people on tv are liars?
Mean internet commenters are piling on Brian Williams, now that there's some proof he's an airhead. This one from Salon is good:
averow45 It was another hot day in Iraq. Hotter than Hades in the Chinook copter that the Brian was flying in. So very boring because He knew that there was unreported news occurring down there in the desert. Wasting no time Brian grabbed a chute from the loadmaster and jumped out of the chopper, drifting straight into the insurgents' command camp. He brazenly strode up to the insurgents' leader and demanded a cease fire. Despite not speaking a word of their language he simply got it done through sheer force of personality. Then he heard that one of the dastardly insurgents had disobeyed the cease fire by firing an RPG at the very chopper he had just been in! The Brian wasted no time. He jogged directly to the crash site, rendered first aid to the wounded and fixed the broken hydraulic lines using his bare hands. After returning stateside the President awarded him the Medal of Freedom in a secret Rose Garden Ceremony.
horizontal censorship in the art world
Mark Ames, who along with Matt Taibbi ran the satirical newspaper The Exile in Russia, moved back to the US in 2008 and comments this week in Pando Daily about what he calls the "horizontal censorship" practiced here (as opposed to Putin's vertical, top-down variety). The social media and blog environment that initially promised a break from elite-managed discourse, Ames argues, has become an intellectual dystopia of earnest "outrage addicts" mobbing up on comedians and satirists.* It's a form of censorship because it doesn't respect satire or comedy as a bounded, socially useful activity, and applies the standards of political responsibility to a type of work that is inherently anarchic and disruptive. A comedian, satirist, or, let's add, performance or conceptual artist, concerned about a loss of reputation or livelihood, has an incentive to self-censor to avoid a personal smear based on deliberate or ignorant misconstruing of work.
Art F City's recent campaign to blemish the reputation of an artist, Ryder Ripps, with the help of Rhizome.org and anonymous Facebook groups, perfectly exemplifies what Ames describes. That campaign came to a head last week with a tweet and a headline crowing that Ripps' current show was his "death knell." Besides the complete loss of critical objectivity in Paddy Johnson citing her own predictions about a show as evidence of its failure, the campaign depended on misreading two separate projects, which were both humorous in context, as unethical and "offensive," and linking them together with a kind of running innuendo about their alleged "misogyny."
Ripps has attempted to correct some of the factual inaccuracies and wrong assumptions in Paddy Johnson's review of his Postmasters show. No artist should have to do this. Thousands more people will see Johnson's attack pieces than will ever see the defense.
*or in Ames' case, a muckracking journalist whose past satirical works were treated as scandalous truth by his detractors
