After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection

Recent tumult at home and abroad has prompted soul-searching in some quarters of America, and many people have a sense that the promise of our founding ideals and the positive international sway we once exerted are in eclipse. Recent flare-ups over art and censorship echo the "culture wars" of the 1980s and 1990s, which, with an economic collapse and a war seemingly in a stalemate reminiscent of the 1970s, add to the feeling of déjà vu. While previous exhibitions in this gallery have revolved around the nature of photography itself or historical examinations of a formal or aesthetic concept, this installation gathers works made since 1979 that address the culture at large.

Currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Moyra Davey (Canadian, born 1958). Copperhead Grid (Detail), 1990. Chromogenic prints; Approx. 25.4 x 20.3 cm (10 x 8 in.) each. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2011 (2011.17kkk). © Moyra Davey

Moyra Davey (Canadian, born 1958). Copperhead Grid (Detail), 1990. Chromogenic prints; Approx. 25.4 x 20.3 cm (10 x 8 in.) each. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2011 (2011.17kkk). © Moyra Davey

Letter to the AARP

Dear AARP,

Concerning your July/August 2011 issue with it's 99 Great Ways To Save: Whilst I appreciate and admire people’s efforts to be frugal and save their pennies, there is patently something deeper at work here. Elizabeth Warren pointed out in a keynote speech in 2007 that Americans in the past generally could make ends meet on a single income and always had a potential second income to fall back on. Now it takes two incomes to make ends meet so the next front on saving is reusing stamps and salvaging tiny lumps of soap. They’re getting rid of cable, using their cars until they fall to pieces on the turnpike and thinking of home ownership as an American Nightmare. Not being wasteful is a good thing but I’d argue this country is wasting it’s first and greatest resource by assigning so many of it’s citizens holes so deep thanks to the burden of foreclosure and debt their imaginations atrophy and they can no longer see any way to climb out. Furthermore the Republican agenda seems bent on making things even harder for those who already have nothing and on further lining the nests of those who already have everything. I think more and more Americans see it this way. Those beyond our borders see this country as slowly going insane with it’s apparent determination to erode what is left of the safety net. Balling up little bits of soap is a waste of energy, an energy that could be better applied doing something helpful for this country. As an ardent Socialist and/or Liberal I have no concern about re-invoking the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by suggesting the introduction of some contemporary version of the WPA. With a few strokes of the pen Washington could create job programs and reintroduce hope to the millions who are losing it by the day. But both the will to act and sanity must prevail.

Russell Christian

Artist, Blogger (Art and the Bouncy Banker), reluctant pessimist and never retiree

Letter to the Bank #65

Dear Bank Manager and Faceless Entity,

as my cherished and esteemed friend, advisor and punching bag, here I go again. Do I hear a palpable groan? No! Because you’re not there! But you not being there hasn’t stopped me yet.
  
    You could
        argue that
            these are
                in essence
                    rhetorical letters

from:                                                        to:

 —the angel on my left shoulder             the little monster on my right,
 —my better nature                                  the self preservationist,
 —my rights                                             the leftovers you toss my way,
 —the artist                                              the pragmatist,
 —the oyster                                            the walrus,
 —the victim                                            the slaughterhouse,
 —the saint                                              the sinner,
 —the obnoxious child                            the stern patriarch,
 —the liberal/socialist                             the apolitical capitalist,
 —the mortgager                                     the mortgagee

(or is it the other way round?)

Gosh! Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, better known as Guillaume Apollinaire, would be proud. He was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, art critic, and did, if memory serves, enjoy experimenting in his poems with typography!

But where were we? Oh yes! I was pointing my finger at you, quietly screaming from within, and watching, aghast as the finger, like a guided missile, turns in the sky to come hurtling back towards yours truly who did, on your advice, not only invest in a home, but also use the imaginary equity it theoretically offered to buy magical thinking. So here we are, you and I, symbiotically linked in a chain of recrimination and guilt deferral forever more, trapped in a purgatory you seem better able to shunt onto the shoulders of others as you go off to play another eighteen holes, holes in which you’ll sink another eighteen homeowners, so you can pay your club membership dues.

Yours sincerely,

Kristian Witherkay

PS-I will, one day, find a chink in your emotional armor, so you can share the burden of debts unpaid.

On Bartering

For me the idea is an abstract concept because I know nobody who really does it. I like the idea of it though. I did recently barter art with a friend and it was definitely a good, fair and equitable, and even an equanimous exchange. Why don't people do it more? I wish they did!


For a very different take from  see the following:


For those of you who are still bartering for things in your business (you know who you are) I want to give you a little loving advice:

STOP that!!

Go to communicatevalue.com for more of this article.

I took the image from their website. Figured they wouldn't mind as long as I gave the credit...or, to put it another way, bartered by mentioning their website.

A fish for beans seems like a good exchange I think. 

Has Money Ruined Art?

I just stumbled across this article by the art critic, Jerry Saltz—perfect for this blog. You can see more of Jerry Saltz's article in New york Magazine:

I love art and the art world, but lately, I can see why the Gavin Brown gallery has a new Website called NewYorkIsDead.biz. The site’s creators say that “nothing’s moribund; energy still abounds. But its timbre is strange.” Just how strange can be seen, as never before, when the bullshit machine runs at full steam; students charge $25,000 for paintings; the M.F.A. (as Daniel Pink notes) is the new M.B.A.; and “the system,” as David Hammons observed, “is making people offers they can’t refuse when it should be making them offers they can’t understand.”

Of course it could also be argued Art Has Ruined Money.

Consumers vs. the Banks-New York Times editorial

In deciding not to fight for Ms. Warren, the president has forfeited the opportunity to stand up to the banks and to highlight their relentless efforts to undermine reform. It is hard not to think that Mr. Obama was worried that choosing Ms. Warren would have cost him and Democratic senators campaign contributions from the banks.

For more on the travails of Ms. Warren read Joe Nocera's article last week in the New York Times.

Mr. Obama, please, PLEASE, stand up for regulation!

They're All Yellow

I plucked this paragraph from article in today's New York Times Sunday Review by John F. Burns:

Looking back over only the last three years, Mr. Miliband has said that the three great crises to hit Britain since then — the banking crash of 2008, the furor over fraudulent parliamentary expenses in 2009 and the tabloid scandal — have been rooted in a culture that engendered a “shirking of basic responsibility” from “top to bottom” in British life, that “sends the message that anything goes, that right and wrong don’t matter, that we can all be in it for ourselves as long as we can get away with it.”
“What,” he said, “is a young person, just starting out in life, trying to do the right thing, supposed to think when he sees a politician fiddling the expenses system, a banker raking off millions without deserving it, or a press baron abusing the trust of ordinary people?”

On NPR this morning Paul Collins, writer of the book The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City And Sparked the Tabloid Wars, compares William Randolph Hearst with Rupert Murdoch. Both of them were about doing whatever it took to sell newspaper regardless of the pain caused along the way. The banks and financial institutions also are all about apolitical pragmatism. They never have to put their money where their mouths are because they always go where the money is to eat.

On a different note it is fascinating, as a duel citizen British-American, to watch as the Press on either side of the Atlantic focus on the troubles the other country is having. The Brits see a crisis in America and the Americans see a crisis in Britain in efforts to keep eyes diverted form their own already profoundly shaken financial markets.

Letter to the Bank #64

Dear BM,

Apparently some conservative member of Congress was saying something about how the poor should do their bit, pay their part, contribute their portion to the tax rolls. Probably went on to declare them—er...the vast majority of the citizens of these fair states—spongers and welfare state leeches. In fact didn’t the whole tea party thing start with some mean rant by some news commentator (Rick Santelli) about how people were in debt and being kicked out of their homes because they made stupid, irresponsible financial decisions and they deserved nothing less? What a strange inspiration for a movement, and what a nasty foundation to build a political platform on.

I am constantly appalled by the nastiness of the disconnected classes in this society. In some form or other the same disconnect is repeated in each and every corner of this planet—those born to wealth or those who have built their wealth, especially those who know deep down they have built it on the backs of underpaid, under insured workers, cannot afford to feel the depth of their own self disgust and so they separate, compartmentalize, divide, pull apart until they no longer can see their own role in the financial mess around them and can then sit back, inspired by the likes of the verbally dexterous Rick Santelli, and bemoan the stupidity of the little people who they (as they perceive it) float. In their fury (that runs in counterpoint to the fury of the working classes) they have set about to dismantle the safety nets that have for so long, in their opinion, only coddled the masses. They blame these so called masses and fortify their compounds waiting for the day when the plebeians come to demand their rights—rights the rich know, in the backs of their clouded minds, the privileged classes steadily eroded or even denied working families in their own efforts to maintain an ultimately unsustainable lifestyle.

I’ve been trolling the internet for images of protest signs world wide, specifically from Cairo where a fledgling democracy is having a painful birth but appears determined to breath strongly and deeply, South Korea where the embattled middle classes are making their voice heard as the gap between rich and poor grows, and Athens where the debt crisis is at CRISIS point. I show a random few here (without credit but this can be corrected if anyone insists) that I found visually interesting, and to which I could relate (no I cannot read Greek). I assumed I’d be finding signs I mostly empathized with but far from it. The desperate and the indignant comprise of all political stripes. The difference lies in their comprehension of their relationship to power, or their understanding of power structures. The disenfranchised with nothing to lose and those with plenty to lose will fight for their perceived rights on different platforms targeting governments or the wealthy and either way they are hoping to be heard by someone or something deep in the cloud of their wildly divergent frustrations. We live in a world where governments either merge with wealth, or clash with it and in doing so either prove themselves strong enough to impose regulations on unfettered profit motives and tax havens, or so weak they loose their clout because they  come to depend too much on the very thing that is undermining their credibility, the people with the money to vote them back in. At any point in any given day it becomes harder and harder to know who one’s opponent is, or who it is you need to educate, need to aim your frustrations at. As you know I choose you as the object of my fury and—all too frequently—contempt. You, the lowly bank manager, the petty bureaucrat, the salesman or woman, who is supposedly there to help the customer but usually is only doing the company’ bidding. I do not blame you for doing what you have to do to hold onto your job but you will suffer the consequences of being the face of unscrupulous and uncaring companies. The appalling optimist in me hopes that my letters will work on you by attrition, slowly wear down your thick skin, and eventually result in lights going on all about you that show how only if we all work together can the world stop catapulting toward financial disintegration.

In hope I wait for the current administration to prove itself as having the backbone and the vision to stand up to the corporations who currently appear to be setting the agenda, an agenda that is driving the middle and working classes slowly into the ground, and impose the kind of regulation that will dismantle heinous profits and bonuses, (neither of which ever trickle down) and replace them with programs that set about earnestly trying to create sustainable infrastructure, jobs, homes and healthcare for all.

Yours sincerely,

Your irritating conscience,

Your Chinese water torturer,

Your friend and your fiend,

Kristian Witherkay

Letter to the Bank #63 (baby boomers behaving badly)

Dear BM,

Face it! Things are no different here than in England. The kind of power wielded by Rupert Murdoch in Merry Old England, a power that had politicians, police and the media all quaking in their boots, is also being thrown around right here in the good ol’ USA. With the closure of the News of The World, that unseemly rag, England is waking up to a new era, one where there is some hope the media, the police, politicians and, yes, maybe even the banks, will wake up, man up, and finally do the job they are supposed to do. Sadly the idea of Democracy has taken a knock but then again it was thin to begin with. Maybe this time it will harden into to something more durable and tougher to scuttle. Perhaps being courageous, honest and concerned for the health of the community as a whole will be rewarded, and maybe—maybe—unscrupulous special interests and the profit motive will no longer be worshipped but will be regarded with deep suspicion.

There is an article you should read by Thomas Friedman in this week’s (newly designed, newly named) Week In Review: The Clash of Generations. In it he talks of “baby boomers behaving badly”. He quotes many of the protest signs he sees. They are the results of a younger generation meeting in the squares of Cairo and Athens, struggling to figure out what the hell is going on, and coming to some fierce conclusions.  The “Me” generation has dumped on the “them” generation and has left them holding the bag, caught in the headlights, stuck with a worldwide debt initiated by greed and self interest.

I’ll do what many I know are doing. I’ll continue to grapple with ways to manage my own fraying situation—to put it in perspective—old, failing cars, a house that needs painting, lack of the kind of resources needed in this day and age to visit family in other parts of the world—middle class, lower middle class problems perhaps...and I’ll turn to my passions, the things that keep me alive and kicking, happy even—my family, my painting, a garden, friends.

Why do I continue to share these thoughts with you, my non-existent bank manager? Because I wish to send a shiver up your spine, a shiver that infects your boss and your boss’s boss, a shiver that is eventually recognized as the cold of rejection, a shiver that finally will penetrate the wall of cosy self interest they have all been building for so long that even now as the world struggles to stay on its feet they fail to see because they are out on the ocean in their hundred foot yacht catching tuna.

Yours sincerely,

Kristian Witherkay



PS: My friend gave me this bag. I imagine she thought it would amuse me and fule the fire of my ire, an ire we all need to keep stoking. She was right!


PLEASE NOTE: Even as I begin to name names, something I have mostly avoided until now, I remain polite even as I “Yield to rage”.

Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream For more information please visit MoMA.org/foreclosed.

As both an artist, somewhat struggling homeowner, and  resident of the Oranges, one of the five urban corridor hubs these teams are examining, I am very interested in this project. What does substainable mean within our current, broken suburban infrastructures? Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith bring up issues of health both physical and financial, shared/cooperative homeownership models, and the notion of reinventing The Street.

Artist’s Statement Video – Charlotte Young

Artist’s Statement Video – Charlotte Young

Very enjoyable

"Artist's Statement"

Letter to the Bank #62

Dear BM,

I decided it was time to check in once more with you, representative of my nemesis—financial institutions everywhere, in all corners, on every block—good and bad (because even the good are never, ever above board). I’m checking in with you just as you all check out, cash out, before anything approximating a noble regulation kicks in and causes you to have to part with a single cent of your reserves, reserves that, it appears to me, you always can refill with new charges and fees that you all are able to make up...willy nilly. The urge to wring your necks and shake you up is ever present and not just in me. I cannot stand how you feel as if you have earned what you have. You never have and never will. You simply happen to be riding a cash cow. You are a farmer milking the teats of the general population who you have hooked up to those rather intimidating, nasty looking machines in the great factory farms you call hedge funds and banks.

Really just felt like a little vent.

That’s better.

As you were.

Sincerely,

Kristian Witherkay

PS-Know that I appreciate you letting me bend your ear, your tolerating the gripes of one without the kind of earning power that would allow me to live beyond—way beyond—satisfying the basic needs of me and mine.