Essay: NEA "Research Agenda" - Another Money Pit

This essay references The National Endowment for the Arts Research Agenda - FY 2022 - 2026.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funds an Office of Research and Analysis that claims to keep and report statistics about the arts ecosystem. It becomes increasingly apparent that arts ecosystem refers to a slew of government agencies that suck the soul and funding intended to advocate arts and artists for themselves.

The agency heavily relies on the usual suspects - "the design and conduct of studies addressing priority research topics through the social and behavioral sciences" - in other words academia unrelated to, well, the arts.

This paper cites concerns about

• health and wellness for individuals; cognition and learning; and U.S. economic growth and innovation
• healing and revitalization of communities
• diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in the arts
• adapting and responding to social, economic, and technological changes and challenges to the sector

In other words jack shit concerning artists, art, or artist issues - a wholesale end run around actually promoting the welfare of artists and their ability to create excellent art. My ongoing research into the NEA's policies and practices exposes lots more of this.

These agendas come and go, nothing more than academic ATMs that finance NEA junkets and worthless, disposable research papers, one after another.  Burp (cha-ching)!

 The research started over a decade ago and this latest batch of DEI infused wisdom is only in its second year of the latest "5 Year Plan". 

The NEA has just hosted a junket for research authors who apparently were funded above and beyond their academic salaries to create - not a public document - but a privately owned and distributed book of their -cough- "research" findings.

As usual, my interest is piqued when the discussion has to do with education of artists, MFAs, and the visual arts in general.

Here Joanna Woronkowicz talks about her book, Being an Artist in America: How Artists Build Careers and What Society Can Do to Support Them.

I couldn't help but look her up on Rate My Professor.  She apparently is paid to instruct a course on Statistics that she - based on the ratings - doesn't show up to teach and whose teaching assistants are clueless to act as proxies. She also accused some students (who plead innocence) of plagiarism.

Putting that into context already raises suspicions about the quality and veracity of the book (unpublished to date).

In the YouTube documentation of the NEA Meet the Authors event she talks about the unintended consequences of Arts policies over time. Assuming this observation is true and based on fact, why has it taken over twenty years for the NEA to continue to fund and practice the creation and administration of these policies.  Why aren't these people being fired and why aren't corrections being made?

When it comes to the mass production of students graduating with MFA degrees and life altering debt, she has this to say, Art School Loans. This is all well known material and if her concern about bang for the educational buck were sincere she might consider performing her own teaching duties - just because $$$.

Most disturbingly are her policy recommendations that include this; Cost and Benefit. I suspect that art students are not the only ones straining government welfare programs. 

Given this research, it seems to me that an easy and obvious recommendation might be to fine each and every current employee of the NEA immediately and start fresh.

And part of starting anew  must include independent studies of arts and artists in America. Enough of the self-serving academic community whose quality of work is manufactured to be ignored by everyone aside from tenure committees.

https://www.arts.gov/initiatives/nea-research-labs

The Artists of Color Show, Art League of New Britain, A Critique, Part One

It's 2024 and an art show called "Artists of Color" juried exhibit is being hosted at the Art League of New Britain in New Britain, CT. it is juried by Andre Rochester. The shows duration is July 7,2024 to July 28, 2024. It is described as a show of African, Asian, Latin, and other artists of color.

Usually, art show criticisms focus exclusively on the artwork or artist(s). But the unusual framework of this show deserves to be unpacked independently and I think its important to do so.

Part one will examine the conceptual basis for the show and a critique of the art in the show will follow. And right up front I want to uncouple any criticism of part one from part two. These will be separate ruminations on separate topics - the participating artists are not responsible for the foibles of the show's architecture.

The Show's Pretense

The call for art for this show was constrained to "Artists of Color". In other words, artists whose skin tone isn't 'white' were asked to submit work and they did. This eliminated individuals who were the birth offspring of a white father and mother but not necessarily adopted children of two white parents. It's unclear to me if white artists who are burn victims qualify as artists of color but i'm assuming the messaging implies no.

As a longtime, sometime member - always supporter of the ALNB, this is just another experimental show. As such, in the sandbox of curatorial speculation, let's break down the logic and consequences, and aesthetic shrapnel any show based on these premises needs to resolve.

The Difference With a Muddled Distinction

Given the skin color constraint, what is gained and what is lost? As far as I can tell the only difference between this ALNB juried show and any other show is that artists with white skin did not have the opportunity to submit their work to this particular show which is little more than a trivial inconvenience, so not much loss for white-skinned artists - area juried art shows and opportunities abound. For the "artists of color" the skin color constraint simply offers a smaller juried pool from which art work will get selected - woo hoo! And while this has its advantages, it can also be seen as an infantilizing of the artists-of-color cohort.

When the profession of art qualifies any artist as assuming an identity different from, say, "a creator of art", the art becomes unimportant or secondary to the role of the artists as an actor in a social narrative.

In this case, skin color has nothing to do with the creation of art at all. All artists live in this Judeo-Christian nation, participate in capitalistic commerce, consume and get consumed by volumes of Western Civilization's comforts, and so on. For practical intents and purposes, we all share and incubate "WHITE" culture. Its impossible to wiggle out of that self-evident truth.

So what was the point of not inviting people with white skin? After all, what do African, Asian, Latin, and other artists of color have any more in common showing together that artists with white skin don't? The answer is 'nothing'. It is magical thinking to believe that an Asian and a Jamaican and an Eskimo share an aesthetic narrative exclusive to their skin color.

In other words, to understand any given piece of artwork that is exclusive to the identity profile of the artist requires an a priori familiarity with the nuances of that identity's aesthetic ecosystem. Art is a door to perception, not personal or tribal allegiance.

Shows such as this, by definition, will be every bit as eclectic as any other juried show. They will also straddle a Schrodinger's Cat enigma of either being either a Utopia or Dystopia where white skinned people no longer exist. Can the entries live up to that challenge? Or will the pieces subliminally reference white skinned people?

The Value of Color

I think another presumption that shows such as these can test is the idea that with any two pieces of art, one piece may be more 'privileged' than another. Bluntly, will a art piece by an artist with one skin color be more desirable than an art piece by somebody with a different skin color? When I'm performing art criticism, all I'm interested in is the work. Buyers and curators have different considerations. And all of this *should be* implicit about enjoying an art show. Galleries such as ALNB, to the best of my knowledge, have never discriminated against any artist submitting their work (and I know of no other gallery that has either) so I was a bit surprised by this show. I look forward to seeing it in person. That review will follow shortly.

Propositional Zenthetics

 Artistic practice in the Zenthetic are not the same as aesthetic practice. In other words, the concept of defining *beauty* and beauty itself are co-incidental by-products of the practice and not a primary or motivating factor in the creation of the art.

In my study of MetaModernism, it has become obvious to me that the duality and incestuous relationship of illusionism and abstraction is insufficient both conceptually and in terms of their limited vernacular in rationalizing their existential artistic hegemony. The territory of illusionism illustrates the agreed upon world and the projections of mankind's dreams, myths, and man's imagination of existence itself into conversational consciousness. Illusionism is, by definition and by craft, abstract. And (formal) Abstraction is the recognition that in a creative composing and decomposing of the elementary aspects of illusionism, an aesthetically pleasing or conceptually plausible argument can be made that these objects define a push-and-pull/binary aesthetic canon.

Artists anticipate art, not reality or abstractions. Yet everything is shoe-horned into the insatiable black hole of the philosophy of aesthetics.

So the question is, can art exist outside of aesthetic consideration and absorption. This being a quantum existential space that successfully repels the aesthetic appetite for the next want-to-be exception to the rule? I think it can.

 

Just as chaos theory informs us that multiple infinities exist - opportunity cracks in mathematics - so too are there artistic orphans whose intellectual parents have no aesthetic DNA, they slip the ties that bind.  The art material defined by Propositional Zenthetics are construction of an artistic proposition, this AND that, this OR that - not yet in time, not yet formed, just maybe -may BE. They are instantiated as worldly objects, yes - but in substance a suspended, wrapping material for a dance of cosmic possibility like a vision of universal dust so far away in time and space that the image is not real - a snapshot of unformed vision - so what is it?

These are not pictures nor objects but a gaze into a visually transcendent abyss, a desolation angel's scribble.  The abyss does not gaze back, it has swallowed a fraction of your existence for its own. The agency of Proposition Zenthetic material is to flush the mind's attention of aesthetic considerations and pose a memory hole of ambiguity for *what if* . When someone sees or observes such material, it is the unrecognizable, zen stillness of thought - peering into artistic desolation - a trajectory without beginning or end - a suspended fall away from traditional aesthetic notions of craft or importance that is a glimpse of god's proximate tinkering with a view of eternity.

Essay: Defining Need in Connecticut

 I recently saw this Facebook posting that i found interesting.

"Art Access: New Britain

CALL FOR ART

[Link in bio]

One of the primary means emerging artists have to build their exhibition resume and gain the attention of curators is to participate in juried art shows. Not only is substantial time and effort involved in the process of creating art and applying for juried shows, but most require a fee for application. For many artists with extraordinary work, their opportunity for significant exposure is limited by their financial ability to apply for more publicized shows involving known jurors. An application fee can be a significant amount to artists with lower incomes and often many cannot take the chance that a juror may not even select their work for display.

Most juried shows charge these entry fees to support the organizations they are part of and those fees are often integral to their budgets and operations; however these fees are keeping out a subset of the artist population. With generous support from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Art Access: New Britain is a juried art show focusing on artists living in households with income at or below the approximate state definition of “lower income” ($80,000). This juried show will collect no fee for application, involves a well established juror connected to a prominent museum, offers assistance to those who cannot afford to transport their artwork to the show, and involves juried prize awards.

This exhibition will be held at Gallery 66 in New Britain from August 12 to October 11, featuring an opening event and artist discussion, in addition to regularly held events at Gallery 66 such as monthly artist discussions and regular open mics."

What caught my eye here is the fact that that the Connecticut Office of the Arts has read the premise for this show and has decided its worth sponsoring. It's worth unpacking the assumptions being asserted here because nobody seems to have put an ounce of critical thinking into what problem this is going to solve or whether there are better ways of staging juried art shows.

Presumably the intent of constraining the household income of the artist to less than or equal to $80,000 will somehow limit participation to lower income artists. But this makes little sense. A single person and a married artist or an artist with kids or legal obligations makes hard capping an income profoundly unfair and could preclude true need and include individuals with no real hardship. In other words, its pointless.

And need isn't always an absolute condition. For the immediate few months I may be dead broke but in a few months that fiscal condition will change. Opportunity cost is often conditional.

The logical argument being made about juried shows is also flawed. Income has nothing to do with getting accepted or rejected from a juried art show. Ideally, the quality of the work is what gets a piece accepted or rejected. And the quality of the juror (e.g. de facto curator) is key. In either case, the artist's work IS "exposed" to the juror.

Any show that decides the identity of the artist is more compelling than the quality of that artist's work is playing with fire. The criteria of judging this show becomes the evaluation of the financial status of the individual rather than the work itself. Is the curation of the show intended to lower expectations based on something other than artistic merit? The point of juried shows to begin with is the assumption that your best work belongs in a show of selected best works.

And because the framing of shows like these emphasize identity politics, the chances of the work being taken seriously is eroded.  It's one thing for a patron or juror to find a diamond in the rough at any gallery show and its completely another to find that unique talent in a blizzard of artwork from an identified  class of "victims". Do the prizes go to the most needy, the most politically compelling or sympathetic, or to the identity artist of the month? Its unclear if participation will elevate or stigmatize the participating artists.

A far better way to help artists in need is for the CT Office on the Arts to support local Art Galleries all over the State by subsidizing gallery memberships for needy local artists - full stop. They all sponsor juried member shows. Such sponsorship might involve the basic membership fee and an additional group stipend for occasional transportation assistance.  This promotes fiscally sound galleries, community goodwill, and transparent artistic participation.  

My guide to gallery art show expenses and consideration are here.

Essay: The American Artist as Pariah

The character and identity of all artists, but more specifically American artists, has been culturally misappropriated by woke political forces. These include the hegemony of academic "studies" professionals who pose as curators or administrators, radical feminists whose "Smash the Patriarchy" initiative is all that matters, and the innumerable special interest groups who supplement their own program finances by openly redirecting arts funding for political social engineering campaigns.

And it is not only the definition of art and artists that has been conflated with a single woke political profile.  The idea of community is also being appropriated to promote racism and identity bigotry and resentment. in melting pot America, community used to refer to integrated urban neighborhoods or country towns and villages.  In both cases, the common denominators were shared social concerns and a dedication to making those interpersonal social units more prosperous for everybody. Working, civil communities countywide can be identified by "not in my backyard!" mantras. In other words, this community manages just fine on its own because its worked at it and has earned its peace - that doesn't qualify it as a candidate to save the world. In fact, Native Americans might argue that "not in my backyard" is their historical meme.  

Contrast that conceptual model with the politically motivated woke narrative that claims that they *are* out to save the world.  But in order to do that saving,  segregation, suspicion, innuendo, reverse bigotry, political tribalism, decolonization, and a Pandora's box of psychological anger and fear needs to be utilized to achieve that goal.

In the context of art and craft, community no longer refers to the community of art and crafts practitioners, it refers to special interest groups who appropriate artistic roles and vernaculars to express their anger and bottomless greed for more funding to promote their holier-than-thou cause - "funding for mine, but not for thine".  Not for thine refers to any art practice that isn't loudly, obnoxiously selling some aspect of the woke identity agenda. This concept of community comes prepackaged with a word salad vernacular,  look-and-feel signaling ornamentation, a demographically tested narrative of need and historical abuse, and a plausibly digestible, socially redeemable intent.

While there is a cohort of woke-mind-virus inspired true believers, most artists just want to make art.  And making art or creating craft has nothing to do with politics, personal identity issues, or saving-the-world.

For highly successful artists, few of them need to care about any of this. But that is a tiny number of individuals. And this is why government funding dedicated to the arts is so critical to ensuring the autonomy of artists and new ideas.

The current Biden administration has allowed and empowered the National Endowment for the Arts to embezzle funding dedicated to the arts for identity politic and Democratic National Committee priority and promotion.  Significantly, union interests have as much or more representation in the NEA process than actual artists do.

Artists (conservatives, liberals, independents, and the indifferent) who would not pass the litmus tests involved must either hold their nose and fake interest, distort their art to fit a narrative, or otherwise hack their way through the process. The damage is external as well.

The funding of anti-Trump/anti-conservative, aesthetic hate speech through the National Endowment for the Arts and its subsidiaries is nothing short of criminal. Despite the presumption that all artists are woke and political, and unified in hating conservatives, the NEA suppresses and muzzles the truth.

Artists should never have to submit proposals for art funding through virtual gateways whose subliminal message is to conform or else and this is true nationally. The evidence is empirical when the administrators post identity politic profiles as their qualifications for the job.

The integrity of Arts funding has to be decolonized of politics and thoroughly regulated for these kinds of political subversion.  

  

National Embezzlement of the Arts - Part 2

 I succinctly described my initial efforts to file a complaint of discrimination against the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and/or the New England Foundation for the Arts earlier. I still have not received any feedback from any of them.

While searching for a political contact who might somehow trigger one or any of these agencies to wake up, something pointed me to the Wikipedia entry for the NEA. And there as is said, "the plot thickens".

So there it is.  There are *six * ex officio members of Congress who are embedded in the NEA and presumably interested in the health and integrity of the organization!  Woo Hoo!

I clicked on the link and it took me here.

Lo and behold, there are only three ex-officio members in the final year of the Biden administration.

I tried contacting all three of these chuckle-heads and what I immediately found out was that despite the fact that all three -cough- "govern" the NEA, not a sticking one of them is responsive to anyone who is not in their gerrymandered orbit.

The first problem is that two of the three links don't work at all.  I tracked down good links. Their actual web pages filter out by zip code anyone who can't vote for them. I managed to hack the zip code problem only to be met with dead end indifference.

Senator Baldwin was the only email response I received and it was a final one.

Pingree and Thomson are out to lunch. Both being wholly oblivious.

And so, there seems to be nowhere to turn except to my own worthless Senator Blumenthal whose integrity I have serious doubts about.

It's been over a week since all of those contacts. 

I decided to watch the March 2024 Public meeting of the National Council of the Arts and found the evidence of political embezzlement and misappropriation in plain sight. 

The Arts have been hijacked by a woke cohort whose subliminal goal is to promote the DNC narrative and to strangle any opposing viewpoints.  Money intended for artists is redirected to a hundred social engineering initiatives that promote unnecessary and wasteful administrative job creep nationally. Everyone and every project takes priority over supporting artists themselves.

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. 

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.

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.

Women Reframe American Landscape - NBMAA, Part 3

So what is the point of this show again?

The pretense of this show - the excuse for yet another Guerrilla Girl sorority occupation of a major American Art museum - is that 19th century women landscape painters are somehow under-exposed under the curatorial framework of Hudson River School artists.  Untangling the poor documentation of the Hudson River School legacy requires also wearing wading boots through the further GG's swamp of obfuscation and convoluted misdirection.  

Who are the Hudson River School?

First understand school as if it were a school of fish.  It is a fluid and highly diluted term for an increasingly growing subset of all American landscape painters regardless of identity politic persuasion. However, money and subliminal political blackmail talk loudly and my earlier comments in Part One and in Part Two speak to my opinions and concerns.

Curatorially and traditionally, prestigious museums attempt to represent the finest examples of the subject(s) they may be exhibiting, researching, or promoting the discovery of. In more recent years, the assault on these institutions has crippled the ability of these institutions to ethically and professionally function.

So it is up to critics such as myself to research and educate patrons of the arts as to the veracity of shows such as these that smell of dubious quality.

Let's narrow candidates who belong on the short list of artists who can be recognizably identified as members of the Hudson River School (HRS) of artists as those listed in Wikipedia's short list. Susie M. Barstow, among other females (not that this show has anything to do with sex!). So that's not a bone of contention.

Something that is argued by the curators of this show however is that Barstow has been historically abused. This drips with irony as Barstow's work constitutes abut half of the third of the show dedicated to 19th century women artists who made art during that period. The aesthetic floggings continue - poor Susie.

So, What's the Geographic and Temporal Context for this Part of the Show?

More precisely, the historically bounded Hudson River School's important activity happens between 1825 and fading by 1875 - a fifty year run though many of the artists lived and worked longer to diminishing or changing interest.

The artists in question begin working not much sooner than 50 years after the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 is still a fresh memory. 

In 1825 there are 24 states in the Union.  In 1875, ten years after the Civil War, there are 37 states in the Union and by 1890 there are 44.

The effects of the Industrial Revolution arrive in America from 1830 to 1840. This includes the proliferation of tourist steamboats out of NY City up the Hudson River. The Catskills become early vacation and tourist destinations for the wealthy. In 1837, the Adirondacks are mapped and by the 1870's routine access to the Adirondacks broadens the geographic scope of these artists.

The temporal sweet spot for the production of HRS artwork by its most famous practitioners is 1830 - 1860.  There's nothing absolute about this as there is an original cohort of artists followed by a second-generation whose work is closely coupled to the HRS profile and prescription. The National Academy of Design becomes a proxy for the HRS artists during this time.

Portable metallic tubes for oil paint are invented in 1841.

Thomas Cole who starts the historically significant HRS landscape painting movement dies in 1848.  

Barstow would have been 12 years old at that time. By 1860, Barstow is 24 and so she is clearly a second generation artist in this category and any claim that she is being marginalized really needs to explain away how she could be confused with the first generation of artists who defined the genre. 

Nine years after Cole's death, in 1857, the 10th Street Studio is opened In New York City. This is where both male and female, famous and wannabe HRS artists establish studios. Cole spent most of his career living and working in Cedar Grove in the Catskills.

A publication called The Crayon is published between 1855 - 1861 and essays in it prescribe very specific instructions for the creation of HRS paintings. By now, innovation within HRS practice is discouraged and rejected.

It should also be noted that landscape painting is unrivaled during these few decades. Google has created a very good timeline of the scope of work.

The NBMAA HRS Collection

 Gallery 5 on the first floor of the museum holds a rich and varied collection of HRS works and it should be made much more obvious that these works complement the WRAL show upstairs.  For grins and giggles let's see what the museum has to say about them.

IMO, this is pretty thin gruel.  It reads like the summary paragraphs of a high school essay assignment.

And its very little help in attempting to ground any of the women artists upstairs. A more detailed timeline and nuanced explanation of likenesses and differences in style would be far more useful considering the richness of the collection.

Where Susie Barstow Fits

The body of work that we get exposed to in the Suzie Barstow section of the show is a sparse sampling.  The majority of pieces do not stand out even as HRS candidate pieces. They are plain, sometimes dull, and not particularly interesting nature snapshots.

The pieces that do distinguish themselves, distinguish themselves in aesthetic sweetness.  Barlow, unlike many of the other artists involved, seems to have developed a color scheme that amplifies the landscape colors.  Rather than sublime the landscape colors pop in both impossible and irresistible ways. Barstow's best work is well-crafted, commercial quality illustration.
 
And, based on the samples exhibited the paintings emulate the HRS look, they never achieve the spirituality that Cole, Church, or others succeeded in projecting.  Nor are her pieces particularly atmospheric (see: Inness or Bridges work in the galleries).  In fact, for Barstow and many of her circle the compositions and problem space are boilerplate, compositionally centered and predictable outdoor scenes.

The scenes consist of a stream or pool of water surrounded by banks of  paper birch trees. Light effects are redundant from one painting to another.  Whatever abstraction exists within the paintings appear to be the byproduct of efficiency and economy rather than experiment or improvisation. 

The larger issue is that much of the pedestrian HRS look and feel is being produced at the end of the century seems to be homogenized. This may speak to the demands of the remaining patrons who had not yet abandoned the genre or it may simply speak to a long tail commercialization that in scarcity required ever sweeter and domestic cosmetic changes.

And the rhetorical descriptions that bookend her work as well as the others is that they were outdoors doing all the same stuff the male artists were doing.  That's true. But is it exceptional for women at the time and the answer is no. In fact one of the accusations about the HRS painters is that their work became a tourist magnet to the area that eventually despoiled the landscape.

In other words, *everybody* who could afford it vacationed or traveled up the Hudson, into the woods, and, because photography was a new and not ubiquitously available, people either sketched or bought prints of the places they visited - a perfect storm for the commercial success of the HRS cohort.

Barstow simply conducted a train the trainer business - teaching teachers the HRS principles and selling the resulting craftwork.

Unpacking the Rise and Fall of the HRS

Thomas Cole and those he influenced most greatly were romanticists first and foremost with a heavy dose of, let's call it Dark Nouveau - darker mythological themes found in the more decorative Art Nouveau genre.

His paintings would include American Indians who were no longer occupying the territory, fairies, Biblical allusions, and dystopian visions of nature trampled by the march of progress. While the GGs argue that there is no Eden and Eden never existed, they disparage the evidence of Cole's art.

Cole and others shared a sacred vision of nature - a religiously colored gaze. Cole is not painting actual representation - not plein air. Sketching Clubs (male, female, and coed) existed because sketching was the more effective and efficient way to capture scenic information.  And these paintings were taken as the best knowledge available for urban populations to actually see and dream the New World.

Cole's paintings are exercises in transcribing his sketches through his religious memory gaze of the, now, composite landscape scene. There is little botanical accuracy involved in his work and he will be criticized for these very reasons much as he is aesthetically valorized for the same reasons. 

In this context, Barstow and her generation of landscape painters explore the same intellectual territory as Cole's cohort with the added advantage that the geography is well documented, the ability to paint plein air is much easier due to tube paints, and the formula for the HRS landscapes is already baked.

For patrons then and now, the accuracy of Barstow's botanical studies, her craft of picture-making, and her understanding of the formula are as good, better, and good enough to admire and love regardless of their historical or intellectual ranking.

The Fall

There's an unfortunate generalization about the demise of the HRS genre and that is that a criticism of the work appearing in a New York newspaper unexpectedly and conclusively diminished the value and prestige associated with the work of these artists.  More truthfully, the piece was a broadside by Impressionist challengers to the status quo.

A second, far more important, complementary barometer of change, can also be found in the NBMAA collections and that is the art of Marie Cassatt whose conversion to Impressionism is compelling and disruptive. The artistic changes in her art signal as well as anyone's the advent and ubiquitous conquest of the French Impressionists and multiple waves of Modern Art that will submerge and swamp any market for previous generations of American art - HRS being no exception.

The stagnation and relatively old-fashioned landscape narrative gives way to figuration at home and aesthetic revolution abroad.  The women exhibited in this show remained forever anchored to this fashion. The as now, American educators are the last to learn or change.

The Pyramid Scheme

HRS paintings are rebounding in value by leaps and bounds.  As with so many mediocre women artists who are disingenuously being promoted as individuals far more significant than they really were or are - buyer beware.  The wake of GG advocacy seems to be a pump and dump aesthetic behavior that really needs some examination.  Museums who should and in many cases do know better are selling off masterworks to acquire work out of the car trunks of less than credible dealers who manufacture and depend on identity politics to leverage their wares.

Barstow has been compared to Jervis McEntee. The art of the two is distinctly different. What is worth noting and comparing is the fact that McEntee is a lesser known HRS artists and that he, like Barstow, continued painting well after the HRS declines in popularity.

His journals deserve research funding more than another GG episode of Mr. Peabody and Sherman rewrite American Art History.

Women Reframe American Landscape - NBMAA, Part 2

 Part two of this review of the Women Frame American Landscape will examine how the Guerrilla Girls character assassination of the Hudson River School white male painters in Part One attempts to justify the inclusion of the Contemporary artists whose relationship to anything having to do with  landscape is a brain teaser in addition to being a challenge to artistically critique.

A summary statement for this division of the show includes the following context.

Landscape Today Claims

The first paragraph can claim that the cohort of Contemporary art solicited for this show are outstanding artists and yet anyone with a set of clear eyes and even a small exposure to art history can see that the actual art objects were either mailed in as an after-thought or thoughtlessly manufactured to satisfy the thirst to justify the political narrative. Nothing here indicates a deep interest in landscape art or even a sustained body of dedicated work to create a new vision of landscape.

The phrase "Reimaging the single point perspective and horizon line" in relation to the politics of any painting is pure nonsense.  The Hudson River School paintings are largely romanticized (atmospheric and :luminous") woodland scenes in which architecturally obvious perspective is absent. And horizon lines are defined by natural ambiguity rather than consistent and uniform horizons.

This word salad is an excuse to include an disproportionately large inkjet print of a digital photo rendering of an I Spy-ish collage of forest floor artifacts by Tenya Marcuse. The wall label description sugar coats it as having something to do with the Hudson Valley where she lives, weaving, and the ecosystem. Oh yeah, something, something... perspective.

Okay. So what?

 The claim that this work "holds economic, historical,-snip- spiritual and personal realities" is no different today than in the nineteenth century. Only the opinions have changed. As an artist, the political identity politics that saturate this work add zero value to its aesthetic contribution to the show.

As I said in Part one, the Guerrilla Girls assertion that they upturn male-dominated histories is nonsense.  They don't have a clue about that history as is obvious by their so-called contribution to the show.

Plesset's piece is cheap appropriation of Thomas Cole's original work.  She turns it into a coloring book learner's copy of the work.  The reason?

The assertion that art historians (who, when, and with what frequency) criticized copies by women more harshly than anyone else smells funny. Copies are rarely original art except with forgeries and the idea that anyone in their right mind might spend the time criticizing copies rather than the originals makes zero sense.

Some reference:

"Sarah Cole (1805-1857)

Sarah Cole was an American landscape painter and the sister of Thomas Cole. Although she did paint some original compositions, many of Sarah Cole’s surviving paintings are copies of her brother’s paintings, including her painting View of Catskill Mountain House. "

 

Does this seem harsh?

Plesset suffers from the same intellectual deficiency that afflicts the Guerrilla Girls. There is very little veracity to the claim that she or they are doing anything artistic at all. They don't do the research or do it so incompetently that that its worthless.  There is no historical recovery in appropriating Sara Cole's need to cash in on her brother's popularity to earn a living. And every woman artist of the time who painted in the Hudson Valley (and there were multitudes) isn't a Hudson River School peer by magical thinking association.

This show, if it illustrates anything, makes clear that rather than adding clarity to art history - a sludge of belligerent advocacy of woman artists whose work needs to be independently promoted on their own merits is instead being shoehorned and distorted into categories they don't belong to and strains credibility.

The Invasion of Private Space

Another repeating and identifiable pattern of political bullying that has become a recognizable trademark of Guerrilla Girl interventions is the act of violating either the space, integrity, or belongings of their intended targets.  This is not an act of virtuous pursuit of truth or anything high-minded. There's a sociopathic fascination with, for lack of a better word, molesting the subject.

Plesset's grooming of Cole's sister's knockoff is intended to cheapen the original as if anyone can manufacture these things with a well articulated grift.

Likewise two another artist's offerings,  Shin and Mattingly, somehow acquired some of Cole's belongings and there's a necrophiliac ambiance to the readymade application of these artifacts  to their art. In both cases there's an implied indifference to the sanctity of their belongings as if being indifferent to the objects entitles the individual to be indifferent to the art  (just another object) and finally indifferent to the history involved.

Whatever spirituality the artist invested in their work can be rationally dismissed.  After all, if the posthumous loot of an artist's estate can be re-appropriated to disparage their reputation then no one will object to a disingenuous tweaking of their historical character.

The Conflation of Landscape with Land Ownership Claims 

The Gorilla Girls sorority is careful to curate shows that are always representative of their enablers. Antone who agrees with their particular viewpoint and will add another iconic letter to their alphabet parade is eagerly enlisted.

And so a number of works by indigenous women is included.

One piece by W. Red Star is an organized collection of signs from the midwest relating to navigating through Native American labeled destinations.  Personally I'm not offended by useful signage and maybe this is a comment that the Hudson River School painters had unobstructed views of the landscape. So true. AND... it takes a woman to really drive this point home!

The art of Jaune Quick To See Smith has become a de facto sidekick of GG sorority infused gallery shows. She represents the politically correct, wise noble native archetype whose virtuous virtues are, well, native.

Her work claims that the existing government, its monetary system, and the rule of law governing property ownership are just an inconvenient social trapping.

Unfortunately, Smith's "critical questions" are, quite honestly, juvenile as is the imagery and exercise of her messaging. She makes a broad unsubstantiated accusation that that all North America is stolen land from cultures whose own claim of ownership is dubious at best or profoundly different from the rest of humanity. Her myopic opinions include the idea that historical confrontations were always maliciously one-sided and then she sugar coats all that in GG sorority virtue slogans [woman, race, commerce, ad nausea].

Your eyes aren't deceiving you.  Diversity metrics require little more than a non-white skin tone and a claim to a cultural charm - in this case beads. The irony is that she charts the United States of America with Western civilization's cartography (hat tip: Columbus). By now it should be obvious and compelling that no trespassing signs were ignored by colonial settlers, money is bad so why bother paying for anything, and don't forget grammar and gender. Got it? Bonus observation - north is north and south is south.

But that's not all.

In this piece North is south and south is north - "a thing of Indian power".  Sorry, I'm not buying it (too soon?). Have a look.

Jaune "Quick to See" enrolled (who knew???) in an Indian tribe and what she sees, in my opinion is a window of opportunity to pass off some crafty art that more appropriately belongs in a 12 x 12' tent at an arts and crafts show than a museum. This is not the stuff of representative fine art produced by Indians - this is just opinionated, self-serving propaganda.

Even the most average middle school child knows that Columbus was the first of many, many previously failed attempts to navigate the Atlantic ocean west to the North American continent.
Navigational errors? Really? In addition to being pathetic art its historically as useful as driftwood.

And confusing the map with the territory is a long learned lesson from far more authoritative sources than Smith. Oh well.

The Kitchen Sink

The rest of the GG sorority contributions are nothing to pay good money to see if you're looking to enjoy or broaden your love of landscape.  It's a mixed bag of tedious videos, climate warnings less effective than no littering signs, and an unimpressive litany of readymade woke, bumpersticker virtue signaling.

As an artist I find the abuse of museum gallery space for this kind of nonsense aesthetically sinful. As a critic I wonder how curators, in good faith, get away with selling this artistic malware. For artists and wishful young artists this set of galleries has nothing positive to be learned and in many cases flaunts a systematic weakness toward political bullying as curatorial practice.

This section of the show abuses the Hudson River School fraternity of painters for being citizens of their time. And by GG sorority word salad definitions the show is an act of violence and bigotry toward long dead historical actors who can no longer accurately contextualize their "lived experiences".

 In part three we'll examine the rest of it.

Women Reframe American Landscape, NBMAA - A Review, Part 1

 The Women Reframe American Landscape exhibition at the New Britain Museum of American Art is yet another in a litany of Guerrilla Girl muggings of vulnerable and weakling American Art institutions. In this case, they co-opt valuable museum wall space with disingenuous curation and intent.

The pretense of this exhibition claims that Suzie M. Barstow is  having a first retrospective (woo hoo!) and the reason is that, well, she provides the plausible pretense that the Ever-Victimized American Woman Artist can be tightly coupled to a male group of painters who became known as the Hudson River School.

The problem with this disingenuous marketing backbone is that Barstow's art constitutes less than half of the show though her work recognizably has something observably having to do with what I hope we can agree upon is landscape.

The lion's share of this show however is a crapscape of identity politic drivel that no legitimate aesthetic gatekeeper for a museum should ever allow this junk pile of nonsense to occupy.  This is not a recentering of women anywhere.  This is a multi-gallery spaced petri dish for the cultivation of the Woke Mind Virus whose anti-intellectual tentacles are strangling fine art appreciation on a global scale.

By now our shared bullshit detectors are all tingling at the same time.  We are are being told straight faced that George Orwell warned you about these weasel words deployed from the mouths of politicians.

Everything the project claims not to attempt, it attempts pathetically to accomplish over and over and over. Let's put a clothespin on our noses and start with the Guerrilla Girls entry.

Yes. Yes. We are led to believe that the GGs"were galvanized by research and statistics" on women *in* the Hudson River School and something about reality. One can only image a bat-signal like beacon shining from the campus art building declaring "Guerrilla Girls Assemble!" - we need a poster!

And so a poster was manufactured. These posters represent one of a number of defamatory techniques that are standard fare for projects such as these. The white male artist(s) who will get mugged need to be softened up patriarchal style. They must be held responsible for 21st century progressive Democrat, politically correct expectations about neo-history. The ritual dry-humping of their previous reputations by the Guerrilla Girls is perfunctory to make the neglected, historically abused, and otherwise victim's victim to look that much more *marginalized*.

In their "poster" they take an axe to the HRS artists.

The allegedly criminal behavior of the Hudson River School painters were that they were an all-white, all-male, who shared a cohort of patrons. Aiiiiieeeeeee! This was about the time of the civil war.

So Edward Mitchell Bannister lived and worked in the Boston, MA/Providence, RI geography not the Hudson.

Robert Duncanson is considered a second-generation member of the Hudson River School (typical of GG "research"). He too might be geographically challenged in having a beer on the Hudson because he worked in Ohio. From Wikipedia before the thought police eliminate the reference: "Inspired by famous American landscape artists like Thomas Cole, Duncanson created renowned landscape paintings and is considered a second generation Hudson River School artist.^["

The Guerrilla Girls successfully use race-baiting to promote the smashing of the patriarchy that is point of these projects.  But their poster couples even more allegations worth deflating.

Again, Guerrilla Girl scholarship is nonexistent in these allegations. The Hudson River School art is more or less a romanticized vision of an American Eden along the river. The *noble indigenous indian* rhetoric is a magical thinking, manufactured historical narrative.  The American continent was not populated by millions of nation park natives who performed any such inhabitation, cultivation, or protection (from what?). 

Indians, like all of the rest of humanity, exercised their culture and governance all over the Americas. the migration of Europeans to the Americas changed that. The unspoken truth is that innumerable wars have been fought on this continent against fellow European governments and against Indian populations. The art of Hudson River School painters has nothing to do with any of that.

Indians were not relocated to the moon.  They relocated to continental reservations where they run casinos, watch TV, and vote.

Nobody is immune to disease.  Sexually transmitted diseases from Indians afflicted Europeans. The likely disease being implied by this photograph is malaria that sickened everyone it afflicted.

The United States judicial system is better place than an art museum to established claims of ownership.  The GG unsubstantiated allegations that these claims have any legitimacy is based on a romantic fantasy that history can be unwound to somehow undo what's done.   To criticize the romanticism of the HRS painters for human progress is a fool's errand but the Guerrilla Girls are promoting this grift as plausible truth.  It's not.  

The photograph used in this indictment poster is by Seneca Ray Stoddard who photographically documented the industrialization of the Hudson not necessarily its eventual degradation at the hands of masses of tourists and commercial arts and crafts landscape painters such as those featured in this show. A show of his photography would be a breath of fresh air here.

And their conclusions about the area becoming a mess is predictably inaccurate as well - profoundly so. A Bill Moyers PBS show on the Hudson documents the GG inaccuracy.