Moderation woes.

We've been having trouble with moderating comments for a few days. As you may know, if you comment on a post more than 2 days old, it doesn't go up until we approve it. But we haven't been able to get to the moderation page, so whatever is there is just helplessly waiting. Sorry, but I can't do anything about that, at least for now. If this continues, it will mean that on older posts, comments are essentially closed.

We're also unable to get to the spam page, so that means that we can't liberate comments that don't belong there. I know there is at least one regular commenter who has been singled out by the spam filter, and I'm especially sorry about that problem. It's not that we don't care and are not trying to get proper comments out of the spam filter. It's that we can't.

"There were very drawn out versions of songs where Manson mostly rambled on about our lack of love and other bizarre things. After an hour and fifteen minutes of this, he threw his microphone and left the stage."

From "Marilyn Manson Cuts Concert Short After Meltdown Onstage/The rocker rambled a freestyle jam and repeated demands for applause, while performing at the Paramount in New York on Thursday night."

I'm fascinated by that phrase "our lack of love and other bizarre things."

"In the past, Mr. Trump said, when dealing with a dishonest rival 'there was nothing you can do other than sue. Which I’ve done... But it’s a long process.'"

"Now, he simply tweets. Caustically, colorfully and repeatedly. Suddenly, he said of his foes, 'I have more power than they do. I can let people know that they were a fraud... I can let people know that they have no talent, that they didn’t know what they’re doing. You have a voice.'... Mr. Trump... is an improbable virtuoso of the tweet...."

From "Pithy, Mean and Powerful: How Donald Trump Mastered Twitter for 2016" in — of all places — the New York Times. Back in October 2015.

... Mr. Trump has mastered Twitter in a way no candidate for president ever has, unleashing and redefining its power as a tool of political promotion, distraction, score-settling and attack — and turning a 140-character task that other candidates farm out to young staff members into a centerpiece of his campaign.

"Farm out" to their troll farm.

In the process, he has managed to fulfill a vision, long predicted but slow to materialize, sketched out a decade ago by a handful of digital campaign strategists: a White House candidacy that forgoes costly, conventional methods of political communication and relies instead on the free, urgent and visceral platforms of social media.

The writer is Michael Barbaro, whom you might know from "The Daily" podcast (at the NYT), which I listen to every weekday. It's great, and I am enjoying happening upon this old article of his, which has special resonance today as we're called upon to fear the national security threat posed by the Russian troll farm. Not only did (and does) Trump do his own tweets, he understands Americans enough to say things that reach us in places Russians don't know about.

What got me to that old article? I clicked on a tag on the previous post, which took me to my old posts containing the name Robert Barnes, including an October '15 post linking to "Pithy, Mean and Powerful...."

"Mueller’s unprecedented prosecution raises three novel arguments: first, that speaking out about American politics requires a foreign citizen to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act..."

"... second, that speaking out about American politics requires a foreign citizen list their source and expenditure of funding to the Federal Election Commission; and third, that mistakes on visa applications constitute 'fraud' on the State Department. All appear to borrow from the now-discredited 'honest services' theories Mueller’s team previously used in corporate and bribery cases, cases the Supreme Court overturned for their unconstitutional vagueness. The indictment raises serious issues under the free speech clause of the First Amendment and due process rights under the Fifth Amendment."

From "Does Mueller Indictment Mean Clinton Campaign Can Be Indicted for Chris Steele?" by Robert Barnes, who observes that Mueller chose targets who will never be brought to trial and therefore knew he was using a legal theory that would not be tested in court.

"Michigan is one of more than 40 states where prisoners can be forced to pay for the cost of their incarceration..."

"Laws that allow the government to charge prisoners 'room and board' or 'cost of care' fees have proliferated in recent decades, as states charge inmates and parolees for everything from medical care, clothing and meals to police transport, public defense fees, drug testing and electronic monitoring.... During the last fiscal year, Michigan collected some $3.7 million from 294 prisoners, who account for just a fraction of the state’s nearly 40,000 inmates. Around the country, some 10 million people owe $50 billion in fees stemming from their arrest or imprisonment.... H. Bruce Franklin, author of 'Prison Literature in America,' said that if prisoners who publish books are forced to forfeit their advances and royalties to the state, it could dissuade aspiring writers who are incarcerated from seeking to publish at all."

From "A Prisoner Got a Book Deal. Now the State Wants Him to Pay for His Imprisonment" (NYT).

The article is about Curtis Dawkins, whom I blogged about here, last July.

"For the past year, Donald Trump has repeatedly denied the existence of a profound national security threat..."

... write the editors of the NYT in "Stop Letting the Russians Get Away With It, Mr. Trump." They're pointing at the new indictment as if it makes it obvious that the Russians already did something that amounts to a profound national security threat. But it's far from obvious. In fact, I can't see it at all.

On Friday, Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russia’s role in the 2016 election, filed criminal charges of fraud and identity theft against 13 Russian citizens and three Russian organizations, all alleged to have operated a sophisticated influence campaign intended to “sow discord in the U.S. political system.”

So... they engaged in speech and they meant to "sow discord." I can't see that as a profound national security threat. If we were to adopt that view and act upon it, there would be a profound threat to freedom of speech.

["Specialists" at the Internet Research Agency] posed as Americans and created false identities to set up social media pages and groups aimed at attracting American audiences. 

Another day on the internet — people pretended to be what they are not. If you're going to assume that readers of the internet are so naive as to take the crap that pops up on line at face value, you're making the argument that we can't even have a democracy at all. People are too stupid to vote. But we're on the alert — even when we read the New York Times — that somebody's always trying to con us.

The broad outlines of this interference have been known publicly for a while, but the sheer scope of the deception detailed in Friday’s indictments is breathtaking.

Eh. I'm still breathing.

By the spring of 2016, the operation had zeroed in on supporting Mr. Trump and disparaging Hillary Clinton. 

Because it was more chaos-y. So what?

The Internet Research Agency alone had a staff of 80 and a monthly budget of $1.25 million. On the advice of a real, unnamed grass-roots activist from Texas, it had focused its efforts on swing states like Colorado, Virginia and Florida.

Staffers bought ads with messages like “Hillary is a Satan,” “Ohio Wants Hillary 4 Prison” and “Vote Republican, Vote Trump, and support the Second Amendment!”

So these geniuses produced more of the same junk that you see all the time on the internet. It was like having 80 more deplorables chattering. How can that be "a profound national security threat"?!

They created hundreds of social media accounts on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other sites to confuse and anger people about sensitive issues like immigration, religion and the Black Lives Matter movement — in some cases gaining hundreds of thousands of followers.

Hundreds! Thousands! Who the hell cares? Is this column written for readers who have never spent any time on the internet? This editorial is doing the very thing it decries, trying to "confuse and anger people about sensitive issues."

They staged rallies while pretending to be American grass-roots organizations.

Another day at a protest. So what? We have our rallies in America, and if you go to one, as a competent citizen, you should wonder, who are these people really? If you went to a Vietnam War rally back in the day, and it turned out it was staged by communists and not loyal Americans, you'd be an anti-free-speech villain if you wanted those identity-hiding communists arrested for threatening national security.

A poster at one “pro-Clinton” rally in July 2016 read “Support Hillary. Save American Muslims,” along with a fabricated quote attributed to Mrs. Clinton: “I think Sharia Law will be a powerful new direction of freedom.”

Sneaky, yes, but profound threat to national security? It's just a stupid lie, and if people aren't smart enough to figure that out, then how can we be trusted with the vote?

As the election drew nearer, they tried to suppress minority turnout and promoted false allegations of Democratic voter fraud. The specialist running one of the organization’s Facebook accounts, called “Secured Borders,” was criticized for not publishing enough posts and was told that “it is imperative to intensify criticizing Hillary Clinton.”

What's the point here? That in the future these people might actually accomplish their nefarious plan to publish more posts?? That's the profound threat to national security?

After the election, they continued to spread confusion and chaos, staging rallies both for and against Mr. Trump, in one case on the same day and in the same city.

This column is continuing to spread confusion and chaos, but I nevertheless persist in keeping my wits about me. I'm not buying it. Just as I don't believe that Hillary Clinton said "Sharia Law will be a powerful new direction of freedom," I don't believe these piddling social media posts and real-world rallies are a profound thread to national security.

All along, they took steps to cover their tracks by stealing the identities of real Americans, opening accounts on American-based servers and lying about what their money was being used for... [A] specialist named Irina Kaverzina emailed a family member: “We had a slight crisis here at work: the FBI busted our activity (not a joke). So, I got preoccupied with covering tracks together with the colleagues.” Ms. Kaverzina continued, “I created all these pictures and posts, and the Americans believed that it was written by their people.”

Fake news, indeed.

Yes, fake news, indeed. "For the past year, Donald Trump has repeatedly denied the existence of a profound national security threat" and based on the indictment — as laid out in this editorial meant to show how wrong he was — I'd say he was right. And I'm disturbed at how stupid the NYT editors seem to think its readers are. It's almost forgivable that they think people could be so easily confused by some Russian rallies and social media posts. Forgivable, but still deserving of the Trump taunt: fake news.

"To the extent that there is a generational divide, it may have to do with the fact that many older women are still wary about the internet, which leads them to not only miss the context of a longstanding feminist internet tradition of ironic misandry..."

"... but also to overlook the more nuanced chatter happening among younger women on social media and digital sites.... And yet most of the disagreement has to do with age-old ideas about sex, power and the function of social movements...

Writes Nona Willis Aronowitz in "The Feminist Pursuit of Good Sex" (NYT). Aronowitz is the daughter of Ellen Willis, "who in a 1981 essay in The Village Voice asked a question that now looms over #MeToo 40 years later: 'Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?'"

Aronowitz says:

My connection to this complex intellectual heritage is at the heart of why I find the prevailing narrative about #MeToo’s generational split baffling and harmful. Here’s how the story goes: Older critics, flattened into “Second Wave feminist has-beens,” are accusing the movement of becoming increasingly anti-sex, anti-agency and anti-nuance. Younger women, also known as “Twitter feminists,” are accusing these critics of being bitter establishmentarians, unable to cede ground to new ideas. They’re both wrong, but so is this tired mothers-and-daughters framing, which threatens to derail substantive debate in favor of a catfight narrative.

I note the assertion that both sides are missing nuance. The older women think the younger ones are "increasingly anti-sex, anti-agency and anti-nuance." And the younger ones think the older ones don't follow "the more nuanced chatter" of the internet so they don't grok "the feminist internet tradition of ironic misandry."

If only we could be more nuanced, maybe we could meet in the middle. But everybody's always only seeing the lack of nuance on the other side. You get the self-flatterer imperiously telling other people to compromise. But Aronowitz seems to be more of an onlooker, trying to mediate. I look at  Memorandum's River and see there's no significant internet talk about her column. I look at the NYT's own "most-emailed," "most viewed," and even "recommended for you" lists and don't find it. Even with "Good Sex" in the title, it's not getting traction.

From the Wikipedia article on Ellen Willis:

Willis was known for her feminist politics and was a member of New York Radical Women and subsequently co-founder in early 1969 with Shulamith Firestone of the radical feminist group Redstockings.... Starting in 1979, Willis wrote a number of essays that were highly critical of anti-pornography feminism, criticizing it for what she saw as its sexual puritanism and moral authoritarianism, as well as its threat to free speech. These essays were among the earliest expressions of feminist opposition to the anti-pornography movement in what became known as the feminist sex wars. Her 1981 essay, Lust Horizons: Is the Women's Movement Pro-Sex? is the origin of the term, "pro-sex feminism."

Willis was the first popular music critic for The New Yorker, between 1968 and 1975... In 2011, the first collection of Willis’s music reviews and essays, Out of the Vinyl Deeps (University of Minnesota Press), arrived. It was edited by her daughter Nona Willis-Aronowitz. Ellen Willis "celebrated the seriousness of pleasure and relished the pleasure of thinking seriously," a review in The New York Times said.

Is anyone celebrating the seriousness of pleasure anymore? Even Nona Willis-Aronowitz — seemingly dedicated to her mother's legacy — left off the "Lust Horizons" part of the title of that 1981 essay. She calls it simply "Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?" — perhaps because few readers get the reference to "Lost Horizon" these days...

... but I think it's because "lust" — a popular and positive word in the 1970s — has become ugly again — returned to its stature as one of "The 7 Deadly Sins"....



The question are feminists pro-sex? becomes — with nuance —are feminists pro-good-sex? The easy answer then is yes, but we're left with the difficult question is how to find good sex when her own daughter edits out Ellen Willis's word "lust"?

ADDED: To be fair, Aronowitz does, in her first paragraph, call herself "lusty," but she's speaking of herself in the past and "before I’d learned much about feminism." She was, she says, "fascinated by what we now call the 1970s 'golden era' of pornography... Being a lusty, modern woman, I was enthralled."

But "lusty" doesn't mean "lustful." It means merry and cheerful or hearty and vigorous. "The Turk... gave him two or three lusty kicks on the seat of honour," wrote Edmund Burke in his memoir.

The word that means "Full of, imbued with, or characterized by, lust or unlawful desires; pertaining to, marked by, or manifesting sensual desire; libidinous" (OED) is "lustful."

At the Friday Night Cafe...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"The indictment is odd, to say the least."

"Its very first paragraph recites that it is against the law for foreign nationals to spend money to influence US elections, or for agents of foreign countries to engage in political activities without registering. But no one is charged with these crimes. Instead, the indictment is devoted mostly to charging a 'conspiracy to defraud the United States.' Normally, that would refer to defrauding the U.S. out of, say, $10,000 in Medicare benefits. Its application to the 2016 election seems dubious. Beyond that, the indictment charges relatively minor offenses: bank fraud (opening accounts in false names) and identity theft.... The indictment says nothing about how effective the Russians’ efforts were, but their magnitude was rather small. At the height of the campaign in September 2016, the campaign’s budget was only $1,250,000 per month. Compare that with the $100 million that Jeb Bush spent, or the $1.2 billion that Hillary Clinton reportedly ran through."

Writes John Hinderaker.

I note that the indictment speaks of the "ORGANIZATION" with its different departments including a graphics department and that "Defendants and their co-conspirators issued or received guidance on: ratios of text, graphics, and video to use in posts...." Could someone point to examples of these graphics? I'm interested in graphics and how graphics might leap over our defenses and hit us in some mysterious emotional place, but what graphics did the Russians come up with? Wasn't it just crap like this:

"The F.B.I.’s admission that it did not act on a tip that Mr. Cruz had a 'desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts,' could open up a new avenue of attack for political opponents seeking to discredit the bureau’s work...."

"After the shooting, conservative news media said that the F.B.I. could have prevented the attack if it had not been spending so much time looking into Russian election interference.... This is not the first time that the F.B.I. has come under fire for being aware of a threat and failing to stop an attack. Congress criticized the bureau for failing to stop the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas, where the shooter was known to the F.B.I. The F.B.I. also knew of one of the brothers who carried out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, but did not stop that attack. After those fumbles, F.B.I. investigators compared themselves to hockey goalies, who are fielding a relentless barrage of pucks. Sometimes, they said, they cannot keep things from making the net."

From "F.B.I. Was Warned of Florida Suspect’s Desire to Kill but Did Not Act" (NYT).

ADDED: Here's the FBI's statement. Excerpt:

The caller provided information about Cruz’s gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting. Under established protocols, the information provided by the caller should have been assessed as a potential threat to life. The information then should have been forwarded to the FBI Miami Field Office, where appropriate investigative steps would have been taken. We have determined that these protocols were not followed for the information received by the PAL on January 5. The information was not provided to the Miami Field Office, and no further investigation was conducted at that time.

"The special counsel investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election charged 13 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations on Friday with illegally using social media platforms to sow political discord..."

The NYT reports, as I'm sure you already know. Sorry to take so long putting up a post, but I sense that you've begun the conversation in another thread. We were out running errands and walking on Picnic Point, but we listened to the news on the car radio [tuned to Fox News TV]. The newswoman exclaimed "Wow! Wow! Wow!" but I did not see the big wow. So there were some Russians trolling social media. Or is the "wow" that nobody on the Trump team is said to have done anything wrong?

“The nature of the scheme was the defendants took extraordinary steps to make it appear that they were ordinary American political activists,” Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general overseeing Mr. Mueller’s inquiry, said in a brief news conference on Friday afternoon at the Justice Department....

All were charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States. Three defendants were also charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and five defendants with aggravated identity theft....

The goal of the Russian operation, which was dubbed the “translator project” and began in 2014 with a monthly budget of $1.25 million, was “information warfare against the United States,” the indictment alleges.

"Information warfare." In other words: speech.

Some of the Russians, posing as Americans and seeking a coordinated effort, “communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump campaign and other political activists.” They communicated with members of the campaign, volunteers, supporters and grass-roots workers, court papers show.

"Unwitting" — none of the Trump people knew.

Individuals involved in the conspiracy traveled to and around the United States, visiting at least eight states, court papers show, and worked with an unidentified American. That person advised them to focus their efforts on what they viewed as “purple” election battleground states, including Colorado, Virginia and Florida, the indictment said.

Ha! The "person" forgot Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — just like the Clinton campaign.

The indictment cites a series of political advertisements paid for by the Russians, all of them against Mrs. Clinton and in favor of Mr. Trump. “Hillary is a Satan, and her crimes and lies had proved just how evil she is,” one advertisement created by the Russians stated.

That's ludicrously unsophisticated. Doesn't even sound American. Who says "a Satan"? Either you are Satan — the one character — or you're one of his minions — and the word would be "demon" or "devil." Why did these people bother, and why should we care?

While the indictment does not directly accuse the Russian government of running the operation, American intelligence agencies have said that Russian President Vladimir V. Putin authorized a multipronged campaign to boost Mr. Trump’s political chances and damage Mrs. Clinton.

In other words, Putin is off the hook, according to the indictment, and the Times has to go back to "American intelligence agencies have said" to breathe life into the Putin monster.

When Donald Trump wrote "I've read John Updike, I've read Orhan Pamuk, I've read Philip Roth."

An AP writer has dug up a letter Trump wrote to the NYT in 2005 in response to a review of a collection of New Yorker profiles written by Mark Singer. The review said:

The only instance in which Singer throws and lands a sucker punch is in a 1997 profile of the pre-"Apprentice" Donald Trump, in which his tone becomes a little arch. That Trump is already a caricature of a caricature makes him too easy a target, with neither the foot speed nor the wit to defend himself. A harder thing to do, perhaps impossible, would have been to find the one lonely component of Trump's character that wasn't manufactured as a brand strategy. It is a small quibble, certainly, as most New Yorkers, including me, would readily climb the arch in Washington Square to drop a flowerpot filled with nasturtiums on Trump's astonishing head if given half a chance to do so.

Trump wrote (or had someone write over his signature):

I can remember when Tina Brown was in charge of The New Yorker and a writer named Mark Singer interviewed me for a profile. He was depressed. I was thinking, O.K., expect the worst. Not only was Tina Brown dragging The New Yorker to a new low, this writer was drowning in his own misery, which could only put me in a skeptical mood regarding the outcome of their combined interest in me. Misery begets misery, and they were a perfect example of this credo.

"In January, 2017, [Karen] McDougal had her breast implants removed, citing declining health that she believed to be connected to the implants."

"McDougal said that confronting illness, and embracing a cause she wanted to speak about, made her feel increasingly conflicted about the moral compromises of silence. 'As I was sick and feeling like I was dying and bedridden, all I could do was pray to live. But now I pray to live right, and make right with the wrongs that I have done,' she told me. McDougal also cited the actions of women who have come forward in recent months to describe abuses by high-profile men. 'I know it’s a different circumstance,' she said, 'but I just think I feel braver.' McDougal told me that she hoped speaking out might convince others to wait before signing agreements like hers. 'Every girl who speaks,' she said, 'is paving the way for another.'"

The last paragraph of "Donald Trump, a Playboy Model, and a System for Concealing Infidelity/One woman’s account of clandestine meetings, financial transactions, and legal pacts designed to hide an extramarital affair," by Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker.

Trump's spokesperson says he did not have sexual relations with that woman, Karen McDougal.

Are we supposed to care about all the extramarital affairs of politicians again? Is that what #MeToo is turning into? Why?! Because there was a "system for concealing" it? Should we ruin the professional life of everyone who's committed adultery or everyone who's committed adultery and been good at hiding it? Do we really want to limit the pool of potential elected officials to individuals who have never been unfaithful to a spouse? Or is this just some special huff we're supposed to get into because of Trump?

I haven't read every word of Farrow's article, so please let me know if there's some accusation of physical abuse. I see the word "abuses" in the paragraph I quoted: "McDougal also cited the actions of women who have come forward in recent months to describe abuses by high-profile men." But on skimming, I don't see anything here other than a married man cheating on his wife and covering it up. Trump has never sold himself to us as an icon of chastity, so why am I supposed to care other than that I'm supposed to hate Trump?

If there is one thing that draws me into liking Trump, it's the pressure to hate him.

"If there are three sculptures that would define sculpture in the 20th century, this has to be one of the three."

Said the dealer who brokered the sale of Marcel Duchamp's "Bottle Rack" to the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Art Institute was set to announce Tuesday that it beat out other top museums to purchase Bottle Rack, the first of Duchamp’s “readymades,” a series for which the artist would go on to beatify other ordinary objects including a snow shovel and a urinal. Bottle Rack, visitors Tuesday will be able to read on the museum’s newest wall card, “upended tradition and artistic convention by revolutionizing the way we think about what an artwork is.”

What are the other 2? I would have thought the urinal...



... but I'm thinking the bottle rack beats the urinal because it was the first of the readymades.

Then there's the question of how to display the bottle rack. Display is key, because the whole idea is that an ordinary object is presented as if it is art and, because of that, it really is art. But Duchamp isn't around to perform the magic. The museum must do it. A decision was made not to put it with the Dadaist and surrealist things because it seemed too "didactic" to make it another example of a genre. So it will appear in a Modern Wing gallery to express its "broader place in art history."

“The appearance of this work should be provocative,” said [deputy director and chair of the modern art department Ann] Goldstein. “To me, every inch means something.”

Shockingly, this much-vaunted item isn't even Duchamp's original bottle rack! It looked like junk and his sister threw it out. Many years later, in 1935, he bought another bottle rack that was exhibited and that one too got lost, and — for another show, in 1959 — he had to get a third one and asked Man Ray to go get him another one. This one, which was sold to Robert Rauschenberg, is the one in Chicago:

It is this lineage — from the original Bottle Rack, through a famous surrealist [Man Ray], to a renowned American modernist influenced by Duchamp [Robert Rauschenberg] — that makes the museum and the art dealer sure of the specialness of this particular version of the five surviving iterations of the sculpture that is interpreted as Duchamp’s original readymade. (He also later produced an edition of 10 bottle racks.)

Ha ha. So many bottle racks! But this is the one bought by Man Ray and sold to Robert Rauschenberg.

“Of the number of Bottle Racks that are out and about this is the most important,” said David White, senior curator of the Rauschenberg Foundation.

Salesmanship! The art of the deal.

“If you take a Campbell soup can and repeat it 50 times, you are not interested in the retinal image,” Duchamp said in 1964, according to an essay on the artist from a 2003 exhibition on the readymade. “What interests you is the concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas.”

The concept is free, but there is still something to sell.

Does it matter if the artist who's said to have painted Barack Obama's portrait had assistants who did much of the work?

Richard Johnson at Page Six writes:

Sources say artist Kehinde Wiley — who painted the former president before a background of greenery and flowers — has studios in China and produces most of his work there. "It’s his base of operation," said art critic Charlie Finch, who has known Wiley and appreciated his talent since they were students at Yale. "He has dozens of assistants working for him.... Normally, Wiley sketches out the important parts, and assistants fill out the rest."

I went there because I heard Rush Limbaugh was going on about it:

This portrait, this artist outsources portions of every painting. I mean, actual brush strokes are made by outsourced painters? And the guy admits it! He admits it! So I’m wondering who paints the sperm in this guy’s pictures. But it’s true. Obama’s picture, his portrait, was outsourced. Kehinde Wiley outsourced it. I’ve never heard of that. Is nothing real anymore? Does nobody actually do their job? Does everybody have somebody behind the scenes actually doing the work while other people are taking credit for it? It boggles my mind how often I run into this. I can’t keep of any other examples here, but it boggles my mind. Well, news anchors on TV. Somebody else is writing every word they say, and probably making one-twenty-fifth (if that much) of the salary they make.

If you don't know what "the sperm" refers to, read this. I want to talk about the practice of artists using assistants. Is it something to get worked up about or perfectly normal? I see that I missed all the discussion of this subject back in 2013 when an assistant to David Hockney died and "Suddenly Hockney's unremarkable seaside house seemed to be an art world Tardis concealing a hitherto ignored workshop of assistants, like Andy Warhol's Factory...." That's from The Guardian, which expanded on the topic:

'It was hard labour by any measure," says Jake Chapman, recalling his and brother Dinos's apprenticeship as assistants to Gilbert and George. "There was absolutely no creative input at all. They were very polite and it was interesting to hear them talking – as we did our daily penance.... We coloured in Gilbert and George's penises for eight hours a day." At least you didn't have to pay, as Rembrandt's assistants did, for the privilege of working in the master's studio. "Oh, we paid," retorts Chapman. "We paid in dignity."

The relationship between artist and artist's assistant is vexed, ripe for oedipal tensions, mutual resentments, or at least spitting in the great master's lapsang souchong. How tired, one suspects, Lucian Freud's assistant (and painter in his own right) David Dawson, got of being called "Dave the Slave" by his late master.*...

Behind every great artist might well be a highly skilled team of assistants, but that truth is suppressed for fear of shattering our illusions: the lone-genius myth helps sales, and is partly what gives an artwork its mystique.... "The idea of the genius struggling in solitude in a cockroached and frozen garret with only a crust of bread and syphilis for company is an historically specific vision no longer, if ever, of relevance," argued Stephen Bayley this week writing about Hockney's studio. "Artists are not solitary. They rely on human support systems, often of a very sophisticated sort."...

What about all those poor saps who paid Rembrandt and then wound up helping him to crank out paintings for which he got the kudos? Chapman is unsentimental: "Does the person who makes the hubcaps or whatever they're called these days – low-profile sports rims – point at a passing Mercedes SLK or whatever it's called, saying, 'I did that?' No. So why should assistants claim possession for their work? It's a job."

The work that you recognize as the work of this artist is work that is done with lots of technical help. He's the face of the operation, and if he did the whole thing himself, it would be very different work. There wouldn't be all those fussy leaves all over the background. It's like the way if the judges didn't have law clerks there wouldn't be all those citations and footnotes and reexplaining of everything over and over again. The badness would be easier to find, but is that what you want? I do, but I think a lot of people prefer slickness and glossy overproduction.

"I find cigarette packets folded up under table legs more monumental than a Henry Moore,**" [said Richard Wentworth, professor of sculpture at the Royal College of Art, who worked as Henry Moore's assistant in 1967]. "Five reasons. Firstly, the scale. Secondly, the fingertip manipulation. Thirdly, modesty of both gesture and material. Fourth, its absurdity and fifth, the fact that it works."

_____________________

* Take a moment to note the actual slave called Dave the Slave, a much-admired 19th century American potter.



** Henry Moore was huge in the 1960s, when people enthused over things like this:



IN THE COMMENTS: narayanan said:

President (you did not build that) has Portrait "painted" by Artist (I did not paint that)

"Salt Bae lives for weeks at a time at the Plaza Hotel. He commutes to his restaurant using a self-balancing board."

Caption — at "How Salt Bae, Restaurateur, Spends His Sundays/Nusret Gokce has moved into the Plaza Hotel in order to be close to his new restaurant, Nusr-Et, where he spends most of the day" (NYT) — on a photograph that shows Nusret Gokce (AKA Salt Bae) walking down the steps at the Plaza. There are 6 photographs at the article. We also see him working out at the gym, posing with steaks, serving steaks doing his signature salt-throwing move, posing with a baby, posing with 2 women, and lighting a cigar. But we do not see that "balancing board," let alone get any explanation about what it is and how you can commute to work on it.

I have an item I'd call a balancing board — it's this thing — and you cannot travel anywhere on it. I see that mine is rated #1 at "10 Best Balance Boards Reviewed." None of these boards are designed to take you anywhere. You just teeter back and forth on it. Is there a different item called a "balancing board"? After much googling, I arrive at the conclusion that the NYT must be talking about a hoverboard, like the SWAGTRON T580 Bluetooth Hoverboard w/ Speaker Smart Self-Balancing Wheel. I'm seeing hoverboards with the term "self-balancing." I guess "self" is key. My understanding of English says that means the board balances itself, but maybe the rider is the self. Who knows?

Anyway, with 6 photographs, including a pointless shot of Salt Bae holding up a baby that isn't even cute, I can't imagine why there's no picture of him on the damned hoverboard tooling around in Manhattan traffic. Actually, I do see the point of the baby picture, and the non-cuteness of the baby is part of the point. Salt Bae displays his his slab-o-meat attractiveness in a restaurant full of unglamorous people. Lots of kids (that shot with the baby has, in the background, a not-that-young kid with a pacifier in his mouth). A man in a teal-colored hoodie staring into his cellphone. The baby's dad in schlumpy bluejeans and mom beaming and wielding her cellphone camera. The more I stare at this photo, the more details I see — grease stains along the back of mom's chair — and I'm now sure the message is: People of New York, stay away from this tourist trap.