Building a Better Bonfire

It’s just over two weeks now since the conclusion of my favorite sporting event of the year, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which has long since been branded “March Madness.” Although “March Madness” is used as a marketing gimmick, I like its echo of the connection between the calendar and behavior. The connection is not insignificant, and would perhaps be more noticeable if we followed a cyclical lunar calendar rather than a linear Gregorian one; see the rise in E.R. admissions on nights with a full moon. And even with the marking of time as we know it, don’t all of us in the northern hemisphere, at least those of us where it’s cold enough to wear hats, go a little mad by the time the tournament starts? Channeling our seasonal affective madness into the obsessive completion of tournament brackets, a therapy redoubled by the completion of equally fantastic tax documents due to Uncle Sam right as the tournament is ending, keeps many of us functioning until mid-April, when, in most years, the sun takes over for sports entertainment life support. This year, it snowed in Baltimore a week after March Madness had crowned its champion, which felt rather like finding out that one is actually a robot.

Each March, the college basketball aristocracy are paired off with their plebeian counterparts for all of the first round games via a politically charged, pseudo-objective seeding process; when CBS is paying billions in rights fees to broadcast the tournament, the “brackets” are about as objective as the Immunity Challenges on that other CBS franchise, Survivor. The seeding arrangements make the tournament the most reliable opportunity for witnessing one of the most interesting sports fan behaviors: we always root for the underdog, unless they are playing our team.

Let’s begin with the first part of the equation, the fact that we (almost) always root for the underdog. There is, admittedly, a little of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” involved in this. As a Tar Heel fan, I always cheer for whichever team in the tournament is playing Duke. I want the Tar Heels to go as far in the tournament as possible, and, just as importantly, this needs to be at least one game further than the Blue Devils. I was just talking to my (96 year-old) grandmother, Bucky, today, and chatting about the Tar Heels’ relatively disappointing 2nd round loss in the tournament. Without missing a beat, and without any prompting from me, Bucky pointed out that while the Heels hadn’t gone far, at least Duke had done even worse, losing in the first round, sparing her from having to hear any gate mouth from the Dukies in her retirement community. Which retirement community is inconveniently located in Durham, i.e. Bucky lives on their turf. Good thing Bucky is tough as nails, in the best possible way.

But, I would venture, rooting for the underdog runs deeper than the whole “enemy of my enemy” thing. With Carolina and Duke both out by the end of the second round, I was still pulling for the 11th-seeded Dayton Flyers to win their Elite Eight matchup with the #1 overall seed and two-time national champion Florida Gators, and not just because Dayton is home to rock and roll goddess Kim Deal. (Our names either make us, or we make ourselves in their images. Just so, her shit is so legit that if she were a boxer, she would definitely be Kim “The Real” Deal. Whereas, if I were a professional wrestler, I would wear a mask and my submission move would be “The Cough Drop.”) With no dogs left in the race, I was backing Dayton primarily because they were the last best underdog left standing. And because, like Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi, and like everyone else in the world who roots for underdogs, there is still good in me after all.

College basketball, like the rest of America, is a landscape of haves and have-nots. The advantages held by college hoops blue bloods, the Carolinas, Dukes, and Kentuckies of the world, are legion: outsized athletic department budgets, deep pocketed boosters, constant television exposure, broad and deep fan bases, and home court cathedrals, just to name a few. In short, elite college basketball programs have a surfeit of power, and it is the responsibility of the head coach, with the full support of his athletic director and university president, to wield this power effectively enough to continually dominate the opposition. In other words, power is deployed in college basketball as it always has been in almost every chapter of human history. Cheering for the underdog, then, is an outlet for our collective instinct that this neverending story of power and its application is plain wrong. Carolina, Duke, and Kentucky aren’t evil (though we Carolina fans have fun pretending Duke is), but, in harnessing every resource to shock and awe their overwhelmed opponents, they are perfect stand-ins. (Evil = 500,000 dead in the Iraq War, all in the name of a lie. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/15/iraq-death-toll_n_4102855.html) Lest I be accused of “anti-Americanism,” I would ask America “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your eye?”) In always cheering for the underdog, we are constantly reimagining the world as a place where the last are, finally, first.

Except when we don’t cheer for the underdog, which is whenever they stand in the way of us finishing first. You may object that of course we root for our favorite teams against the opposition, including underdogs, because, duh, they’re our favorites. Suggesting that one refrain from cheering for one’s favorite team sounds like utter nonsense. But the fact that it sounds so nonsensical is, indeed, the crux of the problem. We so take for granted favoring our favorites (which I suppose is the very meaning of the word favorite) that we can’t even imagine doing otherwise. Which is all well and good in a basketball tournament, but which takes on new meaning when we realize that our absolute favorites, of course, are our very selves. So go ahead and cheer for whomever you please in March Madness; I would have turned on Dayton in a second if they had encountered the Tar Heels in their half of the bracket, Kim Deal notwithstanding. But understand that cheering for the underdog unless they are playing one’s favorite team is a reminder that we instinctively crave justice and equality right up to the point that it costs us something. With humans, the universal is (almost) always trumped by the particular, and “as above, so below” is replaced by “not in my back yard.” When we say “all politics is local,” we are really asking “What’s in it for me?”

We find the perfect exemplar of the tension between our intuition of the good and our instinct for self aggrandizement ready at hand in American history in the person of Thomas Jefferson, who famously wrote the following in our nation’s Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And who just as famously proved unable to give up his slaves and the wealth and sexual access they provided. Self interest blinds us to the self evident truth. The very same dynamic is in play re: climate change, where the two possible responses in play for American power brokers are 1) denial or 2) hand wringing, neither of which costs anyone anything.

Organized religion has been something of a mixed bag down through the ages, though, from where I’m standing, we are, on balance, better for it. Exactly how much better is a more interesting question. The persistence of religious belief combined with the failure of the world’s great religious traditions to collectively bring about what my faith tradition would call the coming of the Kingdom (feel welcome to substitute your own tradition’s terminology for the happily-ever-after) tells us two important things. First, that our intuition of basic universal goodness is, like the State of the Union, strong. Strong enough that the world boasts 5.8 billion religious adherents, an amazing fidelity to the good given everything we know about suffering. (Though all brands of religion miss the mark, each to a varying degree in different historical moments, they also each always aim for goodness. I take this as an article of faith, which, somewhat ironically, decreases my own faith, i.e. I no longer feel about my own religion the way I feel about my children, who I know are the best. Short of feeling this way about one’s children I don’t know how it could be possible to do everything that needs to be done for them, and, just so, short of feeling just that way about one’s religion I don’t know how one is supposed to get one’s self to church, temple, mosque, meditation center, etc. Religion that loves its neighbor’s religion as devoutly as it loves itself cannot, seemingly, survive.) And second, that however strong our sense of the good may be, our sense of self, and all of the attendant self interest, is yet far stronger. We always cheer for our favorite team. Religion may be good enough and true enough, which explains why we all believe in the good, but it just isn’t strong enough. As in strong enough to make us do the right thing when it costs us something. Because if 5.8 billion people were doing the right thing, at whatever price, the Kingdom (or whatever you want to call it) would assuredly have already come. (I use the word assuredly because almost everyone almost always doing the right thing is, to my ears, the actual definition of “the Kingdom”; it is the only conceivable “best of all possible worlds.”)

The great tragedy of religion is that it has lost its great gamble that it could, indeed, prove strong enough. Religion would remake us, one by one, as individuals and communities willing to pay the price of righteousness (funny how tainted that word sounds, as if the idea of doing the right thing has gone rancid in the sun), or, as the Quakers put it on the banners above their meeting houses, willing to take the risks of peace. A significant chunk of religious life is practice for just these risks and sacrifices, e.g. fasting on Ramadan or Yom Kippur, observing Lent, or giving away one’s good fortune to others with the out breath in the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Tonglen meditation. Each of these is rehearsal for craving justice and equality deeply enough to break on through to the other side of self interest. But instead, like Jim Morrison himself overdosing on heroin, we continually hit a wall. And, we should note, we hit the very same wall, perhaps even harder, under the auspices of that religion for seculars, Marxism, the central tenet of which, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” requires at least as much selflessness as any of the aforementioned religions.

There is an old idea making the rounds again which holds that “it's institutions -- not people -- that are evil.” (http://www.salon.com/2014/04/23/noam_chomsky_was_right_why_the_koch_brothers_are_obscuring_the_real_enemy/) This observation is just slightly wide of the mark. I would say instead that 1) institutions aren’t selfish, people are, but 2) institutions leverage self interest so efficiently that they perform something of an anti-miracle, the transformation of water into wine replaced by the mutation of garden variety selfishness into evil. This distinction is critical because it informs another set of solutions. Because attempting to construct or reconstruct institutions which aren’t evil is nearly as hopeless as trying to raise entire generations of selfless individuals. We must recognize the intractable difficulty of both, grounding this insight in an understanding that the inevitability of selfish humans makes the existence of institutions that feed off of that selfishness, i.e. evil institutions, incredibly likely. But note that while human selfishness is, for the foreseeable future, inevitable, we are merely at incredibly high risk of evil institutions. We are, effectively, Jim Carey being told by the girl of his dreams in Dumb & Dumber that his odds with her are “like one out of a million.” Carey sublimely responds “So you’re telling me there’s a chance…YEAH!” So must we. Even if it makes us look dumb. The only alternatives are despair or Rhett Butler’s “I’ve always had a weakness for lost causes once they’re really lost,” though it is unclear whether the lost cause is us, religion, or both.

Our last, best, slim chance is building institutions that are neither good nor evil. Because all of the good institutions, which have tried to carry us past the threshold of self interest, tend to fail, and all of the evil institutions, which simply harness that self interest, tend to succeed. It is said that Buddhism’s First Noble Truth, which holds that life is suffering, is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but realistic. We need institutions that are realistic in just this way. Realistic about both the limits of human selflessness, and the tendencies of institutions to exploit these very limits. There is at least one such human institution, namely the Potlatch:

'“In the potlatch, the host in effect challenged a guest chieftain to exceed him in his 'power' to give away or to destroy goods. If the guest did not return 100 percent on the gifts received and destroy even more wealth in a bigger and better bonfire, he and his people lost face and so his 'power' was diminished" Hierarchical relations within and between clans, villages, and nations, were observed and reinforced through the distribution or sometimes destruction of wealth, dance performances, and other ceremonies. The status of any given family is raised not by who has the most resources, but by who distributes the most resources. The hosts demonstrate their wealth and prominence through giving away goods.'(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch)

The Potlatch, of course, is no miracle cure. But in bending self interest to the good, in stark contrast to the doomed effort to transcend self interest in the name of the good, it gives us a place to start. If we can build just such realistic human institutions, I’d say our odds are at least two out of a million.

So I’m telling you there’s a chance… YEAH!!!

The Hole In Our Soul

I have just started reading Charles Eisenstein’s The Ascent of Humanity. It is always dangerous to draw conclusions from a 512 page book when you are just 40 pages in, but the opening chunk of Eisenstein’s Ascent is more than meaty enough to chew on, especially when amplified by some serious synchronicity (more about which in a moment). Eisenstein is right up front with his central thesis that the current global crisis, a crisis best exemplified by the existential threat of climate change yet somehow even broader and deeper, is a blending of “the story of humanity’s separation from nature with the story of our individual alienation from life, nature, spirit and self.” And, just as importantly, out of this state of alienation we have launched our twin would-be therapies, which Eisenstein describes as “the Scientific Program of complete understanding and the Technological Program of complete control.” But these therapies, far from guiding us from a state of illness back to health, are revealed as a toxic form of self-medication. Eisenstein diagnoses us, bluntly, as addicts:

“The future of the Technological Program is one where all the problems are solved once and for all. Here and now, though, we are waking up to another kind of future, and with a hangover to boot: vomit on the floor, apartment trashed, the world a mess.”

Admiring the problem, getting off on the mess, these can be just as addictive as the technology with which we’ve made the mess. It is something I guard against in writing this blog, with, I fear, mixed results. I am convinced that pessimism is addictive in large part because of how much less effort it takes. Meaningful optimism requires an increasingly steep degree of intellectual rigor, making it at the same time increasingly rare. Which makes it so thrilling that Eisenstein’s project is unreservedly optimistic, whilst, in the author’s own words, “assiduously avoiding New Age clichés.” (I have a heart full of my own favorite New Age clichés, e.g. the bumper-sticker slogan “God bless the whole world, no exceptions,” but keep them there a) because they fuel the heart-work of loving my neighbor, and b) because they are safe there from my mind, which thinks itself fully rational, making it (my mind) the ultimate emperor with no clothes. This heart-mind split sounds exactly like Eisenstein’s “individual alienation from… spirit and self.”) Eisenstein’s optimism is certified the moment he proposes an actual solution: “to abandon the program of insulation and control, and the conception of the separate self on which it rests.”

In contrasting this solution with what he terms our current “off-separation from the universe,” Eisenstein asserts that “rejuvenation and wholeness have been, and will be, the consequence of a different worldview, one that has roots in primitive culture and religion, and that is the inescapable yet heretofore generally unrealized implication of twentieth-century science.” (emphasis added) Everything Eisenstein says, or at least everything I can imagine him saying 40 pages in, hinges on that one little word: “wholeness.” Because as I read this passage the typically inaudible unfurling of my memories sounded instead like a whole tray of plates smashing to the floor in the kitchen. The noise redoubled when I got to page 19 and Eisenstein’s description of “our lost wholeness”: “It is a feeling that something is missing. Some people call it a hole in the soul.” The noise was Slovenian philosopher Slvaoj Zizek’s dramatic take on Shel Silverstein’s The Missing Piece.

Shel Siverstein is most famous in my household for penning The Giving Tree, a book which my wife, Jen, loathes. (Jen sees in The Giving Tree an endorsement of naked self-interest and exploitation. I must admit that I was less than impressed by the boy-who-grows-into-a-man character in The Giving Tree, especially in his bald middle age. And the tree itself seems to me sad and undignified in its giving, needy rather than gracious.) But, having never read The Missing Piece, Jen has no opinion about it, while I only became acquainted with it via Zizek’s interpretation in the introduction to his Enjoy Your Symptom! Here is the plot summary, as quoted from Wikipedia:

“The story centers on a circular animal-like creature that is missing a wedge-shaped piece of itself. It doesn’t like this, and sets out to find its missing piece, singing:

Oh, I'm lookin' for my missin' piece
I'm lookin' for my missin' piece
Hi-dee-ho, here I go
lookin' for my missin' piece

It starts out on a grand adventure searching for the perfect piece to complete itself, while singing and enjoying the scenery. But after the circle finally finds the exact-sized wedge that fits it, it begins to realize that it can no longer do the things it used to enjoy doing, like singing or rolling slowly enough to enjoy the company of a worm or butterfly. It decides that it was happier when searching for the missing piece than actually having it. So it gently puts the piece down, and continues searching happily.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missing_Piece_(book))

The key moment comes when “It decides that it was happier when searching for the missing piece than actually having it.” For Zizek, this is precisely when “the it… constitutes itself as desiring subject through a lack.” If you have been reading this blog you know I have a penchant for reformulating Descartes’ cogito. So, at the risk of going to the well once too often, here goes. Zizek is essentially saying “I desire, therefore I am.” Or, since we only desire because of our constitutive lack, “I lack, therefore I am.” Eisenstein’s “feeling that something is missing,” his “hole in the soul,” is, then, simply the emotional tone and spiritual condition peculiar to a human consciousness.

Seen from this angle, The Missing Piece is the tale of Eisenstein’s longed for “wholeness” found and rejected; it is a reversal of Amazing Grace into “I once was found, but now am lost” that is, shockingly, as overflowing with gratitude as the original. Eisenstein’s pursuit of wholeness suddenly seems reminiscent of the scene in The Matrix: Reloaded when Neo learns from The Architect that the original Matrix was both a) a virtual utopia free of all suffering, and b) rejected by its human inhabitants for that very reason. The history of The Architect’s first Matrix is, at bottom, a retelling of The Missing Piece.

But if, per The Missing Piece and The Matrix: Reloaded, we homo sapiens have rejected wholeness, our preferred modus operandi is leading to another rejection, only this time it is Mother Earth herself rejecting the artificial heart transplanted smack in Her chest in the form of us “desiring subjects.” The choice between Eisenstein’s wholeness and Zizek’s lack begins to feel like choosing your last meal before execution.

It was with just such pleasant thoughts that I went to bed after reading the first bit of The Ascent of Humanity. The very next morning my work took me to a meeting held in an elementary school library, during which meeting I glanced at the bookshelf abutting our little round table. There, at eye level directly in front of me, were three copies of Silverstein’s The Missing Piece. “Aha,” I thought, “the universe is clearly endorsing Zizek, we aren’t meant for wholeness, and if we’re going to save ourselves and our planet we had better rescue desire from capitalism, perhaps beginning by collectively desiring a twenty-hour work week.” (I didn’t actually think all of this on the spot given that I was attending to the specifics of the meeting, but I could feel the thought’s “bow wave,” one of my new favorite terms and one which describes the experience of knowing what’s coming before it happens, i.e. like the wave pushed out in front of the bow of a boat. I played baseball for years and came up to bat hundreds of times, but only once did I ever have precognition of getting hit by the pitcher. Standing in the on-deck circle, I felt the wild pitch’s bow wave. Neither before nor since have I ever been struck with such vivid foreknowledge. We all know what we’re going to think next, e.g. I know that I will never vote Republican, so maybe my use of “bow wave” in reference to my thoughts is a bit of a misnomer. In any case, my wife, who knows me better than I do since her view of me isn’t clouded by my garden variety projections and denial, i.e. she sees through my bullshit, can also tell you what I’m going to think next. And she still loves me! “A man’s greatest treasure is his wife,” indeed.)

But there, just a few books down on the very same shelf, was P.D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother?, which was something of a miracle given that a book by Eastman has no business on the same shelf as one by Silverstein. Unless the books were shelved by genre instead of by alphabet, which changes the particulars but not the fact of the miracle; either way I was staring at two famous illustrated children's books that essentially tell the same story, but with much different endings. Here is the plot summary of Are You My Mother?, again quoted from Wikipedia:

“Are You My Mother? is the story about a hatchling bird. His mother, thinking her egg will stay in her nest where she left it, leaves her egg alone and flies off to find food. The baby bird hatches. He does not understand where his mother is so he goes to look for her. In his search, he asks a kitten, a hen, a dog, and a cow if they are his mother. They each say, ‘No.’

Then he sees an old car, which cannot be his mother for sure. In desperation, the hatchling calls out to a boat and a plane, and at last, convinced he has found his mother, he climbs onto the teeth of an enormous earth mover. A loud ‘SNORT’ belches from its exhaust stack, prompting the bird to utter the immortal line, ‘You are not my mother! You are a SNORT!’ But as it shudders and grinds into motion he cannot escape. ‘I want my mother!’ he shouts.

But at this climactic moment, his fate is suddenly reversed. The earth mover drops him back in his nest just as his mother is returning home. The two are united, much to their delight, and the baby bird tells his mother about the adventure he had looking for her.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_My_Mother%3F)

The search for a missing piece is mirrored by a search for a missing mother, and both searches endure several false starts. But where Silverstein’s “It” finds the missing piece, only to throw it back and continue looking for satisfaction it doesn’t really want (thereby achieving satisfaction by never finding it, making life either a mystical paradox or absurd, which seem to be the only available choices for us desiring subjects), Eastman’s baby bird is delivered to its missing mother by its last, seemingly terrifying mistaken maternal object. As Snort, the embodiment of the industrial revolution, unexpectedly delivers the baby bird to its lost mother, one can hear Eisenstein in the background, riffing on the possibility that it is technology itself that will bring about the end of “The Age of Separation,” and deliver us unto “The Age of Reunion,” a “potential reunion that lies in the fulfillment, and not the abandonment, of the gifts that make us human.” The particular tale of separation and reunion told in Are You My Mother? is the children’s illustrated version of The Ascent of Humanity every bit as much as The Missing Piece is the children’s illustrated version of Zizek’s Enjoy Your Symptom! I would note that in both cases the children’s illustrated version came first.

So what was the universe telling me by putting both of these books on the same shelf right in front of my nose? Presumably, if the universe endorsed either wholeness or lack I would have encountered the corresponding children’s book, but not both. And it doesn’t seem possible that the universe was endorsing wholeness and lack; we don’t live in a universe of squared circles, after all. I am, it seems, left with the work of interpretation. So… if wholeness and lack are mutually exclusive, then perhaps a semantic shift is required. A shift from wholeness contra lack to a desire born from wholeness. The latter may be just as illogical as the former, if we grant that desire is just a byproduct of lack. But perhaps it isn’t always. And what would a desiring subject constituted from wholeness even want? She would want to give and, quite possibly, create.

Some would say that God, who by Her very definition is whole, constituted us with a lack, gave us our hole in the soul, so that there would be someone to receive Her gift. For us, achieving wholeness, then, would be to join in the Divine game of creation in order that we might give. (Our giving will be nothing like the Giving Tree's; if nothing else, we won't end up a stump.) What might we make, and to whom might we give? I seem to recall something about a “five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Here’s hoping we find wholeness before we take to the stars.

Seven of Ten

In a recent Washington Post article about the most expensive colleges in the country, Catherine Rampell reports that “after subtracting the average amount of government and institutional grant/scholarship aid at each institution… seven of the top 10 most expensive schools are arts schools or conservatories of some kind.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2014/03/28/the-most-expensive-colleges-in-the-country-are-art-schools-not-ivies/)

It would be easy enough to note the obvious irony in the fact that the profession which pays the least (see “starving artists”) costs the most to pursue, and stop at that. But I am going to propose that everything you need to know about art schools and, by extension, art in America, can be gleaned from that one fact. Before doing so I should note that I know as much about the ins and outs of the art world as I do about the inner workings of the Internal Revenue Service; my art diet consists of books and rock and roll (the beans and rice of the arts). This means that I am either a) free to interpret the cost of art school without the filters and biases of someone submerged in the arts, and, as such, able to see the truth hidden right in plain sight, or b) completely out of my element, and about as likely to succeed as if attempting to design and construct my own rooftop deck. I will, for the purposes of writing, presume the former; the reader is, of course, free to decide for him or herself.

Prohibitively high art school tuition operates on two primary levels, one impacting those who somehow matriculate, and the other affecting those who are essentially excluded. I will begin with the former. Setting aside the narrow sliver of the population whose parents can actually afford to pay full art school tuition, the dream of making art involves the reality of massive student loans. If your retort is “So what, I had to take out student loans, too,” recall that the art student’s loans will necessarily be the highest, and their post-graduate earning power the lowest. If you took out student loans you took out less, and you came away with the power to earn more. This is true for even the financially humble professions of teaching, social work, and nursing, and even more so for law, business, and medicine. Art school students fall prey to a quintessential double bind, their cash flow bringing to mind the old Black Flag Roach Motel tag line, “Roaches check in, but they don’t check out.”

This analysis is just a longer version of the obvious irony initially noted above. We don’t really get anywhere unless and until we are willing to stipulate that the price tag on art school is no accident, nor is it because it is just plain more expensive to teach art. Last I checked, pastels and clay don’t cost anymore than books or beakers, art history profs no more than their counterparts in engineering, and the computers used to make graphic designs would seem to carry roughly the same price tag as those used for typing senior theses about Proust. The price of art school doesn’t come into focus without the recognition that art school graduates, saddled with enormous debt, become the vanguard of paying the bills. Seen in this light, art school costs the most precisely because theirs is the most dangerous profession. Dangerous because the bulk of an artist’s raison d’etre is the imagining of other possible worlds, except in those cases when the artist instead exists in order to pay back six figures of debt (plus interest!). Art isn’t inherently revolutionary, just potentially so. Really existing art school exists to quell that potential.

Art school’s suppression of that revolutionary potential is reinforced by its clientele. If you are fortunate enough to attend art school, college loan debt notwithstanding, can you reasonably be expected to turn your art against the very system that upholds your privileges, since these very privileges enable your emergence as an (official) artist? Could you turn your back on the only form of externally granted status that could ever align with your deepest sense of who you are at your core, the only institution that has ever said “Yes, art is important, and yes so are you,”? (All of these things, by the bye, apply in varying degrees to liberal arts higher education, which doesn’t cost quite as much, and which allows you to make a little more, but which doesn’t change the fact that folk like yours truly are implicated by pretty much all of this. It takes one to know one.) Which makes the second level on which art school tuition operates, the exclusion of entire swaths of society from art school, equally as important as the first in the neutering of art. Because those who have the most to gain from social change, from making art that opens up new possible worlds, are those effectively excluded from making professional art. In a society where credentials are everything, art school is the keeper of cred. Street cred may help with sales of your first rap album, but it won’t help you open a gallery in SoHo. For that you need a blurb in the Times, i.e. you need to go to art school.

Many of the teachers and students in art schools would likely describe their work as exactly that imagining of new worlds which I am, a priori, denying them. I would respond that by describing their work as such they are making a sales pitch, that they actually believe it to be the truth and not a sales pitch, and that this in turn makes it a more effective sales pitch. I am, of course, accusing them of inhabiting a false consciousness, which is not in any way a new critique, but is, I would argue, no worse for the wear. Again, the reader is welcome to disagree. But if one disagrees one takes on the burden of explaining how one can make art that is both a commodity and transformational. It says here that the two are mutually exclusive.

I don’t know about your burg, but everyone I’ve ever met in Baltimore who went to MICA (the local art school), now works at MICA. And I would hazard a guess that all the rest of MICA’s alumni work at other art schools. There is an old word for toiling away one’s years in debt bondage: indentured servitude. Art school grads have simply updated it for modern times, making it permanent instead of temporary. (To get a sense of MICA qua institution, consider the following report from the current edition of Baltimore’s weekly City Paper: “In response to efforts of the art school’s adjunct faculty to form a union, outgoing MICA president Fred Lazarus and other administration officials have sent out letters urging adjuncts to vote ‘no’ and consider ‘whether you want to turn over important rights to a union.’” (http://citypaper.com/news/baltimore-city-power-rankings-1.1661057) That these “important rights” are left unspecified is no surprise, given that the only rights the adjuncts could possibly lose in forming a union are the rights to continue giving away all of their power; the aforementioned indentured servitude clearly ain’t just a rhetorical device. But the cover-up is always worse than the crime, and in covering their tracks with a bald faced lie, “The union will hurt you as much if not more than us,” MICA is no longer merely exploiting its workers, it is operating in bad faith. This is an exponentially graver sin.)

My solution: Everyone makes (free) art and no one goes to art school. It’s often said that after the revolution comes, the first thing to do is to empty the prisons. But to start the revolution, let’s try emptying the art schools. And, crucially, filling the streets with art.