In terms of audience reception, art can be a source of ridicule and scandal in mainstream society: as seen in Marcel Duchamp’s notorious Fountain – a readymade sculpture that’s a porcelain urinal flipped upside down and signed “R. Mutt”; but just as well, art can also create terrifying horror with a political charge (Edward Kienholz’s Five Car Stud), spectral presence and spiritual depth (Louise Bourgeois’s Spiders series) or art can become a psychedelic wonderland for the masses: as seen in Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room – a dazzling and diaphanous fractal maze of half-silvered mirrors that make one feel endless and glowing. But when it comes to how we feel and breathe about art’s raison d'être: What’s art’s purpose for existing? Who gets to make art? Who gets to experience art? Sadly and grotesquely, just the rich. In this capitalist hellscape of commodified depravity and celebrity-driven attention hoarding, all measures of real freedom, including the ability to choose a life in the arts, are reserved only for the rich & famous. No matter who you are or where you were born, there is an alternative version of you behind every dollar of your parents; the money your family has or doesn’t have, shapes the trajectory of your life and determines your available options. As such, this tragic lottery is ultimately a game best tossed into history’s garbage bin. Our co-hosts will reflect on lifetimes of dashed dreams, yearning for freedom and imagining what art might be like in a socialist future – sketching visions of a New Renaissance waiting just behind the doors concealing humanity’s suppressed imagination. Once achieving The Golden Square, where dignified lives no longer worry about food, shelter, healthcare and education, art is inevitably what comes next. We don’t need Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket to 15 seconds of Ocean Spray © TikTok fame, which is the newer, crueler, sadder reality of the American Dream. The Golden Square is how we get freedom for everyone, not just a few lucky lottery winners in this vicious, boring dystopia. Building real Socialism will unleash a gazillion blooming flowers of human creativity – singing out in a joyous weave toward The Utopian Sphere. New art will ask new questions, make new demands, and push us toward the unknown horizons of belonging, fulfillment, and happiness never-before realized in human history.
Mentioned In This Episode:
Jesse’s Complete Failure on Tumblr.
Jesse’s Total Success on Vine.
A TAXONOMY OF PRODUCTIVE HUMAN ACTIVITIES:
Science Is the Most Essential Human Endeavor;
Design Is the Bridge Between Art and Science;
Art Is the Most Noble of Human Pursuits;
Anarchy Is the North Star of Human Decency.
ANARCHY AS ADDITION:
Anarchy + Design = Democracy
Anarchy + Art = Freedom
Anarchy + Science = Evolution
Caroline Bankoff in Vulture: “Steven Soderbergh Says He’s Becoming a Painter”
Paddy Johnson in Artnet News: “Is Steven Soderbergh’s Ludicrous, Boozy Website a Work of Art?”
Jake Coyle in Associated Press: “Unretired, Soderbergh Wants to Pull a Fast One on Hollywood”
From The Future Is A Mixtape Vaults: Episode 001: The Desire For Certainty
Luke Savage in Jacobin: “Art for the 99 Percent”
Zach Friedman in Forbes: “Student Loan Debt Statistics In 2020: A Record $1.6 Trillion”
Lilia Vega in The Daily Californian: “The History of UC Tuition Since 1868”
Michael Stone in Time Magazine: “What Happened When American States Tried Providing Tuition-Free College”
Excerpt From: A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal:
“The great modernist writer Virginia Woolf once made a living from odd jobs of the kind then available to women [...] Then she inherited five hundred pounds a year from an aunt who fell off a horse in Bombay. It wasn’t a fortune—about $40,000 today, a little more than the median individual income. But it set her free. “Watch in the spring sunshine,” she wrote, “the stockbroker and the great barrister going indoors to make money and more money and more money when it is a fact that five hundred pounds a year will keep one alive in the sunshine.”
Authors of A Planet to Win: Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos. Foreward by Naomi Klein. Published in 2019 by Verso Books.
Murray Bookchin had three powerful concepts he said were necessary for a future utopian society: Usufruct, Complementarity, and the Irreducible Minimum. These concepts were laid out in his magnum opus: The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. It was originally published in 1982 and is now reprinted by AK Press. A free digital copy can also be found at The Anarchist Library here.
The Institute for Social Ecology: “On Bookchin’s Social Ecology and Its Contributions to Social Movements”
Reino Virtanen in Comparative Literature Studies: “On the Dichotomy Between Genius and Talent”
Frederik deBoer’s The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice. Published in 2020 by All Points Books.
Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. Published in 2008 by Little Brown and Company.
Rachel Nuwer in The Smithsonian: “The 10,000 Hour Rule Is Not Real.”
Documentary on Vimeo: Jim Carrey: I Needed Color
David Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones, is the director of the movies Moon, Source Code and the far less celebrated film, Mute, which was so poorly reviewed that he had to resort to getting his third part of the Moonverse Trilogy adapted into a comic book via a Kickstarter; This is further explored in Graeme McMillan’s interview with the director in the Hollywood Reporter: “Duncan Jones Completing 'Moon' Trilogy With Crowdfunded Graphic Novel”
Duncan Jones and Alex Di Campi’s Graphic Novel, Madi: Once Upon a Time in the Future. To Be Published in November 2020 by Z2 Comics.
Influencers: How Democracy Created a Monster by Wisecrack - a Youtube Video Essay on the History of Celebrity
Sherri Geldin on NPR’S Talk of the Nation: “Warhol Was Right About '15 Minutes Of Fame'”
Rachel Nuwer in Smithsonian Magazine: “Andy Warhol Probably Never Said His Celebrated ‘Fifteen Minutes of Fame’ Line”
Kara Walker: A Wikipedia Biography
Adrienne Green in The Atlantic: “How Kara Walker Recasts Racism’s Bitter Legacy”
Documentary on the Famous Chinese Artist & Dissident: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2011), which is about a dystopian future of America with a dumb President where everyone is addicted to a new communicaiton device and billionnaires can buy immortality. Here is the scene where the protagonist attempts to talk to an artist in a NYC gallery opening:
“I wanted to congratulate the artist on his work, that’s how strongly I felt about it, and to recommend a trip out to my parents’ Westbury so that he could see a different, more hopeful take on post-Rupture America. But they had this gimmicky thing going on, where, any time someone approached the artist whom he didn’t know or didn’t like the looks of, these spikes shot up from the floor all around him and you had to back away. He was a nice-looking guy, kind of square-jawed but with something milky, almost Midwestern, in his eyes, and he was wearing this cougar-print shirt and an old-school pinstriped Armani jacket which was festooned with random numbers made with masking tape. He was busy talking to a wildly emotive post-American doyenne dressed in a cheongsam covered with dragons and phoenixes. The moment I approached them, the spikes shot out from the floor around him, and some of the serving girls in Onionskins who were standing next to the artist just gave me the old familiar look that denoted I was not a human being. Oh well, I thought. At least the art was great.”
Alissa Walker in Curbed: “LACMA Is Nearly Demolished, and L.A. Hasn’t Had Much Say About Its Future”
"[LACMA Director Michael] Govan seems more concerned with appeasing the art world’s three C’s — capitalism, corporations, and celebrities — than he is about building a museum that serves the people of L.A. County."
Barry Avrich’s Blurred Lines: Inside the Art World (2016)
Jesse was there: USC SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS MFA 2003: University of Southern California School of Fine Arts
Edward Kienholz: Five Car Stud
The Future Is a Mixtape - more on The Golden Square - Episode 031: The No-Bullshit Blueprint for Socialism
Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981). Translated by Sheila Glaser. Published in 1995 by the University of Michigan Press.
Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Published in 1990 by Duke University Press.
Francis Fukyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. Originally published in 1996 by Free Press.
“What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote two legendary science fiction novels exploring anarchist utopias:
The Dispossessed (1974)
Always Coming Home (1985)
Cory Doctorow in Boingboing: “Library Socialism: A Utopian Vision of a Sustainable, Luxuriant Future of Circulating Abundance”
Here Are SRSLY Wrong’s Podcast Trilogy Episodes Covering Their Idea of Library Socialism:
Episode #189: Library Socialism & Usufruct