Hello everyone! :))

I have a show running right now in the Los Angeles area at the G2 Gallery ("supporting art and the environment") in Venice.

The closing reception will be held Saturday February 6, 2010 from 7-9pm.  The cast of ABC's Desperate Housewives will attend.  The gallery address is 1503 Abbot Kinney Blvd Venice, CA 90291. The telephone is (310) 452-2842.

I will likely have a separate "meet the artist" event on Friday (2/5/10); if so, there will be a notice sent separately.

Here are more details...    (trouble viewing? click here)

On Poverty and the Environment

I watched as the page burned and I cried. Because the words that were written and the dance they made were gone forever. But that’s the life we’ve chosen; to burn our history page by page; and to write a fiction replacing it. I turned away, but saw from the sparks we’d made, the earth was burning too. And because of the smoke we walked in darkness. Freedom is lost. The American Dream is dead. And the earth is raped. The villain in the mirror is grinning back.

The dream of America was born in democracy and killed by the free market. With our first breath we declared all men equal in creation; inalienably due life, liberty and singular ambition. With manifest clarity we knew that every child should have the same opportunity; that every generation would increase our prosperity; that merit is our greatest common ground; and that peace is our gift to those we make in our image. But our democracy was conceived as a right of capital ownership, and participation required it. Political power and economic power were inextricably entwined. But while suffrage expanded, economic power narrowed. And in the separation democracy broke. Holdings must be spread and rooted within the population or democracy cannot represent the people. Yet somehow freedom of capital gained reverence over freedom of man; ignorant that peace and sustainable prosperity can only be a result of the morality of the latter; not the amorality of the former. Unchecked, capitalism is rigged. Capital inherently coalesces in a state of nature. An amoral (or immoral) self-serving act always wins in the dark. It is only pooled (in society) that good can hope to win against the alternative. Society must ensure that the rules promote the public interest. Or it reigns oppression with counterfeit legitimacy. Now, all that remains of our grand experiment is a puppet democracy; a morbid disgraceful display. Collecting in its wake are the poverty, dependency and environmental destruction that are the waste products of unbridled free market capitalism.

And what we create here is amplified around the world. Poverty has always been a feature of private capital consolidation; but extreme poverty needed a global market engine. The more divorced ownership is from action, the more spectacular the casualties. Extreme poverty was bred from the fevered consumption of raw materials and attendant displacement of native populations spurred by 15th century (and beyond) colonialism and 18th century industrialization. These populations were displaced from plots which could sustain them, into large population centers where they were dependent on inadequate employment and where their numbers grew exponentially. Poverty, environmental degradation, disease and war collaborate in a vicious deadly cycle. Poverty both exacerbates environmental problems (ballooning developing world populations, rainforest deforestation, etc.), and absorbs most of the negative consequences (consumption of unhealthy food, exposure to toxins, incidence of disease caused by environmental factors, impact from disasters influenced by environmental change, impact from conflict and violence caused by environmental degradation, etc.). So while industry has always exploited the poor and polluted the environment; in the context of modern global capitalism, the consequences are shocking. We’ve been led, step by step, past the crest of an economic genocide, to the precipice of an environmental crisis. And the poor are on the front lines of the violence and the destruction.

The romance of our democracy is that right will win in the light. But who promised the sun? It is darkness that we see by. The modern world is consumed by the failings, weaknesses and evils of others. The genius of our system is that those are also the main human casualties (failure, inequality, marginalization, exploitation, etc.). As such, the system promotes our destruction and feeds it back to us on a platter. Once, media played a vital role in service to our self governance. It provided a feedback mechanism to self correct and to drive public understanding. It does no longer. As packaged, it corrupts instead of informing. We do not learn; we do not improve. We are fed sensationalism by a fast food media apparatus engineered by corporate / capital interests to drive profit, not public good. Hot off the press or the griddle; it is cheaply produced and tastes good, but it will kill us. Better produced is the fear we're fed by the same apparatus. It spurs stagnation over action; division over consensus. By fostering small public pluralities we are more easily manipulated along the margin; allowing financed interests to divide and game public opinion. And by teaching voyeurism and a consumption lifestyle, we are driven to spending (and resource exploitation) beyond our means.

So we sit on our little mole hills and wallow in the misery of others; strangely voyeuristic in our individualism. We’re obsessed with the problems of others and ignore our own part in it. We guard our privacy and violate that of others. We look outward and hide inward. We act as though what we do and what we say is somehow insulated and harmless. Imagined separation affords space for a lot of weeds to grow; a lot of dirty little secrets hidden in plain sight. Well guess what; it’s not a secret. And you’re as guilty as the next person; for what you’ve allowed and what you’ve done; as a person, as a community, and as a nation. It is the inertia of the fragmented. We think of ourselves as everything and nothing. What good could we possibly do; and what bad could we possibly do? So we do little good and much bad. We know something is broken; but we don’t fix it. We want to change the world but we never do.

Well let me tell you a secret. We aren’t building anything here. When we’re gone, all that will prove our existence is our waste and our destruction. In America, 10 million people (12%) are clearly in poverty. Maybe 30 million people go in and out of poverty over time. But two out of three people are building no wealth. Ten percent of Americans own 70% of the capital. The bottom 50% of Americans own less than 3%. Something is wrong. We are spending more than we earn every day of our lives. And we are spending on subsistence and lifestyle. Too few have too much and too many have nothing. We are a population of displaced individuals who have little option but to participate in a broken system. The vast majority have no plot of productive land for simple self sufficient subsistence; and no wealth or capital. We are dependent; inter-dependent in fact.

Modern value creation is a murderous beast where wealth is not measured in man-hours but lives converted to capital; humanity as a vessel for value transfer. Like any conduction medium, the point is efficient pass though. Each human life can be counted on to generate say one or two million dollars and to transfer that at a high rate to someone’s wealth. We are just another natural resource. There’s value in our productivity and there’s inherent value in our warm mass. The engine is consumer debt. It helps ensure that we don’t worry much about collecting wealth (reducing pass through). And it increases the velocity of our consumption. The negative balance when we die is but small debit to the total.

In December 2004, the United Nations declared poverty, disease and the environment collectively as the top interrelated threat to global security. It instituted the Poverty-Environment Initiative to promote governmental action which simultaneously addresses both poverty and the environment. But we ignore the underlying threat. We see a grim horizon and question if democracy really fosters peace worldwide. Well democracy is not the dominant force in the world, capitalism is. That same capitalism that treats people and the earth as exploitable resources; and that generates economic power by processing those resources. Sure, capitalism is efficient in the task (brutally so). And sure, it results in a degree of liberalization worldwide (and perhaps nominal democratization). But used indiscriminately, it is destructive and unsustainable. It is a tool, not an end, as clearly demonstrated by authoritarian regimes like China which seek to foster goals far different from those we state. If our ideals mean anything, the global capital engine must be curbed; the free market must be shackled; and excessive private capital accumulation must be stopped. Or far different standards will shape the future. It is not an issue of evil men (necessarily); it is men with inappropriate power. It is too much power in too narrow service. At worst that power corrupts; at best it misaligns with the public interest.