As of February 14, 2011, another abysmal Hollywood comic-based movie, The Green Hornet, became a “big box office hit” in the US, so far bringing in $175 million in ticket sales. Also on Feb. 14, President Obama announced his proposed budget for fiscal year 2012, which will once again slash the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, this…
Ronald Reagan would have turned 100 on Sunday, February 6, 2011, and many U.S. citizens are celebrating this centenary from coast to coast with frenzied idolization, praise, and adulation for the “Great Communicator.” As my beloved country undergoes another bout of historical amnesia that is every bit as debilitating as the Alzheimer’s disease our acclaimed 40th President was known to…
Readers of this web log are no doubt aware of events in Egypt, where the people are in open revolt against the U.S.-backed dictator, Hosni Mubarak. The people have but one clear demand, the ousting of Mubarak and the sweeping away of his entire government. Apart from a few comments, I will mostly leave the political philosophizing and theoretical analysis…
On January 6, 2011, Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad unveiled the architectural plans for his new downtown L.A. art museum – which will of course be named, “The Broad.” The $130 million, three-story, 114,000-square-foot museum will be located on L.A.’s historic Bunker Hill, across the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. On…
It is not just another year that passes, but an entire decade. And what can be said of the past ten years, aside from the fact that it has been an extraordinarily bleak period. A stolen election, 9/11, an “endless war on terror”; promises of “hope and change” morphing into predator drone attacks, escalating war, rising unemployment, and tax cuts…
According to figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Dec. 3, 2010, the national unemployment rate in the U.S. is officially up to 9.8%. “Frugal” seems to be the most used word to describe the current Christmas season. Together with rising home foreclosures, increasing poverty, lack of healthcare, and some 14% of Americans relying on food stamps to…
In 1983 a poster appeared on walls all across Soviet occupied Afghanistan. The print featured a tough Soviet Red Army soldier kneeling in the snow, smashing his Kalashnikov automatic rifle over his knee while roaring – “The war is finished! Let’s go home!” I thought of that poster when President Obama announced on Dec. 16, 2010 that there was “significant…
Few artworks from the 20th century make the connection between war production and the impoverishment of society as clearly as the French poster from May 1968, “Light wages – heavy tanks.” Created by an anonymous artist from the Atelier Populaire collective that was active in Paris during the student/worker revolt of May ’68, the poster came to mind when I…
