Healthcare for all a cultural issue

You betcha! Artists are cultural workers and as such often have no way to pay over $600.00 a month for healthcare. This group is trying to highlight the issue at a time when the flat-landers and know/no nothings are busy killing off what little safety net we have left in their version/vision of the American future they envision. The House just passed a murder woman bill that boggles the mind when it is wrapped in what they style 'Christian" compassion. Any hospital can refuse to perform a life-saving abortion. Human cell tissue is more alive than the woman carrying it-by their lights-out brains. And, Obama just jettisoned the long term part of the health plan as too expensive when it might have allowed family care givers to be paid rather than insurance companies squeezing the last pennies out of distressed working families. Is this the America we wanted to see. No, I don't think the 99% ever envisioned Eric Cantor and company's utopia. Great for the elites like the artistocrats of old and the peasants be damned. Fight the wars and die so the rich can play on. Well you know what the French did with that. They got carried away but had a point and delivered it sharply to the heads that oppressed them. Yes Artists need healthcare.

Twitter / Tweet Button

Twitter / Tweet Button So now new information on Van Gogh's portraits. Play it by ear seems to be the watch word at the Van Gogh foundation. They have discovered that portraits they thought were of Van Gogh himself actually are of his brother Theo. How--by ear--the one that isn't cut off is thought to be the clue to who is who!

Price to restore The Triumph of Civic Virtue marble statue in Queens is high

Price to restore The Triumph of Civic Virtue marble statue in Queens is high
Well here I am on my soap box trying to finds culture in Queens and folks who care enough to sign on to a grassroots group effort to rally the troops to save this American master's work. Contact me for a meet up if you have any interest in keeping this treasure in Queens.

The Agenda Project: America The Beautiful

This says it all. If you vote GOP or think you are a Christian when you sign on to the stupid and misleading policies that the extreme right supports-the only result is before your eyes. Is this what you really want American to be about? I don't think so. Gertrude Stein summed it up pretty well. What's in a name--if you call medicare "socialism" to scare people then you can cheat them out of just about everything they've worked for--social security and medicare. We have a broken system and the people who have broken it are getting fatter and greedier as the moments pass. Civil virtue is almost on a resporator and if people don't wise up the visual we just saw could become reality.

PEN American Center - 2011 PEN World Voices Festival

PEN American Center - 2011 PEN World Voices Festival For those of us who believe that if they don't pay you-you don't have to be jerked around by them. If you were wondering about alternatives and haven't quit you day job you can have your say--find out ways and means for independents.

The Secret Life of Poets: Two Sides of Emily Dickinson - She Writes

The Secret Life of Poets: Two Sides of Emily Dickinson - She Writes: "Wild Nights -- Wild Nights!

Were I with thee

Wild Nights should be

Our luxury!



Futile -- the Winds –

To a Heart in port –

Done with the Compass –

Done with the Chart!



Rowing in Eden –

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor – Tonight –

In Thee!"

A John Ascroft moment in Kew Gardens-is public sculpture doomed!

Power and its Abuses

I have lately lost faith in the power of reason. I think the time has come for those of us who call ourselves art critics to fish or cut bait.

Recently the College Art Association, to which I have belonged since the 1960s, has opted to take a pass on writing a letter of support regarding saving a public work of art by the sculptor Frederick MacMonnies, entitled Civic Virtue (something sorely needed in these times). The work crumbles in Kew Gardens, while politicians--including my democratic populist representative--exploit it as a political football to advance their own ambitions. Killing two birds with one stone, Anthony Weiner (D-Queens, Brooklyn) contends that the work is an eye sore and sexist--that the City of New York should sell it off on Craigslist rather than conserve it. His statements would be laughable were it not that he follows John Ashcroft, Pied-Piper like, in his efforts to rid the country of works of art he deems valueless. And his precedent is encouraging others in turn. [This sort of hypocrisy recalls the disingenuous cant of the Nazi party concerning decadent art during the 1930s--cut???.] In Maine, for example, the governor’s recent efforts to remove a 2007 public mural devoted to the subject of laborers represent the same self-serving politics as those of Weiner (and Queens Borough President Helen Marshall). Yet their opinions decidedly do not reflect the sentiments of the local community. Add to this the efforts to relocate Charles Alston and Hale Woodruff's murals from their public perch in an historically important Los Angeles building to the Smithsonian's Museum of African American History, and the signals are clear. Together these events underscore the fragility of an idea that we tend to take for granted: that public art is designed as "site-specific," contributes to a sense of place, and serves as an economic engine for localities that aren't necessarily in the metropolitan center.

Queens, in fact boasts only the residues of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs and the MacMonnies monument as cultural artifacts. People (mostly politicians), as art historian Michele Bogart has noted, seem to believe that if they don't like the work of public art, that it should just be moved out of sight (sorry for pun) and out of mind.

Politicians knee-jerk reactions are not acceptable when they have the power to act upon them. We who have thought long and hard about art know much better, and it behooves us to stand up for what we know is right. Pastor Martin Niemöllers much-cited statement comes immediately to mind:

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the communists
and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me -
and by then there was no one left to speak out for me.

The CAA elects not to speak out against irresponsible political statements and actions (which have potentially disasterous implications for all public art) because “its members might have some considerable differences of opinion” about these works of art. In making this decision, the organization has abdicated of one of its central responsibilities as a professional arts organization. The CAA should be establishing mechanisms for members to mobilize quickly to fire back when politicians behave as did the governor of Maine, or, as was the case with Congressman Weiner, cavelierely disregard the fact that the municipality has a long-standing, charter-mandated process in place for the removal and relocation of works of art. The CAA should be looking out for the interests of its public artist members and actively supporting the idea of conserving works that have been selected for a city’s permanent collection. Civic Virtue is but one example. If we allow it to disintegrate, then any public work that fails to capture the heart of political representatives is potentially in jeopardy.

To ignore the corruption of basic values that we know to be true in both art and life is to collude in our own corruption. Niemöller’s statement affirms that we must all stay vigilant and go against the current if we hope to preserve the creative freedoms we value.