BAD ART
Writing for ARTnews, Richard B. Woodward looks at the popularity of “bad” art and the complicated, contradictory notion of taste.
Cattelan, like Hirst, has hit on a formula that forecloses on the possibility of an audience’s feeling insulted. Only a tiny number of Catholics took umbrage at La Nona Ora, Cattelan’s 1999 sculpture of Pope John Paul II struck by a meteor, and even they weren’t sure why they should be offended. When the piece sold at auction in 2004 for $3 million, Cattelan’s act of smirking impiety was confirmed as a high-priced collectible. As Peter Schjeldahl wrote in the New Yorker, Cattelan’s career “reveals, or even fortifies, the fact that self-parody has become the life-support system of international art infrastructures. Make people feel smart, and they will put up with anything. The mindset cannot be outflanked or overturned, because it routinely performs those operations on itself.
Bad taste often passes for avant-garde taste these days—so long as the artist signals “transgressive” intent. And whereas kitsch in art was once to be assiduously disdained, art that traffics in sentimentality and bathos behind a dancing veil of ironic laughter has become highly prized. Jeff Koons, John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, Richard Prince, and Takashi Murakami are just a few of those who have learned that coy subversion can be popular and lucrative. As long as everyone is in on the joke that the art is satirizing its own historical codes of representation, there is nothing to be upset about.
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The Benefits of an Empty Stomach
For Harper’s, Steve Hendricks synthesizes research on the medical benefits of month-long fasts, and recounts his own.
To test his vow of celibacy, Gandhi slept in the nude with a nubile grandniece. He never advanced on her, but an involuntary emission could prompt weeks of self-recrimination. I lack a grandniece, but I recalled the Mahatma’s test on the day I prepared a meal for my family. When starting my fast, I traded my traditional role of family chef for that of dishwasher. But as time passed, I missed cooking, so on Sunday, my seventh day, I made a trial of penne with olive oil and parmesan for my son. I was surprised that the meal aroused me not at all. On subsequent days I made pad thai, potato and leek soup, chickpea curry, and artichoke and feta pizza, all without yearning.
I was without yearning in other spheres too. My libido, which had been de minimis since Tuesday, had by the weekend become defunctus. I had foreseen this sorry state, another fasting commonplace, but it was still a wound. My avenues of recreation were being hedged in one by one. For paltry redress, the throb in my temples had disappeared, my clarity of mind had returned, and my sense of well-being was once more as intact as a writer’s—a sex-less writer’s—could be.
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How Corporations Became People
Writing for The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin recounts how conservative Justices on the Supreme Court were able to turn a narrow case, originally argued only over whether campaign finance law applied to video on demand services, into one that overturned decades of precedent, remaking how our elections are run:
Through artful questioning, Alito, Kennedy, and Roberts had turned a fairly obscure case about campaign-finance reform into a battle over government censorship. The trio made Stewart—and thus the government—take an absurd position: that the government might have the right to criminalize the publication of a five-hundred-page book because of one line at the end.
…
On June 29, 2009, the last day of the term, the Court shocked the litigants—and the political world—by announcing, “The case is restored to the calendar for reargument.” The parties were directed to file new briefs. In plain English, the Court’s order told the parties that the Justices were considering overruling two major decisions in modern campaign-finance law. Most important, the Court was weighing whether to overturn its endorsement of McCain-Feingold in the McConnell case of 2003. As every sophisticated observer of the Court knew, the Court did not ask whether cases should be overruled unless a majority of the Justices were already prepared to do so.
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Is Public Education a Threat to National Security?
Diane Ravitch, for the New York Review of Books, utterly dismantles “US Education Reform and National Security,” a recent report on the condition of public education from the Council on Foreign Relations.
If there is no national security crisis, as the task force has vainly tried to establish, what can we learn from its deliberations?
Commissions that gather notable figures tend not to be venturesome or innovative, and this one is no different. When a carefully culled list of corporate leaders, former government officials, academics, and prominent figures who have a vested interest in the topic join to reach a consensus, they tend to reflect the status quo. If future historians want to see a definition of the status quo in American education in 2012, they may revisit this report by a task force of the Council on Foreign Relations. It offers no new directions, no new ideas, just a stale endorsement of the federal, state, and corporate policies of the past decade that have proven so counterproductive to the genuine improvement of American education.
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The Fall Of Public Housing
Ben Austen writes in Harper’s about the demolition of Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green public housing high-rises, as part of the Chicago Housing Authority’s so-called Plan For Transformation.
Deborah Hope lived in the Cabrini row houses for nearly twenty years before moving to a fourth-floor unit in the newly built Parkside of Old Town. … It all began, Hope said, when she was ten years old and her mother moved the family into the projects, to Rockwell Gardens on the West Side. That was the start of the disasters for them, the murders and drugs and alcohol and what they call the felonious society. Her sister was stabbed to death in the elevator, and Hope, at thirteen, took charge of raising her eight-month-old nephew. She pointed to a portrait of her sister on the wall above the dining room table, a pretty girl of eighteen, heavy-lidded, seated in a rattan lounge chair. A photograph on top of Hope’s television showed a brother who had died of AIDS. She counted off fifteen family members—including the sister, another brother, an aunt, and two of her own children—who got killed by guns or knives.
Hope later moved into an apartment on the North Side, in an all-white neighborhood. Yuppieville, she called it. They paid full rent, $1,500 a month, no assistance, food stamps, or medical card. She was raising four kids at the time, working three jobs, one for American Airlines at O’Hare, another at a skating rink, and the third as a school crossing guard. Hope would come home to drop off money and head right back out, riding the train or a bike. Then her mom died, at the age of fifty-two, Hope’s age now. And her brother went to prison, for being a “menace to society,” the court said. He got twenty years for selling drugs. Hope said there were weak men and strong men, and her brother was strong… But her landlords found out about her brother and said they didn’t want that kind. They raised the rent up so high Hope couldn’t manage, and she ended up in eviction court. She was given two weeks to get out and either head into emergency housing or be homeless. She didn’t want to go back to the projects, but she had no other choice.
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Is Mitt Romney a Bully?
Jason Horowitz delicately examines Mitt Romney’s years at the Cranbrook Academy, talking with dozens of former classmates to draw a picture of Romney has a young, sometimes overly aggressive, prankster:
John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.
“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenage son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.
A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
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Child, Psychopath
Writing for The New York Times Magazine, Jennifer Kahn looks at a new road in child psychology, one that hopes to identify early signs of psychopathy in children. How do we discern whether unruly behavior is a sign of an innate disorder or simply the rash actions of a child? Can an early diagnosis of psychopathy actually lead to beneficial treatment, or is it simply a scarlet letter?
Currently, there is no standard test for psychopathy in children, but a growing number ofpsychologists believe that psychopathy, like autism, is a distinct neurological condition — one that can be identified in children as young as 5. Crucial to this diagnosis are callous-unemotional traits, which most researchers now believe distinguish “fledgling psychopaths” from children with ordinary conduct disorder, who are also impulsive and hard to control and exhibit hostile or violent behavior. According to some studies, roughly one-third of children with severe behavioral problems — like the aggressive disobedience that Michael displays — also test above normal on callous-unemotional traits. (Narcissism and impulsivity, which are part of the adult diagnostic criteria, are difficult to apply to children, who are narcissistic and impulsive by nature.)
In some children, C.U. traits manifest in obvious ways. Paul Frick, a psychologist at the University of New Orleans who has studied risk factors for psychopathy in children for two decades, described one boy who used a knife to cut off the tail of the family cat bit by bit, over a period of weeks. The boy was proud of the serial amputations, which his parents initially failed to notice. “When we talked about it, he was very straightforward,” Frick recalls. “He said: ‘I want to be a scientist, and I was experimenting. I wanted to see how the cat would react.’ ”
In another famous case, a 9-year-old boy named Jeffrey Bailey pushed a toddler into the deep end of a motel swimming pool in Florida. As the boy struggled and sank to the bottom, Bailey pulled up a chair to watch. Questioned by the police afterward, Bailey explained that he was curious to see someone drown. When he was taken into custody, he seemed untroubled by the prospect of jail but was pleased to be the center of attention.
In many children, though, the signs are subtler. Callous-unemotional children tend to be highly manipulative, Frick notes. They also lie frequently — not just to avoid punishment, as all children will, but for any reason, or none. “Most kids, if you catch them stealing a cookie from the jar before dinner, they’ll look guilty,” Frick says. “They want the cookie, but they also feel bad. Even kids with severe A.D.H.D.: they may have poor impulse control, but they still feel bad when they realize that their mom is mad at them.” Callous-unemotional children are unrepentant. “They don’t care if someone is mad at them,” Frick says. “They don’t care if they hurt someone’s feelings.” Like adult psychopaths, they can seem to lack humanity. “If they can get what they want without being cruel, that’s often easier,” Frick observes. “But at the end of the day, they’ll do whatever works best.”
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Is Indigenous Media a Faustian Bargain?
Anthropologist Faye Ginsburg considers whether the benefits of empowering indigenous people to produce media outweigh those traditions that are lost.
Indigenous and minority people have faced a kind of Faustian dilemma. On the one hand, they are finding new modes for expressing indigenous idetntiy through media and gaining access to film and video to serve their own needs and ends. On the the other hand, the spread of communications technology such as home video and satellite downlinks threatens to be a final assault on culture, language, imagery, relationship between generations, and respect for traditional knowledge.
How The Atlantic Ocean Was Saved
Writing for The Washington Monthly, Alison Fairbrother tells the story of how an alliance of environmentalists, sport fishermen and scientists took on industrial fishers and saved the Atlantic Ocean:
Price is a lifelong striped bass fisherman with no formal training as a scientist. Yet he has spent the last four decades cutting open bass stomachs in a kind of renegade ecological study, charting the precipitous decline of the lowly menhaden. Price’s interest in the species is indirect; menhaden aren’t prized by anglers. But they are prized by striped bass. The little fish has historically been the striper’s most significant source of protein and calories. In fact, menhaden are a staple in the diets of dozens of marine predators in the Atlantic and its estuaries, from osprey to bluefish to dolphin to blue crab. In a host of undersea food chains, menhaden—also known as pogy and bunker—are a common denominator. They have been called the most important fish in the sea.
…
Harvested by the billions and then processed into various industrial products, menhaden are extruded into feed pellets that make up the staple food product for a booming global aquaculture market, diluted into oil for omega-3 health supplements, and sold in various meals and liquids to companies that make pet food, livestock feed, fertilizer, and cosmetics. We have all consumed menhaden one way or another. Pound for pound, more menhaden are pulled from the sea than any other fish species in the continental United States, and 80 percent of the menhaden netted from the Atlantic are the property of a single company.
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“U Want Me 2 Kill Him?”
For Vanity Fair in 2005, Judy Bachrach tells the haunting tale of a fourteen-year-old’s stabbing in Manchester and the sordid, convoluted internet fantasy through which the “victim” arranged his own attempted murder.
Four months after the stabbing, the charges were amended. Mark was still accused of attempted murder, to which he ultimately pleaded guilty. But this time John also was charged—with inciting murder. His own murder. This is a legal novelty in Britain, and very likely throughout the world. “Yes, I’m not aware of any other case where somebody’s incited somebody to murder themselves,” Nicholas Clarke, the prosecutor, declares in his Manchester office, each syllable clipped with derision. It is clear he doesn’t have much sympathy for the boy whose brush with death prompted the unprecedented charge. “I would say, of the two teenagers, John was the more wicked and more criminally culpable.”
For months John had corresponded in an Internet chat room with Mark, a bland-featured 16-year-old who possesses as his most striking traits a vast forehead, a tendency to open every sentence with “Ermmm,” and, it would later be claimed, an almost infinite store of credulity. Every story John spun on the chat-room site, every slithering creation dropped into the ocean of the Internet, Mark avidly reeled in. Invention was so easy, “the equivalent of taking heroin,” John thought. The older boy’s gullible nature stirred in him conflicting emotions: love foremost, but very likely also a shade of contempt.
It was “like feeding a dog,” John would later explain.
As for himself, John was a virtual Scheherazade, a gifted fabricator. “Staggering,” said the judge who would hear his case. “Skilled writers of fiction would struggle to conjure up a plot such as arises here.” From John’s laptop emerged what the prosecutor would subsequently describe as “an Internet soap opera moving from one scene to another, each character and story line more fantastic than the last.” The plots were extracted from what John had seen both in films and in life: thick with treachery, villainy, and betrayal. They were empty of hope.
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