Preface:
Dear Reader,
If you have read through some of the approximately 1,500 little essays on this site, you know that in some posts I employ verse and dialogue instead of prose. Not that I think I’m Plato, but I do find that through dialogue, I wend my way over the obstacles of objections and counterpoints to what I have to say. For the sake of brevity in the fast-paced world of tweeted aphorisms, I keep the conversations to a few minutes’ read. I might offer longer dialogues if I think the topic is multifaceted and rambling as coffee-shop, breakfast-at-the-diner-with-cronies, or talk-at-the-local-bar conversations usually run.
What I hope to do in the dialogues is to get you to involve yourself in the topic. I know I don’t have direct access to your thoughts and your counterpoints, but by guessing a hypothetical conversation with you, a total stranger, I try to anticipate what you might say to refute, or at least, to challenge me. No doubt I probably fail to achieve that goal, but since the purpose of this website is to provide points of departure for your insights, I endeavor by stepping into your role to get your mental juices flowing.
I realize, also, that some of these dialogues take up more of your time than some direct, well organized treatise. But a rambling conversation sometimes serves a purpose. It allows the mind to wander and wonder. Thoughts you might not have in a direct essay might occur to you in a conversation.
Sorry that I don’t hear those thoughts of yours directly. I realize I could turn on the comment box and even ask for comments, but I also realize that there are those out there who would use a chat not for making a point and correcting me politely, but rather for spewing some pent-up stuff and for ad hominem attacks. I hope to allow you to ponder or reject what I have had to say in your own way without the noise engendered by agenda. Although political views have always pervaded public conversations, nowadays they seem to dominate, probably, I think, because of their 24/7 broadcasting on social media and on those round-the-clock pundit shows on TV.
Anyway, today I offer a little longer conversation and one that brings to the reader’s attention a problem that has long nagged me, that is, the problem of bureaucratic minds influenced by intellectual, social, and economic fads du jour. In this dialogue, you might easily fault me for a reductionist viewpoint as I take on a notion that generalizes a population of individuals who are ultimately responsible for their own actions, regardless of social or economic circumstances. As I often do, I do not identify, script-writer style, the speaker. And as so many of us do after we end a conversation, I look back and say, “Oh! I should have mentioned….”
Very truly yours,
Don Conte
Dialogue of the Day: Critical Stupidity Theory: Is Stupidity Systemic in Art and Politics?
“Does systemic stupidity run through the art world? I’m thinking of Kazimir Malevich’s 1918 painting Suprematist Composition: White on White.”
“Let me guess. You’re upset because you think the painting really isn’t a painting, because it’s an off-white tilted square on a white canvas. But Malevich was avant-garde in the early twentieth century. People were going through lots of turmoil, the First World War and the Spanish Flu; millions died. Existentialists of the day were challenging every traditional philosophy, physicists were talking about an unseen world of quanta, and Communism and Socialism were rising political and social movements. And in the art world there were attempts to mimic the confusion of life and to get away from mere representation. It was also a time of experimentation in film and literature. Three years before White on White, D. W. Griffiths revealed underlying cruelty in The Birth of a Nation and Kafka published The Metamorphosis; one year after the painting, the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari revealed the mind of a madman, and four years later T. S. Eliot published ‘The Waste Land’ with its intertwining of birth and death. I could mention other influences and influencers of the times if you want.”
“Yeah. What you said; that’s what I always expect to hear when I ask about so-called avant-garde works. It’s still a matter of someone selling an idea and a product to the gullible. Look at that painting. It’s a roughly drawn square.”
“But it’s what it symbolizes.”
“Here we go. Esoteric gobbledygook.”
“You know, I could never put my finger on it, but now I know your intellectual weakness, or maybe your main intellectual weakness. At heart, you’re a Philistine. Deep down inside all that surety lies a cultural vacuum. There’s just no subtlety, no sophistication. You’re the ultimate reductionist. The ultimate simpleton. Where did you grow up, in one of those fly-over states where people are not capable of a Manhattan or L.A. perspective?”
“Okay, so it’s all right for you to make fun of me but not all right for me to make fun of a painting a doodler might scribble at a boring meeting or a kindergarten kid might do when he uses a ruler for the first time as he learns how to draw geometric figures.”
“Again, your philistinism is showing through your curtain of certainty. Look, here’s what the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA to those of us who aren’t Philistines, says about Malevich and White on White. It’s ‘a white square floating weightlessly.’ The MoMA blurb also says Malevich was fascinated by airplanes.” *
“Whoa. You art aficionados buy into every thought foisted on you as erudite explanation. First of all, planes aren’t weightless; they stay up because of physical forces like thrust and the Bernoulli Principle. They struggle to stay in the air. And you elitist coastal people who fly over those fly-over states think you’re sophisticated, but most of you probably don’t know why the plane stays up over farmland air. Second, I thought you art and literature experts believed that art and literature could be appreciated without knowledge of the author’s biographical details.“
“Well, there are critics who take a biographical approach to explain a work. That’s a legit aesthetic.”
“Look, you can’t apply bio stuff to works written or painted by anonymous sources. Lit and art should stand on their own. I’ve written books, reports, and blogs that are ‘out there,’ but I’m not out there. If I said something unintelligible, it's my uncorrectable fault once it's 'out there.' I’m not around for a discussion to clarify what I might have meant or why I said it. If I wrote an ambiguous line, the reader is on his or her own to interpret it. I can’t ask Homer what he meant or how his life affected his epics. White on White has to stand on its own, I guess in the artist’s mind, weightlessly, if that was Malevich’s intention. Can I even trust that an artist sees all that’s on the canvas? Doesn’t everyone take to a viewing a set of biases and beliefs? Or should I say regardless of Malevich’s intention or life experiences, the aficionado sees and interprets from a different perspective? Anyway, what about the relatively common idea that ‘books write themselves’ or that paintings ‘paint themselves,’ taking the writer or artist wherever the pen or brush stroke says the creator should go?”
“Oh! So, you are aware of the roll of an artist’s muse. But artists often set out to capture some reality, and not all realities are physical phenomena. What if someone wants to paint a mood?”
“Yes, I get your point, but I’m more concerned with an art aficionado’s viewing muse, the inspiration to assume meaning where no meaning exists. White on White. Baloney. Tell you want to do. Go to the MoMA blurb and read about the painting. It says that Malevich thought white was the color of infinity. It also says he wanted a picture to have ‘nothing in common with nature.’ I’m turned off by meaningless gobbledygook that poses as profundity.”
“You just don’t get it.”
“Really? Okay, defend this one. A guy just sold an invisible sculpture for $18,000. ** I’m not talking about a sculpture in glass, plexiglass, muscovite mica, or quartz crystals. The invisible sculpture is invisible because it’s sculpted out of nothing. Nada, zilch, emptiness. Now tell me that the art world doesn’t suffer from systemic stupidity.”
“I haven’t seen the work, but…”
“Haven’t seen it? You can’t see what isn’t there. Some guy does virtually nothing, and garners attention and money. Nice job. Wish I had thought of it. Maybe I should become an artist. Or should I say artiste? The ultimate con perpetrated on those who claim sophistication and intellectual superiority is selling nothing to them, the bitcoin of sculptures. When I hear that someone bought nothing for $18,000, I think that being cultured is not a state of being as much as it is the product of fermentation like cultured milk. Yeah. This Salvatore Garau sculptor guy, the sculptor who made $18,000 for nothing, is the ultimate con artist. I don’t want to generalize too much, but I think that if we keep you art appreciation guys in a room full of paintings and sculptures, you’ll all agree that if you don’t say something erudite-sounding and esoteric, the rest of the world will recognize the subjectivity and fawning praise in your analyses. Garau is a better con man than Malevich was. He didn’t need to buy materials and spend time on his ‘immaterial sculpture.’ The news article on the sale says Garau calls the sculpture Io Sono, which means ‘I Am.’ Yeah, that’s profound. Sorry for the sarcasm. It’s not profound. You know that story about the emperor’s new clothes? Remember that the emperor was a fool, and remember that all his sycophants said the nonexistent clothes were magnificent. Yeah. That’s that Io Sono sculpture and Garau eliciting bids for its auction. Call me the babe, but out of my mouth I’ll say it: There’s no sculpture there! An idiot just spent money on nothing. And you hung in a so-called prestigious art museum a painting by Malevich that was a tilted off-white square on a white canvas.”
“Okay, I don’t know that story about the sculpture; it does sound a bit like a scam, but with painting, you’re wrong. When we see a painting, we examine parameters like brush strokes. The MoMA blurb on the painting refers to the ‘texture’ of the painting and to the “subtle variations of the whites.”
“Again I’ll ask. Really? If you look at my kitchen wall, you also can see subtle variations of the whites, especially where splashes from stove or sink did their subtle work or where kids put their hands on the wall to round a corner as they ran through the house. Guess there’s no need to paint the kitchen. I can tell friends I’m an artist with subtle whites. Maybe I’ll take visitors outside to show them a patch of yard I didn’t cut and tell them that it represents an abandoned yard, that it’s my garden sculpture, or that it’s a cut lawn that they just can’t see, like undisturbed ground waiting to be a hole. Wait! Maybe I’ll say that the uncut lawn reveals the unfulfilled desire for a mowed lawn that is like the unfulfilled desire for peace in the world. I’ll probably get a head shaker to bobble in agreement. But what can I expect in these times when people make up whatever enters their heads and pitch it as reality? And what else can I expect but bobble-headed agreement?
“I just heard a congresswoman say we should do away with prisons because they don’t stop shootings in the community. Well, she’s partially right, but totally stupid. New criminals are born every day. She’s right when she says putting shooters in the prisons doesn’t stop shooting back in the neighborhood; the guys in prison adapt and use shivs to kill one another. But she’s totally stupid when she wants to put something invisible in place of the jails. She says social programs with reformed violent offenders have reduced violence in her district. Tell that to the family of this week’s 15-year-old victim and the 13 people wounded in New York City over the Memorial Day weekend. Tell that to the people who suffered an 86% increase in shootings this past year because they are now defended by a police department that, through defunding, is becoming as real as Io Sono. Sorry for the digression, but that Malevich painting and Garau ‘sculpture’ make me think that there’s systemic stupidity in government as well as in art. I guess some believe that an invisible police force, a nonexistent police force will protect.”
“Wow. Where did that come from? Here’s my counter. If we had more people contemplating art, we would have fewer shootings. If we had more mental health workers, there would be less violence. People would gain insights about life that would take them out of the daily pettiness and the anger that results in shootings. Art elevates. And maybe the congresswoman is right in wanting to build more hospitals and mental health facilities.”
“Sorry. I can see man’s need for beauty and for symbolism and for mental health professionals, but you assume that outsiders can cover all the emotional and mental needs of 330 million Americans in the world’s third largest population. You assume that they can fill the roles responsible parents and guardians need to play. But sociologists and psychotherapists can’t respond to an active shooter with a malevolent intent. The work they do to alter violent tendencies and impulsive actions takes months to years to accomplish. And with regard to eliminating police departments, note that I can’t see what I can’t see. A sculpture made of nothing is nothing, nothing more. A city without a police department and a prison is a city without both protection AND justice. Criminals with criminal intent don’t sit around contemplating the weightlessness of White on White or the vacuum of Io Sono. I suppose what bothers me more than a looney congresswoman’s unrealistic rantings about the evils of police departments and prisons is that standing behind her while she made her comments to the Press were some middle-aged men shaking their heads in agreement. Keep in mind those sycophants in the story of the emperor’s new clothes. And why, oh why, is the Press so compliant? No one in the Press corps present had the guts to ask what she would do with pathological killers, with career con men, with people who rob, injure, and kill without compunction. And where are all those politicians who are mostly lawyers when someone among their number says nothing is better than something, that no police force is better than a dedicated police force? Geez, lawyers, officers of the court, representatives who make laws to keep the unruly in check and chaos at bay.”
“Now we’ve gone from a painting to a police force. You just have a different opinion that you think is irrefutable reasoning. You have your own agenda. You don’t want to accept that crime is a social phenomenon brought on by poverty and mental disease.”
“And you want to believe that society is to blame for an individual’s actions. You see criminals as victims. They just need to be reformed. Someone just needs to explain to them the error of their ways. Tell me something. Did you ever take a paperclip or pen from work? What about a pen from the check-writing table at a bank? Did you return it? No? Why not. Do you think a sociologist could have kept you from taking the paperclip or pen? Or, if there was one hired by the bank or office staff, that he could be present for every check-writer or cubicle-sitter?”
“That’s silly. What’s a paperclip worth? Offices have thousands of them.”
“But you decided that there was no law, no rule, no restriction that prevented you from stealing. You think that you perceive the rules just the way the purchaser perceived that Io Sono was real or that MoMA bought and hung White on White. Is the value of a paperclip just a matter of interpretation? Was there no actual cost in its acquisition by the office?”
“You’re mixing apples and oranges, art and crime, the making of rules and laws and their enforcement and the subtle variations of interpretations of values. A paperclip doesn’t have much value.”
“No, it doesn’t. But it does have some monetary value. It was your decision to take it from the office supplies without permission. It was a slight wrong in your mind, but it was a wrong. And you got away with the theft because there wasn’t a paperclip cop to prevent you. When you begin to use subjective judgments, you can justify anything, from art to crime. For the pathological killer, there is no reality save his or her own. They see an invisible sculpture; they see a meaning in subtle variations in whites. They can ascribe any explanation they want to any phenomena they choose or to no phenomena at all. And sycophants and unquestioning people just accept the explanations. Eliminate police forces in favor of therapists: That’s an interpretation of reality that will get therapists killed in domestic violence incidents and during incidents involving criminal intent. Do you think anyone on those planes that hit the twin towers on 9/11 could have dissuaded the terrorists? Bobble-head agreement can have dire consequences, ramifications far more serious than buying White on White or Io Sono. Eliminate jail time for violent offenders? Send unreformed rapists and murderers back onto the streets? That congresswoman and the head-shaking men standing in agreement need to attend some funerals in the inner cities where there are daily murders or visit sobbing and life-shattered victims of rape. Sure, there are many people imprisoned for minor offenses, probably some for offenses not much more severe than taking that proverbial paperclip. But there are others…”
“Okay. Okay. I get it. I can see the argument with regard to shootings in inner cities, but artists and painters aren’t committing the crimes simply because they experiment.”
“Granted. No one needs to arrest Garau for fraud. No one needs to put White on White in storage in the museum’s attic. Of course, if whoever purchased Io Sono gets tired of the invisible sculpture, he wouldn’t know where to pick it up to move it, anyway. Wait! Get those guys who carry large panes of glass to move it. Get a mime. Whoa! Just had another thought. What if a mime can see Io Sono? White face makeup around eyes staring at nothing. White face makeup around eyes staring at White on White. And, while I’m thinking about it, why not police mimes arresting nonexistent criminals and placing them in nonexistent jails? Can’t you envision the mime closing the cell door and locking it with a pretend key?”
“Funny, but you’re still a Philistine when it comes to art.”
“What am I when it comes to a rationally organized society that relies on police and prison systems to protect the general population from the actions of those with criminal intentions? I have an idea. We should incorporate Critical Stupidity Theory in our public education systems and TV pundit shows, but no, that would require teacher unions, school boards, politicians, and networks to add another level of wokeness. That would require people to see that the emperors really aren’t wearing anything, that White on White is silly, and that Io Sono doesn’t exist.”
Notes:
*MoMA. Online at https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80385 Accessed June 5, 2021.
**Davoe, Taylor. 3 June 2021. An Italian Artist Auctioned Off an ‘Invisible Sculpture’ for $18,300. It’s Made Literally of Nothing. artnet news. Online at https://news.artnet.com/art-world/italian-artist-auctioned-off-invisible-sculpture-18300-literally-made-nothing-1976181 Accessed June 6, 2021.
Dear Reader,
If you have read through some of the approximately 1,500 little essays on this site, you know that in some posts I employ verse and dialogue instead of prose. Not that I think I’m Plato, but I do find that through dialogue, I wend my way over the obstacles of objections and counterpoints to what I have to say. For the sake of brevity in the fast-paced world of tweeted aphorisms, I keep the conversations to a few minutes’ read. I might offer longer dialogues if I think the topic is multifaceted and rambling as coffee-shop, breakfast-at-the-diner-with-cronies, or talk-at-the-local-bar conversations usually run.
What I hope to do in the dialogues is to get you to involve yourself in the topic. I know I don’t have direct access to your thoughts and your counterpoints, but by guessing a hypothetical conversation with you, a total stranger, I try to anticipate what you might say to refute, or at least, to challenge me. No doubt I probably fail to achieve that goal, but since the purpose of this website is to provide points of departure for your insights, I endeavor by stepping into your role to get your mental juices flowing.
I realize, also, that some of these dialogues take up more of your time than some direct, well organized treatise. But a rambling conversation sometimes serves a purpose. It allows the mind to wander and wonder. Thoughts you might not have in a direct essay might occur to you in a conversation.
Sorry that I don’t hear those thoughts of yours directly. I realize I could turn on the comment box and even ask for comments, but I also realize that there are those out there who would use a chat not for making a point and correcting me politely, but rather for spewing some pent-up stuff and for ad hominem attacks. I hope to allow you to ponder or reject what I have had to say in your own way without the noise engendered by agenda. Although political views have always pervaded public conversations, nowadays they seem to dominate, probably, I think, because of their 24/7 broadcasting on social media and on those round-the-clock pundit shows on TV.
Anyway, today I offer a little longer conversation and one that brings to the reader’s attention a problem that has long nagged me, that is, the problem of bureaucratic minds influenced by intellectual, social, and economic fads du jour. In this dialogue, you might easily fault me for a reductionist viewpoint as I take on a notion that generalizes a population of individuals who are ultimately responsible for their own actions, regardless of social or economic circumstances. As I often do, I do not identify, script-writer style, the speaker. And as so many of us do after we end a conversation, I look back and say, “Oh! I should have mentioned….”
Very truly yours,
Don Conte
Dialogue of the Day: Critical Stupidity Theory: Is Stupidity Systemic in Art and Politics?
“Does systemic stupidity run through the art world? I’m thinking of Kazimir Malevich’s 1918 painting Suprematist Composition: White on White.”
“Let me guess. You’re upset because you think the painting really isn’t a painting, because it’s an off-white tilted square on a white canvas. But Malevich was avant-garde in the early twentieth century. People were going through lots of turmoil, the First World War and the Spanish Flu; millions died. Existentialists of the day were challenging every traditional philosophy, physicists were talking about an unseen world of quanta, and Communism and Socialism were rising political and social movements. And in the art world there were attempts to mimic the confusion of life and to get away from mere representation. It was also a time of experimentation in film and literature. Three years before White on White, D. W. Griffiths revealed underlying cruelty in The Birth of a Nation and Kafka published The Metamorphosis; one year after the painting, the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari revealed the mind of a madman, and four years later T. S. Eliot published ‘The Waste Land’ with its intertwining of birth and death. I could mention other influences and influencers of the times if you want.”
“Yeah. What you said; that’s what I always expect to hear when I ask about so-called avant-garde works. It’s still a matter of someone selling an idea and a product to the gullible. Look at that painting. It’s a roughly drawn square.”
“But it’s what it symbolizes.”
“Here we go. Esoteric gobbledygook.”
“You know, I could never put my finger on it, but now I know your intellectual weakness, or maybe your main intellectual weakness. At heart, you’re a Philistine. Deep down inside all that surety lies a cultural vacuum. There’s just no subtlety, no sophistication. You’re the ultimate reductionist. The ultimate simpleton. Where did you grow up, in one of those fly-over states where people are not capable of a Manhattan or L.A. perspective?”
“Okay, so it’s all right for you to make fun of me but not all right for me to make fun of a painting a doodler might scribble at a boring meeting or a kindergarten kid might do when he uses a ruler for the first time as he learns how to draw geometric figures.”
“Again, your philistinism is showing through your curtain of certainty. Look, here’s what the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA to those of us who aren’t Philistines, says about Malevich and White on White. It’s ‘a white square floating weightlessly.’ The MoMA blurb also says Malevich was fascinated by airplanes.” *
“Whoa. You art aficionados buy into every thought foisted on you as erudite explanation. First of all, planes aren’t weightless; they stay up because of physical forces like thrust and the Bernoulli Principle. They struggle to stay in the air. And you elitist coastal people who fly over those fly-over states think you’re sophisticated, but most of you probably don’t know why the plane stays up over farmland air. Second, I thought you art and literature experts believed that art and literature could be appreciated without knowledge of the author’s biographical details.“
“Well, there are critics who take a biographical approach to explain a work. That’s a legit aesthetic.”
“Look, you can’t apply bio stuff to works written or painted by anonymous sources. Lit and art should stand on their own. I’ve written books, reports, and blogs that are ‘out there,’ but I’m not out there. If I said something unintelligible, it's my uncorrectable fault once it's 'out there.' I’m not around for a discussion to clarify what I might have meant or why I said it. If I wrote an ambiguous line, the reader is on his or her own to interpret it. I can’t ask Homer what he meant or how his life affected his epics. White on White has to stand on its own, I guess in the artist’s mind, weightlessly, if that was Malevich’s intention. Can I even trust that an artist sees all that’s on the canvas? Doesn’t everyone take to a viewing a set of biases and beliefs? Or should I say regardless of Malevich’s intention or life experiences, the aficionado sees and interprets from a different perspective? Anyway, what about the relatively common idea that ‘books write themselves’ or that paintings ‘paint themselves,’ taking the writer or artist wherever the pen or brush stroke says the creator should go?”
“Oh! So, you are aware of the roll of an artist’s muse. But artists often set out to capture some reality, and not all realities are physical phenomena. What if someone wants to paint a mood?”
“Yes, I get your point, but I’m more concerned with an art aficionado’s viewing muse, the inspiration to assume meaning where no meaning exists. White on White. Baloney. Tell you want to do. Go to the MoMA blurb and read about the painting. It says that Malevich thought white was the color of infinity. It also says he wanted a picture to have ‘nothing in common with nature.’ I’m turned off by meaningless gobbledygook that poses as profundity.”
“You just don’t get it.”
“Really? Okay, defend this one. A guy just sold an invisible sculpture for $18,000. ** I’m not talking about a sculpture in glass, plexiglass, muscovite mica, or quartz crystals. The invisible sculpture is invisible because it’s sculpted out of nothing. Nada, zilch, emptiness. Now tell me that the art world doesn’t suffer from systemic stupidity.”
“I haven’t seen the work, but…”
“Haven’t seen it? You can’t see what isn’t there. Some guy does virtually nothing, and garners attention and money. Nice job. Wish I had thought of it. Maybe I should become an artist. Or should I say artiste? The ultimate con perpetrated on those who claim sophistication and intellectual superiority is selling nothing to them, the bitcoin of sculptures. When I hear that someone bought nothing for $18,000, I think that being cultured is not a state of being as much as it is the product of fermentation like cultured milk. Yeah. This Salvatore Garau sculptor guy, the sculptor who made $18,000 for nothing, is the ultimate con artist. I don’t want to generalize too much, but I think that if we keep you art appreciation guys in a room full of paintings and sculptures, you’ll all agree that if you don’t say something erudite-sounding and esoteric, the rest of the world will recognize the subjectivity and fawning praise in your analyses. Garau is a better con man than Malevich was. He didn’t need to buy materials and spend time on his ‘immaterial sculpture.’ The news article on the sale says Garau calls the sculpture Io Sono, which means ‘I Am.’ Yeah, that’s profound. Sorry for the sarcasm. It’s not profound. You know that story about the emperor’s new clothes? Remember that the emperor was a fool, and remember that all his sycophants said the nonexistent clothes were magnificent. Yeah. That’s that Io Sono sculpture and Garau eliciting bids for its auction. Call me the babe, but out of my mouth I’ll say it: There’s no sculpture there! An idiot just spent money on nothing. And you hung in a so-called prestigious art museum a painting by Malevich that was a tilted off-white square on a white canvas.”
“Okay, I don’t know that story about the sculpture; it does sound a bit like a scam, but with painting, you’re wrong. When we see a painting, we examine parameters like brush strokes. The MoMA blurb on the painting refers to the ‘texture’ of the painting and to the “subtle variations of the whites.”
“Again I’ll ask. Really? If you look at my kitchen wall, you also can see subtle variations of the whites, especially where splashes from stove or sink did their subtle work or where kids put their hands on the wall to round a corner as they ran through the house. Guess there’s no need to paint the kitchen. I can tell friends I’m an artist with subtle whites. Maybe I’ll take visitors outside to show them a patch of yard I didn’t cut and tell them that it represents an abandoned yard, that it’s my garden sculpture, or that it’s a cut lawn that they just can’t see, like undisturbed ground waiting to be a hole. Wait! Maybe I’ll say that the uncut lawn reveals the unfulfilled desire for a mowed lawn that is like the unfulfilled desire for peace in the world. I’ll probably get a head shaker to bobble in agreement. But what can I expect in these times when people make up whatever enters their heads and pitch it as reality? And what else can I expect but bobble-headed agreement?
“I just heard a congresswoman say we should do away with prisons because they don’t stop shootings in the community. Well, she’s partially right, but totally stupid. New criminals are born every day. She’s right when she says putting shooters in the prisons doesn’t stop shooting back in the neighborhood; the guys in prison adapt and use shivs to kill one another. But she’s totally stupid when she wants to put something invisible in place of the jails. She says social programs with reformed violent offenders have reduced violence in her district. Tell that to the family of this week’s 15-year-old victim and the 13 people wounded in New York City over the Memorial Day weekend. Tell that to the people who suffered an 86% increase in shootings this past year because they are now defended by a police department that, through defunding, is becoming as real as Io Sono. Sorry for the digression, but that Malevich painting and Garau ‘sculpture’ make me think that there’s systemic stupidity in government as well as in art. I guess some believe that an invisible police force, a nonexistent police force will protect.”
“Wow. Where did that come from? Here’s my counter. If we had more people contemplating art, we would have fewer shootings. If we had more mental health workers, there would be less violence. People would gain insights about life that would take them out of the daily pettiness and the anger that results in shootings. Art elevates. And maybe the congresswoman is right in wanting to build more hospitals and mental health facilities.”
“Sorry. I can see man’s need for beauty and for symbolism and for mental health professionals, but you assume that outsiders can cover all the emotional and mental needs of 330 million Americans in the world’s third largest population. You assume that they can fill the roles responsible parents and guardians need to play. But sociologists and psychotherapists can’t respond to an active shooter with a malevolent intent. The work they do to alter violent tendencies and impulsive actions takes months to years to accomplish. And with regard to eliminating police departments, note that I can’t see what I can’t see. A sculpture made of nothing is nothing, nothing more. A city without a police department and a prison is a city without both protection AND justice. Criminals with criminal intent don’t sit around contemplating the weightlessness of White on White or the vacuum of Io Sono. I suppose what bothers me more than a looney congresswoman’s unrealistic rantings about the evils of police departments and prisons is that standing behind her while she made her comments to the Press were some middle-aged men shaking their heads in agreement. Keep in mind those sycophants in the story of the emperor’s new clothes. And why, oh why, is the Press so compliant? No one in the Press corps present had the guts to ask what she would do with pathological killers, with career con men, with people who rob, injure, and kill without compunction. And where are all those politicians who are mostly lawyers when someone among their number says nothing is better than something, that no police force is better than a dedicated police force? Geez, lawyers, officers of the court, representatives who make laws to keep the unruly in check and chaos at bay.”
“Now we’ve gone from a painting to a police force. You just have a different opinion that you think is irrefutable reasoning. You have your own agenda. You don’t want to accept that crime is a social phenomenon brought on by poverty and mental disease.”
“And you want to believe that society is to blame for an individual’s actions. You see criminals as victims. They just need to be reformed. Someone just needs to explain to them the error of their ways. Tell me something. Did you ever take a paperclip or pen from work? What about a pen from the check-writing table at a bank? Did you return it? No? Why not. Do you think a sociologist could have kept you from taking the paperclip or pen? Or, if there was one hired by the bank or office staff, that he could be present for every check-writer or cubicle-sitter?”
“That’s silly. What’s a paperclip worth? Offices have thousands of them.”
“But you decided that there was no law, no rule, no restriction that prevented you from stealing. You think that you perceive the rules just the way the purchaser perceived that Io Sono was real or that MoMA bought and hung White on White. Is the value of a paperclip just a matter of interpretation? Was there no actual cost in its acquisition by the office?”
“You’re mixing apples and oranges, art and crime, the making of rules and laws and their enforcement and the subtle variations of interpretations of values. A paperclip doesn’t have much value.”
“No, it doesn’t. But it does have some monetary value. It was your decision to take it from the office supplies without permission. It was a slight wrong in your mind, but it was a wrong. And you got away with the theft because there wasn’t a paperclip cop to prevent you. When you begin to use subjective judgments, you can justify anything, from art to crime. For the pathological killer, there is no reality save his or her own. They see an invisible sculpture; they see a meaning in subtle variations in whites. They can ascribe any explanation they want to any phenomena they choose or to no phenomena at all. And sycophants and unquestioning people just accept the explanations. Eliminate police forces in favor of therapists: That’s an interpretation of reality that will get therapists killed in domestic violence incidents and during incidents involving criminal intent. Do you think anyone on those planes that hit the twin towers on 9/11 could have dissuaded the terrorists? Bobble-head agreement can have dire consequences, ramifications far more serious than buying White on White or Io Sono. Eliminate jail time for violent offenders? Send unreformed rapists and murderers back onto the streets? That congresswoman and the head-shaking men standing in agreement need to attend some funerals in the inner cities where there are daily murders or visit sobbing and life-shattered victims of rape. Sure, there are many people imprisoned for minor offenses, probably some for offenses not much more severe than taking that proverbial paperclip. But there are others…”
“Okay. Okay. I get it. I can see the argument with regard to shootings in inner cities, but artists and painters aren’t committing the crimes simply because they experiment.”
“Granted. No one needs to arrest Garau for fraud. No one needs to put White on White in storage in the museum’s attic. Of course, if whoever purchased Io Sono gets tired of the invisible sculpture, he wouldn’t know where to pick it up to move it, anyway. Wait! Get those guys who carry large panes of glass to move it. Get a mime. Whoa! Just had another thought. What if a mime can see Io Sono? White face makeup around eyes staring at nothing. White face makeup around eyes staring at White on White. And, while I’m thinking about it, why not police mimes arresting nonexistent criminals and placing them in nonexistent jails? Can’t you envision the mime closing the cell door and locking it with a pretend key?”
“Funny, but you’re still a Philistine when it comes to art.”
“What am I when it comes to a rationally organized society that relies on police and prison systems to protect the general population from the actions of those with criminal intentions? I have an idea. We should incorporate Critical Stupidity Theory in our public education systems and TV pundit shows, but no, that would require teacher unions, school boards, politicians, and networks to add another level of wokeness. That would require people to see that the emperors really aren’t wearing anything, that White on White is silly, and that Io Sono doesn’t exist.”
Notes:
*MoMA. Online at https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80385 Accessed June 5, 2021.
**Davoe, Taylor. 3 June 2021. An Italian Artist Auctioned Off an ‘Invisible Sculpture’ for $18,300. It’s Made Literally of Nothing. artnet news. Online at https://news.artnet.com/art-world/italian-artist-auctioned-off-invisible-sculpture-18300-literally-made-nothing-1976181 Accessed June 6, 2021.
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