Alex Callinicos/SWP vs Laurie Penny/New Statesman Facebook handbags

[Firky]

Hashtags and @ twitter on everyfingthing.

 

[J Ed]

.

 

[rekil]

This is just awful. "Monetize their hotness"? This isn't left-wing politics, this is Thatcherism with brothels.

Monetize Your Trotness.

 

[love detective]

someone should tweet laurie penny something about how some women are too dumb to capitalise on their physical/youthful look and see if she agrees or disagrees

 

[Balbi]

Common People with an etsy account. Jarvis won't be happy.

 

[Bakunin]

It really is the 'rebel sell' writ large. Be edgy enough to stand out from other fame-hungry wannabes, but not so edgy that whatever you're pushing won't appeal to mainstream buyers. Purport to have meaningful political convictions, but don't let those deeply-held convictions stop you from picking up lucrative commercial opportunities. Be just meaningful enough to have the hipster crowd and well-meaning wiberals think you're deep and thoughtful, but don't be so meaningful that they have to think more than it takes them to sign your cheques. Throw those ingreditents into the publicity pot, add lashings of assiduous self-promotion while purporting to be overwhelmingly shy or maybe a little dismissive (not so dismissive that people don't buy your product), attend the right events and be seen with the right people, quote the right philosophers, artists, writers and song lyrics and, presto, a nice, lucrative career with the added bonus of perpetual adoration from people who don't spot that you're as shiny as a Bangkok Rolex and about as genuine.

 

[rosecore]

Nothing sells 'your' revolution better than re-appropriating art you saw in that comic book that promoted Alan Moore's vision of anarchism.

Anyone seen the film Chasing Amy? The character of Hooper X (despite being a gay black man) feels he needs to sell the image of militancy to promote his comic book 'White Hating Coon'. As he must sell the image to sell the book. I see a similar business model.

 

[Balbi]

"What's a nubian?"

 

[butchersapron]

Monetzie your hotness

The rest of you empty-headed fucks don't deserve to be considered.

 

[rosecore]

Motonize the revolution.

 

[butchersapron]

i'm all about that money

 

[butchersapron]

The change of form, C—M—C, by which the circulation of the material products of labour is brought about, requires that a given value in the shape of a commodity shall begin the process, and shall, also in the shape of a commodity, end it. The movement of the commodity is therefore a circuit. On the other hand, the form of this movement precludes a circuit from being made by the money. The result is not the return of the money, but its continued removal further and further away from its starting-point. So long as the seller sticks fast to his money, which is the transformed shape of his commodity, that commodity is still in the first phase of its metamorphosis, and has completed only half its course. But so soon as he completes the process, so soon as he supplements his sale by a purchase, the money again leaves the hands of its possessor. It is true that if the weaver, after buying the Bible, sell more linen, money comes back into his hands. But this return is not owing to the circulation of the first 20 yards of linen; that circulation resulted in the money getting into the hands of the seller of the Bible. The return of money into the hands of the weaver is brought about only by the renewal or repetition of the process of circulation with a fresh commodity, which renewed process ends with the same result as its predecessor did. Hence the movement directly imparted to money by the circulation of commodities takes the form of a constant motion away from its starting-point, of a course from the hands of one commodity-owner into those of another. This course constitutes its currency (cours de la monnaie).

 

[rosecore]

Debate watch party & Molly Crabapple viewing (Debate Watch Party - old)
On October 15th, the Museum of Sex is doing a special viewing of "Politics" by Molly Crabapple. After you see the art, you can watch the presidential debates the way god intended- on a big screen, surrounded by sexy friends.

If you're suffering election fatigue, you can wield your pencils instead, drawing the beautiful Gal Friday in a patriotic Dr. Sketchy's event hosted by none other than Molly Crabapple.

Making the politics of Obama sexy. (2008). https://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gshxg3

 

[Balbi]

It's a bit, or it's a lot, like a local arts scene decided to have a go at McDonalds corporatism.

 

[sihhi]

you saw in that comic book that promoted Alan Moore's vision of anarchism.

Good spot hadn't noticed it myself but yes, here with a nod to Black Bloc:

the masks reappear in lots of details:

In terms of Lichtenstein style copying with stylisation, lots of MC's art is straight stylisation from photographs

from this famous photograph

Is the MC dividing line it's OK to copy from photos but not from comics - it's very hard to pin down a line.

Most of the thinking seems to be about the artist, not the production except in so far as it is raise money from the pool of admirers - cut out the middle man of galleries and foundations - once completed the produced art can be placed anywhere like galleries or protest sites like OWS.

“Art is often raised on the back of wealth, and wealth is often raised on immorality.” — Molly Crabapple, SXSW 2013

This is analysing a discussion about new funding techniques.

Also speaking at SXSW was the artist and writer Molly Crabapple, who spoke with the musician Kim Boekbinder on the panel ‘Hacking the Crowd: Artists as Entrepreneurs’. Crabapple, like Palmer, is one of crowdsourcing’s pioneers, having funded numerous art projects through Kickstarter, most recently Shell Game, which (rather ironically, for an exhibition of paintings themed around the global financial meltdown) raised $63,000, doubling its initial goal. Crabapple, one sometimes feels, revels in confusing superficial onlookers—a radical artist shouldn’t have a mercenary sensibility about their career, at least not openly. But as Crabapple put it, “as any strawberry picker can tell you, hard work and nothing else is a fast road to nowhere.”
Crabapple has no problem asking fans for financial assistance, because as anyone who has gruesome knowledge of the gallery system and its related parasites will know, the alternative is none too different: standing in front people in suits, asking for money. As she said at 2011’s Cusp Conference in Chicago, “The other thing that Week In Hell [another Kickstarter project of Crabapple’s] and other crowdfunded art projects are doing is they’re making art collecting an egalitarian endeavour. One of the big things that galleries have over individual artists is they have access to people with money. I don’t know people who can drop fifty thousand dollars…”
Crabapple also challenged those romantic conceptions of how an artist should conduct themselves (usually formulated by people who aren’t artists), and articulated why such engagement what necessary in an arena like crowdsourcing. “That sort of evil, internet-obsessed, constantly self-marketing career-bot thing is what allows you to do work without the constraints of dealing with an institutional client, or without the constraints of dealing with a museum or a corporation.”

 

[butchersapron]

Making the politics of Obama sexy. (2008).https://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gshxg3

Making partiotism hip.

 

[butchersapron]

It's a bit, or it's a lot, like a local arts scene decided to have a go at McDonalds corporatism.

Whilst being sponsored by burger-king and saying that it's all about becoming macdonalds and crowding out any public visibility for any other perspective.

Filth. Pure fucking filth. And this isn't just a question of differing politics as with Owen Jones, this is about values.

 

[articul8]

She is very sexy, even though her politics is a turn off. It's making my head hurt

 

[rosecore]

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects...-game-an-art-show-about-the-financial-meltdow

She obviously has some rich fans to get $8,000 and $5,000 donations.

 

[butchersapron]

She is very sexy, even though her politics is a turn off. It's making my head hurt

Oh god.

 

[Balbi]

She's attractive, as long as you completely take out the context of how she lives her life and the things she does.

So, you know, completely judging her on her looks, phwoar

Just like Maggie was just an old lady and is worthy of respect for that, Molly's worth a leer. Fucks sake!

 

[rosecore]

Molly Crabapple: for the generation that discovered anarchism from the V for Vendetta movie.

 

[Balbi]

Molly Crabapple: for the generation that discovered anarchism in V for Vendetta.

The film version /

 

[butchersapron]

It ain't much more sophisticated in the graphic novel to be fair.

 

[rosecore]

The film version /

I love the graphic novel, but it really did not tell me a great deal about anarchism.

 

[sihhi]

Filth. Pure fucking filth. And this isn't just a question of differing politics as with Owen Jones, this is about values.

That's pretty harsh, I think their values are similar - both OJ and MC ride above the work of others to 'popularise' (or 'make accessible') 'movements' to middle-class audiences.

It is confusing because it's harder to pin down MC's ideas. Here's the closest from 2012 introducing the Shell Game - after the wave of radicalisation visiting Britain, Spain, Greece, being arrested on the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street:

http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/mar/15/comment-medici-crowd

(droput of state school means dropout from an art school/art university)

Plus, galleries scared me. I was the dropout of a rather cruddy state school. I had a past as a fetish model. I didn't dress right or talk right or have the right degrees. Academic art writing made me squirm. Worse, I worked as an illustrator, which in the mainstream art world was like a neon stamp of "Not Legit" on my forehead.
So I found myself with fourteen thousand twitter followers and a brain punch-drunk on ideas that I wanted to express while they were still relevant. The snot-nosed punk kid inside of me said this: Fuck it. Stop asking for permission. Do it yourself.

We're living in a time where the structures around artistic endeavor are, for better or worse, mutating. Record labels, newspapers, publishing houses, and movie studios are collapsing like flan left in the heat. Yet in many ways, the art world has remained the same. This is because only a relatively small amount of people can afford to buy original art, and only a select few galleries have access to these people.
Banksy, the British street artist, says it best: "The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires."
Government projects like the WPA once allayed some of this. But arts funding is now a joke in the US, and the specialized skill and language that goes into applying for grants is so labor intensive to acquire that you're often better off just working a dayjob.

Rewards from each category were bundled together into packages, so that someone who donated $20 got livestreams (access), and fake money I designed (art object). The plan was met with some skepticism. Most people asked what I would do with the paintings if they didn't sell. That didn't concern me. I just wanted to be able to make them without going broke. When I pressed the launch button on Shell Game's Kickstarter. I feared a rather public failure. But after a few compulsive days on Twitter, and with the signal amplification of some friends with large followings, I had raised fifty thousand dollars. Fuck yeah gold and glittering art. Fuck yeah populism.

All fine OK but the conclusion explains that the only innovation is for named artists who already have a name following

My plan for crowd-funding art isn't for everyone. Buying and selling diamond encrusted skulls will probably remain the domain of the 1%. But for working artists like me, who have a substantial following that isn't made of millionaires, this may be just as good an option as chasing gallery approval.

 

[butchersapron]

**

 

[butchersapron]

That's pretty harsh, I think their values are similar - both OJ and MC ride above the work of others to 'popularise' (or 'make accessible') 'movements' to middle-class audiences.

It is confusing because it's harder to pin down MC's ideas. Here's the closest from 2012 introducing the Shell Game - after the wave of radicalisation visiting Britain, Spain, Greece, being arrested on the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street:

http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/mar/15/comment-medici-crowd

(droput of state school means dropout from an art school/art university)

I think you've just given a fair representation of her values across the last two pages - and i don't think it's to popularise radical ideas, it's to use radical ideas to popularise herself. It's about as reactionary and pro-status quo position as it's possible to come to - and to do it through the guise of artist...in 2013?

 

[cesare]

I think they're trying to create a modern day Bloomsbury Group

 

[sihhi]

I think you've just given a fair representation of her values across the last two pages - and i don;t think it's to popularise radical ideas, it's to use radical ideas to popularise herself. It's about as reactionary and pro-status quo position as it's possible to come to - and to do in through the guise of artist...in 2013?

could well say the same thing of Owen Jones - what do his writing and calls for a movement of Labour(-led)-Trotsykists-Greens-Nats actually mean? Who is Chavs really for? It's not to popularise radical ideas, it's to use radical ideas to popularise OJ.
A movement like Owen wants will cement the position of figures like him.
OJ is doing it through the guise of journalist/rabble-rouser (and Labour Party has a union link!)... in 2013?