Whitney Biennial 2024

(Whitney Museum of American Art, 3 May 2024)

This exhibition is the best argument against socialism---or at least the version of socialism in which merit is apportioned by a committee of opportunists rather than by markets.

A generous interpretation of curators' intentions is to engage in small acts of insider trading: pluck an unremarkable artist out of obscurity, buy some of his work, exhibit the rest, and watch the artist's oeuvre appreciate. There is no law against that.

The best thing about the exhibition is the view from a window, any window, especially if not obstructed by "art."

A less generous interpretation of curators' intentions is that, having lost the public, they are scared and groom politicians for attention. Museums are no longer gatekeepers or trend-setters. Museums are largely irrelevant. Art is everywhere. One can go to galleries, one can go online, one can walk the streets, and one can stop by a Tesla showroom. It appears that, in order to spite the social media, which traffics in beauty so well, Whitney has turned to ugliness, which, presumably, sells to politicians, who have been preferring their messaging dark, as of late. Pandering to politicians is a dangerous game in a democracy, where prevailing politics are liable to change. Whitney's confidence in doubling down on the ugly may be a bad omen.

Will the cult of ugliness persist? Ugliness lacks universality. It excludes by design. In a society that is free, it will not survive.

Another ungenerous interpretation of curators' intentions is that they sought their offerings to be "diverse" as in "preserving irrelevant path dependence." By definition, irrelevant past is preserved when skill is lacking. The mathematics of a skilful mathematician does not sport the Southern drawl or clipped vowels. It is just mathematics. To seek out the scars of the past is to reward mediocrity. To sprinkle them with salt and serve them to the know-all elites is cruel to the mediocre.

Civil War (2024)

Civil War is a paean to capitalism, to its resilience in war and its potential to forestall war by directing thrill-seekers towards the quintessentially pro-social activity of amassing wealth.

To most trapped within it, war has no logic. Those who shoot at you are bad. You try not to get shot, you keep doing your job. You live by your instincts.

By not laying out the "logic" of war, the movie succeeds at being immersive. Cinematography is excellent: deliberate, confident, beautiful.

The movie is about a calling. The calling is neither right nor wrong, neither beautiful nor ugly. Being true to one's calling, not squandering it, is all one should be.

"El Camino del Libertario" (2022) by Javier Milei

One must be possessed just to go into politics, much less to succeed in it. The idea that possesses Javier Milei is Economics 101, which is not a bad place to start when overhauling the government. A liberal, or libertarian, believes that carefully designed markets beat government intervention every time. An anarcho-libertarian, or anarcho-capitalist, believes that carefully designed markets are capable of emerging spontaneously whenever in demand. A neoliberal believes that the government failure is always graver than the market failure; even if a perfect market fails to emerge spontaneously, government intervention can only make matters worse. Milei is somewhere between neoliberal and anarcho-libertarian---in the realm of Econ 101, in other words.

One can admire the modern government as a miracle of self-organised complexity akin to a world city such as London or New York or fear it as one would runaway artificial general intelligence of science fiction and now the near future. One certainly cannot deny the runaway aspect of modern governments, even the most successful of them. The anarcho-capitalist scalpel applied to the tortured body of Argentinian politics by a steady hand of an Econ 101 enthusiast may prove to be the very salubrious intervention that the country needs.

Milei has read multiple books, some of them with equations. This is a commendable quality for a politician to possess.

"The Shakespeare Requirement" (2018) and "The English Experience: A Novel" (2023), by Julie Schumacher

Julie Schumacher has grown as a narrator; she reads both books and excels in the second one, especially when inhabiting the voices of jaded female students. Her forte is not the plot but shifting spontaneously among perspectives from disparate points of self-absorption. Schumacher understands that time is the ultimate scarce resource, and that self-expression is the ultimate urge. Her protagonist, Jason Fitger, pays with the precision of his prose for the reader's scarce attention to Fitger's self. Fitger succeeds. So do some of his students in The English Experience; they make up with sincerity for what they lack in fluency. Janet fails.

Writing is trading in time and over time, with others and with one's future selves. The writer sinks time so that others do not have to. The writer thinks so that others can think better.

Deseo

(12 November 2023, Un Teatro)

A modern ballet tells ten different stories in parallel. One experiences them develop all at once, just as one hears chord progressions in a musical piece. Interpret a dance performance too soon, before the experience of watching it has coalesced, and you have destroyed nine stories out of ten by singling out just one. Do so publicly, and you have robbed other spectators of their stories. It is best not to interpret. If one could interpret, then the medium of dance would be redundant.

What may be more profitable is to describe how watching a ballet has changed one. And even if one is unchanged, one’s sensibilities may be selectively awoken, if only for a moment. That, too, may be worthy of description. Perhaps the latter phenomenon is exactly what the incantation “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” in the motion picture Asteroid City meant. To be consumed by theatre or dance is to succumb to sleep. To wake up is to walk out of the theatre with one's sensibilities sharpened. 

In a typical novel or a film, the protagonist follows a positive character arc. First, he is desperate to satisfy his wants. Then, in the course of the story, he learns that his wants are at odds with his needs. He changes course. He grows. This perspective on storytelling suggests supremacy of needs over wants and a conflict between the two.

In Deseo, needs and wants are in harmony; the characters follow flat arcs. It is the audience whom the dancers invite to become heroes each complete with a conflict and a positive character arc. To this end, Act 1 prompts the audience not just to think of wants but to actually want. Act 2 parts the curtains slightly and invites the audience to walk through for a glimpse of the ultimate needs: connection and beauty.

Jessica Sandoval, Deseo's choreographer and director, along with Estefanía Villa and Tathanna, the dancer duo, define these needs with extraordinary precision. They do so in the language that few speak and fewer still speak fluently but everyone understands: the language of dance. What is even less common is that the artists know exactly what they want say. And they will not repeat the definitions; the production has a limited engagement. The audience members are uniquely responsible for learning the supplied definitions and for living out their assigned character arcs.

Drawing the audience in like this requires a powerful connection with the ballet's creators. Jessica Sandoval reveals the secret: “On stage, one must be free. Free means vulnerable. Vulnerable is open. Openness generates a connection.”

Deseo thus introduces connection at two levels. The dancers connect with the audience. The dancers also connect with each other. Beauty nourishes both connections.

To live is to want. To live intensely is to want passionately. To live is to live in the moment; there is nowhere else.

"Dear Committee Members" by Julie Schumacher (2015)

Life is a fight against the second law of thermodynamics. Life wins fight after fight, and yet, as it wins, it edges ever closer to losing the war. The second law is immutable.

The second law is immutable. As life creates order, elsewhere chaos intensifies. Life is a negative-sum game, in entropy terms. A certain degree of parochialism is required to root for life. 

Human flourishing is the pursuit of beauty and interestingness---a fight against ugliness and monotony. What is considered beautiful and interesting is inherently subjective, parochial, too.

Morality calls for just the right amount of parochialism.

Julie Schumacher's Dear Committee Members is a paean to beauty---the beauty of saying things. The tragedy of the piece---should one be inclined to read it as a tragedy rather than a triumph of the word over matter---is in the English professor's lopsided emphasis on beauty over interestingness.

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023)

It is surely a sign of superior civilisation when night after night stadiums are filled with crowds eager to cheer mellow musicians with whom the crowd has no chance of copulating and whom the crowd has no prospect of feeding to a lion or sacrificing to competing blood-thirsty musicians. Capitalism is a cult of creators, not thieves and destructors. Taylor Swift is the ultimate creator. She reads the room so well that one is ready to forgive her reading the room so well. She has talent, she has grit, and she is free.