pardonthelitany, but... MEMES

Langston Hughes: Beaumont to Detroit (1943)

Looky here, America What you done done – Let things drift Until the riots come

Now your policemen Let the mobs run free. I reckon you don’t care Nothing about me.

You tell me that hitler Is a mighty bad man. I guess he took lessons From the ku klux klan.

You tell me mussolini’s Got an evil heart. Well, it mus-a been in Beaumont That he had his start –

Cause everything that hitler And mussolini do Negroes get the same Treatment from you

You jim crowed me Before hitler rose to power – And you’re still jim crowing me Right now, this very hour.

Yet you say we’re fightin For democracy. Then why don’t democracy Include me?

I ask you this question Cause I want to know How long I got to fight BOTH HITLER – AND JIM CROW.

stop buying into the idea that nonviolent activism is useless, rather than (by far) the most effective form of protest

stop falsely claiming that BLM accomplished nothing and that most citizens “don’t care” when people are murdered by the state

start understanding that most of your neighbors care about your rights, and their own

your behavior has made me realize i should be "meaner": horoscopes are fake.

the position of planets and balls of gas did not in any way impact your personality or destiny. it has nothing to do with what kind of people you are compatible with, despite what an app or magazine told you.

i think sincere belief in horoscopes shows a concerning propensity to trust pseudoscience and a susceptibility to confirmation bias.

Close-up:

you are real as shit for this. anywho:

"Galanin's art is about how Native communities everywhere have consistently been pillaged both literally and culturally by a bunch of white assholes. These white assholes settle on the foundations of Native homes they burned down (also figuratively and literally) and maintain this status quo through such tactics as making discrimination and bias against Native peoples an intrinsic framework of their society, and also by responding to any criticism by going, 'What? We didn't do that. Shut up.'

This art piece depicts the blueprints for the British Museum on deerskin as well as illustrations of stolen Native objects the thief (the British Museum) continues to refuse to return to their rightful owners. A red line shows an escape route by which these pilfered pieces might one day manage to slip through the greedy, thieving grasp they currently reside.

Ghostly Aerial Photos Frame Isolated and Abandoned Houses Scattered Across North America

In his ongoing series titled Thin Places, Portland-based photographer Brendon Burton documents battered houses that stand alone in barren fields, amidst an encroaching marsh, or at the edge of the mountain.

The decrepit structures have been Burton’s preferred subject matter since 2011 when he began seeking abandoned buildings across the continent that exude a sense of impermanence and the uncanny. “This series is for the sake of satisfying my curiosity about the past and exploring isolated parts of North America. It mixes archeology with fantasy,” he says.

There’s just

so many of these

and I think it’s incredibly funny but

I just read this bit from the artist and

This is a "plein air" painting which means I set up my easel right across the street of this Chase bank in my city and painted it like it had caught fire. The police questioned me on the spot. Three weeks later Homeland Security was knocking on the door to my home. The question they kept asking me was "Do you hate these banks?" I can honestly say yes.

There’s just

so many of these

and I think it’s incredibly funny but

I just read this bit from the artist and

This is a "plein air" painting which means I set up my easel right across the street of this Chase bank in my city and painted it like it had caught fire. The police questioned me on the spot. Three weeks later Homeland Security was knocking on the door to my home. The question they kept asking me was "Do you hate these banks?" I can honestly say yes.

You have to look at it in the context of the 90s, right? In the 70s, UK and US culture fermented to the point where it was starting to get a bit ripe, and people voted in fusionist conservatives to cut it open, scoop out all the substance, and fill it with consumerism and family values. By the 90s, the consumerism was still intense, but the family values were on the way out, without other values to replace them.

The iconic art form of the 90s was the advertisement. Banksy was the kind of guy who could go into advertising, who was good at basically that sort of concise, pithy "message" image, but was resentful of the whole complex. As a result, he applied those skills to, like, guerrilla marketing left-wing social conscience in the same idiom. The 90s was the era of irony and ambivalence, and its youth social conscience habitually had this weird affinity with commodity trash, reflecting a sense that everything had already been captured and it was uncertain what it really meant to still care about things (other than brands) at the End of History.

Anyway. There's an actual craft to the kind of stuff he was doing, but it's still low art. It pricks the skin and catches the eye but it's never, ever deep, because it can only evoke simple ideas that people already hold. This worked well for his original schtick, when he was an unknown street artist mostly working in a single town, but trying to parlay that into a reputation and career while doing the same schtick just turns you into an editorial cartoonst. The appeal was surprise and authenticity, and how can you possibly maintain that when you have a reputation and a brand identity and a swarm of wealthy collectors and international newsmedia reporting on your every move? He had to either reject all that or else pivot to something that complemented it, and he couldn't choose between the values and the money, and so...uhm. Actually it worked out great? He's one of the world's most famous and sought-after artists, and he presumably feels OK about his values, so. You know! But yes, it makes him kind of a parody of what he originally was, now.

But also, yeah, I agree with @discoursedrome - his stencils are good. They're usually witty, they're a smart use of the medium, the images themselves are intelligible and evocative. If you isolated each stencil and they were never printed on t-shirts or arranged into fifty dollar coffee table books they would be perfectly solid pieces of protest art (I have always particularly liked the use of rats stenciled around security cameras and I continue to think that those look good and present an actual subversive message; unironically more people should highlight the presence of security cameras to point them out and to remind passers by that this shit is spying on you. Of course Banksy hasn't marked a camera in forever at this point, but at this point if he did people would roll their eyes about it and call him a sellout and the marked cameras would become a place where people congregated to take photos of the Banksy(tm)(c)(r) Art)

He got popular because people looked at what he was doing and nodded genially and went "yeah, man, I feel you" and enough of them did it that what he was doing basically stopped being criminal? But only if he's the one doing it?

IDK I think that Banksy is:

Good in a technical sense; he makes good use of his medium and separated from the Banksy of it all are well constructed and usually funny or thought provoking or at least witty enough to make someone pause and go "huh"

Difficult to take seriously as a political or street artist at this point because his mainstreaming has severed him from the subversive/interesting elements of his art (this is why the shredder thing was so good and funny)

Genuinely doing good work as a political artist in the sense that he knows rich people will buy his art for ridiculous prices so he uses sales of his art to fund refugee rescue boats (which means that the art that a bunch of people want to call shitty and sell-out is doing tangible, material good in the world)

Anyway. I feel like people mostly just roll their eyes at stuff like Dismaland and the walled off hotel and new murals because they feel kind of cringe but i feel like most Art with a capital A is kind of cringe at some level? But yeah, Dismaland feels. Bad. Pandering? Obvious? It feels obvious, the way that a lot of Banksy stuff feels obvious but I don't know how obvious it would feel if Banksy hadn't been doing it for thirty years?

I understand the "burn it all down or do a coke commercial" attitude, and I am certain that I've said something like "the best thing he could do is make sure that every painting he sells from now until the end of time is destroyed at the point of sale" but also, fuck, I can't fund a refugee boat.

That fucking rules, actually. I have made up my mind I don't care if his stuff is cringe he can make all the dismalands the world will take if it lets him keep paying for shit like this.

Anyway, here are two fun bullet points from his wikipedia page:

if people knew that he was a 50 something average white dude from brighton, a lot of his art would fall apart or stop being interesting.

Commissioned by the US government in 1979 the work was made up of a 12x120 foot sheet of cor-ten steel which bisected Foley federal plaza in Manhattan. That's it. Just a sheet of metal in a plaza between several government buildings. It doesnt do anything. But it made people So Angry and also made the best argument I've ever seen for the worth of public art.

I'm thinking of jockeys. Jockeys get an advantage from being smaller and lighter, and while obviously you need sufficient strength to stay on the horse, a well-trained horse does enough of the work that you don't need upper body strength to do the job. Given this and that the majority of children obsessed with horses are female, you'd think most jockeys would be women. Yet somehow they are not.

NASCAR at one point threatened to handicap Danica Patrick by putting extra weight in her car to compensate for the fact that she is smaller and lighter than other racecar drivers. If she gets an advantage as a driver, why is she like practically the only female racecar driver, or at least the only one anyone knows about?

Women, apparently, have an advantage in long distance swimming. Higher body fat percentage and higher endurance means that women can go greater distances in the water. Is long distance swimming even a competitive sport?

Women have actually been excluded from competitive Olympic skiing on the grounds that the jumps required could damage their uterus. The people who actually have unsupported reproductive organs hanging outside their body are considered to have better support than the people whose reproductive organs are nestled in alongside unisex organs like the small intestine and stomach. How does this make any goddamn sense at all? If a uterus could dislodge from the force of a skiing jump, so could intestines and the sport wouldn't be safe for anyone.

Theoretically, any sport where you get an advantage from low center of gravity, better balance, higher flexibility, or being closer to the ground, women should have an advantage. This should include soccer (football in non-US places), and might include hockey if the hockey players hadn't introduced unnecessary viciousness to the sport.