![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Ben Davis, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class: Really interesting essays on the relationship between the visual art world, artists, labor, and class. Argues that authority over one’s conditions of work is the key dividing line between working and middle class, making most visual artists middle-class. Artists lack collective institutions that can exercise economic power—going “on strike” wouldn’t deny art to anyone in particular. But the emphasis on creative/intellectual labor and control means that visual artists are constantly faced with the contradiction between ruling-class values and middle-class situations. This emphasis on individual creativity keeps artists thinking about political efficacy in individualistic terms, which is self-defeating. These contradictions also explain why, as the definition of “art” has expanded, it’s harder and harder to get anywhere in the art world without a fancy degree; “you’d have to be a fool to think that any old person could declare any old thing ‘art’ and be taken seriously. The lack of clear formal guidelines demarcating what is or is not art makes institutional approbation and a command of aesthetic discourse all the more important, and these things don’t come naturally or cheaply.” As for political change, I liked the point that “[w]hether a characteristically ironic sense of self gets articulated in a political direction or turns into a kind of consumerist nihilism depends on what kind of social movements there are for it to intersect.”
Visual artists “ceded the field of depicting reality as photographic entrepreneurs and film moguls outflanked the masters of pigments and modeling clay; eventually, they were trumped in sheer imaginative might as the ‘culture industries’ refined their special effects and absorbed increasingly impressive quantities of creative talent,” leaving “a predominantly middle-class tradition in a largely defensive struggle as capitalism progressively undercuts its status.” This uniquely middle-class status, he argues, can explain visual art’s focus on the individual producer and small production. One implication: “art’s need to justify itself as intellectually superior to mass culture … would clearly be as much about raw commerical interst as it is contingent intellectual posturing. It is … a way of justifying its superior cachet to a class of potential consumers.” But unlike the situation in Pierre Bordieu’s day, pop culture is now often more technically sophisticated than modern fine art. The result: aesthetic distance, not mastery, is the aesthetic virtue to which artists appeal. Visual art is more like fashion, “where designers make esoteric prototypes that are then reprocessed for mass consumption, where they find their true home.” Another consequence: production becomes more like architecture or film, with the artist directing others to achieve the artist’s vision. But different works are differently suited to this treatment—they have to be both “suitably iconic and suitably abstract,” so they tend to “deemphasize personal vision and nuance and center more around the familiar values of mass entertainment and consumption,” as Damien Hirst does. But whether art is “traditional” or “conceptual,” its supposed problems compared to the other type are “just the displaced face of the market itself, with its tendency to transmogrify and vulgarize everything.” The lesson: “there are no formal or aesthetic solutions to the political and economic dilemmas that art faces—only political and economic solutions.” Ultimately, he hopes for a socialism that will allow future theorists to look at art under capitalism the way we now look at older religious art: “We can appreciate how for thousands of years the drama of religion was a primary vehicle for expressing compassion, suffering, and the aspiration for a redeemed world, and still feel that this art is confined to a framework that is narrower than the one from which we now operate.”
Adam Zmith, Deep Sniff: A short book about the cultural meaning of poppers and their relationship to pleasure and gayness. They’re apparently still widely available in the UK and the USA, “thanks to a pact between authorities and sellers. Everyone agrees to say that these products are not for human consumption, which means they are labelled with fake uses like ‘room odouriser’ and ‘boot cleaner.’” Interestingly, unlike with opiates, pharmacos apparently were actually worried that people—that is to say, young gay men—were using the product for pleasure and reported that to the FDA. I guess pleasure that makes you want to have sex (Zmith repeatedly emphasizes how poppers can be used to relax physically for anal sex) is more morally concerning than pleasure that just makes you happy. Zmith also argues that popper marketing participated in the promotion of a muscular, aggressive gay masculinity, e.g., an ad for Locker Room poppers “showed a butch superhero with a six-pack, cape and battering-ram thighs leaning against a locker door beside the words ‘Purity power potency.’” Thus poppers “were both countercultural, simply by being gay, and also deeply conventional in how they were marketed.” Zmith also discusses how moral panics over poppers were intertwined with moral panic over AIDS—indeed, one contrarian insisted for many years that it was poppers, and not HIV, that caused AIDS. I loved the bit about disputes at a gay hotline over what to say about poppers—one volunteer wrote, “People who sniff poppers need an extra physical kick from sex as they get no emotional satisfaction,” while another responded, “You sanctimonious tie-wearer.” The bit on popper vids—clips from multiple porn videos edited together with a soundtrack and instructions about when exactly to sniff—was also very “through a glass darkly” from my own fannishness.
Michael Heller & James Salzman, Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives: A really good popular book about property law; I’d recommend it for law students and for people who are just interested in learning more about property. It sets out various frameworks for establishing property rights (such as attachment to an existing right, first-in-time, and possession) and shows how they’re always contested and partial. The opening example, about the Knee Defender (a device that an airplane passenger can deploy to prevent the seat in front of them from reclining) depends on competing accounts of “whose” space that is, and on the airlines’ own strategic silence on this—they could make explicit rules, but they’d rather have passengers mad at each other. Other topics in this far-ranging book include water rights, kidney sales, Black land loss, South Dakota’s special role in protecting the assets of wealthy people against legitimate creditors, the “sharing” economy that might just be the oligopoly economy, and more.
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: Framed in human-bear relation terms, this entertaining book offers the story of a libertarian attempt to take over a small New Hampshire town. The anti-government longtime residents were further away from the libertarians ideologically than they thought, but their anti-government ideology left them largely powerless to protect themselves or their environment, which is now deteriorating even further (including bears). Libertarians gutted town budgets, destroying roads and relying on a volunteer fire department that didn’t succeed in fighting fires. Instead of personal responsibility, the town got camps of men living in the woods and not dealing with their sewage; crime reports went up and they tried to defund the schools—all for a couple of hundred dollars’ difference in tax rates.
Carl Zimmer, Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive:Interesting tour of scientific theories of life and what the boundary conditions are. Crystals “grow” but we’re pretty sure they’re not alive, but what are the actual requirements for life? For example, a dried-out human being can’t be revived with water, but a dried-out tardigrade can be—it exists in a state of cryptobiosis, between life and death. What about reproduction? Well, Amazon mollies are a species that can only reproduce by interacting with other fish—two Amazon mollies can’t reproduce!
Robert Darnton, Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment: Darnton looks mainly at the publishers surrounding France and how they carved out a living without copyright and often under threat of censorship (sometimes for the political works they published, sometimes for the sexy books). They also lived without much money—there were lots of debts and promises, but very little specie and no government-backed paper, which complicated matters a lot as they tried to make a living in trade. Their interactions and unauthorized dissemination of works, he suggests, were significant in spreading the Enlightenment: with some notable exceptions, nearly all the works of the French Enlightenment were published outside France and smuggled back in. (Hostility to legally enforced “privilege” thus permeated the books both in content and in practice.) He estimates that half the standard books in the crucial period leading up to the French Revolution were pirated in this way, making piracy crucial to the history of ideas. It was a hard life—lots of bankruptcies (which meant flight or debtor’s prison in those days), occasional arrests, lots of authors commissioning print runs and then failing to pay the bills. But by making books available to the literate middling classes—lawyers, doctors, state officials—they contributed to fundamental changes in French society. Since they competed with each other to sell whatever would sell, they had to try to stay ahead of demand and sometimes engaged in false advertising about their own plans to warn others off.
One of the most fascinating tidbits: As the system creaked under strain, censors began giving private approval to printing, until privately approved texts represented 30% of printed books. The approval remained secret and the books would usually indicate they’d been printed outside of France even if they’d been printed in Paris; if they became controversial, they could be withdrawn without a fuss. Also, booksellers who trafficked in unapproved texts were known as marrons, a term also applied to fugitive slaves in the colonies. And people saved a perhaps surprising number of letters discussing their shenanigans, even ones marked “tear this up right away.”
Daniel J. Patinkin, The Trigger: Narratives of the American Shooter: Accounts of the lives of six people who killed someone else with a gun, with varying levels of moral and legal accountability (there’s one cop who faces no legal scrutiny at all; the others go to jail). It’s a tour of American heartbreak.
Hakeem Oluseyi with Joshua Horwitz, A Quantum Life: Engaging if sometimes hard to read story about a Black boy from Mississippi whose greatest period of stability as a kid came from living on his father’s pot farm. His path to astrophysics was wandering and full of setbacks as well as aggressions from white people, especially at Stanford where he got his PhD even after the committee changed the standard so he’d fail his qualifying exam. Twice, he struggles with crack addiction and comes back, with support from a few professors and fellow students who believe in him. His ultimate professional accomplishments, which are many, are listed at the end; he doesn’t share much about his relationship with his kids or his wife, compared to his relationship with his family of birth, and though I don’t blame him for protecting that it highlights how this is a curated story—brutally honest about some things but with a narrative arc.
Visual artists “ceded the field of depicting reality as photographic entrepreneurs and film moguls outflanked the masters of pigments and modeling clay; eventually, they were trumped in sheer imaginative might as the ‘culture industries’ refined their special effects and absorbed increasingly impressive quantities of creative talent,” leaving “a predominantly middle-class tradition in a largely defensive struggle as capitalism progressively undercuts its status.” This uniquely middle-class status, he argues, can explain visual art’s focus on the individual producer and small production. One implication: “art’s need to justify itself as intellectually superior to mass culture … would clearly be as much about raw commerical interst as it is contingent intellectual posturing. It is … a way of justifying its superior cachet to a class of potential consumers.” But unlike the situation in Pierre Bordieu’s day, pop culture is now often more technically sophisticated than modern fine art. The result: aesthetic distance, not mastery, is the aesthetic virtue to which artists appeal. Visual art is more like fashion, “where designers make esoteric prototypes that are then reprocessed for mass consumption, where they find their true home.” Another consequence: production becomes more like architecture or film, with the artist directing others to achieve the artist’s vision. But different works are differently suited to this treatment—they have to be both “suitably iconic and suitably abstract,” so they tend to “deemphasize personal vision and nuance and center more around the familiar values of mass entertainment and consumption,” as Damien Hirst does. But whether art is “traditional” or “conceptual,” its supposed problems compared to the other type are “just the displaced face of the market itself, with its tendency to transmogrify and vulgarize everything.” The lesson: “there are no formal or aesthetic solutions to the political and economic dilemmas that art faces—only political and economic solutions.” Ultimately, he hopes for a socialism that will allow future theorists to look at art under capitalism the way we now look at older religious art: “We can appreciate how for thousands of years the drama of religion was a primary vehicle for expressing compassion, suffering, and the aspiration for a redeemed world, and still feel that this art is confined to a framework that is narrower than the one from which we now operate.”
Adam Zmith, Deep Sniff: A short book about the cultural meaning of poppers and their relationship to pleasure and gayness. They’re apparently still widely available in the UK and the USA, “thanks to a pact between authorities and sellers. Everyone agrees to say that these products are not for human consumption, which means they are labelled with fake uses like ‘room odouriser’ and ‘boot cleaner.’” Interestingly, unlike with opiates, pharmacos apparently were actually worried that people—that is to say, young gay men—were using the product for pleasure and reported that to the FDA. I guess pleasure that makes you want to have sex (Zmith repeatedly emphasizes how poppers can be used to relax physically for anal sex) is more morally concerning than pleasure that just makes you happy. Zmith also argues that popper marketing participated in the promotion of a muscular, aggressive gay masculinity, e.g., an ad for Locker Room poppers “showed a butch superhero with a six-pack, cape and battering-ram thighs leaning against a locker door beside the words ‘Purity power potency.’” Thus poppers “were both countercultural, simply by being gay, and also deeply conventional in how they were marketed.” Zmith also discusses how moral panics over poppers were intertwined with moral panic over AIDS—indeed, one contrarian insisted for many years that it was poppers, and not HIV, that caused AIDS. I loved the bit about disputes at a gay hotline over what to say about poppers—one volunteer wrote, “People who sniff poppers need an extra physical kick from sex as they get no emotional satisfaction,” while another responded, “You sanctimonious tie-wearer.” The bit on popper vids—clips from multiple porn videos edited together with a soundtrack and instructions about when exactly to sniff—was also very “through a glass darkly” from my own fannishness.
Michael Heller & James Salzman, Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives: A really good popular book about property law; I’d recommend it for law students and for people who are just interested in learning more about property. It sets out various frameworks for establishing property rights (such as attachment to an existing right, first-in-time, and possession) and shows how they’re always contested and partial. The opening example, about the Knee Defender (a device that an airplane passenger can deploy to prevent the seat in front of them from reclining) depends on competing accounts of “whose” space that is, and on the airlines’ own strategic silence on this—they could make explicit rules, but they’d rather have passengers mad at each other. Other topics in this far-ranging book include water rights, kidney sales, Black land loss, South Dakota’s special role in protecting the assets of wealthy people against legitimate creditors, the “sharing” economy that might just be the oligopoly economy, and more.
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: Framed in human-bear relation terms, this entertaining book offers the story of a libertarian attempt to take over a small New Hampshire town. The anti-government longtime residents were further away from the libertarians ideologically than they thought, but their anti-government ideology left them largely powerless to protect themselves or their environment, which is now deteriorating even further (including bears). Libertarians gutted town budgets, destroying roads and relying on a volunteer fire department that didn’t succeed in fighting fires. Instead of personal responsibility, the town got camps of men living in the woods and not dealing with their sewage; crime reports went up and they tried to defund the schools—all for a couple of hundred dollars’ difference in tax rates.
Carl Zimmer, Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive:Interesting tour of scientific theories of life and what the boundary conditions are. Crystals “grow” but we’re pretty sure they’re not alive, but what are the actual requirements for life? For example, a dried-out human being can’t be revived with water, but a dried-out tardigrade can be—it exists in a state of cryptobiosis, between life and death. What about reproduction? Well, Amazon mollies are a species that can only reproduce by interacting with other fish—two Amazon mollies can’t reproduce!
Robert Darnton, Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment: Darnton looks mainly at the publishers surrounding France and how they carved out a living without copyright and often under threat of censorship (sometimes for the political works they published, sometimes for the sexy books). They also lived without much money—there were lots of debts and promises, but very little specie and no government-backed paper, which complicated matters a lot as they tried to make a living in trade. Their interactions and unauthorized dissemination of works, he suggests, were significant in spreading the Enlightenment: with some notable exceptions, nearly all the works of the French Enlightenment were published outside France and smuggled back in. (Hostility to legally enforced “privilege” thus permeated the books both in content and in practice.) He estimates that half the standard books in the crucial period leading up to the French Revolution were pirated in this way, making piracy crucial to the history of ideas. It was a hard life—lots of bankruptcies (which meant flight or debtor’s prison in those days), occasional arrests, lots of authors commissioning print runs and then failing to pay the bills. But by making books available to the literate middling classes—lawyers, doctors, state officials—they contributed to fundamental changes in French society. Since they competed with each other to sell whatever would sell, they had to try to stay ahead of demand and sometimes engaged in false advertising about their own plans to warn others off.
One of the most fascinating tidbits: As the system creaked under strain, censors began giving private approval to printing, until privately approved texts represented 30% of printed books. The approval remained secret and the books would usually indicate they’d been printed outside of France even if they’d been printed in Paris; if they became controversial, they could be withdrawn without a fuss. Also, booksellers who trafficked in unapproved texts were known as marrons, a term also applied to fugitive slaves in the colonies. And people saved a perhaps surprising number of letters discussing their shenanigans, even ones marked “tear this up right away.”
Daniel J. Patinkin, The Trigger: Narratives of the American Shooter: Accounts of the lives of six people who killed someone else with a gun, with varying levels of moral and legal accountability (there’s one cop who faces no legal scrutiny at all; the others go to jail). It’s a tour of American heartbreak.
Hakeem Oluseyi with Joshua Horwitz, A Quantum Life: Engaging if sometimes hard to read story about a Black boy from Mississippi whose greatest period of stability as a kid came from living on his father’s pot farm. His path to astrophysics was wandering and full of setbacks as well as aggressions from white people, especially at Stanford where he got his PhD even after the committee changed the standard so he’d fail his qualifying exam. Twice, he struggles with crack addiction and comes back, with support from a few professors and fellow students who believe in him. His ultimate professional accomplishments, which are many, are listed at the end; he doesn’t share much about his relationship with his kids or his wife, compared to his relationship with his family of birth, and though I don’t blame him for protecting that it highlights how this is a curated story—brutally honest about some things but with a narrative arc.