▼ Report: MegaAmerica, Non-aesthetic zones of new politic

Originally published 02/16/11, as part of society-society.

 

The megachurch movement is usually thought to have begun in the 1950s. Globally, these large congregations are a significant development in Protestant Christianity. While generally associated with the United States, the phenomenon has spread worldwide. The advent of television in the 1950′s, and the Internet in the 1990′s and 2000′s have been a motivator for mega churches. Megachurch services are often broadcasted.

In the United States, more than half of these large church institutions are non-denominational churches. Those that have ties to a larger body are most often members of the Southern Baptist denomination, which became a separate denomination in 1845 in following a regional split with northern Baptists over the issues of slavery. - [paraphrased; various sources]

 
Most of the megachurches, even those not associated with
Southern Baptists, share its collision of conservative politics,
mainstream American entertainment, the logic of corporate
architecture and the sense of corporate strategy – all of which
reflects the conservative American political psyche in total.

▼ Report: The Exaggerated American South

 

Now, returning home to Tennessee from Brooklyn, six years between, it comes back in front of the sun: the ignorance and hate of American culture’s fascist forms of Christianity. My cab driver had gold teeth; is ready for the vengeance, the war of the soul, the enemies are coming; prepare the soul and his faith was generating money – rewarding his capitalist life. “There are those picked to go to heaven and those picked to go to hell at birth, he said.

 
“Predestination”, I thought.
 
We picked up another passenger who was reading the same book.

▼A Note on a vision of: The End Of ‘Commercial Art’

As the political reality in the world continues to dissolve into fascism,  poverty,  death and ecological disasters,  the artists who became professionals over the past decade,  drinking from the new corporate investors and giving them empty mindless art will be written into history as complicit.

We will see that these artists are frozen in place by the seriousness of the economic investment in their work and they will be incapable of addressing the horrors of reality.

▼ Report: The Kochs, A Nazi Past, Oil & The Foundation of The Right

Notorious Nazis Ilse Koch, her husband Karl Otto Koch and Erich Koch are the ghosts of Koch Industries,  who seized the U.S. conservative political agenda years ago and seem capable of seizing the government in total through the Tea Party.  Ilse Koch was the Nazi’s specialist in making objects from human skin;  was the only woman charged with war crimes; and along with her husband was in charge of one of the most horrific horror camps in Nazi Germany.

Koch Industries is the child of the violence of Buchenwald,  widely regarded as one of wartime Germany’s most notorious “death camps”.

Information connecting Ilse and Koch Industries is hard to find but is a string of fragments,  pieces of information that connects the American and German Kochs and this connection gives us a clear image of the sentiment behind the Tea Party and conservative American politics since the 1950s.  Where is the connection between the German Koch’s and Fred Koch?  Besides evidence the American Koch was related to Ilse’s family,  Erich Koch  (a high level Nazi official in charge of Prussia)  invites Fred Koch to sell his oil in Nazi Germany when he is banned from doing business in the US.  After the fall of Nazi Germany,  Erich Koch and Fred expand the oil empire to the Soviet Union.  Erich Koch had been in charge of Prussia for Hitler so his ties to the Soviet Union ran deep.  A few years later the Soviets took Fred Koch’s oil and prosecuted Erich for war crimes – Fred Koch returned to the US,  became anti-communist,  and was allowed to do business in the States again.

The War Against Subjectivity

You cannot find sympathetic texts about Foucault and the Iranian Revolution on the internet from within the United States….

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“Foucault’s rejection of structuralism and Marxism can be explained as a consequence of his own approach which posits a radical ontology whereby the conception of the totality or whole is reconfigured as an always open,  relatively borderless system of infinite interconnections,  possibilities and developments.  His rejection of Hegelianism,  as well as of other enlightenment philosophies,  can be understood at one level as a direct response to his rejection of the mechanical atomist,  and organicist epistemological world views,  based upon a Newtonian conception of a closed universe operating upon the basis of a small number of invariable and universal laws,  by which all could be predicted and explained.  The idea of a fully determined,  closed universe is replaced;  and in a way parallel to complexity theories,  Foucault’s own approach emphasises notions such as self-organisation and dissipative structures;  time as an irreversible,  existential dimension;  a world of finite resources but with infinite possibilities for articulation,  or re-investment;  and characterized by the principles of openness,  indeterminism,  unpredictability,  and uncertainty.”

Mark Olsen – Foucault as Complexity Theorist:                                                                                                                                                           Overcoming the problems of classical philosophical analysis

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“Multiculturalism has made UK a ‘soft touch’ for jihadists.” –  A top British defense think tank.

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“We are seeing the first,  the very first,  early signs of a police state in this country.  It does not have to go that way if people stand up to it.  But the torture scandal cannot be dealt with separately from the impending emergence of a police state.  The distortions of the corporate-media cannot be analyzed separately from that emergence.”

– Lila Rajiva;  The Language of Empire,An Interview with Lila Rajiva by Seth Sandronsky

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▼ Report: Fascist USA & Abstraction After 9/11

If contemporary art reflected reality we would believe the last decade in the United States was a reality embedded with infinite jewels and parties all within a capitalist utopia so advanced and perfected that emotional, psychological and political ruptures have become a thing of the savage past.

Today is 09/11/10.

The event of 9/11 has become the perfect incubator of fascist tendencies, already built deep into the American psyche and now born as new oppression often exercised through either the invisible imprint of a corporate ethos or a nationalist chant.

▼ Report: Jerry Saltz Resigns From NY Mag

Jerry Saltz writes,

I have many confessions. One confession: the new New Museum has squandered its last best chance to get it right. Another confession: I am leaving my position as critic of New York Magazine. Why? Let me tell you, my holy ones. Read my words planet Thebes and along the way I promise confessions so powerful they shall divide the very molecules of our being. These words are game changers.

New Museum

There was a moment when my heart fell for the New Museum’s renovation; it’s upgrade. My love was a surprise. I am Jerry Saltz after all, the critic who loves to hate New York museums. To be fair, my love for the new New Museum was tempered by questions from the beginning. From the outside, this silvery museum, this column is a symbol of an ambitious desire to reflect and participate in the discourse around contemporary art.

No one had mustered the gumption to build an art museum from scratch in New York since the Guggenheim (opened in 1959) and the Whitney (1966) did so in rapid succession.

▼ Update: Gagosian’s Co-Conspirator

 

Roman Abramovich is the Russian oligarch and serious art collector named in connection with human trafficking charges brought against New York art dealer Larry Gagosian. Abramovich is accused of both selling countless sex slaves to Gagosian, as well as exchanging slaves for pieces from Gagosian’s private art collection.

Abramovich , born 24 October 1966, is a Russian business- man and the main owner of the private investment company Millhouse LLC.

▼ Report: Larry Gagosian To Be Indicted

 

New York art dealer Larry Gagosian will be indicted next month in Moscow on multiple charges of buying sex slaves from a well known Russian collector. The charges of human trafficking span a decade. Gagosian could face life in prison, although experts in the Russian judicial system express doubt he will be convicted. The Russian judicial system is notorious for its corruption including alleged pay offs to drop previous charges brought against the collector who will be indicted along with Gagosian.

▼ Report: Brooklyn Terrorist Phantoms

Left: Artist Joseph Kosuth. Right: Moderna Museet director Lars Nittve and Francesco Vezzoli.

Linda Yablonsky writes, Friday morning found me in a gallery showing giant black inflatables that could have come from Planet Debbie. On my mind, was the palpable violence felt in any New York Gallery. The newspapers tell us a terrorist group in Brooklyn is likely targeting the bright white spaces of Chelsea, but the group seems a phantom and the NYPD has no definite evidence of their existence. Japan authorities no longer suspect the phantom group of executing the attack on Jeff Koons in February.

▼ Report: Don’t Come To New York

Huffington Post reports -

Musician and author Patti Smith had some sound advice for fledgling artists thinking of moving to New York: don’t.

According to Vanishing New York, in a discussion with writer Jonathan Lethem at Cooper Union on Saturday, Smith was asked if it was possible for young artists to come to the city and find the path to stardom that she did.

▼ Report: The Near Future/ of Museums

The New York Times is covering the slow paradigm shift liquidating museum’s of their critical status. In the near future, museums will lose the difference which has always defined them: the difference between a commercial gallery and museum.

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On the Guggenheim’s Walls, and Now on Yours, by Fred A. Berstein

“Museum auctions are nothing new — many institutions sell pieces donated by artists or collectors to raise money for programs. But the Guggenheim has taken things a step further, mounting a major exhibition with the intention of selling its contents.”
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This is a death of museums, not an isolated event.

▼ Report: Warhol’s Empty Births

Although I have been interested in Warhol since I was a kid, I don’t think his success or the value of his ideas equal a justification for relishing in the media stream at the expense of the poetic or the human. I also think he lived in a different time – a time in which pop art was disruptive to the sleep of art.

▼ Report: Jeff Koons Dies In Tokyo Blast

30 minutes ago a friend who works at Artforum phoned me to say they were receiving messages from a Japanese news agency that Jeff Koons has died in Tokyo. His car was pulling away from his Tokyo hotel around 5pm eastern standard time. A large explosion was reported as far as fifteen miles away. My friend noted that the Japanese press is not releasing the story at this time, waiting for Koons’ family here in New York to be notified. The editors at Artforum are reportedly debating releasing the story before the Japanese press makes the announcement.

▼ Report: Invisible (A day without art.)

Three artists discuss loss.

A conversation with Mark Dutcher, Christopher Stout & Damien Crisp -

12/01/2009

Day Without Art (DWA) began on December 1, 1989 as the national day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis. To make the public aware that AIDS can touch everyone, and inspire positive action, some 800 U.S. art and AIDS groups participated in the first Day Without Art, shutting down museums, sending staff to volunteer at AIDS services, or sponsoring special exhibitions of work about AIDS. Since then, Day With(out) Art has grown into a collaborative project in which an estimated 8,000 national and international museums, galleries, art centers, AIDS social organizations, libraries, high schools and colleges take part.

David Wojnarowicz

In the past, “Visual AIDS” initiated public actions and programs, published an annual poster and copyright-freebroadsides, and acted as press coordinator and clearing house for projects for Day Without Art/World AIDS Day. In 1997, it was suggested Day Without Art become a Day With Art, to recognize and promote increased programming of cultural events that draw attention to the continuing pandemic. Though “the name was retained as a metaphor for the chilling possibility of a future day without art or artists”, we added parentheses to the program title, Day With(out) Art, to highlight the proactive programming of art projects by artists living with HIV/AIDS, and art about AIDS, that were taking place around the world. It had become clear that active interventions within the annual program were far more effective than actions to negate or reduce the programs of cultural centers.

▼ Report: The Cynical Twists Of Jerry Saltz

“Tea-bagging bloggers”, art critic Jerry Saltz recently wrote on his facebook page, “who constantly call for rules to be imposed on the terrible dirty backroom corrupt craven money-besmirched awful art world are, at  heart,  at heart, cynical.”

Cynicism is not critiquing the art market, as critic Jerry Saltz maintains. Critique’s flaw is idealism, if that is a flaw. Saltz mourns the loss of his own idealism. Cynicism is letting yourself be complicit to the deadening of art:  social power games, celebrity culture, the loss of critical thought. Critique of commercial art practices is not synonymous with being cynical. It is belief in art beyond it’s luxury value.

Saltz is not alone in his belief that art is a corporate industry; has always been a commodity; benefits from economic deregulation; benefited from the last decade’s commercial bubble.

The notion that everything including art is now a commodity in our era of hyper-capitalism is a notion the commercial art world co-opted from Baudrillard. Guess what? Baudrillard’s wish was for art to become just another commodity because his ultimate wish was the collapse of western culture. He wanted art to die as a commodity.