F. Precognition

A New Dimension (installation view), “The Bloombergs,” Silver Shed Gallery NYC (2012)

Social media, for all the boosterism, has been co-opted to serve as a processing tool for online social exchange by the usual corporate syndicates.
While it’s very true that individual participants are still finding excellent uses for the systems, and that beautiful community organizing movements can work on Web 2.0 platforms, the macro is slaughtering the micro into media bits for consumption, and the promise of broadband and universal web access is failing to deliver democracy. What mostly occurs in today’s social media is an extension of media syndication, for commercial purposes.
This analysis doesn’t reach the real problem, however. The power-value of MS, FB and Twitter isn’t primarily in their advertiser apps. The juice fueling these platforms is their value as data pools, as case study environments, and back-door surveillance networks. An average user, enjoying FB for its capacity for reconnecting people separated by time and distance, isn’t usually aware of or concerned that an anonymous administrator or analyst or Homeland Security agent can acquire and apply data contained in a FB profile, 4Dimensionally integrating that information into massive databases to whatever end.
When the financial sector giants, the ones who caused the financial catastrophes of 2007 through the present and for the foreseeable future, began to divvy up the major social media sites among themselves, using blood-money from their US racket to do so, I’d had enough. If my high school friends want to let me know what they’re up to, they can email me at art at artforhumans dot com. I’ll be dumping all Google apps soon. “Do no harm,” my ass.
— AFH Real "PURE" Digital Tumblr, “Deactivation of AFH Social Media,” March 16. 2011

Notre Dame Grotto and Golden Dome (1983)

[1982] After abandoning psychology and theatre arts as majors, I settled on English at the end of freshman year, which was mainly dedicated to introductory classes: philosophy, theology, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and a liberal arts section which turned out to be marvelous, due to the instructor’s prowess (the dean emeritus, enjoying his golden years, whose name I can’t recollect, today). I received a first-rate survey of Western Lit at ND, which included: intensive forays into Existentialists, Comparative Lit, like Calvino, Marquez, Kazantzakis, et al. with Werge; the formidable John Matthias and Joe Duffy’s superlative courses, which introduced us to Pynchon, Owens, Davies, Pound, Eliot, Yvor Winters, and so many others. By the spring of ’85, having read hundreds of thousands of pages of words, literally, I reached saturation, which abetted my wholesale shift to art, my commitment to which became vocational. For the next dozen-plus months, I stumbled along from one extracurricular madcap, boozy misadventure to the next, in the meantime feverishly painting a series of mixed media portraits of the artist-alcoholic as a young man that would comprise my unauthorized senior thesis show. Upon graduation from Notre Dame, and barely surviving that terrible motorcycle crash aforementioned, I got hit by lightning (no kidding), and shortly thereafter hit the highway again with my lifelong mentor Don Vogl, his son, also Paul, and another former student of my professor. Along the way, I obsessively plowed through dozens of the popular Louis L’Amour Westerns, purchased at truck stops, as we tripped from South Bend to San Francisco, Vegas, Santa Fe, and back, camping in parks like Yosemite, Redwood, Rocky Mountain National and dozens of others. Don painted lovely plein air pictures. I filled a sketchbook with ink blot-like compositions — which, by the way, developed into a lifelong practice. [RIP, Don. You were one of the most important figures in my life.] Highlights: A full moon at the base of El Capitan on tuinol, weed and whiskey, chatting with Bambi; dropping acid at the Grand Canyon, then driving through the red en route to Sin City; capturing a very large tarantula at White Sands, missiles zooming overhead. My confidence in concrete Reality was definitely getting precarious.

My fellow graduates were interning on Wall Street, on deployments, or celebrating their scholastic achievements in domestic hotspots or abroad. The nerds went straight to med school or whichever grad program/professional training pertained to their designated career path. A lot of them got right to work, in the family business and whatnot. Me, I was spending a decadent month in a custom van on the road with three or four exceedingly colorful guys. One of whom had just finished a prison stint for knifing an Irish football player in a bar brawl. We had this shoebox full of all sorts of drugs (Don never partook), and also buckets of beer, and the radio — a perpetual source of rancor, since our tastes in tunes diverged precipitously. Things got REAL, and real complicated, sometimes in a slow burn, other times like Vesuvias, or a barrage of bottle rockets on the 4th of July. We had no GPS, no cellular or smart phones, no Internet. It was a vastly different world, in so many respects. That was forty years ago, but it may as well be 4,000. When reflecting on those differences, to me the most pronounced is in the character of American folk in general, the pace of our lives, how we connected and interacted with arc other, our expectations, how we expressed grief or pride, the rituals. The crazed velocity of change, its inertia, has left most of us untethered from any fixed assumption of knowable causality. Certainty is dead, and disruption rules.

No wonder a remarkable number of Americans identify as artists and/or entrepreneurs (see Sholette’s Dark Matter), in most cases, a short-lived delusion, shattered as soon as one approaches a dealer or just a gallerista, concocts a semi-legit business plan, or just a spread sheet for startup expenses and revenue projections. “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” an old Irishman I knew used to say! Auto-identifying as an artist still can serve as a glamorous justification for being broke, without viable prospects, desperate, bodily unwell and generally unstable. As long as you’re able to present a vivacious hustler-creative avatar mirage for the streams, you’re still in the Game, am I right? Who’s going to contradict your nominal improviso, in the absence of artistic definition? Be sincere, or not — it ought not matter; either stance can gain traction, depending on your target demographic/platform, if you take the leap and go wired! If you are strenuously committed to your phantasm, I recommend avoiding counter-narratives, like those populating the feeds of Bloomberg News, and also that you not track his (Michael Bloomberg’s) substantial art world exploits, just one his many transactional, public-facing patronage gestures, especially during his corrupt third mayoral term, a structural premonition of Trump, who cloaks his graft and grift in the flag, not front-page NGO grants. What I mean is, don’t bother yourself with pesky macro-economic facts and figures (e.g., the Handbook on the Economics of Arts and Culture). Don’t investigate Eli and Edythe Broad’s brand of “venture philanthropy,” KB Home/Sun America, which made him a billionaire, and was instrumental in causing the Great Recession. You’ll not want to grok the big picture of art’s relation to power in late stage capitalism. I did just that in the early 2010s and paid dearly for the indiscretion of principled dissent. I recommend Hannah Arendt on the topic of complicity among friends, too, if ignorant bliss proves unsustainable. Ain’t it sad, what a soul has to set aside, to simply paint a happy mountain or tree? [God bless you Bob Ross, RIP] Tang ping.