"Lead by example"
A platform for the Democratic party
As this presidential season hits its stride, I watch the debates and visit the websites and still don't know what the Democrats stand for. So I've decided to take matters into my own hands and define the platform I'd like to see. It's this: lead by example. Simple. Lead by example.
It's a rallying cry that can be convincingly shouted by Democrats both nationally and locally. It's anti-corruption and anti-incumbent and anti-politics as usual. It's pan-religious, philosophy-for-dummies common sense and I think it could help the Democrats to regain control of my country.
Lead by example. Here's how:
Lead by example. Create a government of transparency and honesty. There is no other way to have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Accountability should be the first task of every government official.
Lead by example. Our officials are not elected to advance their own individual party's agenda, they're elected to advance the American people's agenda. Act like it.
Lead by example. Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of this great nation. It is the thoughts therein that continue to make America a concept and a reality that is the envy of the world.
Lead by example. Government benefits must be given to deserving citizens regardless of race, creed, age, economic status, gender or sexual orientation. We must never sanction or create a second class of citizens in this country.
Lead by example. Return this great country to the great ideal of separation of church and state. As John F. Kennedy said: "I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish -- where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source -- where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials -- and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all."
Lead by example. If we are going to be the most powerful country on earth, we must always use that power for good, not evil. We must ensure that our motives are beyond reproach and if we use it at all, we must use our military might righteously and without prejudice. We must stop the dealings of murderous dictators whether they have oil under their soil or not. We must step in to prevent genocide whether it takes place in countries of strategic importance or not. We must promote nuclear nonproliferation abroad and at home. We must not turn a blind eye to atrocities no matter where they occur.
Lead by example. Let's be a country with no imperial aspirations, Let's remember that if it's spread at the point of a gun, it's called tyranny not Democracy.
Lead by example. Give our military and paramilitary forces the tools they need to do their jobs. And when they've finished serving their country, we must make certain that we honor their service with a secure retirement and benefits.
Lead by example. Make America the most secure country in the world and maintain that security without compromising our principles or the rights of any human. Shut down the Guantanamo detention center and all secret prisons.
Lead by example. Our balloting systems must be open, accountable, accessible and impartial. We must get more Americans to vote.
Let's make every environmental decision based upon the notion that we don't inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. Why was the biggest global environmental agreement ever called the Kyoto Protocol and not the Washington Protocol? Let's sign it. Let's reduce CO2 and SO4 emissions and get mercury out of the environment all together. Let's take the lead.
We must lead the way in the invention and perfection of safe, renewable energy forms. American business will profit in this quest, as will the global environment and all mankind. Let's have a 100 mile per gallon car by 2010. Let's make all our energy consumption more efficient. Let's work towards energy independence.
Medical, environmental, and energy innovation are the growth areas of the 21st and 22nd centuries, let's lead that growth.
Let's lead by example by forging the path toward responsible globalization. The global market is an inevitability, putting profits before principles is not.
Lead by example. Our children are the leaders of tomorrow. Our educational system should be the envy of the world. Higher teacher salaries, better training, and more technology will help.
Lead by example. Let's spend only the money we have and borrow only the money we know we'll be able to pay back in a timely fashion. Our current culture of credit is fiscally and psychologically dangerous and makes America vulnerable.
Lead by example. Make decisions based upon the ethic of reciprocity that is found in every major religious text: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Let's end poverty and ensure health care for all. Let's treat our elderly as we will demand to be treated when we are older.
Lead by example. Incorporate the lessons of history into the leadership of today. If America is to stay great, we must be a country of great insight and justice.
Lead by example. That's what I want the Democratic party to stand for and I know they can do it.
Saturday, December 08, 2007
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
finally found the funism manifesto. originally written in 1991 or so and updated every few years thereafter. this last version was last updated in 2000. here it is:
My task as an artist is twofold. First, I want to make something that’s pretty, beautiful even. Second, I want to tell a story, put forth a point of view, comment, cajole, illuminate...all the things that storytellers do to get someone’s attention and keep it.
Now, pretty is still fairly under-rated these days in the art world, and has been for quite some time. And even though pretty’s fortunes seem to be rising, I think the general feeling is still something like this: pretty art, with its soothing, harmonious colors, balanced compositions and attention to craftsmanship isn’t to be taken as seriously as art that forgoes these populist aesthetics. Yet if a piece of art is pretty, people look at it longer. If it’s pretty, people want to know more about it. It’s human nature.
Besides, and this is the most important part, I like pretty -- paintings by Thomas Hart Benton or Philip Taaffe or Howard Hodgkin, sculptures by Alexander Calder or Isamu Noguchi or Andy Goldsworthy. Like the majority of people, pretty is what I want to look at and live with and think about.
So you see, for me anyway, that end of things is fairly straightforward. It’s the storytelling end of my job just keeps getting more and more interesting. That end consists mainly of making metaphors and is a wildly interesting pursuit.
It’s basically the same pursuit that poets and playwrights and many other artists are engaged in: the pursuit of poetry. A pursuit which for me is always just a little like chasing a butterfly through a field with a holey net, beautiful and exhilarating and you never know for sure what you’re going to catch, if anything at all. It’s the kind of pursuit that makes one believe in the concept of the muse. When I catch a good metaphor, a beautiful metaphor, I feel just as lucky as I do proud.
But metaphor creation is not always butterflies and roses and good luck, it’s also hard work: finding, polishing, and placing them. But mainly it’s hard work because of the nearly-always-attendant trade-off between the intentional vagueness of poetry and the necessary obviousness of accessibility. A trade off of poetry versus clarity. Of course there are those exemplary artworks that have both, but by and large, clarity does not peacefully coexist with poetry. Here’s what I mean:
Years ago I saw a beautiful painting of Niagara Falls. Out of the mist of the falls floated chemical diagrams, little pentagonal shaped constructs of oxygen and nitrogen and other elements. The viewer looked at this painting and got it, just like that. Niagara Falls, beautiful but polluted. This piece had clarity, but perhaps not so much poetry.
On the other hand are the myriad pieces of contemporary art that look important and are presented as important and poetic, yet rebuff all attempts at interpretation and therefore offer no clarity. Art like this makes people feel ignorant and makes them feel that contemporary art is neither approachable nor understandable. This should never be a by-product of the creation of art.
When I first started out, I founded an art movement that would, by its definition, eliminate this insidious by-product. The movement is called funism, and here’s its manifesto:
•Art should be as much fun to look at
as it is to think about.
•Art should be intellectually engaging
without being intellectually elitist.
Simple: combine beauty and meaning, while maintaining accessibility. It’s simple in theory but difficult in practice due to the eternal tension between clarity and poetry. To err on the side of poetry is to err on the side of intellectual elitism: if I create a metaphor and nobody but me can decipher it, am I not engaging in elitism? By definition. And if I create a metaphor that’s bang you over the head obvious, then I’ve clumsily, lazily ignored the great aspiration toward poetry. And that won’t do at all. Both masters must be served.
Making matters worse in this debate is the current state of our collective cultural relationship to metaphor. The ascendance of abstract art in our time has brought with it the popular understanding that it’s hopelessly bourgeois to ask of art, “what’s it about?” The ascendance of abstract art in our consciousness has replaced meaning with the emperor’s new meaning.
And while Modernism has succeeded in freeing us from the tyranny of church and state proscribed iconographies, it has also thrust us into the gorgeous melee, a free for all of personal iconographies, each artist creating their own symbolism, often times indecipherable by even the most thoughtful viewer. And thus it has also taken from us the mindset that looks for and expects accessible subtext. Where once we looked for subtext in our art and found it, now we look for nothing and find it. Or worse, we don’t look at all. Lacking the habit of looking for subtext causes us to take everything at face value, and that’s a great loss.
This change in the way we relate to art really took off with the ascendance of Hollywood to the high throne of
culture. Hollywood, the recording industry, Bob Ross.
To be sure, they are the creators of many beautiful pieces of art: movies, music, happy little clouds. But subtext is more exception than rule. The majority of the cultural products that this country produces are skin deep and no more. And though I am a willing consumer of much mass market
culture, I’d be happier if more of these products had more
to them than meets the eye.
But what of our art that is about something? Wall “paintings” by Sol LeWitt that even the curators can’t understand; enormous, intrusive sculptures by Richard Serra that are dropped in our path for us to stumble around,
figuratively and literally. Sliced sheep in vitrines of formaldehyde. These types of scratch your head works may be important within the tiny art world itself, but for most people, they’re just confusing and belittling. Supposed
subtext with nothing to draw us in.
It’s a crazy catch-22 in a way, too, because if more
people were coming from a place of symbolism savvy, their approach to modern, non-symbolic works of art would
definitely be a little more open. The art-viewing populace needs something between totally inaccessible meaning and no meaning. And only then, after they have been repeatedly rewarded for asking “what’s it about” can they be expected
to move on to “how does this make me feel” or other, more difficult questions. It's a natural progression and our current art culture has extracted a crucial step.
The popular approach to art has always been, and will always be, to assess its superficial beauty first, to wonder about its subject matter and meaning second, and third, for the advanced viewer, to ask “how does this massive tilted arc of steel make me feel and how does that relate to meaning?” In this way, beauty is the friend of meaning, and thoughtfulness is the friend of feeling, one laying the way for the other, tangible showing the path to intangible.
Looking at and understanding advanced concepts in modern art is a great exercise for our minds, and stretching our notion of “what is art” is a great exercise for our soul, but these are the advanced exercises, and a whole generation of art viewers haven’t ever had an opportunity to work out on the prerequisite exercises of metaphor interpretation first. It’s not that people have become lazy viewers, it’s that the contemporary art world no longer gives them all the exercises they need.
This is how to progress:
More art needs to be as much fun to look at as it is to think about, and more art needs to be intellectually engaging without being intellectually elitist. Only then will more art viewers become better art viewers.
It’s not that all art has to be guided by this rule of accessibility; sometimes, for example, painting just for the sake of painting is enough, and, of course, not everybody can be expected to understand everything. That would be unnecessary, undesirable, and boring. It’s just that more art needs to be guided by the rule of accessible subtext. We need more art to welcome, not rebuff; then people can be truly rewarded for their time spent with art, not just told that they’ve been rewarded.
Which brings us back to my great debate of clarity versus poetry. As a consumer of culture and a creator of art, I have settled the debate with what I think is a reasonable and forgiving addition to the funist manifesto: Art should invite interpretation. Simple. Invite interpretation. I can see it now on the bumpers of the masses where the “eschew obfuscation” sticker has worn off after repeated washes. It doesn’t ask much, and it gives a lot.
And maybe, just maybe, it can help get our culture back on the track of metaphorical literacy, one thoughtful viewer at a time. And who knows where that could take us.
My task as an artist is twofold. First, I want to make something that’s pretty, beautiful even. Second, I want to tell a story, put forth a point of view, comment, cajole, illuminate...all the things that storytellers do to get someone’s attention and keep it.
Now, pretty is still fairly under-rated these days in the art world, and has been for quite some time. And even though pretty’s fortunes seem to be rising, I think the general feeling is still something like this: pretty art, with its soothing, harmonious colors, balanced compositions and attention to craftsmanship isn’t to be taken as seriously as art that forgoes these populist aesthetics. Yet if a piece of art is pretty, people look at it longer. If it’s pretty, people want to know more about it. It’s human nature.
Besides, and this is the most important part, I like pretty -- paintings by Thomas Hart Benton or Philip Taaffe or Howard Hodgkin, sculptures by Alexander Calder or Isamu Noguchi or Andy Goldsworthy. Like the majority of people, pretty is what I want to look at and live with and think about.
So you see, for me anyway, that end of things is fairly straightforward. It’s the storytelling end of my job just keeps getting more and more interesting. That end consists mainly of making metaphors and is a wildly interesting pursuit.
It’s basically the same pursuit that poets and playwrights and many other artists are engaged in: the pursuit of poetry. A pursuit which for me is always just a little like chasing a butterfly through a field with a holey net, beautiful and exhilarating and you never know for sure what you’re going to catch, if anything at all. It’s the kind of pursuit that makes one believe in the concept of the muse. When I catch a good metaphor, a beautiful metaphor, I feel just as lucky as I do proud.
But metaphor creation is not always butterflies and roses and good luck, it’s also hard work: finding, polishing, and placing them. But mainly it’s hard work because of the nearly-always-attendant trade-off between the intentional vagueness of poetry and the necessary obviousness of accessibility. A trade off of poetry versus clarity. Of course there are those exemplary artworks that have both, but by and large, clarity does not peacefully coexist with poetry. Here’s what I mean:
Years ago I saw a beautiful painting of Niagara Falls. Out of the mist of the falls floated chemical diagrams, little pentagonal shaped constructs of oxygen and nitrogen and other elements. The viewer looked at this painting and got it, just like that. Niagara Falls, beautiful but polluted. This piece had clarity, but perhaps not so much poetry.
On the other hand are the myriad pieces of contemporary art that look important and are presented as important and poetic, yet rebuff all attempts at interpretation and therefore offer no clarity. Art like this makes people feel ignorant and makes them feel that contemporary art is neither approachable nor understandable. This should never be a by-product of the creation of art.
When I first started out, I founded an art movement that would, by its definition, eliminate this insidious by-product. The movement is called funism, and here’s its manifesto:
•Art should be as much fun to look at
as it is to think about.
•Art should be intellectually engaging
without being intellectually elitist.
Simple: combine beauty and meaning, while maintaining accessibility. It’s simple in theory but difficult in practice due to the eternal tension between clarity and poetry. To err on the side of poetry is to err on the side of intellectual elitism: if I create a metaphor and nobody but me can decipher it, am I not engaging in elitism? By definition. And if I create a metaphor that’s bang you over the head obvious, then I’ve clumsily, lazily ignored the great aspiration toward poetry. And that won’t do at all. Both masters must be served.
Making matters worse in this debate is the current state of our collective cultural relationship to metaphor. The ascendance of abstract art in our time has brought with it the popular understanding that it’s hopelessly bourgeois to ask of art, “what’s it about?” The ascendance of abstract art in our consciousness has replaced meaning with the emperor’s new meaning.
And while Modernism has succeeded in freeing us from the tyranny of church and state proscribed iconographies, it has also thrust us into the gorgeous melee, a free for all of personal iconographies, each artist creating their own symbolism, often times indecipherable by even the most thoughtful viewer. And thus it has also taken from us the mindset that looks for and expects accessible subtext. Where once we looked for subtext in our art and found it, now we look for nothing and find it. Or worse, we don’t look at all. Lacking the habit of looking for subtext causes us to take everything at face value, and that’s a great loss.
This change in the way we relate to art really took off with the ascendance of Hollywood to the high throne of
culture. Hollywood, the recording industry, Bob Ross.
To be sure, they are the creators of many beautiful pieces of art: movies, music, happy little clouds. But subtext is more exception than rule. The majority of the cultural products that this country produces are skin deep and no more. And though I am a willing consumer of much mass market
culture, I’d be happier if more of these products had more
to them than meets the eye.
But what of our art that is about something? Wall “paintings” by Sol LeWitt that even the curators can’t understand; enormous, intrusive sculptures by Richard Serra that are dropped in our path for us to stumble around,
figuratively and literally. Sliced sheep in vitrines of formaldehyde. These types of scratch your head works may be important within the tiny art world itself, but for most people, they’re just confusing and belittling. Supposed
subtext with nothing to draw us in.
It’s a crazy catch-22 in a way, too, because if more
people were coming from a place of symbolism savvy, their approach to modern, non-symbolic works of art would
definitely be a little more open. The art-viewing populace needs something between totally inaccessible meaning and no meaning. And only then, after they have been repeatedly rewarded for asking “what’s it about” can they be expected
to move on to “how does this make me feel” or other, more difficult questions. It's a natural progression and our current art culture has extracted a crucial step.
The popular approach to art has always been, and will always be, to assess its superficial beauty first, to wonder about its subject matter and meaning second, and third, for the advanced viewer, to ask “how does this massive tilted arc of steel make me feel and how does that relate to meaning?” In this way, beauty is the friend of meaning, and thoughtfulness is the friend of feeling, one laying the way for the other, tangible showing the path to intangible.
Looking at and understanding advanced concepts in modern art is a great exercise for our minds, and stretching our notion of “what is art” is a great exercise for our soul, but these are the advanced exercises, and a whole generation of art viewers haven’t ever had an opportunity to work out on the prerequisite exercises of metaphor interpretation first. It’s not that people have become lazy viewers, it’s that the contemporary art world no longer gives them all the exercises they need.
This is how to progress:
More art needs to be as much fun to look at as it is to think about, and more art needs to be intellectually engaging without being intellectually elitist. Only then will more art viewers become better art viewers.
It’s not that all art has to be guided by this rule of accessibility; sometimes, for example, painting just for the sake of painting is enough, and, of course, not everybody can be expected to understand everything. That would be unnecessary, undesirable, and boring. It’s just that more art needs to be guided by the rule of accessible subtext. We need more art to welcome, not rebuff; then people can be truly rewarded for their time spent with art, not just told that they’ve been rewarded.
Which brings us back to my great debate of clarity versus poetry. As a consumer of culture and a creator of art, I have settled the debate with what I think is a reasonable and forgiving addition to the funist manifesto: Art should invite interpretation. Simple. Invite interpretation. I can see it now on the bumpers of the masses where the “eschew obfuscation” sticker has worn off after repeated washes. It doesn’t ask much, and it gives a lot.
And maybe, just maybe, it can help get our culture back on the track of metaphorical literacy, one thoughtful viewer at a time. And who knows where that could take us.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
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Started working this month on a new show of paintings on the theme of America's Seven Cardinal Virtues. Here's the list so far. Still in formation.
America's Seven Cardinal Virtues
1) The strength of communities. Diversity, altruism, the gorgeous mosaic, the helping hand, the power of the collective dream.
Personally, I'm a member of a bunch of communities, Woodstock, ex-New Yorkers, WDS parents, soccer parents, disgusted Democrats and so on. Most of these communities provide support of all kinds to their members. This is the painting above: "Virtue #1: We/The strength of communities" Charity, altruism, helping hand. Artist's grants, soup kitchens, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Foreign Aid. Wow. We really are a nation of helpful people. Billions in tsunami aid and thousands of volunteers in New Orleans. Could we do more or could we have done more is not the question here because regardless of that answer, the fact is, we do tons.
2) The opportunity for prosperity. It's the cliche that's true. America is still the place where cleverness and hard work pays off more than anywhere else. We expect it to be true and it is.
3) Freedom. It's the enabler of opportunity but so much else: freedom of speech, religion, travel, sin. We take advantage of these freedoms every day and yet take them for granted, too.
4) The expectation of justice (equality) The injustices make the headlines, but the myriad petty justices that make up most people's days don't. The stiving, the feeling that equality is a right. Is there liberty and justice for all or merely for most? Maybe just for some? If we fall short of our goal of absolute liberty and justice, have we still succeeded? Can this really be one of our best traits? I'm an upper middle or lower upper class white guy, can I really even answer this question? Related to freedom and community.
5) The embrace of the new. Our relationship to change, seeking it out, embracing it, fomenting it. The acceptance of new ideas and products. Flitting. The explorer's spirit. Lewis and Clark, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Samuel Goldwyn, Sam Warner, Alfred Hitchcock, Billie Holiday, Buckminster Fuller, Charles and Ray Eames, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ray Kroc, Elvis Presley, Miles Davis, Diane Arbus, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. Ebay. Eee-gads. The spirit of invention, The Spirit of St. Louis, on and on. Makes me want to join the chant: U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!
6) Diversity. The gorgeous mosaic. If Mayor David Dinkins gave us nothing else, he gave us this fresh take on the concept of the melting pot. In NYC especially, nothing's melting together, everyone's asserting their individuality at the same time, resulting in a gorgeous mosaic, a pointillist masterpiece where the colors are blended in the eyes of the beholder and not on the canvas of our country. (Thank you for your indulgence.) I love this aspect of America. It really is a great big place with attitudes and customs varying widely from spot to spot and not just over big distances like from new orleans to minneapolis, but also from woodstock to tannersville. unabridged dictionary page with animals representing main immigrant countries.
7) Optimism. This is an undercurrent to much of the above. The optimistic nature pervades our sense of community and our explorer's spirit, it is there in our expectation of justice and equality, it shapes our freedom. It is a part of all the other virtues but deserves to be counted as its own thing. It's huge. Sometimes it's blindly naive, sometimes well-informed. It manifests itself as a swagger on the world stage that we may find repugnant and also as a dedication to finding the cure that we find so inspiring. Optimism, it's what's for lunch.
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