general

Internet commenters generally outshine media hack pundits. Here is a comment from Salon letters:

Why stimuli won't work!
The trouble with our economy is described widely as a growing loss of confidence by consumers as they witness their housing values fall and their 401Ks atrophied. Before August 2007 and the decline in housing prices, before August 2008 and the collapse of the stock market and investment banks, the economy was not sound. As has been noted by observers of our economy, salaries and wages have not kept pace with GDP growth since the 1970s. Our trade deficits have been reliably larger year by year. Our borrowing has mounted hugely with our each military enterprise.

We have an economy that produces mostly armaments and financial paper. Not many buyers for the financial paper any longer, and armaments cannot be eaten, worn, lived in or driven around town. They can be sold to other militaristic countries, and thus they are our greatest export.

Not until we start producing consumer goods of our own to fill the shelves of Wal-Mart and to sell overseas will our economy be healthy again. Stimulus is like adrenalin. It may keep the heart going for a while, but eventually the muscle dies.

-- Goedel

I'd take it a step further and say we have to break the whole cycle of consumption and waste that results in this year's must-have doodads becoming next year's landfill, with heavy elements seeping into water tables, etc.

And this line from Josh Marshall's blog (by David Kurtz) takes an anthropological tack:

Former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson makes the fascinating point that breaking the back of the elites is a critical stage in crisis resolution in developing and post-communist countries -- a stage we have yet to go through in confronting our own crisis.

Am unofficially dedicating this twitter "intermittent dream journal" post to double happiness.

(Because they write about their dreams and are obsessed with products and such.)

History of Tramp Art

... Tramp Art is also a wanderer's art form: so again, there are no written records of the carvers' work. The stories of this art form became the facts; the misconceptions became the truths. There were no rules for constructing the pieces; materials were whatever the carver had available; decorations were whatever he could produce or find. Within the context of his own imagination, experience, and abilities, the carver assimilated what he saw with what he had to work with. He then translated and created what he saw into works of art by using his pocketknife and the ever-present cigar box.

Like the hobo, the tramp was a wanderer, but unlike the hobo, he was not a worker. Most tramps lived by their wits, some by petty thievery and begging, some by robbery and murder. The hobo feared the tramp and was contemptuous of him as a loafer, while the tramp despised the hobo as a sucker for working.

The distinction between tramps and hoboes, however, was not always discernible. Many men, and women, lived in both worlds, hoboing to make a "stake," then living without working until the stake ran out. Some hoboes became tramps, especially when there was no work to be found, and some tramps became hoboes. But even though tramps and hoboes often lived in different worlds, as far as work and philosophy were concerned, they were forced to share the same space. Hoboes and tramps together flipped the same trains, ate and slept in the same jungles, and were locked up together in the same jail cells.

The tramp world, however, had its own society separate with its own rules and its own hierarchy. At the top of the list was the "profesh," or professional tramp. He was distinguishable because of his good clothes, his habits of neatness, and that he often slept on newspapers.

The typical tramp, as we think of him, was a "fakir." He was part conman and part repairman or apprentice of a trade, such as a tinsmith, carpenter, blacksmith, etc. Many fakirs were very skilled but preferred to wander from town to town, searching for work when they felt like it.

The common meeting ground of both hoboes and tramps was the "jungle." [cont'd]

A good example of the erased-in-Photoshop genre. That was what the Whitney forgot in the specimens it put in the 2001 "Bitstreams" show: wit. (Instead we got "whit.") (Why keep harping on that show? Even though it was 8 years ago it was kind of the arrival and death of computer art in the museum.)

The linked example comes from lalblog.tumblr, but there doesn't appear to be an author of this thing, just lots of links to other tumblr sites. Again, much preferable to having a computer genius touted as the only person doing the gimmick.

Have been rewriting an older post about the artist Dennis Hollingsworth:

Dennis Hollingsworth's paintings have been mentioned here a few times. What follows is an attempt to describe the work and answer some criticisms of it.

Let's start by saying what it definitely isn't:

"just about paint"

That's like saying that The Rite of Spring is just about musical notes. If you think the canvases are some dull, said-a-million-times statement about materiality, as some commenters have suggested, please look again and remember that the whorls, blobs, and explosions are not mere accidents but also a record of events shaped by a human consciousness. Not a vision of an animate cosmos as literal as, say, Blake's, but still a teeming universe of suggestive contours and textures, thwarting powers of speech--a morphed mashup of animals, ghosts, genetic mutations, war wounds, and impossibly tangled plant life, at least in this viewer's art-prompted reckoning.

One could say in '80s jargon that his thick paint is a hyperrealized version of past expressionist art--a Baudrillard term meaning roughly "on steroids." But to call it pornographic, as one commenter did, rather ignores the joyful, non-synthetic element. The artist says the work is an "affirmation of paint" after the negation of the post-Modern years. But does that make it Modernist? If so, it's closer to surreal, abject side of Modernism that Clement Greenberg and other 20th Century critics tried to edit out of history. The colors may be joyful, but the sea urchin-like blobs that cling to everything seem vaguely alien and parasitic. The intricate cutting and slicing of organic forms suggests an anatomist's inner burrowing.

And lastly you have the linguistic side of Hollingsworth's work--a hermetic system of recurring elements (which have names--see Scott Speh's review) that serve as a private lexicon in a state of perpetual breakdown and reshuffling. This recombinant practice hews closer to postmodernism than the Modernism that forever proclaimed its abstract vocabularies as new and scientifically derived. Hollingsworth's work is aware of nonrepresentational conventions and builds on the limited vocabularies of Peter Halley, Jonathan Lasker, et al, who in turn built on the Abstract Expressionists. Yet ultimately his fearlessness to engage in actual, dense, convoluted, expressionistic (or expression-like) paint handling gives him a richer and more varied range of iconography than those predecessor "deconstructors."