Artists on the road to martyrdom

"Artists find nothing quite as fascinating as themselves. When the Medici started their celebrated collection of artist self-portraits, housed in the corridor that Giorgio Vasari built in 1565 to link the Uffizi via the Ponte Vecchio with the Pitti Palace, they set in train a cult of the self that pervades contemporary art today.

Walk through any graduate art show and you’ll see the signs: the shaky video work, the obscure narratives, the fetishistic self-absorption, the over- written “artist’s statement”. The blame for much of this selfimportance can be laid at the door of Romanticism, that seizure of the imagination that dominated the 19th century, a period when artists shook off their feudal ties with the established order and started polishing the first-person pronoun."

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"I imagine; therefore I paint" -- MLW (C)2006 Opps, used "I" twice in my artist's statement; its actually 40% of the word count. Am I becoming what I don't like?

Cyborgs, self-mutilators, and the future of our race. By William Saletan

"Remember those kids who played Dungeons & Dragons and ran the science-fiction club in your high school? They've become transhumanists. Their resident immortalist, Aubrey de Grey, walks around in sneakers, a ponytail, and a 14-inch beard that he strokes like a cat. One of the CCLE officials at the conference calls herself Wrye Sententia; the other dresses like an LSD trip. This was the kind of conference where people talked about the Matrix the way Christians talk about the Bible, and where speakers apologized for their discomfort with piercings or tattoos.

A while back, I'm told, there was a left-right battle for the soul of transhumanism, and the left won. Libertarians got a few nods at the conference, but mostly for opposing drug laws and the draft. Speakers and attendees called themselves visionaries, futurists, or revolutionaries. They invoked Marcuse, Sartre, and Heidegger. They preached struggle and solidarity. They spoke of speciesism, morphological diversity, techno-progressive transhumanism, somatic epistemic technology, nonanthropocentric personhood ethics, and the 'illusory distinction between self and cosmos.' They called the United States a 'bloated uberpower.' They cheered calls for a worldwide guaranteed income, free lifelong therapy, and a universal right to art and paid vacations. 'I'm a very pragmatic kind of anarc"

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Bet playing "Lingo Bingo" at this conference was a lot of fun.

But I guess I read the wrong science fiction growing up. The stuff I read wasn't as much utopian fancy, but understood scarcity and the restraints of econmics. I don't know about "free", but I do think "lifelong therapy" is the one thing I would agree with! :)