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The art world’s Pepsi Generation

I guess it’s tough to be a young artist who started out with nothing and became famous and successful beyond your wildest dreams early in your career. Or at least that would be the uncharitable way of viewing “Beautiful Losers,” Aaron Rose’s alternately winsome and irritating documentary about the art scene that grew out of his Alleged Gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1990s.

Despite the snide comment, I’m not entirely unsympathetic. Visual artists these days face a peculiar quandary. To all appearances, the 600-year-long narrative of post-Renaissance art history has crashed and burned against the brick wall of pop culture…

I share some of Andrew O’Hehir’s cynicism about  “street culture ” art, but at the same time I can’t condemn them because of the real and imagined taint of commercialism. Yes street art has been co-opted by Nike, fashion mags, clothing retailers and Madison Ave, but the only thing that has changed in regard to art’s relationship with the commercial sector is the source and visibility of the sponsorship. In the 1400-1500s Michelangelo wasn’t sponsored by Reebok or including corporate logos in the Sistine Chapel, but the Church in acting as his official patron played a very similar role in influencing his art that corporatism does today on street art. In the 1700 the great Spanish painter Goya had several patrons including the royal family – isn’t Madison Ave just doing what the royals did with Goya – royal patrons of the past are today’s corporate patrons. Art can be corrupted by commerce and as O’Hehir notes some of the  “Beautiful Losers” regret  their ties with commercial art. Some of them think its clever. Hey these big corps bought my crap as is. But those artists may not understand that they changed the persona of that work forever. It doesn’t have its own identity anymore, its part of a product. Nothing wrong with commercial art and being able to pay your rent and buy stuff as long as you realize what you’re doing. Some great photographers like Richard Avedon did some memorable work for glossy fashion mags, but then did other ground breaking personal projects on the side. So going a little commercial isn’t always some kind of Faustian deal, just don’t sign anything in blood.

wet rocks and stream

DHL deal gone sour haunts McCain in Ohio

Finally given a chance to address Sen. John McCain, Mary Houghtaling choked up Thursday and began to cry.

Wiping away her tears, she told the presumptive Republican presidential nominee how a controversial corporate deal he backed in 2003 as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee — the sale of Airborne Express cargo service to a German conglomerate that owns DHL and the subsequent expansion of the air freight hub here — had gone horribly wrong.

[   ]…But on Wednesday, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, previously worked as a lobbyist for the German group, Deutsche Post World Net, and was paid $185,000 to help engineer the 2003 deal, plus another $405,000 for other work.

Davis helped Deutsche Post overcome objections in the Senate when the German company was negotiating the purchase, the paper reported. As head of the commerce committee, McCain fought back proposed amendments in a defense spending bill that would have barred a foreign-owned company from flying U.S. military equipment or troops.

John has admitted that he doesn’t know much about economics and one of his friends for goodness sake was just trying to benefit from that pro business neoclassical capitalism that has set millions free to shop at Wal-Mart. Besides Obama once shot a man in Vegas who was the anti-christ while reading his dog eared copy of Archie and Jughead just to watch him die or something like that. McCain claims that Davis hasn’t lobbied for DHL since 2005. Since the events in question happened in 2003 I’m taking that as what passes for plausaible accoutability in the McCain camp.

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