The Business of Art

I've become interested in the business models of art. I've always thought about them, but now I find thinking about them entertaining. That makes me a certain type of artist. Obviously there's another type of artist, that finds thinking about business models repulsive, repugnant, distasteful or corrupting.

It's just a preference though, like ones preference for vegemite, or football team. And thus I don't know if I have the authority to define anything thusly, but I use the word 'business model' as opposed to 'business strategy' because to me at least a strategy implies a strategist whereas a model is just a description of how someone or some entity relates to the market.

Which is to say, I'm sorry Artists with a capital 'A', that regardless of whether you think about your business model or not you will have one, there's a way to describe your business even if fundamentally you don't think of it as a business at all. As sure as there is a language of physics that can describe the gravitational pull currently being exerted.

Basics

Perhaps contentiously it's been asserted that in the broadest sens business models boil down to one of two options - 1. Market Penetration, and 2. Product Differentiation. One is beating the competition, the other is avoiding competition.

I could now go into a lengthy description of each, putting up several analogies and trying to draw lines with examples in art, but instead I'm just going to attempt to describe what each might look like to an artist with no business training.

Are you competing for something? Grant money, Gallery Space, a prize? That's a good indication you are going for market penetration. There's a 'pot' or restricted resource pre-existing that you are trying to get maximum share of. You're taking into account some defined criteria and trying to best fulfill it.

By contrast, product differentiation - you are creating a criteria that by definition your art will best fulfill. Are you looking at the art world and noticing gaps? either in the art itself or in the audience? Are you trying to reach new audiences? Are you trying to transmit a new message? or both?

Here's where it's tricky, because an attribute like 'uniqueness' could apply to both strategies, the difference being, is the market, or 'scene' in artspeak that you reach employing uniqueness as a criteria? For example any gallery that has the word 'modern' or 'contempory' in it's title? Here if you take the sentence 'a unique piece of art' you can determine which of the two models fit.

If the 'unique' half of that sentence is the important part, and the 'piece of art' arbitrary, then that's market penetration you have there. What your art says is a superficiality, it doesn't carry as much importance as the perceived lack of precedent.

If the reverse is true, the piece of art carries all the weight, and it just happens to be unique, then it's product differentiation. In crafting the message you have produced something new, and superficially you lack competition or precedents. But product differentiation need not be unique, it may be taking a pre-existing work and bringing it to a new audience eg. rap music for old people.

Public or Private

It occurred to me the other day that obtaining a grant as an artist is a source of great pride, achievement and validation, whereas you would never here the CEO's of a motor company boasting that their business model depended on tax-payer subsidies.

Does this mean artists shouldn't seek government money? Well the analogy isn't fair.

In respect to the automotive industry, Chomsky points out the following limitation of the 'free markets' limits: The market as exists gives me the choice between Ford and GM, but it doesn't really give me the choice between Cars and Public Transport, because such choices are beyond an individual consumer, they are social consumption choices.

Because it's from a video I watched, it isn't a direct quotation, but the fact is that we want a representative government to be part of a market. Arts funding, broadly speaking is a good thing.

But questions arise. In the instance of a car company, a business model that includes Government subsidies may work, but could be criticized as 'illegitimate' or 'failed' because they are competing against other car companies that make money without including the government in their business model.

In the instance of a manufacturer of trains, their business model would certainly include governments, as they are competing for government tender. A manufacturer of trains is supposed to sell to the government. (crowd  funding may change even this though).

And there as an artist is your quandary. Is the government subsidizing your failure to reach an audience, or is it funding art that individuals are incapable of doing? Determining the answer is so nuanced, examples would lead to this post snowballing, the question wants to be asked though.

Art Should be Free?

Like the Mx right? Maybe that's too Melbourne specific, but basically there's this 'newspaper' that is handed out for free at train stations. Nobody would consider it an act of lunacy though. It's a rational business model.

I've written in a much lengthier post before, that art is never 'free' so long as it is made out of materials or consumes resources. And it most definitely will, if you think it won't or doesn't need to, you need to include 'time' and 'space' etc. in your definition of resources.

So your art will cost somebody something, but does it need to make a profit? No.

Firstly, I think any business model to be described as 'good' by intention or design, needs to have a question of success AND failure in there. I choose not to explain the whole concept of 'risk' but if an art venture fails, then it doesn't follow that it should never have been attempted.

There are many forms of art these days that people would consider 'financially unviable' including it seems most of the music industry. But an easier example is installation art.

If you are in some back alley gallery expecting an opening night turn out of 70 people, the likelihood in Melbs is that 68 of those people are your fellow art students. The other two are unlikely to be representatives of NGV or MONA or even a publication that representatives of those read. They are very likely to be your parents or me.

But an installation can't be sold to most people, they are large, 3D pieces often fitted to the space they are exhibited in that nobody bar a gallery really has the space for. The odds of an installation exhibition resulting in somebody purchasing it for their permanent collection are incredibly low.

That doesn't mean it isn't financially viable, it just means you are in a 'winner take all' business model. Ai Wei Wei does installations and makes millions. Most installation artists lose thousands. But art can be rationally undertaken when low odds of success x large value of success > high odds of failure x cost of failure.

It's alright to put something out there, for free that costs you money and isn't very likely to succeed. The important thing is to avoid a rationalising ideal to cope with the very high chance of failure. It's not 'bad' or 'crazy' to make installation art. It's just really 'trendy' right now, and what I would call 'oversubscribed'.

Something is always going to be oversubscribed. In the words of Homer Simpson 'they saw an overcrowded marketplace and said "me too"'. What tends to arise, and should be avoided are lofty ideals that make noble the regular occurance of failure (under any criteria) and ignoble those who achieve any kind of success (typically 'selling out').

Education costs us time and money. Some people do it as something to do, but I'd say most people accept these costs carrying the belief that they will pay off at some future date. Practicing takes time but we do it so that the end art pieces are more likely to succeed.

By accident or design, a business model always applies.

Selling Out

Are we destined to collide with the commercial world sooner or later? Is it inevitable that every artist comes to think of their art as a business?

That's the tricky part. I would concede that it is plausible that somebody could survive as an artist and never think of what they do as a business. They are probably lucky in more senses than one. They are far more likely to realise that luck always plays a role in success no matter how deliberate your strategy.

Think of the 'street artist' they do graffiti for years risking prosecution by councils and community service orders and jail time. Their art survives on it's merits to the community, risky and temporary it could be buffed or just nonchalantly panted over by a better or shitter artist. Then some restaurant finds them via their tag and pays them to do the side of their new cafe? Have they sold out? And which piece is 'legitimate' the commissioned sanctioned piece, or the act of vandalism?

Whether they take the job or not, whether they planned to or not, a business model still applies. Choices are being made over who assumes the risk and who has the autonomy.

There's no right or wrong way to cut up this cake. But 'selling out' I think does exist in a practical form.

When 'selling out' is a concept you use to console the fact that your art isn't reaching people, that you are getting poor turnouts, that you aren't selling or that the establishment doesn't recognise you, then you have nothing really to worry about if presented with the opportunity to sell out.

If selling out describes a move where you will lose one audience to gain another. Eg. losing your street art following by moving into the gallery scene, you need to consider the risks and benefits, because these decisions can be irreversible.

Hitting a higher volume of distribution or reaching a broader audience may also simply eat up your time, or become so demanding you stop enjoying your vocation. It can come with demands to reproduce certain works ad nauseum.

In these ways, 'selling out' is a practical consideration where my preference would be for considering them while I have a choice to make, rather than being surprised when the choice is made.

Paper Billionaire

"The Queen of Versailles" I suspect should become mandatory viewing for anybody embarking on a business degree, so salient and brutal are the lessons contained within.

You can as of this writing still watch it on ABC iview, if you are in Oz, but otherwise track it down.

It's hard to feel sympathy for billionaires, or rather people who at one stage or another command more wealth than the vast majority of beings that have ever lived, ever have or will. But even so, I can totally believe that it is more terrifying for most people to lose their money than to lose their lives.

What is lacking in public discourse is that there are many and varied varieties of 'billionaire' and the differences between them are meaningful.

So Steve Jobs died, and I can understand the reverence the world displayed for the passing of this figure, even the Onion was highly flattering. People kept mouthing the opinion that he 'changed the world!' and I guess in a way less trivial than usual, he fucken did.

People have a natural kind of respect for wealth, and it leads to an informal logical fallacy that's something like 'it has merit because they are rich.' (there is a corresponding one for meriting an argument based on the proponents poverty). In short, if I with my sub $10,000 in savings gave you advice on what the future of the economy was, versus a conflicting view of the economy from some fat turd in a suit with $100,000,000 people would be inclined to believe the multi-millionaire because of who he is, rather than the intrinsic merits of his prediction.

Thus, Australian's should probably slap themselves awake to realise that there's a huge difference between Gina and Steve. Gina is no Steve, she is a rent collector. And by 'rent' I don't mean it in terms of what most of my friends have to pay each month, but in the economic sense: an unearned increment.

That is to say, Gina just has a claim to the proceeds of sale of natural resources. She is in mining, and the 'value added' activities in mining are as follows: exploration (discovery of mineral resources, a risky venture), extraction (digging the shit up) and transporting (bringing it from the top of the shaft to the factories that refine  them etc). and for all those activities a mining company is entitled to compensation, hopefully yeilding a profit.

But the ore itself is a natural resource, created by nobody, and irreplaceable. Once sold it is gone. The sale price is an economic rent, and these should be collected ideally by government in the form of taxation.

Thus, if you 'taxed Gina out of Business' it's not the same as taxing Jobs or Gates or the Google guys or Ai Wei Wei out of business. Why? Because the other three are people who use their brains to create value, they don't collect economic rents, they innovate and create products that provide value. If you sent them out of business, there's absolutely no guaruntee that anything would spring up to replace them.

But Gina would be replaced tomorrow. Because so long as there is demand, anybody can operate her business, perhaps not as efficiently or whatever when it regards the actual value-added activities, but the resources will remain the same.

So that's one difference.

Another meaningful difference, valuable to everyone to understand is the difference between a real Billionaire and a Paper Billionaire.

That's much harder. But basically, a Paper Billionaire has not achieved 'wealth' per se, they do not hold an asset in their name that can generate steady income for ever, they do not have a patent or intellectual property that makes them money. A paper billionaire has secured an extraordinary line of Credit.

I mean they are probably cash flow wise, actually very wealthy - they may for example command a salary in the hundreds of millions with million dollar bonuses and have income coming off their assets that is also more than the next 100 household's investment income combined.

But their billion-dollar purchasing power is based on debt, they have a small fortune in the hundreds of millions and a business up to it's eyeballs in debt - billions of dollars of debt.

And that is very different from having billions of dollars in cash.

Peter Schiff explained it sort of this-a-way, under GNP we measure 'success' as how much we consume right now. So one person with a $30,000 wage goes and saves $10,000 and puts it in a savings account. Another person with a $30,000 wage goes and gets a credit card and personal loan, and winds up with a fancy car and italian suit and eats at some very nice restaurants all year with expensive escorts.

GNP says the clear winner here is the latter. The saver is worse off because they have foregone consumption in favor of savings (future consumption) whereas the borrower is better off because he consumed a lot of stuff last year.

It's patently ridiculous to say that somebody with a debt that is 60% of their annual income is better off or more successful than somebody who has 30% of their annual salary sitting in a bank account earning interest.

That's easy to see, but chances are if you live in Australia, you feel you have taken steps towards 'financial security' by buying a home. The thing is, you don't own a home, you have a mortgage, you are still in the process of buying that home for probably the next few decades.

Thus you are similar to guy who blows his wages and borrows money, different only in the respect that the asset you have gone into debt for is different. A house holds the prospect of appreciating in value relative to the debt you have taken on. Whereas if you borrowed money to buy a car there's no real hope your car will be capable of paying off your debt via sale.

But that's really it. You're not financially secure, your wealth is on paper. It isn't 'realized' you are financially secure when you aren't dependent on an income, either to live or to service your debts. Without that you have obtained no financial security, you have simply obtained a line of credit.

If you do watch the Queen of Versailles, whether you muster up sympathy for the documentary subjects or not, realise they are not so much extraordinary people so much as extra-ordinary. They are just your average domestic household raised by a couple of powers.

Fascinating stuff.

Theology: Bridges to No-Where

I feel that in my word theologians now occupy an equivalent sentiment to 'bridges to nowhere' in economics.

What are bridges to nowhere? They are literally just that, huge pieces of infrastructure that service no real populations. But the important thing is that they cost a lot to build and employ a lot of people. A bridge to nowhere is justified only by it's size and scale and cost of production, not because of the intrinsic benefits of the infrastructure. You also get super-dams, and ghost towns.

They are all symptoms of a design flaw in our political-economy, that is, because we reward politicians in both democratic systems like the US, Japan, UK, Australia and Europe for delivering growth as measured by GNP, or even non-democracies like China.

GNP is a design flaw, in that it's definition is too broad to guaruntee that 'economic growth' actually improves our quality of life. The simplest way to summarise bridges-to-nowhere/ghost-towns/superfluous-dams is to say imagine what voters supposedly cared about was how many apples got eaten.

What you would expect is that the government would create huge 'apple-eating-projects' funded by tax payer money, where millions of apples where grown and shipped in, and vast numbers of people where paid to sit in huge factories eating apples all day.

the effect would be a huge boost in the governments performance in accordance with apple consumption, and as for the rest I hope you can imagine how such a practice is unsustainable and beyond creating jobs and employment and stimulating the apple grower industry, there's no real long term benefit being produced. The benefits are artificial.

I've watched enough 'God Debates' to notice a similar trend. The first is that none of God's official mouthpieces ever participate, they are always theologians. Theologians occupy a periphery of the religious sphere, I'm sure there are many clergy that hold degrees in theology, but a theology doctrate doesn't require you be clergy.

And these are who are left to defend the faith in the rational construct of a debate. The second trend I noticed in the hours of online god debates (and some debates go for hours - plural) is that the 'New Athiests' whom are the prestige defenders of a material universe, all eventually just start ignoring the theologians completely.

My initial reaction was that 'this is cynical, they are turning up to sell and sign books and are abandoning the spirit of the debate.' but at some point during either Hitchens extensive book tour debates or Sam Harris vs. William Lane Craig I looked at my own reactions.

Theologians are at a huge intrinsic disadvantage, they have to argue the affirmative of a non-falsifiable theorem. That is they make the concession that you should have a good reason to believe in god, rather than no-reason at all, pure faith.

It's evident watching a couple of debates (and I've watched a lot, it gets lonely in my studio) you get a sense of the disproportionate effort taken.

Take for example the ontological argument. To make it rigorous takes a long wordy speech in order to create defensible premises. If you present it bare bones, the ontological argument is this 'god by definition is perfect, if he didn't exist he wouldn't be perfect, so by definition he must exist.' the ontological argument has been around at least as long as des cartes, and apparently it adds up, but when presented in a simple form as I have - it is unsatisfying.

The thing is that as technical the language gets, and how detailed the premises are outlined, for me at least the ontological argument never becomes satisfying.

By contrast if you present 'the problem of evil' bare bones, it's still I think quite powerful. Why do bad things happen to good people? If there is a God, why does a fire leave a deer horribly injured and suffering for days before it dies? Once again, to address the problem of evil requires a very taxing level of reasoning, of which I believe the common conclusion is that there 'probably is no god'.

And here is our bridge to nowhere. Deepak Chopra is not a theologist, he's... something alright, but not strictly speaking a theologist. But Sam Harris hit the nail on the head I feel when at the commencement of a debate with Deepak on 'the future of God' Sam Harris made an important distinction.

To paraphrase - there are two discussions you can talk about, you can have a discussion about 'God' that most people believe in and are interested in, essentially an invisible friend who hears prayers and occasionally intervenes in human affairs. Or 'God' an abstract concept that is of no interest to most people but is defined sufficiently to survive reasoned debates, an omnipotent, eternal, benevolent but inscrutable agent.

It's the second God theologians are interested in, know and understand. It's that God they turn up and defend. The major limitation is, that almost nobody cares about or believes in this God. They believe in a God that more closely resembles the bearded parody in the Simpsons cartoons, or the illustration by Michelangelo on the roof of the Sistine Chapel.

Theologians are for debates, to create a god that can be defended in the realms of reason, but unfortunately there are no good ways to defend the God that one learns about in Church, that authority can be derived from.

The debates and the trends within them suggest that nobody, with respect to reason, can defend going to Church and listening to a priest because of the moral authority of scripture. Theologians are employed to conceal the fact that this authority has tanked, in the same way that bridges to nowhere get built to conceal the fact that an economy has tanked.

Meme Expression

Genes hang out in gangs. genes come in packs. Genes are parts of a whole strand of DNA, Chromosomes, Cells. They just sit there, on a long bench until they need to do something to survive. At this point, I'd recommend you read 'The Selfish Gene' by Richard Dawkins, because I'm not a biologist, nor even a scientist and am going to grossly oversimplify everything.

So genes are what are the unit of selection for natural selection, and as a result you got all kinds of genes that hang out in your DNA that at one point or another allowed you to survive some environment or another.

And you may or may not have this gene MOA-A, 'the warrior gene' that may or may not be a cause of psychopathic behaviour. The warrior gene seems to correlate with individuals that when their wife leaves them for another man, tend to dismember their wives and wear their head around the house, as opposed to to just getting upset and crying into a beer.

The thing is, there are people who have the MOA-A gene in their DNA that go their whole lives without dismembering anybody. The other aspect of the theory of the warrior genes link to violent and antisocial behaviour is 'gene expression' it's suspected that for somebody with the MOA-A gene, it only 'expresses' itself when you undergo experiences of abuse. For example, child abuse. Conversely genetic psychopath candidates who grow up in loving, stable and secure environments wind up just being regular arseholes.

Now, what to do about psychotically violent individuals? We have two possible solutions.

End child abuse is one. Address the environmental factors that might bring about the warrior gene's expression in vulnerable children. I think it's fair to say, that in a number of societies around the world, this undertaking is underway already. And not just with the motif of making sure MOA-A gene's are dormant and unexpressed in people. And whatever the feasability issues, the relative lack of success in this possible solution, it's fair to say that trying to eradicate child abuse is a noble pursuit, worth adopting no matter how slim the chances of success may seem.

The second is eradicate the MOA-A gene. We may hope for example, that it will simply get bred out of existence as being a violent psychopath becomes more of a reproductive liability than it is a survival advantage. But suppose science makes it feasible to simply eradicate it, I don't know anything about designer babies, and I know even less about gene therepy, but suppose technology becomes such that through a vaccine or genetic screening or some little pill, we can begin ensuring babies don't have the MOA-A gene transmitted in the same way it has become possible for a mother to not transmit the HIV virus to her baby.

Some things to note, neither of these solutions to the problem of psychopathic behavior are mutually exclusive, one is eradicating the gene, the other the gene's expression. It is also fair to say that while both solutions implicitly recognise that psychotic violence is bad, only one recognizes that child abuse is bad.

But this is a very different thing than saying 'child abuse is bad, BECAUSE it can trigger psychopathy' Child abuse is bad for a whole number of reasons that apply to every victim of it regardless of their genetic makeup. The issue of child abuse is distinct and separate. One solution, or course, of action isn't necessarily superior because it addresses two wrongs, in fact it could be wielded in such a way as to make it worse.

This hasn't happened, because as far as I'm aware, there isn't a debate as to what to do about psychopaths, there's no either/or dilemma as yet. But humour me. Psychotic behaviors are bad, particularly the violent ones. As much as we may feel sympathetic to the cuckolded there are reactions that are acceptable, reactions that are even admirable (forgiveness, moving on, self-betterment) there are reactions that are unacceptable, like psychotic reactions. Learning that this is caused by the presence of a gene, and that due to childhood trauma's it may not occur to that person that there are better ways of dealing with it, might take the edge off the outrage we feel, might increase our compassion for the child that they were. I hope you agree with me, that it never makes what they did, acceptable.

Sam Harris' talk on 'Free Will' (you can find it, and several versions of it on Youtube) is well worth checking out, and he makes a non-gene based argument that is much the same, but much much better.

I've sidetracked a bit, but here is the thing, child abuse is a problem, and the gene IS a problem. And it's a problem for the people that have it. Our society is civilized now, there is a 'rule of law' that even if it fails to protect numerous children as it's supposed to, will still punish children who develop into adult psychopaths based on being threatened and abused in childhood.

There is a fallacy to be made, say for some reason a debate does come up, should we invest all our energy into stopping childhood abuse (stop gene expression) or all our energy into stopping psychopathy (stop the gene) or both? And say there's a group that advocate addressing gene expression only. Feeling that we may disable future generations chances of survival if we eradicate a gene that could be useful (say in a societal collapse). Personally I don't think that argument carries much water, but this group urges tolerance and compassion for MOA-A gene carriers, and points to the majority of gene-carriers that never express that gene, saying the 'real' problem is child abuse.

Here is the fallacy, this view fails to recognise that an abused child without the MOA-A gene is still better off than an abused child with the MOA-A gene. Because much as that child has been treated horribly and at a huge psychological disadvantage for entering adult life, they at least wont have the further disadvantage of becoming a psychopath as well.

It is thus perfectly valid for people to construct a case that says 'we should try and eradicate this gene from the gene pool' if there is such a thing as the psychopath gene, it is probably one of the most persuasive arguments for reducing the genetic diversity of the human race.

So, here's the thing. It currently isn't feasible to eradicate MOA-A gene. As far as I know. And as far as I know, the link between MOA-A, gene expression and being a psychopath isn't confirmed. So there is no debate. There could be. Why then did I write at length this whole thought experiment out in a blog post, a blog post called meme expression?

Meme's tend to cluster. For example, if you know somebodies stance on abortion, you probably have good chances of knowing their stance on capital punishment. Another place outside of people's heads that meme's tend to cluster is in books. Some books contain their own 'physics' meme, or metaphysics. Robert Jordan's the wheel of time contains a bunch of memes that set up rules for how magic works that are very different from how the wizard of Oz treats magic.

Suppose you have a book that contains two types of memes. The first type we'll call an 'authority' meme, the second type we'll call an 'instruction' meme. If the authority meme manages to successfully replicate in a persons mind, then the fidelity of which it does can be tested by how closely or literally that person then carries out the 'instruction' memes. It can be fairly said that if none of the authority memes copy over into the mime, then you would expect none of the instruction meme's to be active, or if they do, it to be entirely a coincidence.

I could have lost you in the quick transition from genes to memes, and if I know nothing about genes, I know less about memes. So I must disclaim that I am going to completely oversimplify and say that meme = idea. The use of the term meme is to think about ideas in the same way we think about genes in the framework of natural selection.

So we have 'instruction' memes that's survival is dependent in part on the survival of the authority memes it hangs around, and to an extent vice-verse. Now say you have an instruction meme that instructs a person to behave in a violent and anti-social way. Let's call it the 'extremist' meme. But the thing is that while most people who carry this extremist meme around in their head, never act on it, in a violent and anti-social way.

The key is that the extremist meme only expresses itself in situations where the person lives or comes from a warzone, that has a lack of economic opportunities and access to education. Then the extremist meme can activate and the person commits some act of violence.

Now, there's two possible ways of addressing the problem of anti-social violence. Without looking at the feasibility, you can attempt to eradicate poverty, improve education and broker peace (address meme-expression). Or say that through rational discourse, public discourse, policy and education, you could work to actually eradicate or stop the transmission of the extremist meme. Say you could 'vaccinate' future generations with some kind of 'anti-extremist' meme that makes their minds impervious to the transmission of the extremist meme.

Now, once again there's a fallacy to be made, both solutions recognise meme-driven violence as a problem, but one also recognises the problems of inequality. Poverty, lack of education and war are bad, but they are bad in and of themselves, regardless of the memes present in the people effected by it. Furthermore, there's no need for a dilemma between tackling both the meme-expression and the meme.

But here, a lot of well meaning people make the mistake of not recognizing that a war ravaged, impoverished and uneducated person is better off without the 'extremist' meme, disadvantaged and cruel though their life may be as a result of the war, the poverty and the ignorance. They aren't helped, nor do they help anyone else by having the extremist meme in their head.

But it's wrong for these well meaning individuals to say that we should exclusively address the environmental factors, much as it may eradicate the problems that arise from the extremist meme. It's wrong for them to attack people who are trying to eradicate the extremist meme, and or, promulgate 'anti-extremist' memes, meme-vaccines etc. And it is especially wrong to be an apologist for the extremist meme and respect it's right to exist and be reproduced.

I hope by now, you can make the connection. As uncertain as I am of my genetics, the good thing about memes is that unlike the intensive process that needs to be gone through to determine that the MOA-A gene 'tells' people to wear a hookers skin around their house, an instruction meme is really easy to read and understand for example 'thou shall not suffer a witch to live' is pretty easy to connect with behaviour, because memes either are coded in the very language we speak or very easy to translate into a language we understand.

An authority meme that says 'the instructions that follow are absolutely correct and beyond questioning' is very easy to understand, and gauge the impact of, even for somebody who is not an evolutionary biologist or even geneticist.

So even if you have the same cluster of memes presented to people in different circumstances, such that a person who is well educated and affluent winds up saying 'the authority meme clearly doesn't instruct us to follow the instructions literally, but to contextualize and interpret them' whereas somebody impoverished and uneducated says 'these instructions are perfect and meant to be carried out literally' would demonstrate that tackling meme-expression may produce desirable results.

But it also indicates perhaps, that the former person has been successfully vaccinated against the authority meme, but this vaccination unfortunately doesn't eradicate the extremist meme, but winds up protecting it.

Thus when Sam Harris says agnostics and atheists are at a disadvantage, because they don't understand what it means to actually believe what people say they believe, he has a valid point. And apologists do us all a disservice by defending a bunch of antisocial memes.

So I'm starting to get fucked off at people equivocating acts of violence and injustice carried out in war zones and regions that don't have established 'rule of law' by members of civilized non-warzones as the same problem as individuals committing willful acts of anti-social violence because of memes they are infected with. * Even when the death tolls are disproportionately stacked in the warzone injustice's detriment, the extremist meme is worth attacking because it remains a problem.

There is also a meaningful difference between anti-social violence generated by a gene, that appears almost randomly in a population and anti-social violence that is systemically generated by the spread of memes, even one that requires meme-expression.

Some of the advocates of attacking anti-social memes, have advocated interventionist wars, but always to achieve the goals of peace, economic opportunity and education. To my knowledge, none of the advocates of addressing the meme side of the problem advocate continued war and poverty and ignorance, but conversely many of the people advocating the meme-expression side of the debate advocate that the meme itself stop being attacked, that meme carriers are not identified as dangerous.

Nobody that thinks psychopaths are psychopathic by nature, thinks that they therefore should be free to roam the neighborhood. Just as nobody recognizing that bears by their nature are dangerous to humans thinks they should be free to roam through urban areas. But a psychopath should not be tortured or killed because of a gene they carry and a childhood they couldn't control. A bear should not be killed for wandering too close to a suburban development.

But if you could change a persons genes so that they would seek therapy instead of revenge, and change a persons ideas so that they would converse instead of riot. We should. What we shouldn't do is insist that a person carrying the MOA-A gene (or whatever gene it turns out to be) is genetically identical to people who don't.

Thus I suggest watching Sam Harris on Free Will: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g

and reading

Richard Dawkins' 'The Selfish Gene'

*if you feel this statement needs more defense I will begrudgingly oblige. But hopefully you can imagine many of the differences.

Monolithic

There's a classic mistake. Ageless, impervious to learning and knowledge. How indeed do classic mistakes even exist?

A finemost example might be the Monty Hall problem. Try it out, I bet you like me, will make a classic mistake.

I think classic mistakes are generally able to exist because they are hard wired into our brains. They are something quick and dirty that work most of the time (eg. counting our options n and dividing 1/n to figure our chances of success) but under certain circumstances lead us astray.

Now there's a rule of thumb in the business world that says 'if you are standing still you are shrinking' that is you have to constantly react and respond to the market just to maintain the status quo. It is generally speaking a very good idea to always be innovating.

The thing is, that I think a classic mistake is that a lot of industries, yes, whole industries attempt to innovate when they should be consolidating.

And for that I dredge up an old argument I'd just about put to bed. My ongoing struggle to say music is objectively worse than it used to be.

Why have I suddenly become plucky again? Well consider the closure of Ford Automotive's manufacturing, clearly industries can get worse, can end. The times change such that companies once axiomatically dominant  can look at the books and decide even with handouts they are better off not operating.

The automotive monoliths made their products better in every objective sense as well, and nobody could download their products for free via the interwebs either (although that may change with 3d printing). Cars got lighter, stronger, safer, faster, more responsive, more efficient, more powerful, shorter stopping distances, more comfortable... and the companies still failed.

What then of music? The music industry deals in a product much older than automobiles, one that has been exposed to technological innovation throughout it's entire existence. The great organists of the mighty cathedrals were buried by the more portable harpsichords, the harpsichord manufacturers slaughtered in turn by the more versatile piano forte, the pianola was a technological misfire, then the gramophone really shook things up, along came the wireless which created the teenager demographic, guitars got pickups, amps drowned out classical, synths expanded horizons, as did computers... a lot changed before the advent of internet piracy in an ongoing story of innovation. (Movie posters used to be commissioned paintings for visual artists back in the day, until printing resolutions made photographs and stills the norm.)

Nevertheless, you had these monoliths, two in particular that reached their peak influence in the early 90's. Radio Stations and Record Labels. These two industries were effectively the gatekeepers, they got to decide what we the plebs listened to. These two monoliths are seldom described as 'despotic' even though really that's just what they are. The reason being, that just about every company everywhere is despotic in nature.

It was the despots occupying these lofty perches in the 90's that saw the emergence of the mp3, the digitisation of information that paved the way for a bunch of industry shaking innovations - napster, bittorrent, youtube the providers of 'free' content the new Caribbean of internet piracy, you saw the ipod, iphone, itunes, spotify etc. that allowed people to collect and collate more music than they are ever going to listen to in their lifetime and thus dispense with the radio. You saw garageband, protools, autotune, fruityloops and any number of software platforms that allowed anybody to DIY their own music studio into a laptop, you saw myspace, soundcloud, bandcamp etc. that allowed anybody with a laptop to distribute and promote their own sound. You saw facebook pave a way for bands to promote their gigs with 0 agent fees or promotion budget.

Now virtually all these emergent industries are hailed as 'democratic' that is, by implication that they threatened the despots stranglehold, their gatekeeper status as to what we listen to, when we listen to it, who gets to make it. etc.

And if you are a despot, and watch the water sucked from between your toes on your private beach and see all that water of yours dissappear out towards the horizon, your natural impulse is to decide you need to move, and fast. The thing is, is that if you don't actually try and understand what is happening, then you are going to run with the tide and try and grab up all the fat succulent fish left exposed by the receding waters. 

The correct thing to do is retreat to the higher ground. Consolidate. This is what the monoliths did wrong. Not that they didn't move, as monoliths are almost always criticized for, but rather that they do move, instead of digging in, hunkering down. 

hopefully if you've read this far, you don't really need a recap of what all the democratizing forces in music have done to radio stations and record companies. I offer just one example - in the mid 90's through to the early 2000's triple j ran the 'unearthed' program, if you don't know what I'm talking about, click the link. 

Now that program used to go to regional areas, and solicit demo tapes from bands that couldn't feasibly get to the big smoke, play enough gigs to get heard and followed and attract the attention of a record company to promote and distribute them. From the 2000's though this program was made virtually redundant by myspace, facebook, bandcamp etc. 

picture if you will, a king riding in a carriage meandering around the land creating a scant few opportunities for a luckier few than normal. It's slow, it's inefficient, but it IS something.

Nowadays the unearthed program is a website, and that's all I'll say about that.

Here's what I want to say. If you are GOOD at BEING a DESPOT, stick to what you are good at. The thing is that while programs like triple j unearthed, request fest and even the hottest 100 have had their value eroded, it wasn't the core value radio stations provided. And while distributing and promoting physical records had value back in the day that was virtually erased if illegally over night. But in neither case was this the core value of these monoliths.

The core value, was and is, that they have people filter through a whole heap of potential music and decide what was worth listening to. And that might sound unappealing, despotic and tyrannical, an usurpation of our rights to determine what we listen to.

But you are wrong, and I'm going to take this in two diections and I don't know which way is the easiest to go with first.

So arbitrarily first, here's the thing. How many hours do you spend trawling through bandcamp, soundcloud or myspace to avail yourself of the explosion of musical options to determine finally, purely and truly what music you want to hear. I'm going to hazard a guess and say in your case 0. And you are somebody who has read my blog post thus far. 

How many reality tv show contestants did you vote for in the past decade? how many of their albums do you own (digitally or physically)? how many of those albums would you rate in your top 10 of the last decade? or of all time? Have these democratizing technologies actually produced better results? The best that can be said, is that if you remove any subjective bias (if you youtube the Carpenters 'Georgie Girl' you will find 'I remember when music was real, not like the crap they listen to these days' comments that are identical to the one's left on every other video from every other decade) the best you could say is that the new technologies have produced the same results.

And even that's worse, because those that succeed today can't live off the fat of album royalties, or even advances. They get the fame but not necessarily the fortune. Unless they tour.

Consider on this first side by analogy, the stock market. In the late 90's brokerage got democratised by the same technologies that democratized music. The market went digital, and you could buy and sell shares on the internet. And for all the lauding of this simply improving the markets efficiency and the theoretical framework behind it, what it did was give a lot of autonomy to people who didn't know how to determine the value of the shares they were buying and selling. They gave autonomy to moron's and the effect this had was to hand instituational investment from the artists, the people that looked thoroughly at the companies they were buying and selling, to the quants who studied the mathematical fluctuationality of the market in what, as of 2007, has been practically proven a pseudoscience, less effective than the intuitions of the old school analysts.

And just as an old school investor, or thoughtful philosopher can outperform the most tech-savy investment fund with noble recipient risk-experts, and can certainly outperform a mom-and-pop investor on their laptop, and old school record exec I imagine is going to be much better at picking and finding talent I like, than I am as the autonomous head of my own record label, and autonomous station manager of my own radio station.

And that's the second angle. Just because music appreciation isn't understood in say nueroscience, or evolutionary theory, or philosophy, and is a domain generally regarded as subjective, it doesn't mean expertise doesn't exist around picking talent.

I hand you a card that says '780' and ask you to come up with a large number, you will probably come up with a 3-4 digit number. If I hand you a card that says '7,820,465' and ask you to come up with a large number you will at least come up with a seven digit figure. That's called priming. 

If a person's job entails listening to music all day, talking about music, talking to musicians, seeing bands perform, even trawling the social media wastelands for bands, they are going to be primed to pick much better, more interesting bands than I am listening to music while commuting on bicycle.

And that isn't to say they will gear towards the alienating avaunt guard shit on the fringes of the cutting edge. What I mean to say is that somebody who has listened to 1000 female solo folk guitarist acts is going to probably come up with somebody better than the 7 I hear a year. And if they don't, in my case that's luck, not in the exec's case who listened to 1000 to come to the same conclusion.

When people talk about the bleak future of record companies, and even radio stations, I feel they disregard the thriving industries of interior design. Because that still exists despite people having always had the complete freedom to decorate their homes any which way they see fit. Despite the knowledge that each customer has the exact same access to stores and materials as the interior designer. But they pay somebody with taste and expertise to pick out interiors that they like more than if they picked it out themselves.

Yes! This is actually the kind of despotism that saves us from ourselves. An investor with little more than a newspaper and a telephone can still outperform many of the most subscribed to managed funds. I believe a radio station dj or record exec can still outperform the most subscribed to social media.

But what have they done instead? The classic mistake, of imitating the attention grabbing style of the new industry that has yet to produce any substance. The result: the monoliths lost a lot of substance.

thanxhibition

was received really well. I think if you're an artist, and are always struggling to produce 'real' art, you get caught out by what of your output people really like, and how much they really like it. In many ways the colour exhibition was smaller, less organised, less pieces, less promotion. but only slightly, and it was still a big success.

But the thanxhibition. the part I didn't have to do, and almost didn't but did, that was what pushed me closer to being who I want to be. People really dug the free art. And I was prepped to do it, even if it undercut my own sales (it didn't), and I felt like the disparity in qualities would go noticed and thus, they wouldn't be appreciated. But people were really into it. Really excited about getting a free piece of my output.

I would recommend to any artist doing a thanxhibition.

Hairless

I like all others have a nature that is petty and small. One that makes me want to assert and dominate, particularly over a class of humans I identify as my competition - men.

If Abraham Lincoln regrettibly said:

and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race

I need not end my life for feeling/thinking and sharing with you that I tend to prefer being the superior to other men around me. I like to win foot races (rare, but it's happened) I like to be the tallest man in the room (extremely rare, has only happened in small rooms in south east asia and Japan), I like to be the most physically attractive man present (thanks to some ugly tall people, has happened occassionally).

So I had full and thick underarm hair by Grade 5. I enjoyed a brief period of ridicule on my basketball team for having it. But things quickly changed by the time we hit the under 16's teams where not having under arm hair drove many players of the game to wear a shirt under their singlet to conceal their shame.

Growing up, I enjoyed a position of superiority in the patriarchy of male social order, on account of being fucking hairy. I had chest hair, leg hair, under arm hair, facial hair, sideburns. Thus I was always welcome amongst the manly men, and together we could ridicule the 'skinboxes'.

Less so than the lowly 'skinboxes' were the guys we used to refer to as 'prettyboys' I'm sure it's a sexist term offensive to both men and women, assigning an innate assumption of wretchedness to qualities of feminine beauty, but there was an acknowledgement either tacit or outright, that these guys could get the girls, precisely because they were more effeminate than other guys.

The thing was, that while you may not have gotten the outright fawning there was for prettyboys, there was no strong compulsion to imitate their looks artificially in order to attract girls. Being masculine, in some kind of soviet sense was a viable strategy of attraction.

I would hold it to be generally true, that a man's standing with other men can affect his perception of attractiveness to women. I'm limiting this topic to heteronormative sexual politics, simply because I lack the experience, and indeed motivation to actualy explore the broader spectrum.

I basically contend, that leadership is attractive (in men).

That a fat man, a bald man, a man with a hairy back can get laid more easily than women of equivalent descriptions is one of the persistent gender inequalities that... ah... persists.

And I enjoyed such advantage.

Now, I think the marketing strategy of making women feel unattractive, and that their happiness requires a remedy of this, and then selling them some product to get them back to the previously experienced feeling of attractiveness, is not new, or even unbrazen in marketing and advertising.

It's probably true, that women need to die their hair from grey, just to be considered employable in most professions.

Turning these viscious tactics on men is relatively new. And men are conceding the ground I think. But I don't know. In fact I don't know much, I don't rigorously test any of my theories, I just use them to entertain me.

But I suspect, that it is more likely now, that a man the age I was when I was laughing it up at the skinboxes' expense, would feel considerably more pressure to be less like the jocular and straight Freddy Mercury I revelled in in the change rooms and more like Ryan Gosling, or the skinbox I previously ridiculed.

Does present adolescent me get his chest waxed? or shave it? or some shit? Does present adolescent me equivalent wear a shirt to play basketball? Or worse, play soccer because the uniform has sleeves?

I don't know. I don't particularly seek the company of recently pubescent males.

What I will say is this. Attraction is worth getting your head around. Physical is important. In my life I have had suitors that would have made good partners to me if not for the fact that I had no physical attraction to them. I am sure the reverse is true of me.

But my observations of my own physical attraction to women is that there is a lot of room to move. Asking me, for example what my prefernce for a woman's pubic hair grooming is, is a misleading question. When looking at pornography on the internet, these superficialities matter, because in masturbatory aids I need efficiency, to utilise as little of my imagination as possible in holding that image. I can supplant any personalities I want and have any interaction with a female form I like knowing that every aspect is under control of my imagination, and that the female form I utilise for arousal in that instance is instantly disposable.

If we are talking about sex with a woman, rather than sex with myself while trying to forget my actual circumstances though. Here's the thing, and I wished when asked I had the confidence to answer so honestly.

My preference, overwhelmingly in my case is for vagina, and specifically the vagina that belongs to somebody I actually want to have sex with. Thus in most circumstances I imagine myself coming across the pubic bone, it's fleshy covering and then discovering how much or how little hair it is garnished with (or wether it has been vagazzled) is of so little consequence, it doesn't even pose a risk of rejection to anyone that might value my opinion on the subject.

In a long term relationship promising multiple iterations of the sexual act and variations upon what is done by whom to what, I feel there is then the appropriate time to share preferences, and even then, whatever preferences I give or recieve, for me it is but an expressed preference, not a command, or ultimatum or even request. Even if I did have some enthusiasticly overconfident lapse where it was posed as such, I would hold little sway because my preference for who's vajajay would generally give the other party monopoly power.

I don't expect reciprocity either, nor believe any relationship enjoys equal power, equal control between parties. I guess I would assume reciprocal respect, as in if somebody told me they really wanted a peircing in my penis, they would respect my desire not to fulfil that preference.

Just as I don't know whether hairy young men like I was now fork out for back waxes at Salons, I don't really know how prevalent my attitude is amongst the general populace. I'm aware that many people are averse to strong attachments, get bored quickly of any particular sexual partner and that that's a perfectly valid approach to sex, I imagine for such people anticipating a very finite union their preference for hairless may in fact exceed their preference for penis, and even their preference for whom the genitals are attached to.

I'd be more curious to know, whether people who like me, attempt to enter lasting relationships, may indeed find the preference for hairless, hairy or any particular grooming or accessories a sufficiently important one to be a dealbreaker.

Benchmarking

Goodness and badness or wickedness or whatever are not entirely subjective terms. I mean in the sense of 'the villain is just the hero of the other side' principle, in many senses goodness and badness might take on a relative sense.

Danny the football hero tells me he loves me. I want to believe it, because Danny is a dreamboat. But I'm a fan of evidence based beliefs. Thus as a reasonable person, I test the claim that Danny does in fact love me, by observing his behaviour, and whether it supports his claim.

Why behaviour? because it can be seen. And while there is perhaps no universally agreed upon definition of what it is to love somebody, there are useful, functional ones. One I find serviceable is that you love somebody when the importance of their needs equals or exceeds your own.

Now I'm testing Danny's love for me, not my love for Danny. This is not entrapment, but observation. Does Danny hurt me? emotionally or physically? Is it intentional? Does Danny provide care? Attention? Does Danny know what I do? Who is important to me? Does he misrepresent himself to me? Say he can't make our date thursday night because of training, then I run into him at the local bar? Does he remember my birthday? Is his love exclusive in accordance with my need for security? etc. etc.

Danny may well be convinced on a subjective level that his claim is true. But if he slapped me for talking back to him that time, and cheated on me with that slut Siobahn, if he skipped my birthday to go on a fishing trip with his footy mates, if he dislikes my friends and discourages me from associating with them. I can reasonably conclude that in a very real and practical sense he doesn't love me.

This is the approach of a reasonable person, a reasonable line of enquiry.

You can apply the same approach to claims of goodness, by looking for evidence of altruistic behaviour, similarly to wickedness by looking at selfish acts and malicious behaviours - intentionally harming others.

Claims of goodness and badness, are in other words falsifiable.

So, in one way debates over the existence of gods are both tired and overdone, and also kind of inexhaustibly fascinating. They are tired and overdone because the same arguments are endlessly dealt with again and again and seemingly make no progress.

Why?

Benchmarking.

Above the question 'Why?' this entire post was preamble. It illustrates a reasonable line of enquiry to verify a falsifiable claim. That is a claim that can be proved untrue.

Here is where the idea of a congenial rational debate between reasonable people and religious apologists falls apart in my view.

The religious apologists generally don't believe their personal God to be subject to the tests we applied to Danny's love. In my experience and observations, most religious apologists shake their head in chagrin, because God's benevolence, goodness, greatness etc. is not a claim, but a definition, or perhaps an axiom.

God's behaviour (drawn from scripture etc.) is not admissible evidence, but simply the benchmark of what defines good behaviour.

Thus the reasonable side of the debate takes scripture and starts... well wherever you like, the 10 commandments, Job, the Plagues, Revelations... probably* all scripture of all religions contains behaviours attributable to the deity that falsify claims of benevolence - eg. if we applied the same acts to Danny a mere mortal no matter how good he is at football he would be deemed everything from a war criminal to a petty person.

You end up with a disconnect. On the one hand, the reasoners are using reason to reasonably draw conclusions about God's character. On the other hand the apologists aren't even apologising but the whole line of inquiry is invalid. What God does, is by definition good character, the best character of all. God cannot be judged, He is the judge, who sits in judgement over the people who are but a part of his master plan.

Inscrutibility thus is the suedo-reasonable defence, if I were to command a group of loyal and devoted followers to go out and kill their neighbours in my name because they do not believe in me, I would book myself a cell next to Charles Manson. God though, this is simply the product of his omniscience, knowing that this is the best outcome for a much bigger picture that we don't understand, thus anything that happens good or bad is much as we don't understand it, the most altruistic thing a omnipotent and benevolent entity could do.

Tsunami wipes out 80,000 impoverished people destroys the property and security of many survivors = benevolent. Baby born with Downs Syndrome = benevolent. Ancient civilization destroyed as heretics when Catholic Spain arrives after having no opportunity to discover the true messiah Jesus Christ = benevolent.

There are other defences, like that the Conquistidors were acting in the name of God, but not representing his 'true' will, however allusions to the 'true' spirit of Christianity, or true will of God defeat inscrutibility, so this defence just makes Tsunami deathtolls and congenital conditions not defendable by inscrutibility.

It also indicates that if people can misrespresent the true will of God and the true spirit of scripture etc. that these institutions have no particularly special protection, nor are the scriptures of any particular merit as sources of instruction, against misrepresentation. They are arguments against the efficacy of organised religion.

See, see how wonderous/monstrous reason is.

The debate about the benevolence of any particular personal God could be an interesting debate about the notion of inscrutibility and it's implications. (I would argue, that an inscrutible personal God, invalidates any 'moral authority' to be derived from belief in them, and is functionally no different from an athiestic view of the universe, therefore superfluous, therefore a waste of energy in contemplation.) THAT's interesting.

What you get instead, is people chuckling and smiling, and as Mark Twain would say 'opening their mouths to remove all doubt they are a fool' when God's nature is called into question. Because that question doesn't make sense.

Professor Lennox has debated Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens making the same profession of ignorance twice - to paraphrase - 'I don't believe in created gods... what makes you think the creator was created? ... God is eternal... you demonstrate that you cannot comprehend eternity/eternal etc.'

In isolation, it may be a fair point, except that the point made by Richard Dawkins is that as big and mysterious as the universe is, to explain it's existence as the design of an eternal sentience - God, is introducing a bigger mystery - that is for those seeking explanation - Intelligent design is no explanation at all, both Hitchens and Dawkins make the very valid point in an appeal to reason that if something as mysterious and inscrutible as an eternal creator is sufficient explanation, then there are no mysteries, and no reason to enquire about anything.

It is the equivalent to explaining the emptiness of my 600ml pepsi bottle on my desk as being drunk by an elephant. Because most people would not find this a satisfactory explanation - how did the elephant get into my room? Why did it drink the pepsi, and then leave with no other traces of it's presence? Why didn't anybody in the suburb notice an elephant?

Do you follow? An explanation that raises more questions than it answers is not a servicible explanation. But for Prof. Lennox thanks to the miracle of benchmarking it does. Reasonably, there was no point to discovering anything about the big bang in the first place, if we can be satisfied with an 'eternal creator' as explanation for that event. As Bertrand Russell, a name that Lennox doesn't manage to drop, pointed out an eternal creator is as satisfactory an explanation for the big bang as for the whole of existence being created 5 seconds ago, and we are merely under the illusion that it has been around for trillions of years or whatever.

These debates are not one sided as such, only if you believe as I do, that debating is a domain of reason, and thus beholden to reason. These debates remain irrational.

Stuff

A friend shared a link to this story. A story that's contents I find slightly outrageous.

But another said: "John Oliver visits western Sydney and meets racist people – shocking I know."
Other tweets included: "I'm pretty sure John Oliver could find just as many racist people anywhere he went in the world" and "Where did you go in Aus? On the Bugle it sounded like you only met bogans and John Howard. No wonder you think we're racists!"

Here's the thing, it's just about even money that any visitor to Australia will hear something to the effect of a racist statement. Unsolicited too. I think for a visitor to our country, to come across anti-Lebanese sentiments in a brief visit to Sydney is a valid reason to criticise the prevailing culture of Australia.

Because it's a cut and dry issue, racism is not ok. Yet some way, some how, significant enough numbers of our community think it is.

Surely, where you want your society to get to, is a point where somebody aged 60 perhaps without the benefits of a completed high-school education knows enough to tell themselves 'paying out the Lebanese is not a good thing to do to a complete stranger.'

That's not an unreasonable nor unobtainable idea. Those twitters in the twittersphere that seemed pleased by the Australian stitch up are understandable, and perhaps pleased because our country has a policy debate on an issue that is plainly and purely racist - refugees arriving by ship - or better known as 'boat people'.

I know, the comedian has generalised Australian culture. He's lumped us intogether with Bogans, he doesn't understand, bogan's aren't the real Australians. Except that they are real Australians. And they and many others are encouraged by highly educated people know as the opposition party. And they are not suitably chastized by the government whom fears losing their vote.

So what I would ask you, if you aren't a racist, and you abhore racism, is don't speak up. Don't defend the country's honour. Because ultimately you are merely blocking us from actually purging this idea from our national psyche.

The innocent have to stop defending the guilty.

Your Gap

Smoking has few advantages. That doesn't mean though that it has none. One advantage of interest to me is it's function in networking in an organisation. Smoking selects people from across and up and down an organisation and puts them regularly into the company of eachother.

The thing about this benefit though, is that you could just ditch the cigarrettes, and do everything else the same and recieve the same benefit.

But we don't. Nobody does.

And as Bill Cosby said 'I told you that so I can tell you this'

Religion has few benefits, but one is moral instruction and particularly moral reinforcement. I mean sure now days church is hardly attended, and the first thing that comes to mind when somebody says 'priest' is 'kiddy-fiddler'.

But have you met any Christians? Or Muslims? Or Japanese people?

I mean met them, because generally there will be tea and cake involved, probably orange juice and out-and-out pleasantness. Like all things, it depends. There are of course meaningful differences between the various dogmas, thus not being a homosexual, I imagine that while I find an interaction with a Christian and Muslim virtually indistinguishable, a homosexual might find it a very different experience.

Hindu's in my experience tend to be fine vegetarians, but otherwise show very little evidence of instruction in anything that resembles morality to me.

And perhaps I should clarify, because most religions have a bunch of shit grafted onto 'moral' instruction that I think as our body of knowledge (particularly psychological) grows, has nothing to do with morality at all. For example, many religions frown on divorce. Other religions feel that people enjoying great privelege is the equivalent of evidence that they have earned it.

Thus like there are only limited benefits I would concede to smoking, and that I should point out will be generally far outweighed by it's disadvantages, so too there's only a limited benefit to religious instruction that is far outweighed by the cumulitive disadvantages of religious thinking.

What I mean is that many religions share in common with humanity, a lot of moral thinking - kindness, compassion, courage, humour, reflection, patience etc. that in most cases will get lumped in with a bunch of immoral crap - obedience, intolerence, fear, aggression etc.

If you are a reasonable person, this list of desirable traits, personality traits, should be much much easier to determine and adhere to, because if you are employing reason you can actually just observe how they work.

For example, look at divorce, you have two people whose lives are conjoined and restricted in some way. And I could probably be accused of being uncareful in my language because a word like 'restricted' has negative connotations, but would point out that something like an employment contract restricts people as well and we sign contracts because then we can plan ahead our lives knowing we will be recieving monies and being occupied for the duration of that contract.

anyhoo, somebody in this restricted relationship becomes unhappy, unhappy with the arrangement and wants out. Divorce allows that person to get out. Alternatives is for that person to continue to suffer, and perhaps increasingly so. For them to channel their unhappiness in making life miserable for their partner, family and other people on the periphery of the marriage arrangement. They may also seek extra-marital relations to try and compensate for the dissatisfactory aspects of the relationship. An extreme alternative is to kill or injure the dissatisfactory spouse.

A reasoning person would observe that so much as there can be any reasonable justification for entering a marriage, divorce is a way to allow a person to admit they made a mistake, and minimise the suffering that arises from this (their own and/or others).

An unreasoning person might see the promise of marriage as sacrosanct, and divorce as the breaking of a promise of which all other negative consequences of keeping the promise pale in comparison. I say unreasoning because there is little to no evidence that breaking a promise through divorce is worse than the endurance of an unhappy and toxic relationship.

The above illustration may have been long but its rich. A reasoning being, can in the case of seeing the unpleasantness of a divorce, exercise their moral muscles to show kindness, compassion, understanding, sympathy, generosity etc.

The progression of reason into the realm of morality, moral science, psychology etc. has I feel greater potential to change human experience for the better, than what reason and science have brought to the field of medicine.

Here is the thing, athiests are relatively good at not starting wars, going to jail, not lynching people with brown skin, not firing rockets at their neighbours, not dispossessing neighbours of land etc. And they are relatively good at supporting worthy causes: equal love, anti-war, disaster relief etc.

But while I have met many believers in my time, irrational people of faith, that I would never doubt would take the opportunity to be a thief, to pick on somebody weaker than them, or even to stay home and watch 'My Kitchen Rules' rather than turn out to support a friend, I have met relatively much fewer awesome athiests.

It should be the easiest thing in the world for athiests to emulate all these awesomely nice things good little christian kids and good little muslim kids and polite japanese people exemplify, but we don't. It's extremely rare that you find an athiest that doesn't devote most of their reasoning power at convincing themselves that God doesn't exist, and focus on how to use their liberation from dogma to become the most awesome that people can be.

Religion is a bad source of moral instruction, but a committed one. It's the McDonalds of Morality, there's a lump of protein in there, but a whole heap of shit that is bad for you, but it keeps consistentlyy churning out that food and has a very secure hold on the market.

On paper, emulating all the advantages of religious morale instruction should be easy, religious morality is after all derived from the inherent behaviours of all human beings that have pitted selfish behaviour against altruistic over millions of years to allow humans to thrive as a species.

It doesn't take much reasoning to figure out which behaviours hurt other people and which actually uplift them. These simple observations are what give religious belief so little appeal to so many.

Yet what I find is a great cognitive dissonance between peoples reasons for rejecting the church, belief, superstition etc. and then how they comport themselves in their everyday lives.

Your gap, is to walk away from belief gaining everything and losing nothing.

This is how you should be employing your reason to improve your and everyone else's lives.

Great to Good

It is rare for me to feel like I need to write a blog post. In most cases it's procrastination for me. But here now I need to document my thought process epiphany somewhere.

I'm currently in preparation for an exhibition, and in such times I like to ratchet up my emotins so that I get into a quite intense creative space. I like to generally have at least one emotional breakdown while prepping.

At these times I become super susceptible to my irrational sides. Highly superstitious, in constant dialogue with myself, I become my own imaginary character. A character in a story, and everything, everything speaks to that story.

On the weekend I saw 'Oz the Great and Powerful' and that particularly spoke to me. I know that it's useless to tell people 'go see it, it's powerful' because I just sincerely doubt it would be if you aren't on the emotional wavelength I tend to be at times like this.

Much of the movie resonated with me, but it's conclusion, it's diadactic morale of the story was something like this:

'I knew you had it in you all along.'
'Greatness?'
'No, goodness.'

And this punched through all the clutter, all the voices in my head.

At this point in my life, I am receptive to the very lesson I need to learn to actually take me to that better place. Learn and remember.

I saw Ruby Wax's show on monday at the comedy festival, and though it wasn't sidesplittingly funny, it was interesting and it spoke to me too. Yet another person that was successful and famous and in the limelite, seemingly with everything and yet discovered they were unhappy and had a breakdown. Somebody with the authority to say, that success doesn't fill the void.

And I reread Phil Jackson's book on coaching the bulls, and how his role as coach as he saw it was to connect the players with the love of the game. That the players that came into the league wanting fame, money etc. ultimately were pursuing something hollow.

All this shit is known to the point of being cliche, yet why can't I learn it.

To me, and I really worry if this is just an excuse, and I fight it, but to be good is more important than being great. What success I've enjoyed has been derived from both my goodness as a person as well as my artistic abilities. And I don't think of myself in particular as a particularly good person.

But I know, from the time which was the worst I've ever been, where my life was just pure and absolute shit, that it was so shit because I hadn't done any good for anybody including myself.

I am at the very least a much better person than I used to be, and life is a lot, lot easier than it used to be.

And here is the thing, it is possible to be both great and good, they are I believe a common constellation. When I look and observe, the people that can really, REALLY succeed in life, are both good first and great.

I can look at and admire the dogmatic dedication of a true artistic genius like Michelangelo, or Leonardo, but the one I really admire is Donatello for the way he worked with and treated others.

To me, the truly great artists of the last century aren't Warhol, Picasso, Dali... great though they were, but Jim Henson, Dr Seuss.

Those two gave the world so much it's incomprehensible to most, the impact they had, continue to have. They were both good and great.

A revelation, like the Wizard of Oz, of what the true destination is, and it's good when you finally notice the emerald city way off in the distance to discover you are already upon the yellow brick road.

Amatuerism

"Work harder! there's a 100 people that want your job." said the corporate fat cat to the proleteriat.

I'm starting to think I should join a union. An artist union.

Seriously, why is it the arts that any graduate or amateur holds an expectation that they won't earn any money unless they are the best of the best of the best. That the job itself is reward enough and that they'd gladly 'do it for free'

my friend Leah illustrates this cognitive dissonance here, which really kicked this post off.

my friend Harvard, also a photographer linked today to this article. Which follows on from one of the concluding statements Leah made about amatuer photographers being willing to work for free/$50.

And then one of the artists' whose blogs I follow has been on a spate of posts regarding this issue culminating in this most/more recent videoblog.

I'm increasingly convinced that Stephen is right, there is plenty of work, everybody needs artists. It's just that it has become accepted now on all sides of the market, that you don't get paid.

It's ridiculous. I know it's a scalable profession, a winner-takes-all profession because every artist is differentiated. But it still holds true, there is plenty of work for everyone.

While any time Banksy and I applied for the same gig, Banksy is going to get it, the fact is that Banksy and I will never apply for the same gig. Banksy I suspect doesnt, but also simply can't do all the gigs on offer to him. So while the winner-theoretically-could-take-all, the winner-literally-can't-take-all.

There are still plenty of clients that will have to take the artist they can get.

But here are some disturbing market realities that have arisen that Amatuer artists need to stop capitulating in:

1. crowdsourcing - client opens up for submissions to design album cover, shoot video clip, do poster, design building etc. and offer some nominal prize. These prizes can even be substantial, but the fact is the client is saving huge dollars by getting a 'crowd' of amatuers to produce a lot of work collectively that they can cherry pick off the top of. Crowdsourcing is effectively trying to get a pro-quality job for free playing the law of numbers.

2. foot-in-the-door - a publication offers for you to go to a restaurant, pay for your own meal, write a review and take some photography and they pay you - jack shit, or $20 or whatever pissant amount allows you to produce content for them at a loss to you. Before you the amatuer artist take on such a gig, does the 'employer' actually pay anybody to produce content for them? Are there a hundred other people inline behind you to take the same 'opportunity' the moment you start trying to get compensated for your work? In other words, is the door you are putting your foot in, actually there? or is it just your foot in a desert? If most of those that took the job before you 'graduated' to working for different clients that actually paid, they aren't really an opportunity at all, shoot your own portfolio, publish it on your own blog, don't let a third party ride off your back.

3. landlords - I'm not opposed to gallaries per se, having a gallary scene, and applying for ever increasingly prestigious spaces to show at. I'm opposed to grossly disproportionate market power between artist and gallary. Most artists have little business training, thus if this post applies to you, I'm going to ask you to trust me when I say markets reward risk taking. Thus a gallary can seek compensation in two ays, it can take the reduced risk up charging a high gallary rental up front, where the artist concievably can recover their costs by selling art and keeping the proceeds, here the artist, not the gallary takes the risk. Or if the gallary wishes to express confidence in the artist they are displaying, they can forego or reduce the upfront revenue's of the rental fee and instead opt for a higher commission on sales. Many gallaries though do both. When a gallary has already covered it's costs and made an operating profit on the rent, skimming the cream off your sales is just greedy.
Amatuer artists can capitulate in two ways - the first is by pushing up the rents by applying for gallaries with unsellable art. The recent trend of installation art for example is generally speaking unsellable. People may have some wallspace to purchase art, few have a spare room to install a giant inflated donkey dick. The number of art-school graduates doing installations is just intense at the moment, and while it's understandable that gallaries taking on installation art need to get compensated in the absence of commissions, many just leave their commission policies in place. So the high rents have to be absorbed by artists working in the more sellable mediums of painting, illustration and photography.
The second way is by cutting their own margins so as not to price themselves out of the market. If you are routinely taking a loss at gallary shows, stop showing in gallaries. Go figure out a way to cut your overheads and sell your art at a price your audience can afford.
Displaying in a gallary is a two way transaction, artists need to make sure they are getting something while paying something. In both cases while the gallaries need to be compensated in order to survive as businesses themselves, they can only justify rents and/or commissions if their are people at your shows and buying your art that you didn't bring there.

The unfortunate thing is that there are far more artists in any field than their are clients willing to pay anything at all. Compounding this is that often you are dealing with clients that have a monopoly on the opportunity, gallary spaces, festival organisers, record labels etc. so you have intense competition for opportunities that don't pay at all.

But somebody is paying, either you, the artist, or your parents or something.

It seems like with technology lowering the barriers to new competition, piracy and globalisation intensifying the competition (such that not even the world leaders in art are getting paid for all their work that is used) that things can only get worse.

There was a time though when blue collar jobs faced the same kinds of problems and exploitation. They managed to organise and stop the exploitation and their own willingness to be exploited.

That's why I in my capacity as an artist am thinking of joining a union.

Ready To Die

I think I finally know the feeling Biggie was feeling when he boldly and foolishly proclaimed that he was ready to die.

I don't want to die, but just briefly, briefly while walking my dog today, I felt as though somebody could stick a shiv in me and I wouldn't even flinch.

It's a good feeling.

here's to living as long as I possibly can.

Invitations

It's friday, I started writing invitation last Sunday afternoon. It's been a full time job. I suddenly feel very tired and run down, but it's totally worth it. This is the third time I've gone through the process and I always forget how time consuming it is. After my exhibition I will write thankyou notes again.

It would be so much easier not to do this, but the fact is, as tired as I feel now, it will be envigorating later.

I live paranoid that I might die and people will make shit up about how great I was at my funeral.

I would like that shit to be as close to the truth as possible.

play the long game.

Missed Opportunities

Abound. Missed opportunities abound. It's funny how shit folds back on itself, the learning cycle - unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence - and so forth.

A couple of years ago I determined that all the artists' I respects advice boils down to 'Do the work'. After a long toil, and perhaps a lap of that learning cycle, I have come to the same conclusion. Here's why:

In certain situations you can say that two errors can be observed, type 1 - saying 'No' when you should say 'Yes' and type 2 - saying 'Yes' when you should say 'No'.

Broadly this could apply to any opportunity, but let's look at creative arts - a type 1 error you can see anywhere virtually any day of the week, unrecognised talent - that really cool piece of art on the back wall of the bar you are drinking in, or the really cool band playing in the bar you are drinking in. The big-time in both cases hasn't found these artists, and said 'Yes' to them.

Type 1 errors aren't controversial, everybody recognises the struggle in the arts, that few make it, and you should concentrate your efforts on getting a respectable job and paying off a mortgage.

Type 2 errors though contribute to the creative environment and it really fucks shit up, few people think about or understand them, even though you would have conversed about a type 2 error many a time. In a regular office this commonly happens when a manager makes a bad hire, they pick the wrong person for the job, I could write pages of speculative theory as to all that is wrong with recruitment, business and education.

I'll instead get back to the creative field, people who are successful that are not very 'good'. One reason it doesn't get discussed, debated or talked about much is because any core meaning to the error will be thrown out with the subjective bathwater. Start with movies though and you have less subjective examples - movies that tank, bomb, that do not live up to the hype. There's movies like Oprah's 'Beloved' that tanked at the box office, and then there's movies like ID4 that are successful at the box office despite being massive pieces of shit, and the type 2 error only comes out with the passage of time.

Stuff gets picked, by gallareys, by record companies, by producers all the time for various reasons that simply fails to succeed, or succeeds arbitrarily - for a while.

Type 2 errors highlight that much of 'success' is arbitrary. The difficult type 2 errors are the stuff that is successful despite on a subjective level being seemingly 'shit' that demonstrates that some decision makers, some outlets have a degree of immunity, they are influential to the point that they can make anything succeed.

Now to try and bring it all back to 'doing the work', if you are aspiring to be an artist, in any form or medium, you are looking at a field not only with people who should succeed but for whatever reason haven't, but people who have succeeded but in some point in your gut, 'shouldn't'. And it's fucking confusing.

The truth is, there's not much to learn, I mean there's a lot to learn, but like trying to ascertain any 'meaning' of life, there is no formula for success that you can figure out.

The industry in whatever form applies to you, will miss a lot of opportunities, as will you. The thing to do is just work. What is your motivation? To 'succeed' if you succeed as a type 2, you will never feel successful. Your motivation should be because you love it, it's an addiction, you are compelled to do nothing else, the work itself is it's own reward. To be great as you can be.

It will be subject to an emotional rollercoaster as to whether you get that recognition, validation and material support that bundles together into what may loosely serve as 'success' but the fact is your job, your mission is to grow and get better, to bridge the gap between the art you create in your head and the art you can create with your hands.

Create enough opportunities for somebody to say 'Yes' to you, and it will happen and it won't be an error at all.

Art Exclusion 2

I'm enamoured with the Renaissance, a bizarre period in history that from a small part of a small country - turned out a set of artists that did amazing things. More curiously though is that some of these artists, these creatives were also the leading engineers, architects of their day.

These days take two thirty year olds, one dressed in a shabby paintflecked attire of an adolescent his/her skin rendered with inks that in turn render him/her unemployable and another in drab and unimaginative office attire, and they will probably both find eachothers lifestyles foreign and curious.

Yet half a millenia ago, a pope would turn to a painter/sculpter and say 'Michelangelo, would you mind redisigning St Peter's Basillica?' and another sculptur may turn to an architect and say 'well you sculpt a crucifix then!' and they did. They did it.

Perhaps the idea of a mechanical engineer drawing and painting in their spare time is not such a stretch these days, but for that person to paint some of the greatest paintings of all time... unthinkable.

The renaissance I look at with envy because these cast-system of trades was dissembled, gone, one was a thinker, and expressed themselves in any way and any medium they could. Neither was their expression considered more pure in the absence of science, thought, technique.

I don't begrudge my parents not sending me at a young age to apprentice in an artists workshop, nor do we live in an age where one of the Grollo brothers is going to walk into an art studio and say 'design a building'. The job market has become far more streamlined, specialised and the sheer number of people that use to toil on the land that now want to go for that creative dreamjob mean nobody is going to corner the market on ideas like the renaissance masters did.

But the real point I would labour is that a lot of disciplines used to inform eachother back in the day, and science and art held hands as prominently as religion and art did. There is much about art that does not get cradled by the arms of subjectivity - anatomy, perspective, proportion, lighting, rendering, working with colours. Much of art is highly scientific. That is to say, falls under the purvue of objectivity - we can conclude based on evidence whether an image, or sculpture is in proportion or not. It can be measured, tested.

Then as art becomes abstracted, soft sciences like psychology still take hold. It may be a mystery to us as to why we enjoy music, but there is definitely a body of evidence to say most of us will inuitively prefer listening to beethoven over John Cage. John Cage himself said he enjoyed listening to sounds - any sound - equally. But you would be surprised as to how much science there is - which is to say - knowledge there is and how far it applies into the most modern and abstract of art.

I sympathise, I totally sympathise and think that it even makes good sense, if you lack the knowledge of how to create great art, it is no excuse not to make art, or even great art. Many art movements require little more than our ability to concieve and conceptualise and require nothing of us in terms of execution. 'Found Art', 'Installation Art', 'Minimalism' etc. do not require years of practice and mastery to execute. There are even mediums of art that have sprung up in the undergrowth like 'Video Art' that require different standards of execution to the large canopy that is 'Film' above it.

Drucker said the Executive's role is to bring his employees strenghts to the forefront and make their weakness irrelevant. It is totally strategically valid to adopt a style that makes irrelevant many of the demands other styles may make. It's good self management on the artists part.

But, the danger is adopting a philosophy that says that technique is irrelevant. Concept is where it is at. We have accumulated much knowledge, and in many ways the work of Renaissance Artists is some of the most vacuous. Paintings of religious themes and subjects, many say nothing of the human condition, nor challenge us philosophically, they are in their superb execution merely propaganda for an ideology or belief system, a seductive image like advertising. But it's been a long time since the Renaissance, there are few concepts worth exploring that weren't explored by artists that could ALSO paint, sculpt, draw, design, really really well. Performance art expires with the artist, and can be renewed, redone, reinvented.

Execution is where it is at. Art lecturers, art schools are in many cases not psychological retreats, nor even spiritual ones. Concept also is the most subjective, and thus the hardest for any individual to lay claim to expertise on the matter, craft though falls under the purview of objectivity, if the paper sizing is wrong the watercolours will make it buckle. This can be taught, transmitted effectively.

To have such a luxury of time to just pursue and perfect the craft, that is what I envy as a self taught artist, the idea that any of that time (or accumulated debt) is invested in talkfests borders to me, on the criminal. (petty white collar crime mind you, like defrauding investers).

Much as I agree that their are ways for an artist to work around a lack of finely honed technique, he also said that an organisation cannot demand an ideology from its workers, that any expectation more than performance is usurpation.

Art Exclusivity 1

Work becomes an irritation, you just want to draw or paint or write all day, one fanatical push towards excellence. But you have bills to pay, materials to buy, eventually you need to eat something... it is a long standing dream, to be an exclusion from the material reality that affects every other profession.

The artist also has suppliers, competition, customers, we make shit out of shit that needs to be sourced, manufactured etc. we need to labour away, burn calories, eat, sleep, rooves over the heads...

With older artists, I suspect the delusion cannot outlast the reality. With younger artists often the material reality is externalised, that is to say, somebody has to pay the bills and these bills can be paid by parents. But it remains a delusion, or at the very least cognitive dissonance. Maybe I'm too harsh, there's probably a bunch of artists that work graveyard shifts and pay he gallery rent space or whatever and instead of externalising the material costs of their practice they exclude their supporters from providing any material support.

Alll for an ideology that says art should be uncontained, an ideology that can't be realised until the perpetual motion machine is built and we have limitless energies. Until then anything that is produced in the physical realm is constrained by physics.

Which brings science into it and I have more to write about the recent seperation of art vs science.

The Agony & The Ecstasy

I never paid much attention to Michelangelo, I always identified more with Da Vinci, knowing that he was a lefty like me. But anyway I was talking over my recent problems with art to my psychologist and she pointed out the 'agony & the ecstasy' that Michelangelo mentioned or something.

And I mean you can't expect your psychologist to be an art-history expert, but it is the name of a best-selling biography of Michelangelo so I don't know if it is a quotation from apparantly the best documented personality of the Renaissance. Attempts to google search yeild me nothing instantly gratifying.

But on this two things:

1. It is unlikely that I will ever reach the dizzying heights of Michelangelo's artistic ability, he had after all carved his statue of David by my age, but even so, to read that an idol like Michelangelo suffered from self-doubt, isolation and misery through the process is relieving to anybody beneath them in ability/achievement.

2. Pursuing a career like art, it must be understood is addictive, and similarly has all the drawbacks of addiction. The higher the highs, the lower the lows. It is escalatory in nature too, what got you buzzed yesterday won't do it for you today, and tomorrow seems impossible in what it will take to get you back there.

I mean obviously there is shit I haven't achieved and don't have the depth of experience to imaginate, like if there's an achievement threshold that does create that stable and secure base of achievement where you have already passed the test and now are just going for the high score.

But I suspect not, my friend Bryce said 'you never feel successful' and he is far further along this creative road than me. Thus far my experience holds true to his hypothesis, every moment your fears are beaten out by your optimism is a triumph, and yet it's not enough, even a personal triumph can not dodge a critical eye, to pull back, pull apart, go again and go better.

I have hit that phase where I really have to dig deep and find the resolve to follow this path till it realises my dreams or smashes me against some kind of metaphoric or literal rocks.