In the place where analogue and digital overlap, that's why you will find me in the kitchen at parties. Everything is at my site, http://blog.ivanpope.com
> Subject: RHIZOME_RAW: Marketing/PR Intern Wanted > > Rhizome.org seeks a Marketing/PR intern for the Fall 2002 session. > > I just wondered whether Rhizome was ever again going to have a moderated list, i.e. Rhizome RARE alongside all this PR/Marketing? We seem to have drifted into a small inconsequential grouping on RAW, pondering nothing in particular and dominated by heavy duty nonsense posters. Of course, just my own personal view as usual. Ivan
> Well, religion can be abolished as well. Fine by me (another story). However, > property is simply violent (yes, state sponsored) protection of whatever a > particular group of people have decided should be protected. When taken very > far, becomes pretty repressive - small group "owns" most everything. Fighting > to abolish property, not a bad diversion, helps counterweight those trying to > own everything. It's like being one of the few sighted in a land of blind > people - are you going to rob or protect?
All power comes from the barrel of a gun.
The arguments as above can and will go on forever. But the laws that big bad corporations use to abuse poor starving artists are also of use to the poor starving artists. If you take the laws away and it becomes a free for all, who do you think is going to win. Personally, I accept that the world is imperfect and that there is no right or wrong, just interpretation of the situation. That's what I do as an artist. If people steal my work, I might shrug and accept it or I might fight them. Depends on how I feel and what I think I might to next. But I gave up thinking that there was a right worldview and a wrong worldview.
Man is alone in a godless universe. He has made himself what he is and has to be what he is.
> >All power comes from the barrel of a gun. > > Actually, power can also be from various energies - sexual, religious, > charisma, public opinion etc...
Ivan said: > > Man is alone in a godless universe. He has made himself what he is and has > > to be what he is.
and Joseph Franklyn McElroy Cor[porat]e [Per]form[ance] Art[ist] replied:
> We are talking to each other aren't we? We exist as a community, not alone, > and in that community we can find the richness for life and afterlife for which > we are looking. The community sustains us and allows us to operate > independently or with others as we see fit - providing that the community is > healthy and flexible enough to allow individual freedom. It is part of our > responsibility to contribute to the health of our community. Why there is this > responsibility is a subject of debate (is there a god), however, almost > everybody has an inate sense (perhaps constructed - but if so - from what > origin?) of this - sometimes rejected, sometimes ignored, sometimes accepted.
I don't deny any of the above. My line above is about an existentialist worldview. I don't want to get into my worldview at this point (or I'd be here for days), but effectively if there is no god, and we are what we have made ourselves over millenia, then there is no per se 'right' or 'wrong' . Just a human striving to affect and alter our world (and as you hint, to leave a better one for our genetic offspring maybe). You can't just change the world, because we are what we have made ourselves. But the option of change is not precluded. This doesn't make me a bad person or a good person - it just allows me to have some touchstones so that I can keep my view of the world and my art in perspective.
BTW, more interestingly, when writing the line above I wrote ... there is no per se 'truth' or ... and then I spent a while looking for the word that is the opposite of truth. And after a while I decided there wasn't one, as in 'right' and 'wrong'. I mean, you could say 'lies', but lies is not a state as truth can be ... or whatever. Or did I miss something?