NEWSgrist - where spin is art

The president won't apologize to women so Liz Plank did it for him...

The president won't apologize to women so I did it for him. pic.twitter.com/Y4GGnWu4FU

— Liz Plank (@feministabulous) December 21, 2017

Egypt: Police Arrest Canadians John Greyson and Dr. Tarek Loubani

    
L: John Greyson is a filmmaker and professor at York University in Toronto.

R: Tarek Loubani is an emergency doctor from London, Ontario.

 

For Updates:

Aggregated links at The Globe & Mail

Justin Podur's blog

For Letter Writing, see example.

Email addresses to send letters:

The Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs: [email protected]
Canadian Embassy in Egypt: [email protected]
Egyptian Embassy in Canada: [email protected]
Egyptian Embassy in the US: [email protected]

via The Toronto Star:

Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, physician Tarek Loubani arrested in Cairo

The fate of two Canadian men who were arrested in Egypt remains unknown amidst growing concern from family and friends of Tarek Loubani and John Greyson.

By: Sean Tepper Staff Reporter, Published on Sat Aug 17 2013

The fate of two Canadian men who were arrested in strife-torn Egypt remains unknown amidst growing concern from family and friends.

Tarek Loubani, an emergency room doctor from London, Ont., and John Greyson, a filmmaker and professor at York University, were arrested in Cairo Friday, according to Justin Podur, a mutual friend of both men.

At around 4 p.m., which is approximately 10 p.m. in Cairo, Loubani called Podur to tell him he and Greyson were being arrested.

“He basically said ‘We’re being arrested by Egyptian police,’” he told the Star, adding that the phone call was very brief. “I don’t know where they were arrested and I don’t know where they are now.”

Podur, a professor at the faculty of environmental studies at York University, says Loubani was on his way to Gaza as part of an ongoing collaboration between the University of Western Ontario and Al-Shifa Hospital. Greyson was tagging along as a filmmaker to do some exploratory work.

“Their plan was to travel from Egypt to Gaza,” he said. “They were in Cairo and the crossing was closed from what I understand so they stayed an extra day in Cairo and that’s when they were arrested. I haven’t heard from them since.”

Podur immediately contacted the Canadian government for help but has not received any updates on their status.

“We’ve got no idea of their condition or where they are right now.”

Caitlin Workman, a spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs, said they are aware of the arrest of a Canadian in Egypt.

“The embassy in Cairo is in contact with local authorities and we are prepared to provide consular assistance,” she said. She was unable to provide any additional details.

Hundreds of people have been killed in Egypt in the past week amidst clashes between supporters of ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi and security forces. Toronto resident Amr Kassam was shot dead while attending a protest in the Egyptian city of Alexandria on Friday. He was visiting Egypt with his wife Asmaa Hussein and their baby daughter.

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Aaron Swartz: The world was a better place with him in it

Here's to Aaron Swartz.

An all-too-brief compendium:

BoingBoing
RIP, Aaron Swartz
Cory Doctorow at 4:53 am Sat, Jan 12

NYTimes
Internet Activist, a Creator of RSS, Is Dead at 26, Apparently a Suicide
By JOHN SCHWARTZ, January 12, 2013

Lessig Blog, v2
Prosecutor as bully
12 January 2013

ARTINFO
Remembering Aaron Swartz's Ethically Engaged Internet Art Collaboration
by Ben Davis, January 15, 2013

The Tech (MIT)
Aaron Swartz found dead Friday
Internet legend faced copyright-related legal issues before death
By Anne Cai and Deborah Chen, January 16, 2013

Time Magazine
Aaron Swartz’s Suicide Triggers Response from Top U.S. Lawmakers
By Sam GustinJan. 16, 2013

Boingboing
2600 radio tribute to Aaron Swartz
Cory Doctorow at 8:49 am Fri, Jan 18

Techdirt
Internet Freedom Day, Watch Aaron Swartz Explain How SOPA Was Stopped
by Mike Masnick, Fri, Jan 18th 2013

 

More Hard Truths About the Art Market....

 
Image via The End of Bling.

 

As a friend of mine (who shall remain unnamed) has been saying for at least a decade, (and has just reminded me in an email, in response to Ben Davis's piece):

"The art boom correlates directly to the Bush tax cuts. Why did it take soooo long for people to figure that out? Clearly, for the upper middle class, who used to be the collector class for the vast majority of artists, the artisanal lifestyle thing has long since taken over from art, as far as investment and interest goes. But I do think an art market crash that effects the top echelons, like Hirst et al, which I believe is immanent, and which will correlate directly with the end of the Bush tax cuts (see fiscal cliff negotiations), would allow the 'middle arts' to come back to life. This is not just important for those diehard artists who have embraced the end-run despite having no sales for years, but for art and culture in general which has been damaged so brutally by the past decades of growth for the 1%. It turns out that they are not our friends, even though some would have us believe so."

"Damaged so brutally" is right.

Onward.

via ARTINFO:

3 Hard Truths About the Art Market: It's Nasty, Brutish, and Short-Sighted

by Ben Davis

Published: January 15, 2013

You probably don’t want to read another article on art and money. I don’t really want to write one. But then again, I don’t really want to read another article about how humans are destroying the planet. But it's a fact that they are, and until it is not, I am happy to see such coverage, when it appears.

I have three main points that I’d add to the recent onslaught of angry articles about money and its effects on art. 

UNSUSTAINABLE CONTRADICTIONS

What are the two great and indisputable trends in art of the recent past? The first is for artworks to approach, more and more, the condition of pop culture. The scholar Johanna Drucker has dubbed this “complicit aesthetics.” More art-celebrity team-ups of all sorts clog our mental space, and there are more and more massive art installations billed essentially as theme park attractions.

The other unavoidable recent trend is the craze for Art as an Asset Class (or AaaAC, as I prefer to call it).

Well, when you stop to think for one second, it is plain that these two trends run in opposite directions, held together in our minds only because the indispensable condition of both is the presence of vast amounts of money — either the money to create multi-million-dollar maximalist environments, or the money to gamble spectacularly at the auctions. But this is money spent to very different ends.

For art to function as an effective investment vehicle, it needs to increase in value steadily over a long period of time — decades. On the other hand, pop culture is by definition short-term culture, constantly changing and overwriting itself, the subject of explosive interest one second, a half-remembered curiosity the next. Mediating this tension is not impossible, but at a certain point, there is going to be some kind of breakdown.

Some such reckoning seems already to be happening in the case of Damien Hirst, whose recent works have disappointed when they hit the auction block — a fact which seems to stem from this very tension. “I think Hirst was a very good artist at the beginning,” Georgina Adam said, “but he has been a fabricator of luxury goods for a long time now.” While Hirst-ean theatrics may in the short term delight nouveau riche scenesters looking for crushingly obvious symbols of sophistication, it turns out that wedding your work to the conventions of mass fashion — which must of necessity constantly revolve — is not a great strategy for producing investment grade art.

If I were someone interested in contemporary art as an investment, nothing would chill me more than the fact that fashion brands are so obsessed with hooking themselves in to contemporary art. AaaAC.

INEQUALITY

When you hear talk of a “bubble,” it seems mainly to mean that commentators don't particularly like the art that is getting the most attention. Still, you must admit that there is a lot of frothiness in the art market, a fact discernible from the ever-growing number of cack-handed schemes to profit off of the art boom.

Quick show of hands: Who thinks the starfucking joke art of Francesco Vezzoli is one for the ages? Anyone? Well, if so, there is a French art exchange that will let you invest in “shares” of his work…

Nevertheless, we should be precise about what makes a bubble a bubble. Just because house prices are rising fast doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a “housing bubble.” It’s hard to say what a “normal” house price is, but there are various factors that you can look at, among them the average family income in an area and the relative cost of renting. If prices soar way above all such possible rational measures, then you are likely in a bubble.

So, what is the underlying constant that determines “normal” art prices? In the artist Andrea Fraser’s great text, “L'1%, C'Est Moi,” she quotes a study by three economists who attempted to find an answer to just this question. They found that

a one percentage point increase in the share of total income earned by the top 0.1 percent triggers an increase in art prices of about 14 percent… It is indeed the money of the wealthy that drives art prices. This implies that we can expect art booms whenever income inequality rises quickly.

 

[Read on...]

'This year...voting is an act of defiance against malicious political forces'

Image Via

Via NYTimes SundayReview:

Editorial | The Struggle to Cast a Vote

Upholding Democracy, Ballot by Ballot

Published: November 3, 2012

This year, voting is more than just the core responsibility of citizenship; it is an act of defiance against malicious political forces determined to reduce access to democracy. Millions of ballots on Tuesday — along with those already turned in — will be cast despite the best efforts of Republican officials around the country to prevent them from playing a role in the 2012 election.

Even now, many Republicans are assembling teams to intimidate voters at polling places, to demand photo ID where none is required, and to cast doubt on voting machines or counting systems whose results do not go their way. The good news is that the assault on voting will not affect the election nearly as much as some had hoped. Courts have either rejected or postponed many of the worst laws. Predictions that up to five million people might be disenfranchised turned out to be unfounded.

But a great deal of damage has already been done, and the clearest example is that on Sunday in Florida, people will not be allowed to vote early. Four years ago, on the Sunday before Election Day, tens of thousands of Floridians cast their ballots, many of them black churchgoers who traveled directly from services to their polling places. Because most of them voted for Barack Obama, helping him win the state, Republicans eliminated early voting on that day. No legitimate reason was given; the action was entirely partisan in nature.

The author of that law, as The Palm Beach Post revealed last week, was Emmett Mitchell IV, the general counsel for the state Republican Party. Under his guidance, party officials in Florida got thousands of perfectly eligible black voters purged from the rolls in 2000, and got a law passed last year that limited registration drives and early voting days. A federal judge struck down the registration limits, but not before they drove down the numbers of new registrants.

The law cutting back nearly half the number of early-voting days in Florida remains in place, a reaction to the Obama campaign’s successful use of the system. Early voting is wildly popular, freeing people from having to cast a ballot within a few hours on a workday, and all but 15 states allow it in some form. (When will New York get the message?) But even after long lines formed last week at early-voting stations in Florida, Gov. Rick Scott refused to extend the period an extra day. In Ohio, a judge had to restore early-voting days that Republicans had tried to cut.

One of the biggest attempts to reduce the turnout of minority voters, poor people and others likely to vote Democratic has been the imposition of photo ID requirements, under the guise of preventing nonexistent voter fraud. In Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin, courts have blocked these laws or postponed them until after the election, but the issue is by no means dead, and Republicans can be expected to continue to press their self-serving case.

In Iowa and Wisconsin, the Romney campaign has given its poll watchers misleading or incorrect information — for instance, that voters should show an ID in Iowa, where none is required — which could create disputes and long lines, most likely in Democratic precincts.

One of the saddest signs of the politicization of the voting process and the counting of ballots has been the armies of lawyers assembled by both parties in the swing states where the vote is likely to be the closest. Much of this would be unnecessary if not for the requirements that Republicans have tried to put in place, which force Democrats to make sure that provisional ballots are not thrown out or mishandled. (In Nevada, Republicans are already preparing their challenge by claiming, with absolutely no evidence, that some machines are malfunctioning in Mr. Obama’s favor.)

Public outcry, with support from the courts, may eventually remove these threats to democracy. For now, those who contribute to a heavy turnout on Tuesday will send a message that Americans reject any underhanded effort to place political gain above a franchise for which people have given their lives.

A version of this editorial appeared in print on November 4, 2012, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Upholding Democracy, Ballot By Ballot.