grab bag o fun

-It would be remiss of me not to recall the name of my own blog. This is supposed to be a cartoon blog, and I haven’t posted a cartoon (or any other thing I’ve drawn) in months! The horror! Since returning from DC in April, much of my time has been spent transitioning into “art student” mode. I have just finished the first semester of the UGA art school’s foundations classes, i.e. drawing, composition and art history. At the outset I was worried that all the time I spent in cartoon mode had somehow robbed me of any latent ability to represent things as they actually, well, look. Judging from the meager, two-month sample size, this doesn’t appear to be the case. I will post a select few examples of what I’ve produced in these classes once I get the photos up (most are too big to scan).

-The semester has, in certain ways for me, been a months-long rationalization of what could be interpreted as a decision on my part to delay “real life.” I have come to the conclusion that the most useful thing a 22-year-old in my position could do in a recession would be to improve skills for a future potential economic upswing while at the same time becoming relatively self-sufficient. I’m using that as my narrative from now on.

- I’m currently working on a character that I haven’t spent much time on until now. You’ll see the results of that soon, too, hopefully.

- My image-hosting site has decided to change names, once again rendering all the embedded images in this blog dead. I will dig through my memory banks and correct everything in the next few days. Fixed.

- I have added to the “Luminaries” category the Web site of Joshua Bienko. Wish him well at Texas A&M.

shorter next four months of progressive blog commentary

Obama loves the surveillance state. And scolds the impoverished. But at least he quotes Jay-Z and lives in the city. Perhaps he even owns an iPod.

He is truly a window into ourselves.

the funny pages

Regular readers may have noticed a spate of fluffy, content-free posts this week. Don’t worry — we haven’t been bought out by Instapundit.

It would be silly to call the NYTM’s weekly artcomic “bad” or “unfunny.” That’s a question of personal taste. Far more useful would be this analogy: Comics are like hamburgers. You can make the world’s bestest, most expensive hamburger, but it doesn’t change the fact that there’s shit in the meat. And you can make the world’s most literate, sensitive, artsy comic strip. But it’s still a comic strip — a cheap, throw-away cultural artifact that strikes at a purely visceral level.

People who read the New York Times Magazine don’t care about comics. Sure, they may have read “Maus” once twenty or thirty years ago, but that’s because it was about a Very Serious Subject (and they were trying to get some coffeeshop play). So we ask the NYT:

Santy Claus, why? Why are you deluding yourself and boring your readers? Why?

death to elitism

Milton Glaser takes advantage of falling housing prices, snatches up a prime piece of left-wing real estate and uses it to ramble incoherently:

The experience of art can be considered a form of meditation. By suppressing the debris of everyday life and the illusion that desire creates, meditation enables us to observe without judging. In this way, what is real to us becomes visible. Recollecting Horace’s description of art’s purpose, he said, “To inform and delight,” not “to persuade and delight.” Informing us makes us stronger. Persuading us robs us of our ability to observe things for ourselves. Propaganda cannot be described without its link to persuasion.

Well, no shit. Here, the author conflates propaganda – one particular method of persuasion that doesn’t exactly connote warm, fuzzy thoughts – with persuasion as a whole. This is crucial for Glaser’s ability to maintain the artificial distinction between his selflessly informative, delightful Art (which has, incidentally, made him quite a haul of selflessly informative, delightful bling) and the soulless, corporate schlock produced by you and me. Glaser is an Artistic Visionary who, through the selfless pursuit of his Craft, is attempting to dislodge us from the Matrix by letting us see the World As It Really Is. Through his art, he is attempting to save us from people who want to… uh… change our minds…

Propaganda is not necessarily a lie, but it affects our neurological system and brain in the same way. It undermines our ability to understand our own reality. It makes us more infantile and dependent. It substitutes an alien authority for our own perception. [...]The mind’s ability to alter itself is the source of human freedom. Information expands the capacity of the mind to change. Persuasion limits that capacity. Beliefs must be held lightly, because certainty is frequently the enemy of truth. Or, put another way, we can follow the example of the scientist and psychologist William James, who was said to have loved questions more than answers.

Here in the last paragraph, Glaser applies his new definition of propaganda (“anything that attempts to persuade”), arriving at the wholly counterintuitive conclusion that persuasion limits “the capacity of the mind to change.” This is a pretty bizarre argument. Is Glaser really suggesting that an ostensibly informative painting like Guernica served no purpose other than to show viewers the True Nature of War for the simple sake of Art? What would have been the point of Picasso unveiling the True Nature of War if he didn’t have a motive? The obvious moral of the piece – that Picasso’s Spain should not be the site of widespread bloodshed and death – would be totally lost on someone who shares Glaser’s disbelief in persuasion as an artistic end. For someone like that, the only logical conclusion would be that Picasso was a propagandist.

It would be nice if certain significant cogs of this country’s culture machine would replace self-importance with self-awareness, and remember that persuasion is an underlying motive for pretty much everything. Yes, even Art.

my new favorite blog

On a subject that deserves more scholarly inquiry than it gets.

dave berg, postmodernist

My only problem is that the author doesn’t explore Berg’s use of the Foucauldian doctor-patient regime of control.

the demopticon

I recently completed a class project. I attempted to describe how the CNN/YouTube presidential debates essentially function by turning the current cultural compulsion to make ourselves visible to a mediated audience into a synonym for political transparency and authenticity. I then attempted to describe an ideal structure for televised presidential debates in this media environment, which ended up being a panoptic structure, of sorts.

But more importantly, it has cartoons. Think of it as a Frankenstrip, if you’d like.