Wangechi Mutu

Kenyan-American artist, born 1972, moved to the US in the 1990s. She works in sculpture, photography, film, collage, acrylic paint, performance art, and more. Very big right now; the Met just bought two of her sculptures. She is my idea of a successful avant garde artist; her stuff is strange, and some of it fails with me, but when it works it has the shock of the new.

The Chinese Crackdown: Xi Jinping and Teddy Roosevelt

In the Times, Paul Mozur has a very interesting take on events in China. A while back, I presented Victor Mair's view that China's crackdown on, among other things, shady business practices, LGTBQ student groups, and effeminate male pop stars represented a return to the politics of the Cultural Revolution. Mozur prefers a different analogy, that of American Progressives taking on the business titans of the Gilded Age:

Chinese tech companies are reeling from regulation. Nervous creditors are hoping for a bailout for China’s largest developer. Growing numbers of executives are going to jail. An entire industry is shutting down.

For China’s leader, Xi Jinping, it’s all part of the plan.

Under Mr. Xi, China is reshaping how business works and limiting executives’ power. Long in coming, but rapid in execution, the policies are driven by a desire for state control and self-reliance as well as concerns about debt, inequality and influence by foreign countries, including the United States.

Emboldened by swelling nationalism and his success with Covid-19, Mr. Xi is remaking China’s business world in his own image. Above all else, that means control. Where once executives had a green light to grow at any cost, officials now want to dictate which industries boom, which ones bust and how it happens. . . . 

The goal is to fix structural problems, like excess debt and inequality, and generate more balanced growth. Taken together, the measures mark the end of a Gilded Age for private business that made China into a manufacturing powerhouse and a nexus of innovation. Economists warn that authoritarian governments have a shaky record with this type of transformation, though they acknowledge that few have brought such resources and planning to the effort.

This ignores the moral crusades that have lately gotten so much attention, but then our memory of the Progressive Era has the same blindness: the leading Progressives were mostly for Prohibition, anti-prostitution crusades, crackdowns on crime, and so on.

Anyway, I want to take Mozur's argument seriously for a moment. Suppose he is right, and what Xi and his people want is what Teddy Roosevelt wanted, and what economic populists everywhere want, whether they are left or right: jail for corrupt billionaires, an end to people getting rich off stock manipulation, a diversion of talent and resources away from get-rich-quick schemes and social media tricks toward the building of real things; a shift of attention from bankers or influencers to workers and parents. 

I wonder; it is possible to do such a thing without being seen by a wide swath of opinion as dictatorial? Not that I'm saying Xi and his people aren't dictatorial, I'm asking if the aims Mozur attributes to them could be promoted without raising cries of alarm. Certainly American Progressivism, and even more the New Deal, were met by exactly such accusations.

One thing that is clear about Xi's recent moves is that he wants to promote manufacturing and cares not a fig for online retail or social media. The one big Chinese tech company that seems to remain a government favorite is Huawei, which focuses on building fundamental gear for running wireless networks. Millions of Americans wish our government would show the same bias.

One of the developments that frightens people about events in China is the new prominence of Communist Party cells within corporations. These have always existed, but they have now been empowered to overrule corporate leadership when their decisions, in the eyes of the CP, put their own interests over those of the nation. Haven't many political factions in both the US and Europe dreamed of the same thing?

I regular hear people say some version of "everyone on Wall Street should be shot." Well?

Watching China over the past 40 years has been an object lesson in the power of global capitalism. Across much of the country extreme poverty has nearly disappeared. Hundreds of millions have joined the middle class. The cities have been transformed. Yes, this was accompanied by environmental devastation and sweatshop working conditions for millions, but I doubt you will find many Chinese people interested in going back to the 1970s.

But of course all of this comes at a high cost. One factor that bothers many Chinese is the influence of global corporations, which directly or indirectly have invested a trillion dollars in China and control much of its industry. We have also seen the crazy speculative bubbles that seem to accompany capitalism everywhere, with fortunes made and lost in gambling that seems at best tangentially related to the real economy. We have seen the rise of billionaires and staggering inequality. Intense meritocratic competition has taken over the schools.

Suppose Xi and company really wanted to fix these problems. Could they do it? If, along the way, they randomly jail a few hundred executives whose behavior has not really been worse than average; if they impose stricter limits on what people can say, or where they can say it; if they ruin a few dozen outspoken internet personalities; would it be worth it?

How much do we really care about equality, and what would we give up to get it? Is the craziness of our world, the inequality and the attention lavished on ludicrous celebrities, the inevitable price of real freedom?

Ian Frazier, "On the Rez"

Another book review from my old blog:

In the first chapter of On the Rez (2000), a book about life among the Sioux at Pine Ridge, Ian Frazier explains that he likes Indians because he admires their devotion to freedom. He describes in a series of moving paragraphs the history of this devotion, and of the price paid for it, over the past 400 years. He mentions Powhatan scoffing at English offers of vassalage, explaining that he is a king, too, and will bow to no one. He tells of Red Cloud, brought before a Senate committee in Washington, so unimpressed by their threats that he refused a chair and took his seat on the floor, where he said, "I have grown to be a very independent man, and consider myself a very great man." Frazier recounts the long struggle for independence waged by the Sioux, the Apache, and other western tribes, and he praises their "centuries of resistance to authority, intractability and independent-mindedness." He longs for the America described by Amerigo Vespucci, where "everyone is his own master." "We live," he complains,

in a craven time I am not the first to point out that capitalism, having defeated communism, new seems to be about to do the same thing to democracy. The market is doing splendidly, yet we are not, somehow. Americans today no longer work mostly in manufacturing or agriculture but in the newly risen service economy. That means that most of us make our living by being nice. And if we can't be nice, we'd better at least be neutral. In the service economy, anyone who sat where he pleased in the presence of power or who expatiated on his own greatness would soon be out the door. "Who does he think he is?" is how the dismissal is usually framed. The dream of many of us is that someday we might miraculously have enough money that we could quit being nice, and everybody would then have to be nice to us, and niceness would surround us like a warm dome. Certain speeches we would love to make accompany this dream, glorious, blistering tellings-off of those to whom we usually hold our tongue. The eleven people who actually have enough money to do that are icons to us..... Unlike the rest of us, they can deliver those speeches with no fear: The freedom that inhered in Powhatan, that Red Cloud carried with him from the plains to Washington as easily as air--freedom to be and to say, whenever, regardless of disapproval--has become a luxury most of us can't afford.

I have thought about the freedom of the plains Indians for many years, since I read a stack of books about them in a course on legal anthropology. There is something in what Frazier says-- among the horse-riding peoples of the plains, men were very free and defended their freedom at great cost. But, I wonder, what does their way of life really have to offer the 21st century?

I should point out, first, that Frazier errs when he attributes to the eastern Indians the same sort of freedom-loving lifestyle he finds in the west. Powhatan, after all, was a king, and while he loved his own freedom his subjects who dared to defy him generally had their heads bashed in. The Aztecs were Indians, too, and we know what happened to their rebels. I should also point out that the freedom Frazier admires was limited to men—and I will argue in a minute that this was an essential part of it. I do find it remarkable, though, that men of the plains tribes generally refused to obey orders from anybody, and this rather extraordinary fact raises, for me, some questions about why we live in a society where freedom is so tightly circumscribed.

There is a terrific scene in Dances with Wolves in which the old chief, faced with a tough challenge, invites Kevin Costner to sit down and have a smoke. As they smoke and talk, the chief tries to persuade Costner to see things his way. This was how chiefs in these tribes really operated. They could offer advice, but most of the time they could not give orders, because no self-respecting man would do anything that a chief commanded him to. His personal honor would not permit it. A war leader who wanted to lead a raid would say, "I want to attack the Pawnee" (or whomever), and those who wanted to go, went. The others stayed home. If a dispute arose between two men over, say, a debt, the chiefs, the elders, or their friends would try to persuade them to agree on a settlement, and there was no court that could order either man to submit to a resolution he felt unjust.

Unfortunately, this utopian system didn't work very well, and murder was the all-too-frequent outcome of conflict. All of our stories of plains life are full of killings, and many of the most famous chiefs were killers. As a result, the chiefs spent a great deal of their time and energy trying to mediate between the families of victims and the families of their killers, so that each murder would not lead to an unending cycle of revenge. The violence of plains life was, in a sense, the necessary consequence of the freedom, for there was no institution to restrain bullies or force peace between enemies, no way to control these free men except death or the threat of it.

The chiefs saw most killings, not as crimes needing to be avenged, but as wounds in the society that needed to be healed. Most of the tribes ritualized this notion. Among the Cheyenne, a killing was held to bloody the sacred arrows of the tribe, and all ritual life had to cease until the arrows could be cleansed. The cleansing could not take place until the killing had been resolved in some form. According to the information we have, the most common resolution was for the killer's family to pay compensation to the victim's kin (often a number of horses), and then for the killer himself to undertake a period of voluntary exile. Note that the killer was not exiled by the chiefs; he had to be persuaded to leave freely, for the good of the community. Of course, the threat that some relative of his victim would kill him in turn was an added incentive to go, but one imagines this was left unsaid as much as possible, so as not to insult the killer by insinuating that he was afraid. In any event, he left for several years. He went to a neighboring tribe with whom his own tribe had an understanding about such exiles; given the number of killings in our stories, exiles must have been a regular feature of Indian life.

As a system of criminal justice, the plains way has many advantages: it was generally humane, and through negotiation and ritual it often managed to use potentially disruptive violence as a way of bonding the community closer together. It also avoided the dehumanizing, oppressive machinery of the state--the prison, the courtroom, the gas chamber--that burdens the "civilized" world. On the other hand, it didn't deter crime very well and it did not always succeed in keeping the community together. Plains tribes frequently split into factions that lived apart for years, sometimes forming new, long-lasting entities.

As a model for us, the Plains way has an even greater weakness, which is that it depended on the low density of people on the land, and on their great mobility. When two people couldn't get along, they lived apart. When two groups couldn't get along, they packed up their teepees and rode off in different directions. It seems to me that this model also depends on the matrilineal structure of the society, and the small role played by fathers in their children's upbringing. In the cases I have read, men always just head off by themselves, leaving their families behind. What happened to women killers I do not know, since there don't seem to be many examples in the record, but it doesn't seem to have bothered these people that men should leave their families for 7 years if need be. Surely most killers were young men, as they are in every society, but some Indian men married and fathered children in their teens, so many of these exiles must have been abandoning children. This made so little impression on the Indians who told these stories that they didn't even bother to mention it. The freedom loving Indians Ian Frazier befriends, who live in New York or Los Angeles or Pine Ridge as the mood strikes them, are all men, and they don't have any children with them.

Ian Frazier knows all about the violent history of life on the Plains. He also knows that the legacy of violence lives on among contemporary Indians: "Especially in Western towns that border big reservations, stabbings and fights and car wrecks are a depressingly regular part of life." He seems, though, to regard the loss of life as a price worth paying for the freedom. He points out several times that none of the Indians he knows wears a seat belt, despite the frequency of accidents, and I take this as a symbol of the trade-off. Those willing to wrap themselves in safety gear may live longer, but they do not live free. Those with judges and prisons and police may be safer, but they live in the shadow of the state, never breathing the truly free air of a man like Red Cloud.

Like Ian Frazier, I admire the struggles of the Apache, the Seminole, and all the other tribes, and I think we should preserve the memory of the sacrifices they made for freedom. We should value freedom, and we should always think carefully before we trade some of this precious substance for safety or comfort. I share my love of freedom with many Americans, and I think that perhaps we learned some of our devotion from the Indians, whose way we admired even as we trampled them. But I wear a seat belt. It is, I find, a trivial burden, and it is a burden that saves a thousand lives a year and might well save mine. I also make an effort to be nice to everybody I meet, not just the ones I work for in my service-sector job, and I rarely even fantasize about telling people off. If you ask me, we could do with a lot less rudeness, not more. I have my misgivings about our swelling police and prison apparatus, but given the choice I would rather have it than nothing. Without such mechanisms it is all too easy to end up in a kill or be killed situation, and that repulses me. I lack many freedoms, but I am free to choose nonviolence, a choice no man of the Sioux or the Comanche ever had.

To live together in our cities and in our nations we must learn to get along with each other. You can choose to see this as a surrender of freedom, or you can choose to see it as a miraculous coming together of different kinds of people to build something greater than any one person or tribe could build. There are things in our crowded society no land of nomads could support, from Hollywood to Harvard. By curbing our tempers and our impulses and working together, we have sent men to the moon, built the Internet, decoded the genome. None of this can be done without sacrificing some freedom to do and speak as we please. You can take your teepee and head off in a huff when you don't get your way, or you can participate in the extraordinary project of human civilization. I think civilization is worth it. 

2006

Mainie Jellett

Mary Harriet "Mainie" Jellett (1897-1944) was an Irish painter best known now for being one of Ireland's first abstract artists. Which is sort of silly when you remember that ancient Celtic art was also mostly abstract, but who can remember that far back anyway? (Achill Horses, 1939)

She came from an elite Dublin family; her father was an MP, and one of her teachers was Elizabeth Yeats, the poet's sister. Here's an early work, Child and Cart, 1918.

Jellett moved to Paris in 1921 with her "companion," artist Evie Hone. Not entirely clear about their relationship, since both were known to be devout Catholics, and Hone in particular did a lot of work for the church. In Paris Jellett learned about Cubism, and when she returned to Ireland in 1923 she exhibited two abstract works. This is one, Decoration. It was quite controversial in Ireland; one critic said she was suffering from the "artistic malaria" of cubism, which I find amusing.

A portrait I can't find out anything about; I got it from Tyler Cowen, where I first learned about Jellett.

Wave, 1934.

The Madonna of Eire, which assimilates the Virgin Mary to the tradition of Celtic triple goddesses.

And a more conventional Madonna, from 1939. Jellett died of cancer in 1944, and I haven't founded any work for her dated after 1939. I'm not sure if she was ill or spent the war years in other pursuits.

Otters Menacing the Koi of Singapore's Rich

In today's example of animal-adjacent class warfare, wild smooth-coated otters have been invading the garden's of Singapore's rich and devouring their expensive koi. In one night, a pod of otters did $65,000 of damage to one collection.

Otters have long been native to Singapore, but they were rare back when the city's streams and canals were heavily polluted. Now that the waters are cleaner and the people less economically strapped, they are back in force, roaming the city in pods of about 15 animals. Most estimates put their number around 100. People say they got particularly bold during last spring's complete Covid-19 lockdown. 

Koi fanciers are of course outraged, but so far majority opinion is with the otters. It is a theme seen at various places around the world, that when wild animals invade the compounds of the wealthy – beavers in Virginia, capybaras in Argentina – some people in the working class cheer.

Thomas Mann on Democracy and Literature

Since I recently read and reviewed Thomas Mann's vast novel The Magic Mountain, I was interested in Christopher Beha's NY Times review of Mann's World War I-era political tract, Reflections of a Non-Political Man. This was written during Mann's rather brief period as a gung-ho German nationalist, and he later renounced a lot of this. But here is what he said in 1915:

Central to Mann’s argument in Reflections is a distinction between “civilization” and “culture.” The terms are often used interchangeably, but Mann insists that they “are not only not the same, they are opposites.” Civilization “involves reason, enlightenment, moderation, moral education, skepticism,” whereas culture represents “the sublimation of the demonic.” As such, it “belongs entirely to the other side … a deeper, darker, impassioned world.” Every nation has a distinctive culture, but not all nations are civilized. Culture tends to prize its particular local character; civilization seeks to make itself universal.

What did Mann find so objectionable — above all, so un-German — about democracy? It epitomized “the imperium of civilization.” Putting the power of the state in the hands of the people requires making them into rational, enlightened citizens — whether they like it or not. Here he quotes Friedrich Nietzsche: “All states are badly organized when people other than statesmen must be preoccupied with politics.” To Mann, democracy means “the politicization of every ethos.” Personal questions are turned into social questions; moral problems are turned into political problems; art is turned into “social literature.” . . .

Nietzsche is of course a big influence on all of this, but the distinction between Civilization and Culture was all over German thought in that period. Civilization was portrayed by many writers as something inauthentic, over-refined, and feminizing, too much drawing room manners, too much academic theorizing, not enough heart and blood.

The criticism that democracy politicized everything has been made by many critics since the French Revolution, and I think there is something to it; after all, the US today has counties with rival Democratic and Republican farm stands. But on a deeper level I would say that all societies are deeply political, and we just had kings and aristocrats for so long that people stopped seeing their cultural power as anything worth commenting on.

But though he theorized about the superiority of Culture, Mann recognized that his sort of work, the highly refined literary novel, was a product of Civilization. This is what fascinated me most about Beha's review. I have lately been writing about the falseness of so much contemporary literary discourse, because we are always looking for “authentic” voices who speak for this or that marginalized group. Mann understood that novel-writing, as a Civilized activity, necessarily involved the writer in its compromises and required him or her to learn its artificial conventions. He never tried to claim that any of his work was pure Culture, or pure anything, he only strove to express something that felt authentic and true within the narrow confines allowed by this very refined form.

For the whole of his career, from Buddenbrooks to his final, unfinished novel, Felix Krull, Mann was fascinated by the figure of the artist, an ambiguous character who stands “between two worlds … at home in neither.” In Mann’s rendering, the artist wields a vital power, one not entirely under his control, and as such poses a kind of risk to a culture that nonetheless depends on him. There is something unsavory, even sickly about the artist, something not entirely on the side of life. (Mann, who was bisexual, closely associated his own artistic impulses with the dangerous secret of his same-sex desire.)

Above all, the artist is a nonpolitical figure, because he refuses to be put in the service of some larger program. The artist “creates just what he is, what corresponds to his own aesthetic judgment and need,” without concern for what society at large demands. Since Mann believed that democracy politicized everything, he believed there could be no place for true art in a democracy: “What is necessary [in a democracy] is at bottom not art at all but the manifesto, the absolute manifesto in favor of progress.” Instead of the artist, democracy has the Zivilizationsliterat — an unwieldy German compound noun translated as “civilization’s literary man.”

Real art appears in this conception as a sort of wild card, something that cannot be entirely tamed by Civilization, that cannot be made to serve any political program. This insistence that art must be anti-political is one idea that stuck with Mann through his anti-Nazi phase and his American exile. He fled Germany partly because he refused to let the Nazis tell him what to write, but he equally refused to write anti-Nazi tracts for his American hosts. Mann wrote:

Authorship itself has always seemed to me to be a witness to and an expression of ambivalence, of here and there, of yes and no, of two souls in one breast, of an annoying richness in inner conflicts, antitheses and contradictions.

And

I think that the most important aspects of the human spirit — religion, philosophy, art, poetry, science — exist beside, above and beyond the state, and often enough even against it,

I strongly agree with this. Art, like sex and humor, cannot be tamed, cannot be made to suit your political program. You can try, and you can produce things like art that exalt whatever you want to exalt, from kings to corporations. But art draws on places beyond. And yet this does not mean that art springs from those places fully formed; if it is to communicate anything it must be shaped by conventions and fit into understandable shapes. It must wear the clothes of Civilization. But to have real value it should be smuggling something wild and disturbing beneath them.

The Vučedol Calendar

One of the odder archaeological discoveries from Bronze Age Europe is this pot. Excavated in 1978 at a site called Vinkovci in Croatia, it dates to around 2600 BC. It was made by people of the Vučedol culture, the local offshoot of the Bell Beaker phenomenon.

A certain Croatian archaeologist, Dr. Aleksandar Durman, believes that it is a calendar, in fact the oldest surviving European calendar. The image above shows the surviving signs; the pattern is not complete because the pot is broken. Durman believes all the symbols represent astronomical objects, mainly constellations.

Cassiopea

Cygnus

Orion

Pegasus

Pisces

The Sun

The idea is that the calendar depends on what stars are rising at key points on the horizon. And you absolutely could make an astral calendar like this work. But if so, what is the sun doing in so many slots? The astral calendars used for example in the South Pacific don't rely on the sun at all. So that's something of a puzzle. It is maybe a filler symbol between key astral events? There are 48 slots on the pot for symbols, which is a lot more key dates than most ancient people needed. Most made do with 12 or 13 months.

Artifacts from the Museum at Vučedol 

I have not been able to find out much about what non-Croatian archaeologists think about this notion, but it seems to be completely accepted in Croatia. The government is building a special museum at the site, which will include a planetarium that shows the sky of 2600 BC and the theories on which Durman's claims are based.

Dove-shaped vessel from Vučedol

It's certainly possible that the pot depicts a calendar; think how many objects you have seen decorated with the signs of the zodiac. But I'm going to leave it in the "interesting if true" category. Even if it isn't, it's another great little peak into the fascinating societies of the Bronze Age, just beyond the reach of our written records, but tantalizingly resembling the later peoples of the Iron Age that we know much more about.

Twenty Famous Artists

Sandro Botticelli, self portrait as one of the witnesses

to the Adoration of the Magi, 1476

Here's the My Modern Met's list of Twenty Famous Artists Everyone Should Know:

Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510)
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
Michelangelo (1475–1564)
Caravaggio (1571–1610)
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669)
Jan Vermeer (1632–1675)
Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)
Claude Monet (1840–1926)
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)
Gustav Klimt (1862–1918)
Henri Matisse (1869–1964)
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986)
René Magritte (1898–1967)
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)
Frida Kahlo (1907–1954)
Jackson Pollock (1912–1956)
Andy Warhol (1928–1987)
Yayoi Kusama (1929-present)
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988)

I don't want to get into quibbling with this list; mine would be different, of course, but these are certainly twenty of the most famous and important artists of the modern period. But notice how the gaze of the art world shifts around in chronology and geography.

We start with three Renaissance Florentines; for that century, the gaze of the art-loving world is focused on one medium-sized Italian city. 

Rembrandt, The Night Watch, 1642

After nodding toward Mannerist Rome our gaze travels north. One of the many figures left out is Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), who I suppose had the bad luck to be competing with the Florentines, but then we take in the wonders of the Flemish Renaissance and the Dutch Golden Age.

Eugène Delacroix, self portrait, 1837

We then skip over more than a century, ignoring the late Baroque period (think Versailles) and all of the eighteenth century. We just don't love the painting or sculpture of that period, or its poetry. What stands out in the art of that era, for us, is music, the glittering arc from Bach and Vivaldi through Haydn and Mozart to Beethoven. Does this mean anything? Is it just an artifact of whims in taste and things that happen to have gotten famous, or the random distribution of the greatest artistic geniuses, or are certain ages really better at some things than others? In defense of the last view we might note that people in the eighteenth century wondered themselves why their poetry and drama were worse than those of previous periods, when they were themselves so much more Enlightened. But they liked their painting, which we mostly don't.

One also sometimes reads that art has to follow certain trajectories, because of internal factors or what have you, so music had to go from polyphony to Baroque to Classicism to Romanticism. I have never really understood what these arguments mean or how they work in practice. One analogy I suppose would be mathematics, each advance leading logically to another, or raising new questions that the next generation answers. And it just happens, this argument runs, that the necessary movement of music between 1720 and 1820 thrills us.

Monet, of course

Then our gaze shifts to Paris and Vienna for the astonishing period that marks the ascent of modernism. Conventions that had dominated art since the classical world were smashed, and some of the results were glorious. This went along with a further refinement in the artist as celebrity, giving us men who worked at least as hard on their public personas as on their paintings. I find it interesting that while Paris was the capital of art some of the top artists were Spanish, moving back and forth between Paris and Barcelona. This, and the European catastrophes that drove so many artists into exile, explains how Mexico got to share the spotlight for a while.

Then comes the rise of New York; you may hate Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, but that was the first period in which European art critics took American art seriously. (Georgia O'Keeffe painted in New Mexico but her work was shown and sold in New York.) I have always suspected that the art and architecture of the 1950s says something dire about the culture of our time, but I have never been sure if this is so, or, if so, what that dire thing would be.

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Room

And finally we nod toward the rise of East Asia, as the wealth and creativity of Japan and now China brings their artists to center stage. 

Norman Rockwell, The Connoisseur, 1962

Whenever I think about this sort of art history I imagine a bored, rich museum goer, rudely dismissive of anything not famous enough to be worthy of attention, cruising hurriedly through the gallery so as not to waste time better spent seeing and being seen. Ah, here we are in Florence, wasn't Michelangelo amazing, pity Leonardo was such an oddball, let's move on to the Flemish room. I see them at a biennale, taking a few moments off from celebrity gossip to glance at the work everyone is talking about this year, I mean, one must be up on that, before going back to the bar for another drink and to see who else has arrived at the gala.

I suppose that isn't fair; if one is to present the history of western art in a manageable amount of time or space one has to leave out almost everything. I just have my suspicions that this wandering gaze, skipping across centuries and omitting whole continents, is about something other than the love of art; that is it corrupted by, among other things, worship of celebrity, thirst for novelty, immersion in irritating arguments like when the Renaissance began, and refusal to devote too many brain cells to art that isn't important in the sense that everyone already knows it is.

Links 1 October 2021

Gothic revival house, c. 1840, Thompson, Connecticut

Long, interesting essay by Emily Bazelon about the intellectual debate over "sex positivity" among feminists. (NY Times)

In Canberra, Australia, a drone package delivery service had to shut down after nesting ravens repeatedly attacked drones flying near their nests.

The looming fight over Apple's requirement that remote workers return to the office.

Why do we have women's chess tournaments? "I support the right to fun, even when it undermines feminist ideology."

During the US Civil War, mapmakers struggled to keep up with the rapidly changing political situation in the southwest.

Winners of the Nature Conservancy's 2021 photo contest.

Excellent Guardian profile of Paul Gilroy, Afro-Caribbean-British scholar of race, history, and humanism, with interesting glimpses of the debates roiling that part of the academic world.

Why do African Americans have better mental health than white Americans? (More on this from Kevin Drum)

Vox says that given all the supply chain problems around the world, you should do your Christmas shopping now. Have a nice day!

The US Fish and Wildlife Service says 23 species should be removed from their Endangered Species list because they are extinct. Most have likely been extinct for decades, although controversy continues over a few, like the Ivory Billed Woodpecker. (NY Times)

Strange article about pawpaws that blames their decline on something to do with race and colonization, failing to mention that compared to bananas or pears they just don't taste very good.

Many Afghans are burying or otherwise caching works of art to hide them from the Taliban. (Washington Post)

On the internet, everything is a symptom of mental illness.

Suicide among American soldiers: "Last year, the military lost 385 active duty members to suicide, up from 267 people in 2015." Currently, the military suicide rate is three times that for civilians. (Washington Post) 

The Plated Project sells very expensive, artist-designed plates to raise money for fighting hunger. Nice collection of the best images at This is Colossal.

People in New Guinea may have been hatching and raising Cassowary chicks 18,000 years ago.

Review of the evidence on whether pre-K raises elementary school achievement, not positive.

A close look at what "supply chain issues" really look like on the ground. (Washington Post)

These days the news makes it seem like professors live in fear of attacks from leftist students and colleagues, but Yale just had a professor resign from a prestigious post because wealthy conservative donors objected the liberal slant of her teaching and public comments. (NY Times)

And the Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest. Nice, but I want a ban on super-exaggerated false color.

This week's music: Anna Vidovic plays Asturias by Isaac Albéniz on classical guitar.

Ocean Photography Awards 2021

Aimee Jan

Galice Hoarau

Alex Kydd

Two by Matty Smith

Martin Broen. More at My Modern Met.

US Covid-19 Case Rate vs. Population Density

Above, average daily number of Covid-19 cases diagnosed last month per 100,000 inhabitants; below, population density. The extent to which these are mirror images is quite remarkable. I suppose that's partly because places like New York and Los Angeles had many more cases in the first wave. But you have to think that given how spread out people are in most of Alaska, even a little bit of caution could easily have given them the lowest rate.

Religion and Politics in the US

Chart from 538. Notice that white evangelicals make up 7% of Democratic voters; according to the story, more young evangelicals are shifting toward the Democrats because of issues like racism and climate change. Developments like this remind me that, as the meme says, we live in a society, and there are trends that impact people in every religious and ethnic group.

Jupiter's Red Spot Has Shrunk a Lot

Above, drawing by French artist Etienne Léopold Trouvelot, 1880; below, recent NASA image. Trouvelot worked at the Harvard observatory for many years, and Yahoo has put up an interesting collection of his work. Some of his drawings of things like solar flares and sun spots are stunningly accurate.

Affective Polarization and the Turn Against Democracy

Most of Thomas Edsall's NY Times columns amount to conversations with social scientists about some major issue in the news. He reads their papers, then calls them or emails them for comment. I think it's a great format, and the most recent installment is very interesting. Edsall has been asking people about "affective polarization," which means that voting behavior is driven mostly by hatred and distrust of people in the other party. Everyone agrees that this has increased in the US, and some say it is increasing worldwide.

Edsall's questions have to do with how much is explained by affective polarization. Edsall starts from a major paper that appeared in Science last year, arguing that it is driving our political disfunction:

The political sectarianism of the public incentivizes politicians to adopt antidemocratic tactics when pursuing electoral or political victories. A recent experiment shows that, today, a majority-party candidate in most U.S. House districts — Democrat or Republican — could get elected despite openly violating democratic principles like electoral fairness, checks and balances, or civil liberties. Voters’ decisions to support such a candidate may seem sensible if they believe the harm to democracy from any such decision is small while the consequences of having the vile opposition win the election are catastrophic.

Following this argument, it would seem that affective polarization is driving things like laws limiting ballot access, election "audits", and violent attempts to undo election results.

But others say, not so fast; they think that while affective polarization exists and is a problem, it doesn't seem to explain anti-democratic feelings or practices. They have done experiments to show that the degree of affective polarization is relatively easy to manipulate up or down, but they find that this has no effect on attitudes toward voting restrictions etc., or especially on violence. Support for political violence, which is very much a minority attitude, seems oddly disengaged from hatred of the other party.

(This would fit with a theory I have defended here in other contexts, that violence is its own thing, feeding mainly on itself rather than on other sorts of conflict.)

In response to these findings, the scientists Edsall queries have four sorts of responses:

1. This type of research is irrelevant, and in the real world affective polarization and anti-democratic views absolutely do go together;
2. We have no idea what is driving the turn against democracy, and this is worrying;
3. The explanation is elite behavior, especially that of Republican leaders, and Americans are turning against elections because Trump and his allies keep attacking election results and vaguely advocating what a Fascist would call "direct action";
4. It must have something to do with race and racism, because, I mean, what about American politics doesn't have something to do with race and racism?

I think that as far as the events of the past year go, 3) is mostly correct; most of the anti-democratic acts we have seen have been Republican, and that this absolutely goes back to Trump and his friends. Which means that at some level 4) is also involved.

But this doesn't explain everything. There is also an angry left, embodied by anarchists in Portland but also in the form of various people I know. Polls show that young people across the western world are much less likely to call democracy "essential", and in one Pew survey 46% of young Americans said they would prefer government by experts to democracy.

I think that while Trump & Co. are leading the assault on democracy, they only have support because of a widespread sense that democracy is failing us. In fact I think widespread anger about systemic failure explains how Trump ended up in the White House in the first place. There are a range of issues –immigration and industrial decline are prominent on the right, racism and climate change on the left – that leave many Americans feeling like their government has turned against them. Since elections seem to produce no meaningful change in how these issues are dealt with, the temptation to try other options rises.

 In the short term what is required is to oppose the Trump crowd and defend elections against their machinations. The long term issues may prove much harder to resolve.

Dostoevsky Ponders the Fate of Humanity Amidst Riches

Notes from the Underground, Chapter VIII:

In short, one may say anything about the history of the world—anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational. The very word sticks in one's throat. . . . 

Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? 

Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary-- that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. 

And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object--that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don't know? 

Ever since modernity opened up the prospect of a world without want, people have been asking what such a world would be like. A great many of them have agreed with Dostoyevsky: that we would blow up the whole thing rather than let social engineers contrive our happiness.

I am not sure how true that is, but it is certainly true in part. Our relationship to peace and prosperity is complicated and sometimes perverse. 

If you consider science fiction, you find that the optimistic kind is mostly about exploration: sailing between stars, these authors suggest, we will find wonders and horrors enough to keep us from blowing our civilization to pieces. Staying on earth with replicators and holodecks is too awful to contemplate.

You might consider Asimov's Foundation series a response to this passage; what if our learning were so great that we could really predict our future? That we could even predict when we would rebel against the predictions and try to overthrow them? Because we absolutely would.

One reason I sometimes find my fellow human baffling is that I believe, very deeply, that we are not capable of perfection. I hope for a better world; I believe in working for a better world. But I find the idea of perfection both impossible and intolerable. Whenever anyone says something like G.W. Bush's "we will rid the world of evil" or a call to "eliminate sexism" I shudder. But "Let's strive to keep our problems within reasonable bounds" doesn't make much of a battle cry.

I have an acquaintance who is a revolutionary socialist. He seems, so far as I can tell, to be a mostly reasonable person. He has acknowledged, in response to my prodding, that past revolutions have at best achieved modest gains in welfare at very high cost. He admits that many revolutions have made the world worse. And yet he continues to believe we must have another, because he finds the current state of the world intolerable. He finds it unbearable that anyone goes hungry in a world with billionaires, that any woman anywhere is kept from her dreams by male oppression, that any child is abused, that any species be driven to extinction. Since our current system cannot fix these problems, we must have a revolution, and if that fails we must keep having them until the suffering is over.

Talking to him makes me feel callous and cruel. What is my excuse for not being constantly angry about the state of the world, for not devoting my every waking moment to improving it? But I have to admit that I do not find the dream of utopia appealing at any level. Even if we could achieve it, which I do not believe we could, we would just blow it up and start over again, because struggling is what we do.

More Myths about Rotten Food: African American Spice

This is NOT TRUE.

My old post about pepper and rotten food in Medieval Europe has logged several hundred page views, so perhaps I have made a small contribution to fighting that nonsense. So I'm going to wade right in and try to fight this one as well. Let's recap a couple of things:

1. It is not possible to hide the taste of rotten meat.
2. Even if you could, rotten meat doesn't just taste bad, it is poisonous. Adding spice would probably just make you sicker.
3. We know quite a lot about the diets of enslaved people in the Caribbean and the American South, from a variety of sources – plantation accounts, agricultural journals, narratives by enslaved people themselves – and rotten meat doesn't feature much.

I'm not saying that nobody anywhere wasn't ever hungry enough to try eating rotten meat; no doubt that happened all the time. They got sick. If they were weak from hunger they might have died. Spices wouldn't have helped them.

I'm also not saying that slaves were always well fed or that their diets did not contribute to the evolution of African American cooking. Not being given enough food was a standard complaint of slaves, and a lot of "Soul Food" was about turning the cuts of meat that planters didn't want for themselves into palatable meals. The bones I excavated at the Bruin Slave Jail in Alexandria, Virginia were mostly the heads and feet of cows and pigs. There is a lot of nutrition in those parts of the animal, but they weren't much sought after, so they were cheap. That deposit also included thousands of oyster shells, which, again, were cheap, at least at certain times of the year. Oysters spoil quickly so it is quite possible that slaves who ate them sometimes got sick, but then that happened to white people, too.

And also what this commenter said. Heavily salted meat was very common in the Americas, for white people as well as black, because salt was cheap and so it was the simplest way to preserve meat for later. Also, heavily spiced and salted food is a West African tradition, and by eating that way enslaved people were maintaining their own culture, not just trying to survive on rotten flesh.

There is an interesting worldwide association between heavily spiced food and poverty. The most refined and expensive cooking avoids the heavy use of hot peppers or horseradish in all the cultures I know anything about, and in many places the poor have a special fondness for spice. I suppose this is because heavily spicing your food is an inexpensive way to make your life a little more interesting, although various neo-Freudian explanations also come to mind.

But there really isn't any reason to trash-talk Soul Food, any more than there is to trash-talk the Blues. Yes, they emerged from a culture of poverty and oppression. But they have a value that transcends the sadness of their origins.

Enslaved black people ate spicy food because they liked it. Let's not retroactively ruin the pleasures they found amidst their toils.

Mamma Andersson

Mamma Andersson, born 1962, is a Swedish artist. Holiday, 2020.

She is a favorite of Karl Ove Knausgaard, who wrote:

Her paintings are mysterious, enigmatic, but still kind of everyday life-ish. They show people in empty rooms; she also paints forests and landscapes where there’s always something slightly threatening, but you don’t quite know what it is. There’s an apocalyptic feeling in some of them, but they’re very beautiful too.

Swannery, 2019. 

Shoreline, 2021

Dead End, 2010

And two more posted without titles.

Paleogenetics and Etruscan Origins

Ancient Greek and Roman writers wondered about the origin of the Etruscans. They spoke a language nothing like the Indo-European tongues of their neighbors, and their religious tradition was also quite different. Some thought the Etruscans were native to Italy, others that they had emigrated from Anatolia – presumably because there were several non-Indo-European languages spoken there. Of course some writers connected this to the Trojan War, because the Greeks liked to connect everything with the Trojan War. 

Now there is paleogenetic data that bears on the question:

The origin, development, and legacy of the enigmatic Etruscan civilization from the central region of the Italian peninsula known as Etruria have been debated for centuries. Here we report a genomic time transect of 82 individuals spanning almost two millennia (800 BCE to 1000 CE) across Etruria and southern Italy. During the Iron Age, we detect a component of Indo-European–associated steppe ancestry and the lack of recent Anatolian-related admixture among the putative non–Indo-European–speaking Etruscans. Despite comprising diverse individuals of central European, northern African, and Near Eastern ancestry, the local gene pool is largely maintained across the first millennium BCE. This drastically changes during the Roman Imperial period where we report an abrupt population-wide shift to ~50% admixture with eastern Mediterranean ancestry. Last, we identify northern European components appearing in central Italy during the Early Middle Ages, which thus formed the genetic landscape of present-day Italian populations.

Of the 48 people who lived BC, 40 were perfectly standard western Mediterranean types. So the Anatolian migration theory is out. They had a bit of steppes ancestry, so they were not isolated from the Indo-European invasion that changed the other languages of the peninsula, but for whatever reason they kept their old language while others did not.

More striking is the evidence of major immigration from the eastern Mediterranean during the Roman Empire. This was also true at Rome, but not nearly to this extent; I have to think that this is a sampling problem, and that immigrants did not really make up half the Tuscan population. 

And, again as at Rome, there is clear evidence of invaders from the north (Ostrogoths, Lombards, Franks) during the early Middle Ages.

I am just loving that I can experience all this genetic data coming in to answer age-old questions.

The Moorish Sovereign Citizens

The Sovereign Citizen movement originated among white supremacists in the 1970s and made the news several times in the 90s. The central belief is that its members are independent states unto themselves, not bound by the laws of the US or any other nation. I have always found it an interesting thought exercise. What argument can one use against such people except force? We have police and an army, and you don't, so buzz off. I can't think of anything else one could say to them.

Since everyone in the US has been so focused on racial divides lately, it has been an interesting to watch as this peculiar ideology spreads among black radicals. 

Known as the Moorish sovereign citizen movement, and loosely based around a theory that Black people are foreign citizens bound only by arcane legal systems, it encourages followers to violate existent laws in the name of empowerment. Experts say it lures marginalized people to its ranks with the false promise that they are above the law. . . .

This past summer the Moorish movement exploded into public view, after Ms. Little posted viral TikTok accounts of her ordeal and when the police pulled over members of a militant offshoot of the group on a Massachusetts highway. That subgroup, known as Rise of the Moors, engaged in a standoff with the police for more than nine hours, claiming that as sovereign citizens, law enforcement had no authority to stop them. No one was injured; 11 people were arrested and charged with unlawful possession of firearms and ammunition, among other offenses.

Increasingly, across the country sovereign citizens have clashed with the authorities, tied up resources and frazzled lives in their insistence that laws, such as the requirement to pay taxes, obey speed limits and even obtain, say, a license for a pet dog, do not apply to them.

People who claim to be Moorish sovereign citizens believe they are bound mainly by maritime law, not the law of the places where they live, said Mellie Ligon, a lawyer and author of a study of their impact on the judicial system in the Emory International Law Review. (NY Times)

You have to love that detail about maritime law. What?

The major nuisance caused by these folks lately has been claiming property as their own, based on deeds and titles they issue to themselves. Sometimes they claim (as in the case in the Times story) that the property in question is their "ancestral estate," other times that it is due to them as reparations for slavery. 

If there's one thing in the US that unites people of all races, it's cranky antigovernment conspiracy theories.