Hi Greg. What a sadness hangs now over the Kennedy Center. If the Eiffel Tower was standing near the Texas southern border, Trump would scrap it to help build a wall. I pray that someday we are not discussing the Trump Center. How fitting is the Duchamp urinal when discussing Trump Fuckery. Great writing.
Great read Greg, thank you. Appreciate the education on the history and public reception of La Tour Eiffel... I had never learned about that before. And just back from a biz trip to Paris, the tower's lines are etched anew in my mind. I remember learning about the Fountain and the Dadaists in my first and only Art History course in college...it was shocking and mind-opening and redefined art for me. I loved how you tied this in to the current stifling of the arts under our artless dictator class. I wonder what Duchamp would create in reaction to the current shitshow...
Thanks, Erin. I wonder about Duchamp and AI. He probably would have liked it and used it. He wasn't overtly political, even during WW2, but Musk and trump are such obvious targets.
I was thinking about the art of revolucion in response to your essay and wrote and re-wrote those lines in between breaks of blow-drying my hair. While looking at your link for Duchamp's "The Illuminating Gas" (which for all the world (along with his close friend, Man Ray's "Minotaur") reminds me of the way the "Black Dahlia" Elizabeth Short's corpse was found), the heat from the blow dryer made me think of being transfixed on peeping through Duchamp's little hole in the door while all around me the museum is a blazing inferno. It seemed a fitting sentiment for a time such as this.
Greg, my husband and I were in Paris in May, 2001 for the first time. We may have been there at the same time. The first night we were at dinner near Notre Dame and I looked up and I saw the lights sparkling! It was probably the highlight of my trip.
But I had the most horrifying thought at the end of your essay. Trump is going to rename that "Trump Center" isn't he? It's why he put his favorite syncophants on the board. And why is Vance's wife a part of this? I truly can't take anymore.
Let him rename it. The family has allowed RFK Jr. to hijack the vaunted name, and all anyone under the age of 30 will remember about the family, aside from some Zapruder film mystery, is the whale beheading lunatic who killed off medical science on Putin's behalf. Disgraceful. For shame.
He does seem to have a hard-on for John Kennedy. Remember when Melania ripped up Jackie's rose garden and replaced it with that dry, brittle, sterile monstrosity reminiscent of her own marriage bed?
Dear Steve and Greg: after reading this excellent journalism, I am sure that the Democratic Party and former platform will never survive or win another election for POTUS. This will also not bode well for the “downtickets” in congress, it does not bode well for governors and mayors. We cannot even get chuck Schumer to step down. I have seen the new DNC chairman. Not Good.
Now is the time for our new party and winning platform!
Substack Journals, I give you:
“the American Party of Freedom!”
Let’s ask the Democrats we want to join. This could be the fresh energetic start.
Let’s ask only democrats and independents that meet our criteria for the new platform. We know what sunk us during the last election. We will not repeat those mistakes. We will not be advocating working across the aisle. We should be able sweep the trump ashes soon. I am sending this message to Paul Rieckhoff for help. Best regards, J Fender.
The Republican Party has already imploded and is now, functionally, the MAGA party of American National Socialism. The Dems are in the process of imploding. Two new parties need to emerge from the wreckage...assuming we get to have a two party system moving forward.
Personally, I automatically distrust anything that uses "liberty," "freedom," or "America" in it. We need a new word for the new party. What that word is, I have no idea. But I support the effort!
My first thought on seeing the Duchamp: Trump. He's broken Art. Our RISD prof taught, "Don't try to be different (or rich or popular), just be good; if you're good, you'll be different." How many times in his life has Trump tried to be good? But he installs himself as the boss of art? Our Brandeis set design prof, Karl Eigsti ("American Set Design" by A. Aronson), used to break egos to tears, to free students to design art instead of cliches. Woe to any soul that dares so much as bruise the Orange Master's blowfish ego. So a Trump Center "Yes" Board adds itself to Trump Sirloins and Trump Scruniversity. Mark Cuban's BlueSky today hit the nuclear nail on its head: Trump & Musk will allocate a $zillion in Federal contracts that decide whose AI will control our government. (Hence Bezos, Zuck, et all suckin' up.) Guernica ain't nothin' beside "the best" that's "yet to come."
Well put, Maureen. He's broken art or is trying to break it.
I don't understand how the NRx people running the new government, all disciples of the Unabomber Manifesto, missed the part about how technology is dehumanizing and bad...the central thrust of the entire document. But then, none of this makes any logical sense.
I consider myself an artist, though my paintings have been just a hobby; but in bygone years I have been considered quite talented by friends, family, coworkers and buyers of the paintings. But my talent is merely the ability to render in paint a representation of a picture, object or scene. Duchamp would not consider my work art, but rather, I suppose, a craft. I have never tried very hard to intellectualize a definition of art, but for me it’s a personal thing: it’s art to me if I think it is.
Earl, Duchamp liked the idea of craft. MAGA has severed and cauterized the receptors to the brain that make art. Their right brains are damaged beyond repair. Yours is not, and therefore you are an artist.
My heart goes out to Caroline Kennedy. She must be grieving more than most over the confirmation of RFK Jr and the ruination of the Kennedy Center. Such a sad time so I truly appreciate your reminder that our hope for “the wondrous side of life” can remain.
I feel bad for her, too, now that the family name has been permanently disgraced. But the Kennedys were too quiet for too long. They needed a much stronger unified front to expel the guy from the clan. One appearance a few days before the confirmation vote was not enough. And while it's not their job, per se, to speak out and take care of the family business, they can't only accept the benefits while not tending the garden. If that makes sense.
Art calls us, sometimes singing,sometimes screaming, to sculpt the city where we can live in peace and beauty.
https://youtu.be/zWd3FWwL2Lw?si=XpVhGX2rCrAJf_PU
As always, your essay is a work of art. We never know what to expect. Billserle.com
Okay this is my favorite. (Until next week, probably!) 🙏🏼
Hi Greg. What a sadness hangs now over the Kennedy Center. If the Eiffel Tower was standing near the Texas southern border, Trump would scrap it to help build a wall. I pray that someday we are not discussing the Trump Center. How fitting is the Duchamp urinal when discussing Trump Fuckery. Great writing.
The phrase that keeps popping in my head is "pearls before swine." Yes, he would absolutely sell it for scrap.
Wonderful.
Great read Greg, thank you. Appreciate the education on the history and public reception of La Tour Eiffel... I had never learned about that before. And just back from a biz trip to Paris, the tower's lines are etched anew in my mind. I remember learning about the Fountain and the Dadaists in my first and only Art History course in college...it was shocking and mind-opening and redefined art for me. I loved how you tied this in to the current stifling of the arts under our artless dictator class. I wonder what Duchamp would create in reaction to the current shitshow...
Thanks, Erin. I wonder about Duchamp and AI. He probably would have liked it and used it. He wasn't overtly political, even during WW2, but Musk and trump are such obvious targets.
ars gratia artis!
As it should be!
They taught us ink outlives the blade,
that words, like rivers, carve the world—
while in white rooms, men split atoms,
and birthed a second sun to burn the world clean.
Rifles, not sonnets, were pressed into the palms
of boys still unshaven, sent to jungles
where death wrote its own verses
in bursts of gunpowder and blood.
No red tide of an open wound was ever stanched
with the Mona Lisa’s smile.
No stanza ever stopped the swift precision
of an AK-47’s tongue, nor turned away
the AR-15’s kiss.
Hunger does not hum Mozart;
it wails, it gnaws, it begs—
and settles for the requiem of birdsong
as ribs sharpen beneath thinning skin.
Did a mother, Jewish, trembling,
whisper of the Eiffel Tower
while poison gas curled its fingers around her child’s throat?
Did the wail of a Negro spiritual
turn the overseer’s lash
into something softer than pain?
Or make it grow weary?
How many songs between lash and lash
could turn black skin to steel?
Or make a whip forget the backs
it was taught to break?
In gilded halls, framed beauty,
priceless, hung in reverence above overflowing plates—
or locked in museums where those who have been
weighed in the balance and found wanting
must pay to glimpse their inheritance.
Yet madmen, with thoughtless hands and a flick of ink,
un-names nations, unweaves freedoms, redraws maps in blood.
Call Michelangelo from the dust.
Tell him to chisel us a city,
one where we might live unbroken—
or, at the very least,
craft us bullets more beautifully wrought.
Excellent
Oh wow. What is that?
I was thinking about the art of revolucion in response to your essay and wrote and re-wrote those lines in between breaks of blow-drying my hair. While looking at your link for Duchamp's "The Illuminating Gas" (which for all the world (along with his close friend, Man Ray's "Minotaur") reminds me of the way the "Black Dahlia" Elizabeth Short's corpse was found), the heat from the blow dryer made me think of being transfixed on peeping through Duchamp's little hole in the door while all around me the museum is a blazing inferno. It seemed a fitting sentiment for a time such as this.
Greg, my husband and I were in Paris in May, 2001 for the first time. We may have been there at the same time. The first night we were at dinner near Notre Dame and I looked up and I saw the lights sparkling! It was probably the highlight of my trip.
But I had the most horrifying thought at the end of your essay. Trump is going to rename that "Trump Center" isn't he? It's why he put his favorite syncophants on the board. And why is Vance's wife a part of this? I truly can't take anymore.
Let him rename it. The family has allowed RFK Jr. to hijack the vaunted name, and all anyone under the age of 30 will remember about the family, aside from some Zapruder film mystery, is the whale beheading lunatic who killed off medical science on Putin's behalf. Disgraceful. For shame.
He does seem to have a hard-on for John Kennedy. Remember when Melania ripped up Jackie's rose garden and replaced it with that dry, brittle, sterile monstrosity reminiscent of her own marriage bed?
Dear Steve and Greg: after reading this excellent journalism, I am sure that the Democratic Party and former platform will never survive or win another election for POTUS. This will also not bode well for the “downtickets” in congress, it does not bode well for governors and mayors. We cannot even get chuck Schumer to step down. I have seen the new DNC chairman. Not Good.
Now is the time for our new party and winning platform!
Substack Journals, I give you:
“the American Party of Freedom!”
Let’s ask the Democrats we want to join. This could be the fresh energetic start.
Let’s ask only democrats and independents that meet our criteria for the new platform. We know what sunk us during the last election. We will not repeat those mistakes. We will not be advocating working across the aisle. We should be able sweep the trump ashes soon. I am sending this message to Paul Rieckhoff for help. Best regards, J Fender.
The Republican Party has already imploded and is now, functionally, the MAGA party of American National Socialism. The Dems are in the process of imploding. Two new parties need to emerge from the wreckage...assuming we get to have a two party system moving forward.
Personally, I automatically distrust anything that uses "liberty," "freedom," or "America" in it. We need a new word for the new party. What that word is, I have no idea. But I support the effort!
👏👏👏BRAVO👏👏👏
Thanks, Sally.
My first thought on seeing the Duchamp: Trump. He's broken Art. Our RISD prof taught, "Don't try to be different (or rich or popular), just be good; if you're good, you'll be different." How many times in his life has Trump tried to be good? But he installs himself as the boss of art? Our Brandeis set design prof, Karl Eigsti ("American Set Design" by A. Aronson), used to break egos to tears, to free students to design art instead of cliches. Woe to any soul that dares so much as bruise the Orange Master's blowfish ego. So a Trump Center "Yes" Board adds itself to Trump Sirloins and Trump Scruniversity. Mark Cuban's BlueSky today hit the nuclear nail on its head: Trump & Musk will allocate a $zillion in Federal contracts that decide whose AI will control our government. (Hence Bezos, Zuck, et all suckin' up.) Guernica ain't nothin' beside "the best" that's "yet to come."
Well put, Maureen. He's broken art or is trying to break it.
I don't understand how the NRx people running the new government, all disciples of the Unabomber Manifesto, missed the part about how technology is dehumanizing and bad...the central thrust of the entire document. But then, none of this makes any logical sense.
AI will be the death of us.
Greg, you can’t break Art. Or creativity. You’ve just demonstrated that!:-)
That was exactly what Duchamp did.
I met him in the 60s. Saw his chess set and wife.
An amazing man as you so clearly stated. So are you.
Yes, AI will be the death of us. Musk is on a mission to break the world and re-make it in his image.
I consider myself an artist, though my paintings have been just a hobby; but in bygone years I have been considered quite talented by friends, family, coworkers and buyers of the paintings. But my talent is merely the ability to render in paint a representation of a picture, object or scene. Duchamp would not consider my work art, but rather, I suppose, a craft. I have never tried very hard to intellectualize a definition of art, but for me it’s a personal thing: it’s art to me if I think it is.
Earl, Duchamp liked the idea of craft. MAGA has severed and cauterized the receptors to the brain that make art. Their right brains are damaged beyond repair. Yours is not, and therefore you are an artist.
My heart goes out to Caroline Kennedy. She must be grieving more than most over the confirmation of RFK Jr and the ruination of the Kennedy Center. Such a sad time so I truly appreciate your reminder that our hope for “the wondrous side of life” can remain.
I feel bad for her, too, now that the family name has been permanently disgraced. But the Kennedys were too quiet for too long. They needed a much stronger unified front to expel the guy from the clan. One appearance a few days before the confirmation vote was not enough. And while it's not their job, per se, to speak out and take care of the family business, they can't only accept the benefits while not tending the garden. If that makes sense.
You’re not wrong.
Objective subjectivity.
Well put, Meemaw!
Art is forever.
Trump and his fellow psychopaths are temporary.
Hopefully these monsters will not languish in "cruel federal prisons" but swing in the wind. Feet not touching the ground.
I believe in deterrence for treason, myself.