The Academic Ages

Once upon a time, there was a research study conducted in which two men and a woman were put in a situation in which the study's designers believed they had accounted for all of the possible variables that they would encounter and thereby be able to specifically determine what motivated them to do this, that, and the other. 

The situation involved the three subjects being put in a 10x10 foot room. They were all of the same age, same height and weight, same educational background, same socioeconomic background, same ethnic ancestry, same geographic region, and so on, all the way down to the length of their toenails. Quite a study, really. Historically speaking. 

But there was also an apple, a dildo, and a knife. The three were told to stay in that room for 24 hours together. Once in the room, the researchers stated over an intercom that the only person who would be allowed to live would be the person who ate the apple while the dildo was in their ass. For some reason, the researchers believed they knew exactly how the scene would play out except for one tiny detail. That detail involved speculation over whether the woman would wait until one of the men killed the other or if she would team up with one of the men. They were certain the two men would not team up. 

What happened, though, was that three had sex using the dildo, slept, had sex, shared the apple, used the knife to carve tattoos into their arms and legs, had sex, slept, and then died all together when the gas was released into the room. This was not considered an unethical experiment at the time. It was state-sanctioned. It happened. 

What are you gonna do, right? Well, some things were done after the fact, but they were related to the volume of such odd and useless experiments. Strangely, oddity became the fashion. Macabre oddity in the form of academic research. For the first time in history in any country, academics delivered knowledge to the public in ways most understood and could apply in their daily lives to improve the quality of their lives. The only people who didn't understand what was happening were the academics. 

"The ideas are too simple," one scientist said to another.

"It's like they think they know something worthwhile and aren't telling us what they know," said another scientist. "It's baffling."

"We must do more research," said another.

So they set up a new research study at a renown university. This time they lined up a bunch of people who came from undereducated backgrounds, working class folk, plumbers and pipefitters, mechanics and warehouse workers, clerks and receptionists. They asked each of them what they knew. It only took a few days to ask all of the subjects to express all that they knew. 

The researchers were flabbergasted. "How could they know so little and yet be so satisfied?" asked one. "What are they not telling us?" asked another. "They are clearly withholding in bad faith; we must be more aggressive with our methods," they all decided. They tortured them to extract whatever they were withholding, using intelligence interrogators for the most hard-to-crack subjects. Even after months, they knew little more than the number of vowels that could be screamed in succession without taking a breath for most subjects. 

One subject thought it was odd that they should be called subjects, wondering how being the object of research could grant anything approximating the status of being a subject. The researchers recognized this man's insight as a legitimate breakthrough. They further tortured him and discovered that the man began creating wild delusional theories as to why the researchers were doing what they were doing. 

They decided to plant this man's initial question into the interrogations of the others and they discovered that introducing one question alone could lead subjects to become frightfully inquisitive in general, completely changing their orientation. They discovered, in a sense, how to transform everyday people into academics by torturing them and putting them in a position in which they had to try to answer all of their questions about why they were being tortured so that they could somehow figure out a way to stop being tortured. 

There were two conclusions reached after four decades of ongoing research in this vein: One, that the people who held little knowledge lived in worlds in which little was needed to live a fulfilling life. Two, that being put into excruciating pain leads people who may have only had a six-grade education to spontaneously become academics, questioning everything. Only one academic asked the question, "What in the hell does that say about me?" 

He killed himself immediately after asking the question which led to an era of academic censorship. All was well and good for a couple decades, but then climate change got out of hand and people thought, "Shit, we need the fucking scientists again!" Overnight, academics emerged from the woodwork like bedbugs, swarming over the landscape, torturing people in the name of climate research, discovering that the fear of torture was much greater than the fear of climate change. This calmed people down and helped them accept that they were going to drown if they insisted on living in Miami. The academics cheered, screaming, "No, no, we won't go, we've got Reason, Rationality, and Logic, yo!"

That immediately changed everyone's perceptions of the academics and everyone who wasn't an academic said, "What a bunch of nerds. Let's torture them this time." And so what was later called the Dark Ages by academics who rose to power again centuries later came into being. We could say it isn't known what happened without the university informing the public, but there was the Internet and smart phones so everything was documented. 

Seemed like a pretty boring time in history. Not a lot of fights. No arguments to speak of. No one wondered anything. They just sat with pina coladas on beaches everyday without a thought or care in the world once they figured out how to handle climate change, end racism and sexism, and simplify everything so even children could thrive. It was utopian, in some sense, but eventually someone asked a question about what time the party ended and someone else wondered if parties should ever end and then someone said it's too bad life ends and then someone wondered whether life had to end and then science came roaring back into practice and everyone doubted everything and everyone again, returning the world to its natural academic state.

Art and Trust

I think artists are decision makers and leaders who find the political discourse of their place and time to be outrageous and infantile. They aren't retreating from political life so much as collaborating with others and the world more communally. They are offering rather than imposing. 

It's a real question for me whether a "commercial artist" can exist. Artist is not the right word in that context. Money changing hands changes the nature and the message of the artwork itself, even as performance. Ownership has been exchanged, not art or even artistic experience (aesthetic experience is possible, yes). An artistic experience has been expressed in the creation, perhaps, but not in the exchange. The receipt is the ownership of a privatized (rather than personal) aesthetic experience. 

Nothing personal has changed hands because nothing personal is contained in the exchange of the work or performance. It's only when art is given or "left" as placements or performances in public or communal spaces -- no other exchanges being made between the artist and the communal audience -- that the exchange can be personal and the art received as an offering rather than an acquisition (in terms of object-based or time-based ownership. This even applies to architecture viewable from the commons, but that's another story).

Viewing a Monet in a gallery is not the same as in a museum or public display. The setting makes a difference. A gallery is a private space, even during open viewings. A museum is public, ostensibly, depending on whether they accept donations or force visitors to pay for the experience of improving the quality of their visual lives as well as their internal orientation (which, in practice, raises the experiences of each person coming into contact with such a person). 

A museum visitor, a person who wants to experience the art of another, in this case let's say Van Gogh, is a nomad seeking visual sustenance in the areas of the urban and agricultural environments where certain types of visual nutrients exist. They're roaming the lands looking to immerse themselves in a painting, but it might as well be a sculpture, an installation, architecture, a concert in a park. 

It's the same with any interaction. If I pay you to listen to me as a counselor or therapist, I speak differently than I would to a friend who is personally invested in my life to some extent. Trust is leased only so far when money changes hands. Releasing that which binds trust is the only way out of the local, regional, national, and global mess. Saying "corporations can't be trusted" need not be dramatic or a radical position, but one can hear the emotional inflection from the voice of any actor in a movie (I want the truth! You can't handle the truth!) when reading that quote. It smacks of Occupy Wall Street on the surface.

That emotional content masks the factual content of the underlying structural foundations for the thought: If money changes hands, the transaction represents a lack of trust between the two parties. It is not about compensation or self-interest; it is about distrust of the other, the impersonal nature of the relationship.

That distrust of others is the foundation of all political discourse throughout "civilized" history. It still persists even though biology has been telling us humans are a social species for how long now? Each of our self-interests are dependent on the well-being of others. We ignore one another at our own peril. Art and science have answers that contemporary politics can't fathom. They are locked into gazes deep into one another's eyes, distrusting, conniving, trying to outwit each other for the opportunity to impose their will and dominate. Nothing achieved politically is ever a gift or an offering. It is always transactional and, thus, impersonal and distrusting.

Light and Shadow

We are living in Jeremy Bentham's world:

The Panopticon. The Instagram. The Facebook. The Twitter. 

But what if we stopped viewing the world as black and white or even as a range of colors? What if we saw it as light and shadow?

When the light shines on the face of a person, that person's skin is brighter than it is when seen covered by shadows, no matter the skin's color. A person's fate is determined more by how the light of the world shines on them than any given choice they could ever make (as if choices could exist independent of circumstance).

A person who has lived in the shadows for years or decades, whether by chance or choice, may reject the light entirely, as the light illuminates what is hurtful, what is harmful, what is hateful. Our cameras can't capture that; the images don't provide that information other than as wrinkles or lines on the face, the posture of a person, and so on. No technology can do that. 

But, our technology can mask what is present in reality. Most of the features on cameras are designed to do just that. No matter what brightness or contrast or airbrushing is used to change the appearance and texture of the skin and shape of the face, those applications are shadows that hide the face and body from the natural light of the world in a specific context of being in a time and place. 

A lighter skin provided by an airbrush is false. It's a lie. It's not a different type of lie than commercial advertising or selling false conspiracy theories online. Each of them hides life in the shadows and those images present shadow as light. 

But saying this in the way I just did in the previous paragraph, saying one is true and one is false, is a type of moral shadowing of reality. It's not that morality has no place in the world, just that acknowledging light (construed as truth, morally) has to occur before any moral (or, better yet, ethical) judgment is ever applied. The "rush to judgment" is the rush to see one thing and ignore everything else displayed in the light. 

What is displayed in addition to what is in the light are the potential locations of the shadows. This is mostly considered something bad, something the Panopticon is producing that it should not, exposing what is ugly in the world as something bad in the world. But, we're the ones putting the onus of "bad" onto what we perceive as "ugly" when exposed to the light. Perhaps we're not seeing what is actually present when we determine that something is "ugly." We're rushing to judgment. 

If we can withstand looking for a long time at what we instinctively or intuitively think is ugly, we might actually see what is there. We see through lenses of black and white, of color ranges, but we give short shrift to light and shadow. Publicly, anyway. 

But online, within social media, the vomiting of ideas without expressive filters is like the surfacing of the world's subconscious, with people not realizing the impact on the world the raw power of their truth (however aesthetically or morally pleasing or unpleasing). The only chaos in the world is our emotional chaos erupting from the shadows. 

There are filters being used, but none involve the light. They are shadows as well. The shadows of airbrushing Instagram photos, the shadows of touching up vacation photos on Facebook, the shadows of sharing conspiracy theories for fame and money, the shadows of BLM founders claiming to be Marxist while buying luxury vacation homes, the shadows of connecting personal content with commercial advertisers for the sake of profit, the shadows of trying to purge content from the sight of the world, the shadows of silencing dissent, the shadows of shaming and hating based on race, sex, gender, identities of all sorts. 

All of these things place content within the shadows. It's neither good nor bad to live in the shadows. When shadow provides shade from the harshness of the light, I prefer it as well. But saying shadow is light is not reality. 

The writings on Anti-Dada are anonymous. They are intellectually and financially free for your viewing and reading. They are free of advertising. The content is not intellectual property. It exists within the wilds of the corporate world, specifically the corporate world of Google. It's hardly free in that sense. But the ideas are not bound by copyright or trademark. Not by me. Yes, it could all be traced back here, whatever one writes and may present as their own. But I like the ideas more than I like the ownership of them. I'd like to see them spread because I prefer them over what exists in the consciousness of the world.