissance. What matters isn’t how those things look, but rather how they fit into larger systems, and what they demand of the viewer.

In that specific sense, large swaths of art theory have failed to keep pace with art practice. Try to evaluate Dada on the same terms as you would evaluate Piet Mondrian (let alone the representational art of the Renaissance), and you’ll just end up confused. I think that when people walk into an art gallery and feel lost, confused, or intimidated, it is this disconnect that is tripping them up. Art galleries are designed for looking at things, but they’re now filled with art that is not meant exclusively, or even primarily, to be looked at.

So all of that muddles our understanding of art, both as a usable word and as an intuitive, unspoken concept. In my next post, I’ll break down that problem.

We’re Not Objective

If you’re not sure what The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was about, this is what it was about:

No, not the bit about turtles--though for the record, I agree.

There seems to have been some confusion as to whether Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and the rest of the Daily Show folks are subtly saying that we should all vote Democrat, or very clearly saying exactly what the fuck they’re saying–namely, that our country is not on the brink of devolving into a socialist/fascist/communist/theocratic dystopia, and that our news media spend about 99% of their time callously exploiting (and creating) people’s fears, rather than trying to keep the political process honest. That’s not a partisan position. It’s just reasonable.

Which is not to say that Jon Stewart has no political ideology. Everyone has opinions, and everyone is biased. If our news organizations would stop worrying about appearing objective, and instead use that energy to be intelligent and accurate, then perhaps they could do some worthwhile work.

Look at it this way: If NPR really were an objective news organization–and they clearly think that they are, since they banned their employees from attending the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, lest they should appear biased–then Juan Williams’ opinions about Muslims (or anything else) would not be grounds for termination. As long as Williams did his job well–as long as he did objective reporting–his opinions would not matter in the least, right? Or are we are arguing that a good journalist must have no personal biases? Because in that case, there has never been, nor will there ever be, such a thing as a good journalist.

The whole idea of objective reporting is misleading. Having an opinion is not bad reporting. Having an unsupported opinion is bad reporting, just as unsupported facts are not factual. We have replaced the burden of proof (which supports honest argument) with a pretense to objectivity (which fosters dishonesty, demagoguery, and equivocation).

Hence all this idiotic hang-wringing about Jon Stewart’s ideological position. NPR asks, “Is it a political rally? Is it comedy?” It’s both. That’s how satire works. Case closed.

To ask whether the rally supports or opposes Obama–or the Tea Party, or Glenn Beck, or whoever one thinks it supports or opposes–is to miss the point entirely. The rally did not espouse a party affiliation, nor did it aspire to milquetoast opinionlessness. The point was specifically to show that an awful lot of people would like to be addressed as rational adults rather than frightened, malleable, exceptionally stupid children.

When most of the people with platforms purport to have no opinions, only the most extreme and incendiary caricatures of political thought (the very loudest opinions) get any airtime. When everyone is allowed to have an opinion, but is also required to support it, then we can have a variety of viewpoints and a substantive debate between them.

Jon Stewart isn’t trying to tell you how to vote tomorrow. He’s just reminding you that, when voters can recognize bullshit, Democracy is much healthier. So here’s my small contribution to that noble goal: Whenever a news organization claims to be objective, that news organization is lying to you, or else to themselves. Yes, any news organization. Yes, that includes the one that you personally like and/or with whom you personally agree. It can be surprisingly hard to inform oneself, but we can start by contumaciously ignoring sources of deliberate misinformation and self-congratulatory, intellectually dishonest pseudo-objectivity.

Your Opponent Is Not Your Enemy

Bill Maher frustrates the hell out of me. He’s clearly smart, he’s often funny, and his show allows other smart and/or funny people the opportunity to have lengthy discussions about important things. But he’s also infinitely smug, and Real Time–when it isn’t hosting some of the best political discussions on television–takes far too many detours into lazy, self-satisfied, Jay Leno-style late night pablum. That kind of bad writing reduces the overall quality of the show considerably, but it doesn’t necessarily contradict or weaken the substantive discussion for which I tune in.

This kind of crap does, though: “When it comes to voting,” Maher said on October 1, “you’ve got to grow up and realize that there’s a difference between a disappointing friend and a deadly enemy.” In this analogy, Democrats are the “disappointing friend,” and Republicans are the “deadly enemy.”

Maher’s statement struck me as inflammatory partisan bullshit, probably because it is, in fact, inflammatory partisan bullshit. But to be fair, I heard Bill Maher say that only a few hours after hearing Jon Stewart say that we really, really need be wary of precisely that sort of idiocy.

There’s a difference between disagreeing with people–like newscasters on Fox News that I think are incorrect in their analysis of the day’s events–and people that threaten to kill you for putting a cartoon image of Mohammad in a bear suit. And that’s a line that we too often forget.

Our system genuinely allows for peaceable exchanges of power, Stewart reminds us on NPR’s Fresh Air. Even if [INSERT POLITICIAN YOU REALLY DON'T LIKE] comes to power,

we’ll be fine. You know, we had a Civil War. Just–we’re not that fragile. And I think we always have to remember that people can be opponents, but not enemies. And there are enemies in the world. We just need the news media to help us delineate, and I think that’s where the failing is: That the culture of corruption that exists in the media doesn’t allow us to delineate between enemies and opponents, and that’s where we sort of fall into trouble.

Or to put it as succinctly as possible: Al-Qaeda is my enemy, and Glenn Beck is my opponent, and seriously, there’s a difference.

And it’s a very real difference, and obscuring it is an historically situated political strategy that, according to Rick Perlstein, Richard Nixon helped to pioneer between 1966 and 1972. It is not an inevitable consequence of human nature, or of the political process, but rather a matter of “using the angers, anxieties, and resentments” of the day to unite voters against a common, essentially imagined enemy.

When Republicans suffered humiliating defeats in 1970, Nixon blamed the chicanery of his enemies: America’s enemies, as he had come to think of them. He grew yet more determined to destroy them, because of what he was convinced was their determination to destroy him.

Millions of Americans recognized the balance of forces in the exact same way–that America was engulfed in a pitched battle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light. The only thing was: Americans disagreed radically over which side was which.

Rick Perlstein, Nixonland (Scribner, 2009): xii.

The imagined conflict between the forces of light and those of darkness (with light defined as whatever I think, and darkness defined as whatever I don’t) has come to dominate the American political landscape, to the extreme detriment of the nation’s public discourse. We actually forget that someone who wants to kill us belongs to a different category than someone with whom we disagree about the role of government in regulating commerce.

And I get it: A world composed entirely of absolutes would be much easier to sort out than our own messy, complicated one. But we have a responsibility to live in the real world, because we’re adults, and growing up isn’t about realizing “that there’s a difference between a disappointing friend and a deadly enemy,” as Bill Maher said the other night. Growing up is about realizing that the person with whom you disagree is not necessarily an enemy, let alone a deadly one.

There really are deadly enemies in the world, and we’ll be in no position to confront them if we waste all of our time and energy squabbling with one another along cynically delineated partisan lines.

Strength in Numbers

In the most recent episode of The Simpsons, Bart had something topical to write on the blackboard: “South Park–We’d stand beside you if we weren’t so scared.”

Even for The Simpsons (a show that hasn’t contained a valid satirical thought in years) that gesture is unbelievably stupid, morally bankrupt, and utterly hypocritical in the truest sense of the word. The principle, which Bill O’Reilly shares, is basically this: Free speech is extremely important, except when someone makes a threat, in which case we should do whatever the terrorist says, regardless of our values.

As Matt Stone explains, this has become “the new normal” in the wake of the Danish cartoon controversy in 2005.

If everyone would have just–like normally they do in the news organizations–just printed the cartoons, everyone would have rallied together. Now that guy [the cartoonist] has to be in hiding and all this shit, because everyone just hung him out to dry.

The only reason that South Park’s creators have to be scared–the only reason that Theo Van Gogh was targeted, the only reason that Ayaan Hursi Ali needs protection–is that no one else is standing up. When a few people are singled out, there is the potential for violence. If everyone would show a little backbone, then no one could be targeted. Ali recently said as much to Anderson Cooper, and this same idea is at work in Dan Savage’s recently-announced “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.”

In that same Anderson Cooper piece, Revolution Muslim’s Younus Abdullah Mohammed says that his group is “commanded to terrorize the disbelievers… I define terrorism as making them fearful, so that they think twice before they go rape your mother, or kill your brother, or go onto your land and try to steal your resources.” To the best of my knowledge, Mohammed’s mother is quite safe, so I assume that he is referring to the United States’ military presence in Muslim countries. Well, this business with depictions of Muhammad isn’t likely to end the American wars of occupation in the Middle East, so in that sense, Mohammed’s tactics have been a miserable failure.

But Revolution Muslim has apparently succeeded in making people fearful, and in that sense their terrorist threats have been a rousing success. There is one law of Sharia that American non-Muslims now follow, zealously, out of pure cowardice. Bill O’Reilly, and the team behind that moment on The Simpsons, and everyone else refusing to speak out, is making terrorism work. What an excellent use of their media presences.

If you don’t want to live in a world in which your values (whatever they might be) are only one threat away from being abandoned, then now is the time to take a stand.

The Fundamentalist’s Paradox

Recently, I posted a three-part entry. My goal was to take a look at what Revolution Muslim, the group that warned Matt Stone and Trey Parker not to show an image of the Prophet Muhammad on South Park (and implied that the duo would almost certainly be murdered if they did not heed the “warning”), had actually said. I thought that it was important not to immediately dismiss the website as being too “radical” to hold a valid opinion–to meet it on its own terms and engage in the kind of open discussion that at least one of its bloggers claims to want. I want to approach everyone, and especially those with whom I strongly disagree, on terms of mutual respect and shared humanity.

But man-oh-man, does Revolution Muslim ever make that difficult.

Revolution Muslim is down at the moment, because of hacking or heavy traffic or both, so I am unable to look up the name of the blogger to whom I was responding. But at least one person at that website, Younus Abdullah Mohammed, is a massive hypocrite, and his hypocrisy has given me the opportunity to bump up against the outermost limits of my own patience and tolerance.

In a recent Gawker interview, Mohammed said that “We already know the outcome as Muslims… Islam will take over the world,” and will triumph over “the filth and trash that is America.” He said that most Americans are “dumbed down, stupid and pathetic.” He said that “it’s very justifiable to act violently against Western aggression,” and that “we did not start the war on September the 11th 2001. You started the war.”

Since that “we” is ambiguous–does he mean Muslims generally, or just the ones who commit acts of terrorism?–I am not in a position to answer that particular claim. But I am in a position to point out that Revolution Muslim is based in New York City. As Jon Stewart observes, Revolution Muslim can only say all of this “because of how much we, in this country, value and protect even their freedom of expression.”

And indeed, I value Younus Abdullah Mohammed’s freedom of expression very highly, even when he spouts hateful, perplexing gibberish about “Darwinist faggots who are as despicable as the rest, walking around eating your Triscuits.” (I’m pretty sure that evolution happened and is happening in some form or another, and I do enjoy Triscuits, so I guess that I am just such a “faggot.” I’ve been called worse). Younus Abdullah Mohammed is absolutely allowed his homophobia, his implied disbelief in evolution, and even his ill-defined hatred of this nation’s beloved snack crackers.

But if Islam were to “take over the world,” do you think that analogous dissent would be allowed? Do you think that I could have publicly called the Taliban “trash” as a citizen of Afghanistan, circa 2001, without being imprisoned or killed?

The central irony of Revolution Muslim is that it could only exist in the kind of society that it actively seeks to undermine and overthrow. Free speech allows for tirades against free speech, but theocracy does not allow for tirades against (or even minor disagreements with) theocracy. Speaking out against free speech is something of a self-negating principle.

Incidentally, in the Gawker article that I quoted above, you will find a reproduction of the 2005 cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb on his head. Have a look, and downland it and archive it, because its availability is unreliable; due to the spectacular cowardice of the Western media in general, lots of people have yet to see the image at all, and it’s worth knowing what all the fuss was about. I can certainly see why the image was and is considered offensive, but that’s all the more reason to see it for yourself and form your own opinion.

I’ve Learned Something Today (3 of 3)

Do South Park’s last two episodes constitute an insult to Muslims? In the opinion of Revolution Muslim, it all comes down to a rather simple question: “Is there a purpose, other than evil, in insulting something someone holds sacred?” I would answer that question with an unqualified yes.

A simple example: The Catholic Church holds its hierarchy sacred, but we can and must insult the craven hypocrisy of Pope Benedict II, who continues to protect the child molesters in his employ. Here the purpose of insulting the Pope–who is supposed to be infallible, remember–is to stop trusted authority figures from raping children. The purpose is to stop evil, because sacred institutions are perfectly capable of the most horrific evil.

One must believe that sacred institutions can do evil, unless one wants to say that everything every religion does is good–which would be paradoxical, since the world’s myriad religions openly (and often productively) contradict one another. And if religions can do evil, then we have to be able to call them out on it. In the case of Catholic priests raping children, the evil would be in not attacking the sacred institution in question.

Since this point is such an important one, let us examine Revolution Muslim‘s argument in a little more detail. I would like to speak directly to Revolution Muslim.

While insulting Jesus, Moses, or any other prophet would remove someone from Islam, we Muslims are also forbidden to insult the deities that other religions hold in high esteem. Allah says in the Qur’an:

وَلاَ تَسُبُّواْ الَّذِينَ يَدْعُونَ مِن دُونِ اللّهِ فَيَسُبُّواْ اللّهَ عَدْوًا بِغَيْرِ عِلْمٍ

Revile not those unto whom they pray beside Allah lest they wrongfully revile Allah through ignorance.

Therefore, as Muslims we do not define speech which has no place in a moral society as “free speech.”

Because I cannot read Arabic, I am utterly at the mercy of the translator as far as the wording of that Koranic quotation goes. But it seems to me that “reviling” is quite different from satirizing. Satires do not hate everything they mock. I believe that your assertion–that “speech which has no place in a moral society” is not “free speech”–confuses a moral society with a society in which everyone agrees about everything.

The entire point of free speech is that speech must be allowed to occur even if it offends people. That is precisely what makes free speech necessary. Without that safeguard, sacred institutions could do unlimited evil without being questioned or stopped. No individual, no group, and no religion should have the privilege of going unquestioned or uninsulted. A free society cannot afford to grant anyone that privilege.

We would also like Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone to understand the tastelessness of their portrayal, apologize and reflect on the words that follow. An apology or at least recognition of bad taste might not remedy the situation, but it would go a long way toward turning this situation from a gaping wound into an ugly scar.

No one denies that South Park is tasteless. Few satires retain good taste, for the simple reason that good taste is often incompatible with truth. But how has the show’s tastelessness wounded you? Where is the wound?

I do not mean that as a rhetorical question. I honestly want to understand. What gives Muslims the exclusive right not to be satirized, or even to be included in a satire of something else entirely? That is the question that Matt Stone and Trey Parker have asked, and they are still waiting for a satisfactory answer.

If the answer is simply that whoever threatens violence gets whatever he wants, then I resolutely reject that answer as unethical, arrogant, and incredibly dangerous.