Basically, being an artist is like being an athlete. One is not merely an athlete. If one is a professional athlete, then one is practising some discipline or another. I might be a speed-skater or a javelin-thrower, or else a professional football player or whatnot. I am veritably an athlete, but more particularly, I am a practitioner of a given discipline within the various athletic disciplines or sports.
The same goes with being an artist. I am an artist practising this discipline. In my case, I specialize in the visual arts, in painting, as well as in musical composition and sound design, as well as in writing. I write fiction and non-fiction, I am an experienced poet, these are my disciplines. It is in this sense that one is never merely an artist. One is an artist, surely, but one practises this or that discipline.
One must specialize, and one can almost never be an expert in all disciplines. Those individuals are few and far between who can specialize in more than 3 or 4 artistic disciplines, just as it is in sports amongst professional athletes. Take the Olympics for example. Those individuals are few and far between who specialize in more than 3 or 4 separate disciplines.
It is the same with the arts. One tends to specialize in at most 1 or 2 separate disciplines. I happen to specialize in Images, in Sounds, and in Words, in Text. That technically makes me an interdisciplinary artist, and that in and of itself comes with a great deal of baggage. It is not easy, and of such interdisciplinary artists, very few are great at what they do. It just comes with the territory and terrain of being an interdisciplinary artist. It is really hard and difficult to be great at more than one discipline, more than one field of expertise.
I do not, cannot pretend that I have ever achieved Greatness in my separate disciplines. All I can really attest to is that I have been constant, have persevered in my various disciplines. If I ever achieve Greatness, it will never be for me to judge, to decide. If I have ever achieved Greatness in what I do, I shall let the audience decide. They shall be my judge and jury and executioner. All I can do is wake up every morning and continue working on my stuff.
I swear, though, I am not an Artiste. I am an ordinary, everyday, workaday individual working on his stuff. I happen to make paintings and musical compositions, sound designs, but that doesn't make me special. I don't see my job as any different than the work a plumber does. I wake up every morning and do my thing, work on my stuff. My career involves practising this and that discipline, these specific professions. I do not think I am special. I do not consider myself to be an Artiste. I am just an everyday, average guy, doing his daily work, earning his daily bread.
This is my position with regard to the Arts, specifically the Liberal Arts, and for the time being, I will never change my position. I will however have much more to say about this, so as always, please stay tuned. :)
https://chumly.com/n/21a830a
mardi 31 décembre 2013
What is an Artist?
Believe it or not, the notion that we have of the Artist is a relatively recent invention. We may speak of Michelangelo as a great artist, but back in the day, he wasn't an Artist. He was a painter, a sculptor, he was many things, but not what we today would call an Artist.
Monet, the Impressionist painter, was a Painter and not an Artist, at least not the way we think of artists today. More and more, individuals today are becoming Artists as though being an artist was a career path, a profession. But it isn't.
For example, I am a professional painter as well as a sound designer. There is no such thing as a profession known as being an artist. One can create art but then one is a painter or a sculptor or a musical composer and so forth. I will be writing more about this over the coming months. Stay tuned. The point is that one cannot become an Artist because there is no such thing. One cannot be an Artist. There is no such thing. One is a) an individual and b) one practises some profession, but there is no such profession as creating art. It would be like saying a human being is a breather of air, or an eater of food-stuffs. Art is an abstract concept, not a profession. More to come.
https://chumly.com/n/21a509a
Monet, the Impressionist painter, was a Painter and not an Artist, at least not the way we think of artists today. More and more, individuals today are becoming Artists as though being an artist was a career path, a profession. But it isn't.
For example, I am a professional painter as well as a sound designer. There is no such thing as a profession known as being an artist. One can create art but then one is a painter or a sculptor or a musical composer and so forth. I will be writing more about this over the coming months. Stay tuned. The point is that one cannot become an Artist because there is no such thing. One cannot be an Artist. There is no such thing. One is a) an individual and b) one practises some profession, but there is no such profession as creating art. It would be like saying a human being is a breather of air, or an eater of food-stuffs. Art is an abstract concept, not a profession. More to come.
https://chumly.com/n/21a509a
lundi 30 décembre 2013
Themes for the Coming Year
As I said earlier, I will be logging things continually on this blog. Here are some themes I will be touching upon.
Jean-Paul Sartre: There is something in J.-P. Sartre's philosophy that I have understood deeply and that I want to share with the world. I call it his concept of bad faith to keep it simple. It's something I have a great deal to say about, and will be making statements on this accordingly.
Albert Camus: Camus is another thinker, author, that I have a great deal to say about. Expect me to get into some details about his life and his work, particularly the war in Algeria and what that might mean to a 21st century audience.
Literature: Of course, I will be going through various works of literature in both the French and English traditions. I have a lot to say about modernist literature, and will say it. I myself am an author and wish to position myself in terms of authors that have come before me. Call it a Testament or a Manifesto, as an artist.
Art: As always, I will be speaking of art and art markets. I have a great deal to say about Modernism as a movement and as an art market. Stay tuned for amazing revelations from the artist known as The A.G..
Politics & Religion: The two things that they tell us NOT to talk about in polite conversation. I will be making some bold statements about the two. I have studied it, researched it, I will be making statements with no excuses. I have apparently been given these freedoms, to believe what I believe and to be able to speak what I want to speak. Nothing will get in my way, and anyone trying to stop me will be dubbed a Freedom-Hater.
More to come. Always more to come, but this is a beginning. I will lay out the themes for the coming year and then begin writing. Please stay tuned. There will be much to discuss.
https://chumly.com/n/219d19f
Jean-Paul Sartre: There is something in J.-P. Sartre's philosophy that I have understood deeply and that I want to share with the world. I call it his concept of bad faith to keep it simple. It's something I have a great deal to say about, and will be making statements on this accordingly.
Albert Camus: Camus is another thinker, author, that I have a great deal to say about. Expect me to get into some details about his life and his work, particularly the war in Algeria and what that might mean to a 21st century audience.
Literature: Of course, I will be going through various works of literature in both the French and English traditions. I have a lot to say about modernist literature, and will say it. I myself am an author and wish to position myself in terms of authors that have come before me. Call it a Testament or a Manifesto, as an artist.
Art: As always, I will be speaking of art and art markets. I have a great deal to say about Modernism as a movement and as an art market. Stay tuned for amazing revelations from the artist known as The A.G..
Politics & Religion: The two things that they tell us NOT to talk about in polite conversation. I will be making some bold statements about the two. I have studied it, researched it, I will be making statements with no excuses. I have apparently been given these freedoms, to believe what I believe and to be able to speak what I want to speak. Nothing will get in my way, and anyone trying to stop me will be dubbed a Freedom-Hater.
More to come. Always more to come, but this is a beginning. I will lay out the themes for the coming year and then begin writing. Please stay tuned. There will be much to discuss.
https://chumly.com/n/219d19f
vendredi 27 décembre 2013
mardi 24 décembre 2013
lundi 23 décembre 2013
You are the risk to privacy
Quicknote: The greatest risk to privacy - and security, accordingly - that I have witnessed in my lifetime, has been created, perpetuated, instituted, by the actions - unknowingly, I would presume - of normal, everyday individuals. They were simple actions, but they all broke the foundational binds of trust in our society.
People are right to be concerned about things like privacy, information security, and so forth. There are real and serious reasons to be genuinely concerned. However, it has been my lifelong experience that the greatest of all infringements to privacy have been done by the hands of normal everyday people, what one might call common folk. That means me, you, and everybody else in this room.
It's not that we are evil, not at all. It's just that we have very bad habits and that - I am beginning to believe - we are fundamentally flawed in this area. I don't think that humans come prepackaged with a good enough sense of what the boundaries are between the private and public realms, possibly because these are cultural constructs and not actual physical borders or frontiers between things in the material universe.
With that being said, the borders that bind together the two separate, non-communicating realms of The Private and The Public, are no less real, and important. That is, it is important to keep them separate, but as I have just said, human beings don't seem to be well-equipped to respect such things as privacy, and security, accordingly.
Yes, for not respecting someone's privacy could be putting them in danger. You might not know that, it is in fact not your privacy, but theirs. It's why you should respect it, because it does not belong to you, but to the individual whose privacy it is.
Since this has become almost the bane of my very existence, I will be logging events on this blog whereby individuals have broken the binds of trust, binds - or bounds if you will - that are foundational to living in a just and democratic society. I will not name names, but since my privacy was infringed upon, if you are vigilant enough, you might be able to trace it back to the case in point (the infringement). In doing so, the private information never meant to be private will be revealed to you. It was already revealed, but you probably never noticed. Since it was revealed by someone else, and pertained to my private realm the best I can do is to attempt to reclaim it. I find that I can best accomplish this by pointing out the infringement - of my own private information, revealed publicly - and making an example of it.
I cannot go back in time and change things, I also have no power over others. I also cannot live in isolation. I too must live amongst people, in this society, and if others are not respecting such things as the binds of trust, i.e. by infringing upon people's privacy, knowingly or unknowingly, there is nothing I can do to stop them. But, as I said, I can set an example.
I have very high standards when it comes to these things and for very good reason. I was born with the exceptional ability to see true risks in everything. I also see false risks, erroneous risks, and can do the math to adjust for the discrepancy, the errors of judgement. I end up with a more or less neutral value that is not too optimistic or too pessimistic but just right. And over the course of my 36 years, these judgements have never failed me. I am a natural-born assessor of potential risks. I am telling you that it isn't evil corporations or banks or governments that are putting the very foundational binds of trust at risk in our civil societies. It is normal, everyday people. It is part of what I am calling The Little Evil(s). Small, perhaps even entirely anodyne, behaviors by individuals that infringe upon things such as privacy and so forth, and that taken in the aggregate actually create Evil with a capital E, The Greater Evil.
Evil is not some force of Nature. Evil is in us. I am evil, you are evil, we all have a little evil in us. It is part and parcel of this thing we call being human. It comes alongside our very birthright. It is our birthmark, the reason we are flawed and not perfect beings. The sooner we realize what our little evils are, and take measures to correct them, the better life will be for all living things on this planet.
Remember, I too am a purveyor of little evils. This thing I called a Quicknote is a little evil. It is meant to slight those that would do me harm, do harm to my privacy, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly. This slight is a little evil, but smaller than the little evil of infringing upon my privacy, which, if it ever came to that, could put my life in jeopardy, or cause an existential risk or threat to my life, in the very worst case. All because someone did not respect the foundational binds of trust of our democratic societies. A little evil, but that can do great harm to individuals.
You shall not be named. Nothing will be revealed that was private except my own personally identifying information that you disclosed without the right to disclose it. All I am doing is logging it on my blog. It's my privacy, and I am told that I an inalienable right to it. Yet no court of law will take such petty, trifling matters into consideration. They are not important enough, and I wouldn't want a court to have to decide. This is my privacy, after all, and I can do something to preserve it. I have that power, not a very great power, but a power nonetheless.
More and more, people are concerned about Surveillance. Yet who is it that you see spying at you from behind the Venetian blinds when you go freely walking down the street? It isn't the State. It is your neighbor(s). There's nothing wrong with keeping an eye on things, safety is an important public good in our communities. Vigilance is a very important thing to be cultivating. But one must parse things correctly and accept that we are all peddlers in little evils, tiny evils, anodyne evils, petty, trifling evils of this world.
It does no harm, does it, if I tell someone I am with - indoors - that I just saw Mrs. Smith leave her house, walking her dog? Of course it doesn't. Except that it might. It depends who I just told, and if they relay that message and to whom and so on and so forth. It doesn't take long for the message to make it into the wrong hands, of someone who might capitalize on the fact that Mrs. Smith has left her house, and at what time, and with whom - her dog in this case.
Here is the basic rule. There are cases when it is the correct, proper thing to do, to tell someone such things. In fact, it is our duty and responsibility to do so, again, because we live and want to continue living in decent, civil societies, in our wonderful democratic nations. What messages one must relay are ones where there is something seemingly wrong with the picture. There is nothing wrong with Mrs. Smith walking her dog. She probably does it once a day, maybe twice or more. It is a redundant piece of information, entirely regular in the Grand Scheme of Things. But even when one sees someone unfamiliar, this does not mean it is an evil-doer. We are all little evil-doers, as I just said. It is not for us to judge. For all you know, it might just be Bob Dylan. This actually happened recently, he was stopped by police for taking a walk in some neighborhood where apparently he was either unwelcome or unfamiliar. But it was Bob Dylan. So please leave Mrs. Smith alone. Let her mind her own business, and mind yours instead. One has to learn to parse these things properly. If you think you see a risk of violence, or aggression, or else coercion of some form or another, please take immediate action. But then again, you are not to take the law into your own hands. There are trained persons for such always complex and difficult matters. Recent history ought to have taught us all a very good lesson about such vigilantism - or anything resembling vigilantism, even if remotely.
Otherwise, relay nothing. Do as doctors do with our medical dossiers and as priests and lawyers do. The Commandment on bearing false witness has an important, often overlooked corollary: Bear truth only. A private truth is not a truth you have borne witness to, if it is not your privacy. Carry on, pretend as though you never saw anything. It happens at times, we unknowingly stumble upon something we weren't meant to spy upon. If it isn't something dangerous, then carry on. Mind your business.
It doesn't have to be a trade secret or even a state secret for us to mind ourselves if I can put it in a less dramatic tone. These little evils, however, if we are not careful in treating them with care and compassion in our hearts and intelligent discernment, concern and vigilance in our spirits, will grow to become a canker sore, and may risk the very sovereignty of our great nations. It is a general rule that such small, simple things as individual behaviors, when taken in the aggregate, can grow to processes of great complexity, of massive complexity. Things can emerge that are quite ugly. Yet no one wanted to do anyone any harm. Right. I've heard that one before. When we were kids we told our mothers, "It wasn't me." Of course it wasn't. It wasn't any one of us. Then who was it? It must have been this strange ghost, this character living in our house, named It Wasn't Me.
Let us not live in a world with 6 billion persons named It Wasn't Me. That's all I am trying to say. Godspeed and may you carry on.
https://chumly.com/n/2172852
People are right to be concerned about things like privacy, information security, and so forth. There are real and serious reasons to be genuinely concerned. However, it has been my lifelong experience that the greatest of all infringements to privacy have been done by the hands of normal everyday people, what one might call common folk. That means me, you, and everybody else in this room.
It's not that we are evil, not at all. It's just that we have very bad habits and that - I am beginning to believe - we are fundamentally flawed in this area. I don't think that humans come prepackaged with a good enough sense of what the boundaries are between the private and public realms, possibly because these are cultural constructs and not actual physical borders or frontiers between things in the material universe.
With that being said, the borders that bind together the two separate, non-communicating realms of The Private and The Public, are no less real, and important. That is, it is important to keep them separate, but as I have just said, human beings don't seem to be well-equipped to respect such things as privacy, and security, accordingly.
Yes, for not respecting someone's privacy could be putting them in danger. You might not know that, it is in fact not your privacy, but theirs. It's why you should respect it, because it does not belong to you, but to the individual whose privacy it is.
Since this has become almost the bane of my very existence, I will be logging events on this blog whereby individuals have broken the binds of trust, binds - or bounds if you will - that are foundational to living in a just and democratic society. I will not name names, but since my privacy was infringed upon, if you are vigilant enough, you might be able to trace it back to the case in point (the infringement). In doing so, the private information never meant to be private will be revealed to you. It was already revealed, but you probably never noticed. Since it was revealed by someone else, and pertained to my private realm the best I can do is to attempt to reclaim it. I find that I can best accomplish this by pointing out the infringement - of my own private information, revealed publicly - and making an example of it.
I cannot go back in time and change things, I also have no power over others. I also cannot live in isolation. I too must live amongst people, in this society, and if others are not respecting such things as the binds of trust, i.e. by infringing upon people's privacy, knowingly or unknowingly, there is nothing I can do to stop them. But, as I said, I can set an example.
I have very high standards when it comes to these things and for very good reason. I was born with the exceptional ability to see true risks in everything. I also see false risks, erroneous risks, and can do the math to adjust for the discrepancy, the errors of judgement. I end up with a more or less neutral value that is not too optimistic or too pessimistic but just right. And over the course of my 36 years, these judgements have never failed me. I am a natural-born assessor of potential risks. I am telling you that it isn't evil corporations or banks or governments that are putting the very foundational binds of trust at risk in our civil societies. It is normal, everyday people. It is part of what I am calling The Little Evil(s). Small, perhaps even entirely anodyne, behaviors by individuals that infringe upon things such as privacy and so forth, and that taken in the aggregate actually create Evil with a capital E, The Greater Evil.
Evil is not some force of Nature. Evil is in us. I am evil, you are evil, we all have a little evil in us. It is part and parcel of this thing we call being human. It comes alongside our very birthright. It is our birthmark, the reason we are flawed and not perfect beings. The sooner we realize what our little evils are, and take measures to correct them, the better life will be for all living things on this planet.
Remember, I too am a purveyor of little evils. This thing I called a Quicknote is a little evil. It is meant to slight those that would do me harm, do harm to my privacy, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly. This slight is a little evil, but smaller than the little evil of infringing upon my privacy, which, if it ever came to that, could put my life in jeopardy, or cause an existential risk or threat to my life, in the very worst case. All because someone did not respect the foundational binds of trust of our democratic societies. A little evil, but that can do great harm to individuals.
You shall not be named. Nothing will be revealed that was private except my own personally identifying information that you disclosed without the right to disclose it. All I am doing is logging it on my blog. It's my privacy, and I am told that I an inalienable right to it. Yet no court of law will take such petty, trifling matters into consideration. They are not important enough, and I wouldn't want a court to have to decide. This is my privacy, after all, and I can do something to preserve it. I have that power, not a very great power, but a power nonetheless.
More and more, people are concerned about Surveillance. Yet who is it that you see spying at you from behind the Venetian blinds when you go freely walking down the street? It isn't the State. It is your neighbor(s). There's nothing wrong with keeping an eye on things, safety is an important public good in our communities. Vigilance is a very important thing to be cultivating. But one must parse things correctly and accept that we are all peddlers in little evils, tiny evils, anodyne evils, petty, trifling evils of this world.
It does no harm, does it, if I tell someone I am with - indoors - that I just saw Mrs. Smith leave her house, walking her dog? Of course it doesn't. Except that it might. It depends who I just told, and if they relay that message and to whom and so on and so forth. It doesn't take long for the message to make it into the wrong hands, of someone who might capitalize on the fact that Mrs. Smith has left her house, and at what time, and with whom - her dog in this case.
Here is the basic rule. There are cases when it is the correct, proper thing to do, to tell someone such things. In fact, it is our duty and responsibility to do so, again, because we live and want to continue living in decent, civil societies, in our wonderful democratic nations. What messages one must relay are ones where there is something seemingly wrong with the picture. There is nothing wrong with Mrs. Smith walking her dog. She probably does it once a day, maybe twice or more. It is a redundant piece of information, entirely regular in the Grand Scheme of Things. But even when one sees someone unfamiliar, this does not mean it is an evil-doer. We are all little evil-doers, as I just said. It is not for us to judge. For all you know, it might just be Bob Dylan. This actually happened recently, he was stopped by police for taking a walk in some neighborhood where apparently he was either unwelcome or unfamiliar. But it was Bob Dylan. So please leave Mrs. Smith alone. Let her mind her own business, and mind yours instead. One has to learn to parse these things properly. If you think you see a risk of violence, or aggression, or else coercion of some form or another, please take immediate action. But then again, you are not to take the law into your own hands. There are trained persons for such always complex and difficult matters. Recent history ought to have taught us all a very good lesson about such vigilantism - or anything resembling vigilantism, even if remotely.
Otherwise, relay nothing. Do as doctors do with our medical dossiers and as priests and lawyers do. The Commandment on bearing false witness has an important, often overlooked corollary: Bear truth only. A private truth is not a truth you have borne witness to, if it is not your privacy. Carry on, pretend as though you never saw anything. It happens at times, we unknowingly stumble upon something we weren't meant to spy upon. If it isn't something dangerous, then carry on. Mind your business.
It doesn't have to be a trade secret or even a state secret for us to mind ourselves if I can put it in a less dramatic tone. These little evils, however, if we are not careful in treating them with care and compassion in our hearts and intelligent discernment, concern and vigilance in our spirits, will grow to become a canker sore, and may risk the very sovereignty of our great nations. It is a general rule that such small, simple things as individual behaviors, when taken in the aggregate, can grow to processes of great complexity, of massive complexity. Things can emerge that are quite ugly. Yet no one wanted to do anyone any harm. Right. I've heard that one before. When we were kids we told our mothers, "It wasn't me." Of course it wasn't. It wasn't any one of us. Then who was it? It must have been this strange ghost, this character living in our house, named It Wasn't Me.
Let us not live in a world with 6 billion persons named It Wasn't Me. That's all I am trying to say. Godspeed and may you carry on.
https://chumly.com/n/2172852
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