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

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.

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.

 

  

Bigotry at the Brooklyn Rail

 The Brooklyn Rail (BR) is a multimedia, Brooklyn based, arts social media outlet.  They publish a newsletter and provide a Monday thru Friday zoom to YouTube artist or arts organization interview that presumably anyone can participate in. Usually this involves one hundred or fewer live participants and a few dozen additional YouTube views. 

The Zoom meetings include the ability to hold a side chat between one another audience members. The principals in the Zoom conversation can choose to see or ignore these comments and these comments never show up in the YouTube exports of the Zoom call.

And these chat room conversations are moderated - presumably to eliminate any inappropriate remarks or malicious content in the chat room. One would hope that the moderation isn't intended to exercise bigotry against legitimate material being shared.

Unfortunately, the Brooklyn Rail podcasts are moderated in a way that calling it The Brooklyn Bus of Bigotry would be a more appropriate label for the enterprise.

The BR's subtitle claims "Critical Perspectives on Arts, Politics and Culture" but doesn't really practice it. With few exceptions the editorial hegemony that governs all of its content is closer to an exercise in liberal fascism than Critical Perspective. The explicit allegation about their representation is that they represent and defend the intellectual voices of the marginalized, under-represented, and, well, the litany of victimization adjectives is far too long to list. Suffice it to say that no identity politic group is too small or ridiculous to be included in this community.

A practicing artist, minding their own business, and attempting to make apolitical art is not welcome in that cohort. 'Community' by their practical definition doesn't include anyone who isn't a victim (e.g. you or I). And therein lies not only the root of the bigotry but the weaponization of amplifying race, gender, skin color, sexual preference, and so on as a profit platform.

The editorial architecture of the BR guarantees a strict and unapologetic conformity of thought and opinion. The BR employs a number of editors whose specialty is the bigotry of low expectations. Their gender editors are gay, queer, or non-binary and their guests always identify by gender. Rare if ever is there a discussion about art that isn't a fawning, mutual gender admiration discussion. Art is always the collateral neglected topic.

Likewise with the Trump Derangement Syndrome editors. In these interviews the artist being featured must spend at least fifteen minutes showing their politically correct inoculation credentials. They hate Trump, love BLM, are not sexually straight, their personal identity is a mystery to everyone, they've been marginalized by the mythic patriarchy, they decolonize their lives with anti-Western bleach, and on and on and on.  No evidence is ever required and no logical coherency is ever offered.
dare to ask what any of it has to do with their art in the chat and you will be eliminated from addressing the chat group with all comments going to the null bin direct messages of the moderator of the day.

"The New Social Environment is a space for community and intellectual exchange. Please be generous with each other, and allow us all space to interpret and discuss."

Some BR editors constrain conversations to art and they are often richer and more generally worthwhile participatory fare.

As a platform, one of many problems is the fact that all of their Zoom moderators are young and female. Aside from Phong Bui, the publisher, there is not a male speaker to be found among the general staff.

The women find every Zoom participant "awesome", "generous", and "amazing".  And the experience of the Zoom calls is often that of an echo chamber with designated chat cheerleaders who elevate even the most mundane artistic exchanges as epiphanies. To offer any contradictory input is troublesome.

And therein lies the biggest problem the BR promotes.  that is that the so-called "New Social Environment" is not only no better than the old one but an insultingly condescending alternative.

If artists "of color" are looking for equality, one would think that treating them with equal respect would mean having adult conversations about their art and process.  Likewise, young women who claim an entitlement to privileged representation in galleries, museums, and shows need to provide some/any evidence that their art deserves such favor. They don't. In the New Social Environment they can freely vent their spleen full of alleged evils by men without a hint of proof.

Other groups all enjoy this non-critical pretense of victimization and birthright innocence while condemning the other - whoever they think they are.

All of this is to say that this echo chamber mentality ensures new generations of racism, victim-hood, and  needy narcissism that does nothing more than pollute a generous society that does its imperfect best to create a better world. And a better world lifts every aesthetic ship.

    

On the Politics of Contemporary Art (Why Modern Day Art)

 1. The conceptual ecosystem of  Contemporary Art has been saturated by political messaging.  

2. It forms and deforms the meaning of Contemporary Art.

3. The signifying message of Contemporary Art requires that the art itself pay a virtue signal  tax for being allowed acceptance to the genre.

4. The Contemporary Art ecosystem constrains and governs its aesthetic territory by rejecting alternative art expressions from self-signifying differently.  

5. Its authoritarian stranglehold on the art vernacular creates and distorts cultural discourse.

6. This political aesthetic Kafka Trap operates as a cultural sensory deprivation mechanism.

7. The Contemporary Art ecosystem entangles and engulfs all currently produced art into an inescapable framework of political polarization.  You cannot choose a side.  The side chooses you or NOT.

8. Abstraction and other more esoteric territories have been co-opted. Play or perish.

9. The social politics of Contemporary Art are aesthetically cancerous.  Contemporary Art is a money sink for political and social special interest groups whose promotional interests have nothing to do with art.

10.  Contemporary Art is a self-serving, self-perpetuating system that demands absolute conformity.

This is where artists such as myself fork away from this madness to create a new stream of expression that is called Modern Day Art.

It's a cohort of artists whose byproducts are not described by Identity politics or any other form of political bigotry.  Art for Art's Sake on a planet whose insane asylums have open borders.

Bound By Creativity, Imprinted with Victimhood

 On page 112 of Hannah Wohl's Bound By Creativity book, the assertion that women and others are under-collected because they are under-represented in galleries is made without any further evidence.  The author, claiming deep and thorough research of the subject matter, is wholly imprinted with the meme that women are and have been victims of gallery neglect.  Its an assumption as certain as the sun rising the next morning.

Readers of this blog can do the arithmetic for themselves.

The lie is far too profitable to investigate or accurately report.

 

The Gerrymandering of Art Museums by Gender

Since the election of Conservative governments in the cultural West, there has been a screaming siren about the politics of Museum art.  Using rudimentary arithmetic, activists have counted the number of pieces of art that belong to major museums and have discovered that men are historically (to date) more highly represented than women.

This lonely, unrepresentative of any context save provincial politics, factoid is sufficient to provoke an aesthetic Sherman's March on the collections of major museums.  Numerology and not historical context, quality, nor even a sense of decency is driving one museum after another to make these numbers match population demographics (gender only of course).

The fact that these collections were largely donated by wealthy collectors and connoisseurs whose cultural ecology was ambiently patriarchal is immaterial.  The cult of Numerology in sexual politics is both profitable, politically satisfying, and culturally toxic.  Museum shows now pander to a mass of contemporary female artists whose claim to recognition starts and often ends with genital equipment however installed.

I recognize that I'm - excuse the expression - pissing into the wind by pointing out that a historically accurate museum should be imbalanced prior to the mid-nineteenth century and be correcting its acquisitions to the degree that they can control gifts from then on.

In 2020, the Baltimore museum will only but women's art.  What's the rush?  Why isn't a healthier balance of acquisition just good business every year?

WE ALL KNOW that this will not be followed by a year dedicated to buying only men's art. After all what sin have today's male artists committed to be flogged for years with womens only shows, economic boycott, and  suicidal worthy neglect?  Are there sociological studies that recommend these kinds of remedies?

And although museum collections are mathematically imbalanced, women dominate juried gallery shows  on the order of 70% women acceptance and 30% male artist acceptance.  I've been doing the arithmetic in this blog and it goes back years.

Gender advocates have been distorting art in Western countries for decades.  They can rewrite history but they cannot undo it without ruthless indifference to inescapable cultural heritage.  Museum walls are being wallpapered over with politically motivated aesthetics rather than artistic merits.  It hurts everyone and turning museums into political battlefields is unacceptable political damage.

Yesterday *this* arrived from the New Britain Museum of American Art:

Shameless pandering.

Whitney Biennial 2019 - A Critique

The Whitney Biennial of 2019 is an institutional and curatorial failure. Four museum floors of it. The effect isn't new but the scale and audacity of exhibition is.  Its managed to weaponize political correctness on an institutional scale.

The show is largely a rarely interrupted, mind-numbing procession of  aesthetic victimization screeds.

As a patron of Fine Art, I found myself groping for something/anything that could quench a thirst for aesthetic satisfaction.  Instead, one installation of woe-is-me-and-mine art after another.  And how could it be any other way.  When shows are curated like a house of cards relying on satisfying the long tail of identity political affiliated groups of patrons, what can we expect but *this*?

The tropes employed by each artist are nothing new. The attempts to shock any sophisticated viewer are unshockingly unsuccessful.  We've seen this all before. So much so that this show may signify many tipping points in the institutional evolutionary calendar.

The first tipping point is that Fine Art in as much as "Art for Art's Sake"  has any contemporary meaning is no longer welcome in museum spaces that are now held hostage to generations of academically programmed curators whose myopic marching orders involve curating shows based on identity politic bingo cards.

The result is that this show represents a regressive transformation of artistic merit for the work that's accepted.  Its *intent* was never "art".   Its intent is politics and its creation is CRAFT.  With few exceptions this biennial promotes cottage industry, political arts and crafts as Fine Art.  It fools no one.  This stuff saturates and intellectually lobotomizes any one who cares about art.

The result is that the exhibition exposes the large body of work as well-made craft.  And it exposes each political interest as being ignorant of the fact each victim, in turn, victimizes all the other neighboring victims - a cacophony of mutual indifference.  Like highway drivers with me first attitudes, these artists - thanks to a curation from hell - desensitize the patron from giving a shit about any of them.

As an artist, I attend shows to inform my own practice.  Where is my work in relation to *this*.  And is there a thinking worth applying to my practice.  I left uninspired and in many cases disheartened.

I'll leave it at that for the moment.  I'm working on a study of the idea of *language* being used to describe art and artworks and a few artists in this exhibition caught my eye because "I don't think it means what you think it means".  But that's better written about as a separate piece.

The Intersection of Rancid Political Correctness and Bat-Shit Crazy

The Director of the Brattleboro [VT] Museum was pressured to issue this apology the other day via email,

"November 2, 2018

To the recipients of BMAC's e-newsletter:

We recently sent out an e-newsletter that contained the image below alongside the announcement of a forthcoming panel discussion on addiction and recovery in our community.



It was subsequently pointed out to us that our use of that image in connection with that event could perpetuate harmful stereotypes about people of color. We regret not realizing that ourselves, and we apologize for our mistake, which we appreciate having been brought to our attention.

We will try not to make similar mistakes in the future.

Sincerely,
Danny"



I guess the question I would have is what color hands could be used without potentially creating the racist incident du jour.  This image of two black people expressing support and need of support would be racist in what way?  I mean wouldn't the person who objected to this already have a racist agenda.  And if so, how will not publishing images of caring somehow perpetuate the make-believe "we aren't racist" stereotype so carefully cultivated by the system?

I guess one solution would be to have hands of every color person represented like some kind of happy go lucky superhero group that is a Noah's Ark of racial representation.

OR, and I like this idea a lot, the art community needs to re-establish its autonomy.  In recent decades Art has become co-opted by the social services to the degree that museums are no longer about art but about therapy, local politics, and its funds diverted away from artists and into the hands of State Social Services Agencies.

The Arts in America have become politically diseased.  I have little hope that in my lifetime this will change.

Sad.  Sad. Sad. 

Shredding the Banksy Narrative

I've been shredding artwork for a few years now.  Its a reductive form of creating something new.

Recently, at an auction of one of Banksy framed illustrations the frame apparently shredded the illustration.  The more I watched the video in its various incarnations on the internet the more I believe that Banksy's performance piece is a magic trick illusion.

IMO. there are two illustrations in the frame.  One, the whole cloth piece is rolled down while the second, pre-cut illustration is slowly unwound to shredding noises.

I could be wrong of course but I suspect this may be true.

Looking for my shredded work?


Lake/Ice

Reflections on Mirror Lake

Broken Glass

Representational Ambivalence #1

to mention the most recent examples.

Art Review of the UConn 52nd Annual Studio Art Faculty Exhibition

This show is taking place at the Benton Museum on the Storrs campus of UConn and it runs until October 14, 2018.  It features work by (presumably) all of the studio art faculty.

Shows like this are always hard to gage.  Is the art being shown serious or is it academic - that is, is the faculty member a gifted teacher but not so gifted artist or are they an artist making a living by teaching (either well or well-enough to stick).

This show closely follows last year's show.

This show features a rather tedious by-product of an art faculty "project" (maybe a junket) having something to do with the interview of Indian (as in India) artists. If memory serves me correctly these are the remaining fumes from last year's show.

Another thread of work seemed to center around the use of new technology dedicated to printmaking - as much an exercise in manufactured effect rather than artistic innovation.

Likewise the photography seemed stale to me - again, maybe a hangover from last year's show and exposure to the MFA show.  Rather  than pushing any photographic envelope the work seemed to mail it in.

In touring the show I settled on a set of work from three faculty artists.

Ray Dicapua apparently always attracts attention for his oversized drawings. He's UConn's 'art of the spectacular' entry to these shows.

Here is this year's entry;

Done in vine charcoal!  Impressive stuff.  How these things get stored are an even larger mystery.

The second piece worth mentioning is by Brad Guarino - The Appearance of Balance and Perspective (2018).  Its the first piece I've seen recently that speaks to manhood.  Here's the piece and how he speaks to its intent;

Finally, there's the acrylic work of Pamela Bramble which was like a breath of fresh air for me, a fellow painter.  I found the innovative use of material, size, and nature of the work to be, at the very least inspiring.  The work is playful and full of cryptic surprise, often mimicking fine art print grounds.

It is hard to be impressed or disappointed in faculty art shows.  Faculty art is always a mixed bag.  But what I look for is innovation, risk, skin in the game of pushing the envelope and in this regard I don't think there's enough showing to write about.   This doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it simply isn't on display.

This is not an inspiring show by any means.  One can only hope that this faculty's calling is teaching where inspiring students is the masterwork.  As they say in baseball, "Wait until next year."

The Weaponization of Juried Art Shows

Americans are well-aware of a concept developed by our rival global antagonists of using American freedoms, social norms and expectations against us.  For example, extremism can effectively hide behind religious freedom of expression against criticism or legal remedy.

The curation of Art has been under political attack for decades usually by politicians who extort concessions by withholding funding and claiming to be guardians of a public constituency needing protection from the indecency of the latest art sensation.  The soft fascism of threatening public funding of the offending institution was often enough to discourage another such sensation getting exposed *there*.

And though the Art World would be loathe to admit it, art in America has been self-constrained for decades.  Art curators, like dogs trained not to break their way across and electronic fence, are rarely suicidal enough to promote anything too risque for fear of their jobs and a tarnished CV.

However, the object of the contention was always the quality of art and not something else.

Today, we see disruptive mutations of this idea being played out nationally, and to some degree internationally. The variation is a logical one.

First, the exposure of certain kinds of art can be constrained is well-established.  One way [using copiously by government] is to threaten or deny funding.  Soooo... one way to exercise control over what gets shown is to seize control of the agency of what gets funded. And so, under the special interest banner of "diversity" - [as defined by minority status, geographic origin, and cultural [no matter how dubious] background] - the micromanagement of art funding is being controlled.  This is the first form of the Identity Politics effect that eliminates the quality of art as a metric of artistic merit and elevates the individual nuances [no matter how contrived] of the artist and their constituency.

The second mutation is cultural vigilantism. To understand the ease in which juried art shows can be fixed I need to briefly explain the game pieces.

Art has no formal definition.  It has a number of categories, all of them fair but soft. In other words, no one can authoritatively claim something isn't art.  Within the working artist community, there's a trust relationship that what is submitted as art is intended to be worthy of consideration.

The second gaming piece is that jurors of art shows are also trusted to use their best judgment in evaluating the body of submissions and to honor the subject to which the work was addressed. The juror is rarely held accountable for the selections they make.  As an artist, you take your chances and it always costs money - you are subsidizing the show this juror selects as a matter of trust that its curation is trustworthy.

So these two gaming pieces offer plausible deniability for the eventual selection of art for juried shows.  Artists trust each other to submit authentic art and they trust [implicitly biased] jurors to put their biases to one side and objectively curate *the art*. And everyone in the art community is aware that the final selection is used to always be an aesthetic sausage for better or worse.

But all of these trust presumptions cannot be taken for granted any longer.  Any simple arithmetic applied to juried art shows in the United States going back years exposes an alarming fact. Juried art shows are more often than not juried by women who ore often than not favor female artists with statistically improbable regularity.

It is empirically obvious that the quality of art, the metrics by which art is judged, and the veracity of prestige associated with curators and their politically endorsed art beneficiaries is the equivalent of artistic malware - a denial of service attack on gallery institutions.  And its being performed by presumably well educated, credentialed individuals who seem to believe they are being asked to punish contemporary innocents for the crimes of historical ancestors.

By being disingenuous as to their intent and by taking money from individuals they have no intention of judging objectively, they are committing fraud on a class action scale. They and their educational mentors need an intervention.

In the meantime, choose your juried shows carefully AND publish the scorecards of local jurors so we can all triangulate this kind of information.

Key pieces of information;

How many entries to a show, then by gender.

How many accepted pieces, then by gender of artist.

Note that the names of male sounding names are often deceptions. 

How to Submit Art to a Show in the Era of Identity Politics and Curatorial Scorecards

The cost of showing work as an artist consists of many things

• the cost of the materials to make the artwork with
• the time to make it
• the cost of entering art shows both open and juried
• joining the gallery usually discounts the entry fee for shows
• not joining the gallery usually adds $5 to $10 per entry piece for the show
• the cost of transporting/shipping the piece to and from the show
• satisfying the show obligations
• gallery sitting or a $5-ish buyout
• Show opening contribution in helping to set up or food contribution
• manufacture or distribution of show/personal marketing artifacts
• repair of damaged work/frames (its all on you)

As if all of this wasn't enough, all galleries require a commission fee on anything sold.  This can range usually not more than 50%.  Thirty percent is more common. So, the artist must factor in that discount to their final remuneration.

A common complaint about the commission structure is that frames (an expensive cosmetic value add) are included in the commission even though the artist's final take is less AND in order to even out that double-jeopardy these pieces must be adjusted cost even more thus making them less likely affordable.

So far so good.  But the subliminal message here is that art is not cheap to make nor show.

Okay. So the next consideration has to be what shows are worth submitting work to.

Here we have to triangulate the cost of showing as calculated from the show-based costs identified previously against show duration, anticipated show attendance, and opportunity cost.

IMO, shows that last fewer than a full month must be inexpensive to submit to or incredibly attractive in terms of sales potential or prestige.  And every show ties up the works involved for the duration of the show. That can be an opportunity cost in certain situations.  The other opportunity cost is limited arts funds being dedicated to *this* opportunity.

As far as all of this is concerned, there is nothing discriminatory in terms of identity politics.  You, the artist, whoever you are or think you are or have been told who you are play by these rules.

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Things that are out of our control as artists are the conventions and practices of the gallery owners/organizers. Somebody ALWAYS has an upper hand in what they deem acceptable.
Raging on about that is a different blog entry.

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Generally speaking, open gallery shows will accept as much work as they can show within wall/floor space constraints.

And in deciding whether or not to enter a show all candidate entrants need to study the aesthetic bias of the juror involved.  Representationally opinionated jurors are generally less likely to select abstract or contemporary work and vice versa.  You want to pick a juror at least sympathetic to your practice.

The Identity Politic Tax kicks in for juried and blatantly discriminatory shows that sell themselves as oppressed, special interest group promotional vehicles.

In recent years the number of woman only gallery shows has become a floodwater.  In browsing open calls for artists its rare that a month goes by without at least one of these advertised close by.

This is the first erosion of art shows evolving from being quality-of-object specific to identity politic specific. Its unclear who this truly benefits.  Its anti-democratic nature removes a degree of prestige from the work involved and the self-imposed autonomy of the enterprise is as likely to generate animosity as promotion of anything more than hate politics.

Maybe the intended by-product of these tactics is to simply reduce the exposure of anyone who doesn't qualify and hope the public's taste is socially-engineered to believe the quality of art has an artistic identity preference.

The more pernicious effects of juried shows comes into play when the juror or the gallery put their thumb on the scale so that, as previously mentioned the show is no longer about the quality of the art being juried and instead some kind of socially engineered conclusion. The rationalizations are endless to justify this stuff so let the recriminations make their way into the comments section.

But to be more specific, in recent years,  juried art shows increasingly reflect disproportionate female representation.  Furthermore the remaining entries often favor tightly-coupled gallery members, supporters, or associated figures.  Some of this is to be expected.  But that leaves but a small fraction of eligible entry spots.

For men, there's an economic consequence.  Their work is less likely to be selected, they are more likely to be subsidizing an unspecified and unwelcome discriminatory practice, and contributing to the deterioration of the community's artistic reputation.

The sober reality is that the Identity Politic war has deeply polluted the art community worldwide amounting to nothing less than cultural appropriation not only of the present but the past.  This is an unregulated affirmative action program - aesthetic vigilante-ism in the professional ranks.  Its by-product is an archaeology of myopic mediocrity elevated to a seat of importance not even the village idiot artist can salute.

The most obvious personal solution is for male artists to simply be far more awoke about who the jurors are, what their agenda is, and what the track record of the galleries are.

To the degree a more general solution must be a scorecard for jurors that includes the Political Identity arithmetic involved  in their jury practice. This must include all the politically motivated algorithms being used to bludgeon the artistic community into yet another polarized political institution.

It shouldn't be long before, on a scale of one to five vaginas, any gallery or museum ranks or how genital friendly any gallery call for art will be.

The Identity Politics of the Real Art Awards and the Art of Art as Politics As Usual

Real Art Ways posted the following to Facebook on July 16, 2018

"Real Art Ways announces the first Real Art Awards. Six visual artists will receive a $2,500 cash prize, and each will have their work presented by Real Art Ways in a solo exhibition in 2018-19.

“Real Art Ways has a 42-year history of supporting artists and innovation. These awards are intended to give artists a boost of recognition and opportunity, and to highlight the importance of art and creativity in shaping our shared culture.” - Executive Director, Will K. Wilkins 

The six recipients are:
Keith Clougherty: Braintree, Massachusetts
Kylie Ford: Portland, Maine
Niki Kriese: Croton, New York
Mateo Nava: New York, New York
Liona Nyariri: Brooklyn, New York
Sofia Plater: Newton, Massachusetts
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. To learn more about the Real Art Awards and this year's recipients, visit the "Artist Submissions" section of our website. #realartways #realartawards #contemporaryart#emergingartists #massachusetts #maine #newyork #connecticut #hartford #parkville#visualart #sculpture #painting #installation #mixedmedia "

I know the Guerrilla Girls are holding their breath so here is the math.

Six shows are being shown.  Two are by men, four are by women.

Five of the artists are in their mid-twenties. One is forty-ish.

MFAs abound.  No outsiders.  The smell of entitlement and Identity politics is not an illusion.
Make of it what you will.


In this case allow me to -cough- *offer* some opinionated criticism.

As simple background information, Connecticut has been mired in a one-political-union-party hostage situation for decades.  The State is reeling from decades of corrupt double-dealing, insider, and self-serving gluttony at the trough of future taxpayer debt.  The pigs have largely left the farm burping up tens of millions in pension benefits that third-world dictators dream of someday amassing such wealth.  

I know.  I'm being too kind.

To the point.

Real Art Ways is one of a handful of largely urban Connecticut Arts organizations that  manage to get funded from whomever is willing to support them. I'm sure that is neither easy nor fun.

However, I think its disingenuous for Real Art Ways to make the claim that the shows awarded will somehow be innovative in some special way.  As far as I can tell the six shows represent academic rebates on expensive MFA program degrees.  This is not the Art of innovation, this is business as usual - insider, academic, state sponsored, political system art - obligatory, liberal fist-waving, happy parade art.

It also reinforces artistic tropes that belong to the last century. The cult of youth being an important criteria to make innovative art for instance.  Or that expensive academic degrees earned by studying with Modernist trained artists and political activists make for superior art.

The cult of personality has been replaced by the practice of perseverance yet it is nowhere in evidence in these awarded shows.

In the 21st century cyberspace is far more important than geography but as a longtime Connecticut artist this is a familiar slap in the face.  I have a hard time believing that NO Connecticut artists submitted their work for a show.

Its not that these cash awards are so much.  But they are money that leaves the State. Poof. Connecticut is no richer for the showing. Real Art Ways hasn't nurtured a single Connecticut artist in this cycle.  Shouldn't it?

It seems to me that a geographically important gallery that presumably bestows some prestige on the artists selected would, if Connecticut artists don't come to them, go out and find the artists.  There are dozens of Connecticut gallery shows all over the State to mingle with.

The unfortunate message Real Art Ways is sending is:

CT artists are NOT innovative - don't come here, don't stay here.

Don't own an Ivy League-ish degree - Fuck You, don't bother

An artist of color, and outsider, or an edge artist - Fuck You too - we cater to those inside the box not the outside

CT patrons are in need of artistic carpet-baggers to educate them about art - Connecticut artists are too damned stupid to do that

The taxes Connecticut artists pay should subsidize the entitlement class - Connecticut artists don't need the money or recognition - they're losers anyway

Old is unwelcome