Give me a reason to believe.

Detroit teachers stage “sickout” over horrible conditions, force schools to close

“Furthermore, the report shows that a significant number of these cases involved young, often vulnerable people. About half of the cases involved people aged 21 years old and under, and some involved people with mental health difficulties. In some cases, the person alleged to have made the false report had undoubtedly been the victim of some kind of offence (sic), even if not the one which he or she had reported.”

And then, when you get into the case studies you find things like a 14 year old girl sleeping with an 18 year old. When discovered, she claimed the sex was non-consensual in fear of her father’s disapproval, but investigation of texts and emails found that to be untrue. THAT SAID, the 18 year old was found to have a history of pursuing and seducing many very young girls, and once he was counseled he expressed not only regret over his actions, but the knowledge that he was purposefully picking vulnerable girls who could be easily manipulated into consent.

Another case was a married couple, where the wife claimed rape and domestic violence, so the husband was arrested and held. After some contact between the two while he was incarcerated, she went back to him and wanted the charges dropped. It’s okay because she still loves him. When the DA decided to keep going, she suddenly said that she made it up and he never raped her at all. Further counseling revealed that the allegations were true, but she didn’t want to be without him so she lied about the allegations being false. I don’t know about you, but this kind of sounds like classic domestic violence, and the kind of patterns you get into after living with an abuser.

Embroidery by Sheena Liam on Instagram

This piece actually went to court over the issue of whether or not it was hate speech in South Africa. The cheif magistrate,  Thulare, found that the words “white” and “people” were not directed at all whites‚ but rather to a system of oppression inherent in “white domination"‚ therefore the display could not be seen as discrimination against all white people‚ he said.

And I really love some of the statements Hutton has made about the piece.

The primary intention of the work is to make whiteness visible. And many white people have responded mostly in the typical way, which is with violence.

White people in general tend not to feel racialised, or feel answerable for our actions in terms of a racialised identity. We exist in spaces where we very rarely “feel white”. We exist at a level of default because every space is open to us, to use and exploit at will. We tap out too easily, as “not all white people” when confronted for both interpersonal racism and our programming into white supremacy.

We are individuals first, with little to no collective responsibility for actively dismantling the systems that keep us white. Being white is a construct which we have too heavily invested in emotionally and spiritually, and which asks us to turn a blind eye to oppressive behaviour that continues to destroy our humxnity. It is too easy to blame racism on the “bad whites” and give ourselves a cookie for good behaviour but every single one of us profits from white privilege and, until we actively deal with systemic racism, with both everyday and extraordinary action, identifying as white to the exclusion of our humxnity will continue to be problematic. The discomfort of feeling racialised in spaces, to honestly ask ourselves if we belong, or how we achieve belonging, is a very necessary part of unlearning oppressive behaviour.

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Like this piece:

Sits in the National Gallery of Art in DC. It’s from 1988 and is a representation  of the actual signs carried by 1,300 striking African American sanitation workers in Memphis, made famous in Ernest Withers’ 1968 photographs.

This piece:

by Mel Bochner is from 1970.

Lawrence Weiner does a lot with text as well. Here’s an example: 

This piece is from 1970 and sits in the Guggenheim. 

And there’s this piece by Bruce Nauman in 1984

It can kindly go fuck itself. Had it never been invented, nothing would have been lost.

“ This piece is from 1970 and sits in the Guggenheim. “ And the question has to be asked: why? People have accidentally cleaned up modernist ‘art’ because they could not tell the difference between it and garbage.

Medieval art, on the other hand, was CLEARLY art. You might not like a piece, but you knew there was something to it beyond the idiocy of the Emperor’s New Clothes - something that only existed so long as fools said it did. “ Art isn’t (exclusively) about making beautiful things or even skill. “ If ‘art’ is devoid of skill, then the ‘artist’ deserves nothing for their work.

This isn’t beautiful. But anyone from any part of the globe could recognise it as art. Writing text and sticking it on a wall?

Only a post-modernist thinks that it’s art or not depending on the level of wankery involved.

This could be generated by an Excel spreadsheet. It’s mindless and empty. It’s only called art because the wankers involved are talentless, and the people paying for it all just as pointless. You know what should be on gallery walls?

This is true Modern Art. This requires skill, takes work, and imagination, and inspires emotion in the viewer.

Even a joke is more important than an exit sign.

This is art.

This is computer generated noise.

Like, the question of what is art could fill multiple doctoral papers. A lot of contemporary art movements have been concerned with that exact question. What subjects, what styles, what materials can be artistic? And a lot of them are highly contextualized within their place in history within the art world, building off of and in response to whatever came before. 

A lot of contemporary art explores the relationship between color and emotion, symbols and meanings, expectations and reality. 

I would argue that the best way to define art is that it is a human product designed to convey a deeper emotion or understanding in the viewer. 

That Nauman piece that you say isn’t art because you could make it in excel, for example, speaks to me very deeply. The use of neon makes me think of modernity, of new technologies, even escapist technologies. The repetition of the “and die” (and “and live”) phrase is pretty ominous, or maybe dull in its repetitiveness, but the glaring colors of the neon don’t make the overall piece LOOK ominous or repetitive. There’s conflict here between substance and appearance. To me, the piece is meant to explore how shallow modernity can be, how modern society can be gaudy and empty and bleak in many ways. 

It says a lot more to me than the medieval piece you shared, even if it is technically less complicated to create. 

And that’s why I like contemporary art. I think it has the potential to be very thoughtful, but personal, challenging. 

But if the emotion you feel in response to a piece designed to call out your whiteness in a public way as a specific counterpoint to the neutrality that it normally holds in a given space is to be angry at it and hate it and want to revoke it’s status as art?

So like, a white person seeing this art and being uncomfortable and hostile?