Ah, Good The Sea

From Eyeshot Magazine

kind of gets my goat.

So much of the way people are trained to look at art is as facts and soundbytes and names in a list that can be related to other names. So many people I speak to, when seeing a group show, talk only about the names of the artists included and have like nothing substantive to say about the work itself. It's easy, a cop out, a name-dropping, brand-identifying, late-capitalist way of consuming something and claiming that consumption as experience.

You read your way through the museum, looking at labels for meaning rather than the objects they interperet, and cache all these little inanities away and call it education. All this so that the next time you look at a piece by idk Georgia O'Keeffe and you think to yourself "she lived in New Mexico and was bisexual, if not a lesbian" you can feel pleased with yourself for Knowing something, meanwhile you've completely ignored the work as a holistic thing in its own right.

You don't need to "get it"! You don't have to read the tombstone info and intellectualize the experience and place what you're seeing inside a canon of "known" vs "unknown" or distance yourself from it with soundbites and little facts. You don't even need to read the artists statement, really (in fact I argue you shouldn't until you've seen the work irl).

Be quiet and let yourself have a pure aesthetic experience with something. Let yourself be uncomfortable with the process of deep looking. That's the point. That's "getting it".

The way that art history as a discipline is taught these days is entirely backwards. 101 level survey courses are taught with rote memory at the forefront. Exams are slides of images and you're expected to write the tombstone: artist, date, medium, dimensions (if your professor is a hardass), location made, and maybe a few lines about historical relevance within the commonly accepted canon. This is regular history. Art history is not regular history.

To engage meaningfully with art history you have to start with the object and work your way up to the history rather than starting with the history and working your way toward the object. I.e "this is done this way and thereby can tell us these things about this period in history" rather than "this period in history was like this and that's why this thing was done like this". Descriptive vs. Prescriptive.

Just very clearly an attempt at saying, “my what?”

There are a ton of quick and cheap electrolyte drink recipes that you can find online. Tea, coffee, cocount water, milk, milk substitutes, juice, etc are all hydrating despite extremely persistent myths. Many fruits and veggies like cucumbers, watermelon, strawberries, bell peppers, etc have high water content and are a great way to hydrate while also getting vital nutrients. Popsicles are also a good way to stay cool and hydrated and you can buy them or make your own with whatever ingredients you want; there are recipes online, including ones for electrolyte popsicles, but you can also just do basic ones with your choice of fruit juice and whatever you want to add, like chunks of fresh or frozen fruit.

1. Eat fruit

2. Eat something with salt.

I had a day during the worst of the heatwave when I was a feeling really ill and I realised I hadn't had anything with sodium for a good while. I ate some crisps (chips) and immediately felt better. Was that the healthiest option? Maybe not. Was it the most accessible at the time? Absolutely

Many neonazis and their ilk are okay with their icons being portrayed negatively as long as that negativity takes the form of a powerful and threatening figure. They like identifying themselves with Big Scary Destroyer. It's a power fantasy for them.

That's why, for instance, Trump's incoherence when speaking doesn't bother them. His incoherence is taken, by and large, very seriously. The man opens his mouth and drops a bunch of verbal turds - and the world panics, or at the least gets very, very nervous. Not unjustifiedly, it's true, but the power fantasy of being able to say whatever they want and get taken seriously is still vicariously fulfilled.

But the Reflecting Pool? The Reflecting Pool wasn't supposed to be broken. It's not something Trump destroyed for the sheer pleasure of destruction, which is how Trump's base experienced his gutting of the government via Musk. The Reflecting Pool is something that was supposed to be improved, which he boasted about improving, and instead it's clearly turned to muck. There's no power fantasy there. There's nothing to gloat over; it's just a damp gross failure. It isn't even a catastrophic failure! Tearing down the East Wing of the White House was dramatic, and had the value of making a big, indelible change to a national icon. No matter what happens, the East Wing as we knew it is gone. Power fantasy. By contrast, the Reflecting Pool? It's just fuckin dirty. It's gross. It's your neighbor's neglected cheap pool that's full of dead leaves and slime. An entirely pedestrian, grody, pathetic failure. It would literally be more salvageable as a PR thing for Trump if it got hit by a meteor and turned into a smoking crater.

When I taught second grade, one of the options for students who had finished their work was to write a letter to the president. I would send all of the letters in a big envelope at the end of every month.

Watching my students get more and more frustrated with him (and concerned about his wellbeing) was not the result I'd hoped for when I came up with the idea, but it was kind of hilarious.

See, Obama had a standard packet with information and activities about his dog he'd send in response to letters from very young citizens...and of course his office sent one back to our class every single time we sent mail.

So eventually all of the letters looked something like this: