National Embezzlement of the Arts - Part 1

 I started my research into the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) earlier this year based on the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) and CT state arts grants.  The point of the research was to simply understand how tax-payer funded Arts grants to individual artists such as myself are administered.

That research resulted in discovering innumerable unethical and likely illegal administrative practices being conducted nationally, regionally, and in the hydra of local malpractices.

On April 3, I called the NEA office to inquire how to make them aware of what I was documenting. I was told to email the public affairs and office of the Inspector General which I did. On April 9 I added additional material in a second email. I received absolutely NO FEEDBACK whatsoever.

On May 1, I requested that both divisions simply acknowledge that my emails were received. Public Affairs replied with a robo-response that implied that the organization likely ignores all incoming mail on these channels.

The obvious conclusion is that the National Endowment for the Arts is self-insulating and that there is no serious autonomous Office of the Inspector General auditing the operation.

In the interim I have attempted to solicit information from numerous tax-payer funded Arts organizations - a few of which are listed above.  Scott Wands at CT Humanities is the sole individual who ever responded.

All of the websites list phone numbers that, when called, don't get answered - leave a message - when leaving a message is attempted, you are informed the phone message box is full - send an email.  Sending the email is ignored.  It is unclear if anyone on the Arts payrolls ever works their job. Emptying the phone messages daily should be a no-brainer.  Reading the inbox and spam email folders is also a no-brainer. NOT DOING THE JOB YOU ARE PAID TO DO is malfeasance.

Given the wholesale dysfunction of the Arts network, the next most logical step is to lodge a discrimination complaint for both the lack of opportunity and the unacceptable conditions under which to pursue opportunities for grants and awards from these entities.

Yesterday I called the CT Human Rights and Opportunities Commission  to inquire as to where to file a discrimination complaint against NEFA which serves multiple states and is administered through a Boston office. I was directed to the federal Equal Employment and Opportunities website but hit a deadend. My complaint didn't neatly fit any of the obvious categories and so I selected "other".

The EEOC blindspot has to do with opportunities involving arts grants, funding, and arts administration. I called them and spoke with Rachel Aniston who said that although it wasn't covered by the EEOC that "some other" government agency regulates and governs Arts organizations.

She said that the answer must be listed on USAGOV.gov and if not there then the Federal Coordination and Compliance Division (FCC) of the Department of Justice.

Finding nothing on the USAGOV website, I called their number and was eventually speaking with an operator who was incapable of doing anything other than reading the USAGOV website talking points to me without adding any value.  Another deadend.

I located the information for the FCC and called their generic number.  It rang for three minutes and hung up.  So I called the Title 06 HOTLINE, it too rang for three minutes and hung up.  

There is little question in my mind, that the Arts and Arts funding is an unintentionally rogue set of operations that function out of sight and out of mind and as such are functionally unaccountable except to their own make-believe Offices of "Inspector Generals".

As such they represent a tax-payer money sink that has been illegally appropriated for Democratic party solicitations, special interest honeypots, and exclusive higher education institutional abuse. And there is nobody enforcing the ethics, the veracity, or the governance of this operation.

I'm going to share this with some politicians who should wake up to this.

Updates will follow. 

Essay: Bionic Aesthetic Fixations

 I'm going to attempt to triangulate a number of ideas about reading [decoding], thinking, and aesthetics that may or may not make for a new hypothesis about viewing art.

I just recently encountered the invention of Bionic Reading a few weeks ago. The link introduces the synthesis of font bolding into the narrative flow of reading material with the effect of increasing the speed of reading the material.

Another category of interest is found in a Lex Fridman podcast with Edward Gibson, psycholinguistics professor at MIT on Morphology - the relationship of words to one another.  In the context of words, a morpheme is the smallest unique linguistic unit.

Comparing the Fixation notation of Bionic Reading with Morphology, even at face value gets very interesting. Fixations aren't the same as morphemes, they're simply a visual recognition shorthand for reading faster. So what happens to morphemes either as autonomous units or in more complex configurations?

And before attempting to answer this rather obvious question, also consider that Gibson talks about the belief that assigning meaning to what is read [not just visually processed but what is holistically being cross referenced] is separate from the parsing [e.g. either traditional OR Bionic Reading] of the material. In the case of text or listening, a language network is activated to make it make sense.  But this is different for, say, music or art.

And the last piece of this exercise involves the late Daniel Kahneman's  ruminations on Thinking Fast [system 1] and Thinking Slow [system 2]. And this has to do with control of attention and confidence in memory recall.

All of that is a lot of information but it all has to do with how we, as humans, comprehend information and we are constantly bombarded with information.

Let's start to unpack all this and, if I'm successful, maybe map reading text to "reading" a piece of art.

The reason Bionic Reading grabbed my attention is that I'm currently reading Suzi Gablik's The ReEnchantment  of Art and I usually read when I'm at the Community Center on an exercise bike. Someone walked up to me there and asked what I was reading and I quickly showed them the cover of the book that had the title in embellished lettering. "Oh, so you're reading The Reinvention of Art, how interesting."

The mistake the individual made is an understandable one - we all think we are getting the whole of the material we read quickly but at times its a big fail. I thought about this in the context of Bionic Reading which emphasizes and strongly hints that the whole word is the most familiar word you'll assume. The immediate issue with this is that morphemes, for lack of a better conceptual model, post-process the nuanced meaning of the a priori [Bionic Reading] "Fixation". I can't help but think that, left unchecked, this mismatch of the intended word and the expedited reading of the word may account for a large body of [system 1] memory recall confusion. In other words we internalize information we think is correct based on our own uncorrected misreading of the text.

And if this is the actual cause of misunderstanding, it may be that the cognitive bias that is so often attributed to an individual isn't bias at all - just an untrustworthy cache of immediate gratification, system 1 factoids.

We can re-purpose the concept of fixation from Bionic Reading and invent a speculative aesthetic equivalent to use with artistic material. Morphemes already map to words and biology with a heavy inference of the concept of the form of the thing. Let's add another usage to the term that relates to aesthetics, morpheme as the smallest, unique recognizable unit of sensation experience that includes vision, movement, feeling, and so on. For example, to answer the question of "What is a chair?",  we might answer, "Something/anything to sit on.". An aesthetic response might be, "Something/anything comfortable to sit on.". The arrow of additional aesthetic nuance moves in the direction of fine art or fine craft and it is the look or feel of a chair candidate object that becomes the aesthetic morpheme.

What is true about Bionic Reading and aesthetics is that the process can only work if the richness of understanding is already in place. For reading, a large vocabulary is important. For art a rich and sticky exposure to the range of imaginations who have solved the problem at hand, say, "What is a chair?".

And just like the individual misreading the title of my reading book, an individual grazing through an art gallery must also have an aesthetic set of fixation forms. Studies have shown that most gallery attendees spend an average of 5 seconds or less actually looking at a museum painting [obviously high recognition pieces among other objects of interest get more]. It is obvious here that immediate gratification [system 1] memory is kicking in - "I don't  [or do] think this object is worth my attention.".

Maybe this is worthwhile information about how art appreciation should be nurtured. What aesthetic fixations are worth cultivating to instrument an individual's taste in art, craft, or performance? This is much different than promoting art history artistic achievements or museum merchandise best-sellers. If an individual is going to rush past a piece of art, shouldn't they be armed with a quick and dirty, drive-by sense of why they ignore it?  And is it possible that art students can be armed with sufficient, quick and dirty aesthetic morphemes that enable them to make better personal curatorial choices about what they consume and experience?  i think this is worth exploring in greater detail.

If we accept that all sensorial arts are experienced with some kind of a priori aesthetic fixation response then the chronic criticism about Modern Art [and after] is unfairly selective. Every museum object requires a minimal understanding of its reason to exist, Modern or not, abstract or not, beautiful or not.

Back to our original question, what happens to morphemes in the context of being fixated? I think the assumption has to be that is the Bionic Reading results in an accurate interpretation of the text then morphemes maintain their veracity. However, it seems to me, that morphemes can get stepped on by the Bionic Reading notational font enhancement.

Because aesthetic fixation is an invention that starts here, further development of the concept will need to be wary of creating a shorthand of expectation about experiencing art that is illegitimate.

 

NEFA's Common Ground - A Mass Grave for Artists

Creative Ground has become the defacto warehouse being designated by the New England Foundation for the Arts as a registration destination for an artist's profile of availability. The Connecticut Office of the Arts (COA) claims it "uses it to find artists for projects, including public art opportunities".

Creative Ground is a NEFA "project" which, as you can easily imagine, is a cluster-phuck of bad ideas shoehorned into a website that features a handy-dandy database of  [Norm Macdonald voice] "the world". 

By the "world", I'm euphemistically referring to every possible art related person, place, or thing in New England relating to art, humanities, education, health, child care, merchandise, or identity politic grift that they could identify. This is the short list, btw.

I was recently sent an email telling me to update my profile and I did. I already had one from years ago when I probably got a similar message to create a profile because it would ensure being seen by the state as an artist with work to sell.

You quickly find out that the completeness of your profile is used to rank your position in the sequence of search results that is returned to a user using the database.  I'm being kind in calling it a database.

As of May 20, 2024, the database contains approximately 32053 database results. 

Having spent my career working with developing and designing databases, I wanted to test the hypothesis that an architect from CT wanting to locate an artist who would qualify for the 1% arts money in a new construction. This, after all, is the pretense of the exercise.

Being a visual artist, I searched for "Painter". On the first page of 10 search results, there were 3 individual painters returned, 2 retail stores, and 5 professional associations. The next page returned 4 painters and 6 associations of painters. Subsequent pages devolve into community organizers and dancers who "work with painters", and dross.

To make a long story short, this database is worthless when it comes to locating, say, a fine arts painter whose work might satisfy decorating the walls of a University Humanities building.  An architect or arts associate would need to slog through pages of search results whose ranking is not based on relevance but on a misguided completeness metric. And although these search results yield a link to a fairly attractive looking profile page, the lack of uniformity of content is maddening.

The search problems are both in the database design and the parsing of search material. And root cause analysis goes even deeper to reveal that the problem is in the people creating the database specifications.

The NEFA administrators are unqualified to design databases, they are infected with the woke mind virus , and they subscribe to institutional arts special interest kickbacks.

The largest group represented in Professional Discipline is Visual/Crafts a category that NEFA provides no grants or funding for individual artists. Yet fine art and crafts are not the same thing at all. Yes, a cohort of Contemporary Art individuals do their best to entangle the categories this adds no value to a database that is intended to be used by individuals to identify very specific requirements.

The 32053 search results number is a drop in the bucket. In the Visual Arts/Crafts category, over 49% of the individual profiles are tightly coupled to teaching.  Furthermore, of the 159 profiles, only 20% are men. In other words, NEFA's database is virtually devoid of any kind of regional visual arts representation at all.  And those who are represented are an ingrown cohort of educators who as a profession are largely women.

Why the gender bigotry? And why is this database, assuming it imported all of each New England's State's individual databases of artists, so sparsely populated?

As this database scales, if it ever does, the interface will become impossible to navigate or make sense of. imagine being an artist on page 30 of the ranked search result? Or page 130?  Today, the database is a fool's enterprise meant to distract artists from the misrepresentation NEFA inflicts on visual artists. It is an expensive graveyard of misguided arts administration.

Criminalization of CT Artists by Proxy

I ran into the administrator from a local arts organization and the issue of soliciting government funding came up. "All I want to do is put a coat of fresh paint on the walls and I'm forced to fill out applications requiring all this Woke shit about diversity, gender, and on and on.  The building just needs a fresh coat of paint!"

There's a particularly obscene set of grants given by the Connecticut Office of the Arts called Artists Respond because of the dysfunctional and functionally malicious application of the National Endowment for the Art's (NEA) organizational criteria for Artistic Merit and Artistic Excellence to the criteria for grant evaluation at the individual artist or fellowship level. Both Merit and Excellence are wholly bleached out of the equation in favor of "Community" (e.g. Woke social issue engagement) criteria.  The result is that artists requesting funding are pledged into laundering public arts money into progressive (Woke-Democrat-friendly) issue advocacy. 

On a statewide basis this violates ethical and legal conventions by misappropriating these funds for political advantage.

Let's unpack the scope of duplicity, incompetence, and outright disingenuous bad intent involved.

In Your Everyday Art World, Lane Relyea documents how by the mid 1990's capitalism transformed the product made by artists into  Projects (Operational Business Units). Reputational Networks of Art collaboratives began to supersede the ability of artists to self-promote or compete with the cost of legal representation required to establish a business footprint.

And this appears to be the origin of the NEA's usage of the term. And this is important for artists to understand.  The vernacular for describing art is no longer merely that you are creating a worthwhile piece of art or craft or performance.  The individuals evaluating these grant and fellowship applications think in terms of project-speak. The expectation of the star chamber judges is based as much on your good standing in an exclusive reputational network of fiscally incestuous relations.  For example having Yale on your CV even as a one-night-drive-by provides plausible credibility. 

When asked about the multitude of religions on earth, mythologist Joseph Campbell remarked, "There's a lot of ways to get it wrong." At the national level, the NEA establishes Artistic Merit and Artistic Excellence definitions that are primarily tailored for organizational requests for funding.  Tightly coupled to arts organizations are communities they may serve with specific requests.

The first way that the pretense of Merit and Excellence goes sideways is when the assumption is that all organizations are somehow community ambassadors for a cause. Many organizations just need to paint the walls.  There's no real political or social spin that is necessary except that it is coerced with increasing intolerance by the application expectations at every lower level. And at every lower  level of funding administration are ever more incompetent, cover-your-ass midwits.

Not only are organizational requests for funding nuanced yet treated with Kafkaesque indifference, these evaluation metrics are applied to individual artists who in no way shape or form are responsible for, representative of, or otherwise likely to engineer social change objectives for a vaguely-woke-ambiguous social cause, say, *climate*.

At the national regional level I have already documented how badly broken the New England Foundation for the arts is.

Let's look at how badly those NEA quality metrics get mangled in CT using the Artists Respond biyearly arts grants as an example.  If you open the FY23 (latest) Grant Recipients list, you'll see the damage.

There are 81 artists who got funded and all but one had to pick a social justice cause to frame their request for an art grant.  The claim made about these grants is that they serve a "community" interest but that's an obvious lie.  The vast majority of these pre-seeded categories are progressive social justice advocacies driven by Democrat special interests.

In other words, assuming that arts funds should ever be subsidizing the interests of political parties, why aren't there categories for safe borders, lower taxes, deregulation, right to life, and so on? All of these are equally legitimate and maybe even more so.

And as a fine artist my larger problem is why aren't these categories based on art and aesthetics? Why not Promote Abstract Art, Art for Art's Sake, PostModernism for Everyone, or a million other art related advocacies.  After all, Everything is not Art - if it were, nothing would be art and artists themselves become anybody with a social axe to grind.

The use of cognitive bias to coerce artists to distort their art to conform to politically expedient objectives is a criminal enterprise - extortion.  

A Grants Writing for Artists, April 2024 document contains another subliminal suggestion:

Step five on slide three is ominous. Artists who don't "look" (conform) to that above woke profile may as well pound sand.  This is an exclusive club and you're not in it.

There's a lot of ways to administer art funding wrong.  This is just a teaser.

The Uniparty Arts Money Pit - A Work in Progress

 The acronyms in this diagram refer are:

NEA - National Endowment (euphemistically) for the Arts

NEFA - New England Foundation (euphemistically) for the Arts

DECD - [CT} Department for Economic Community Development (e.g. a special interest group run by and for casino gambling)

COA - CT Office (Euphemistically) for the Arts 

DRSO - Designated Regional Services Organization (CT is divided into "service" regions)

This topology of organizations manages to mismanage multi-millions of Federal, State, and local taxes in addition to funds donated to promote the Arts community (e.g. actual, living, breathing artists). This investigative series that started by simply attempting to understand if there was a single source, uniformly administered way to apply for an arts grant or fund to -gasp- make some more art.

By the time money is awarded to actual, living, breathing local artists the grand total awarded to a cohort of artists is equivalent to less than one single State of Connecticut bureaucrat (about $100,000 per year) with no benefits. The awards to individual artists is $1000, $3000, or $5000 dollars, the quivalent of a week's to a few week's pay of that same sample CT State employee - don't spend it all in one place.

The deeper I dig, the more obvious it is that this money is illegally being funneled into a single political party's narrative. An apolitical fine artist not only doesn't stand an honest chance of  consideration but is doomed to witness money intended for arts to be squandered maliciously on the corrupt and unethical subversion of that funding for illiberal political gain. 

Use this link to follow my investigative series into all of these organizations, their malfeasance, and their brazen criminal practices.

 

  

May 2024 ALNB Solo Art Shows - An Appreciation

Yesterday I attended the opening of four simultaneous shows that will run until at least June 2.  Paul Baylock, Claudio DaNapoli, Don Leger, and Paul Ott's art are being exhibited. Paul Baylock and Paul Ott are both longtime fellow artists and friends - Claudio and Don being new acquaintances and as such this  is less a critical review and more an enthusiastic appreciation for everyone involved.

The shared common denominator for all four is a grounding of subject in memory and a broad and stark divergence in the development of the work.

Paul Ott and fellow artist Pierre Sylvain

Paul Ott is a professional photographer whose flower photographs I'm most familiar with.  This exhibition features both flowers and black and white photos of underrepresented object spaces/places.

These flower photos are unique because the point of view is that of a horticultural voyeur - flowers aren't academically staged, they are being framed in compromising and sinfully beautiful detail.

Another body of photographs are stills that capture a spooky elegance of decades old remnants of a neglected and untended ruin. These snapshots that document the indifference of entropy on our claims of propriety.

Don Leger

In contrast Don Leger's paintings often picture summer vacation destinations. These are snapshots taken by the corner of one's eye or a lingering image of that moment any one of us might wish could last forever. Her are summer gardens that border clapboard vacation homes or beach scenes of a well traveled sand dune shortcut.

Paul Baylock's work will be familiar to central Connecticut gallery attendees.  Paul's work reimagines historical marketing imprints that remain stuck to our consumer memory bank. The slogan, the ad from the back of a comic book or Hollywood trade periodical, or the illustration of an idyllic mother or father figure become part of a visual collage of color and contrast.

These paintings are the descendant visions from filmmakers like Roger Corman, Rod Serling, or David Lynch.  There is a gaze that looks back - when you recognize it, it recognizes  you.  After all, who didn't want the X-ray vision of Roy Milland?

Claudio DaNapoli and Paul Baylock

Claudio DaNapoli is one of a growing segment of artists using photographic artifact as material ground. His work is highly unique and somewhat original in that regard. DaNapoli started by making a collage of photographic images selectively overlaid with pastel embellishment.  The effect is strikingly atmospheric and aesthetically pleasing. This success was followed by simply using a uniform photograph as back ground for the addition of pastel embellishment and subsequent framing using a bespoke, flat cement frame that gives it a three dimensional, apocalyptic ambiance.

As a longtime, sometimes ALNB member and artistic participant. DaNapoli's photographic technique reminded me of our patron saint, John E. Melecsinsky's highly under-rated  photographic work in which he would draw into or decapitate the photographs of models. Same vibe.

A word about attending art openings - you never know who you'll run into. A cohort of familiar and unfamiliar Connecticut artists routinely show up to support each other's work and anyone and everyone interested in art is remiss in not taking advantage of the opportunity to pick their brains. 

The Department of Eternal Victimization From No Such Thing

 There is an episode of Arrested Development in which the Bluth family promote a fund raising campaign for TBD. TBD is exactly what you think it is - to be determined.  By the end of the episode an even more absurd but plausible disease is substituted and the crowd riots insisting TBD is far more important.

The Art World has managed to manufacture a factory that mass produces TBD studies, causes and reparational aspirations.

I encountered one that every once in a while makes the rounds and it is the meme that access to art is highly restricted, too expensive, and intellectually damaging for all the poor souls who are denied access. I mean this is a tragedy that escaped even Shakespeare. Oh, my god.  How do we live with ourselves as artists while *this* goes unchecked?

Of course this belongs to the Artistic Justice Warrior's arsenal of no-such-thing urgent existential problems.

Digitally, almost every major museum has its entire collection of works online.  No cost. None.

And most, if not all, museums nationwide and elsewhere offer periodic free admission entry.  It may be first Saturday or by specific date, or by celebratory event but your closest museum certainly can be accessed for FREE!

And if the claim of any social group is that they are - heavens to Mercatroid - marginalized, unrepresented, or otherwise disturbed even, every local art gallery has a door that is open during hours of operation that... opens to let you inside FOR FREE! Furthermore, anyone who represents YOU (and you know who YOU are) can exhibit when the gallery has an open call for art.

Furthermore, and this is secret knowledge, the art community has never practiced discrimination against anyone with rare AND unrepresentational (of the community) exception.  There is zero need for the unnecessary expense of fancy EQUITY, DEI, or other virtue signaling inoculations. 

So why do these cottage industry nonsensical "causes" attract flash mobs, angry identity politic movements, and nothing-better-to-piss-and-moan-about opportunists?

The answer points to a much more difficult problem that involves arithmetic.

Pick a category of art.  I've researched visual art for years so let's use that as an example and your mileage will vary with your own research. The Guerrilla Girls have long claimed that biological women are under represented and marginalized and with every passing decade they claim "little has changed".

Well I've used the best information I could find and Women visual artists represent 40% of all visual artists in the United States. I have logged years of juried art shows in NY and New England and performed the arithmetic.  Women's art is accepted more than 65% of the time year after year and I suspect this has been the case stretching back decades.

Nothing's changed?! Underrepresented? I define these accusations as fraud and abuse.

We suffer from a social disease that is caused by having our sensibilities imprinted with the idea that art is discriminatory and artists are bigots of one kind or another. It isn't true now and it wasn't true then. historical disparities and injustice are eternally redundant and never one-dimensional.

Grifters and opportunists will always find ways to distort and abuse the dissatisfaction of individuals to create ever larger and directed attacks on the other.  The arts community needs to decolonialize our shared intellectual space from these bastards (radical feminists at the forefront of that shitlist).

They over-represent and misrepresent us.

Do your own arithmetic.  What percentage of whichever art category does your favorite identity group of artists represent to the whole? Your concept of fair representation will introduce itself to reality.

Connecticut Humanities Grants

Yesterday, I had a great conversation with Scott Wands, the Director of Grants at Connecticut Humanities.  This was a follow on of research I've been conducting involving how Arts and Humanities grants work.  

My first question was why CT Humanities (CTH), unlike the National Endowment for the Arts framework, was administered the way it is.  That is, no regional equivalent of the New England Foundation for the Arts exists for the Humanities AND, oddly enough in Connecticut the CT Humanities is funneled through the Department of Economic and Community  Development (DECD) -> CT Office of Arts (COA).

Scott explained the in the 1960s the Humanities were administered exclusively from Washington, DC and later through State affiliates. In Connecticut this was implemented through the creation of a 501c Non-profit - the CTH.  It's primary function is to distribute as equitably as possible grants for organizations that promote the Humanities and for local Community programs doing the same (this all includes Digital content as well).

So where does the money come from for Humanities grants?

One Source is Federal funds. Some of this incoming money is used for staff expenses but the rest is used exclusively (by law) for Connecticut community programs and Digital cotent that are listed in detail on the CTH website. 

The Second money stream comes from the State of CT itself and is, of course, dependent on State budget considerations. Some of this incoming money is used for staff expenses but the rest is used exclusively (by law) for Connecticut institutional grants. 

I questioned why NO grants to individuals were available and the answer is that this is how the State of Connecticut constrains, through governance, the dissemination of these funds.

I was a bit perplexed here. One of the advertised responsibilities for CT Humanities is that funding for Art Criticism should be administered through CTH. What gives? Scott's response was that any such grants to individual Arts Criticism writing would be found downstream from an institution receiving CTH state funded grants.

In other words, someone looking for an Art Criticism project grant should not waste time soliciting CTH and instead research candidate institutions.

The third source of funding comes from outside contributions. These funds get dedicated to lobbying.

Who gets lobbied? The State. I had examined their transparent spreadsheet of Tax Returns and had noticed the lobbying expense and it occurred to me that unless that expense was exceeded by the return it seemed like a waste.

Scott explained that the lobbying is necessary and of course cannot guarantee a return but ensures due diligence in soliciting for programs that benefit the State.

One such program, Summer at the Museum, offered free passes to CT museums during the summer months had been defunded post-Covid and remains and sorely missed program that continues to be lobbied for. 

In terms of my research into qualifying for Arts grants, CTH exercise its responsibilities on an institutional or Community Program scale.  The quality and metrics for determining the effectiveness or continued veracity of institutional grants is out of scope of my interests for the time being.

And the idea of cultivating arts and humanities patrons is a topic I'll return to.