The Subversion of Art
“The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.” Pablo Picasso
Ok, so it has been more than a month since Rick DeVos made his big surprise announcement about the world’s largest art competition, known as ArtPrize. Thus announcement resulted in lots of response that ranged from exuberance to outrage. The blog-o-sphere was hopping with commentary and lots of conversations were had throughout the community. What follows are seven points I’d like to make about ArtPrize and its significance in this community.
First, did you notice all the hype and near reverence from the local news media about this announcement? For days we were all teased by stories about the “big surprise” and once the announcement was made it was as if the Pope was coming to Grand Rapids. Imagine, any hard working person who has a great idea getting that kind of press coverage. I can see it now, “local activists take a stand against global warming.” Oh, wait…..that’s not news. How about, “Amway is a green business.” Yep, now that is news!
Second, the ArtPrize announcement came with the statement that this project would revitalize the art community in West Michigan. Anyone who knows artists in this community should be outraged at such a statement. It is my observation that in the past 10-15 years there has been a tremendous amount of artwork done in this community by people who are committed to improving the community. Think about the work done in the past decade to use empty, forgotten spaces for art by the Free Radical efforts. How many young people in this community have been turned on to art and self-expression from the projects organized by Art Works? The bold new work by Latino/a artists and the quiet dedication of artists like George Bayard. Numerous artists have volunteered their work and talent to making Grand Rapids a better place. To claim that ArtPrize would revitalize art in this community is an insult to the hard work of countless artists who have given so much.
Third, are we all supposed to jump at the chance to win money? I have spoken with several artists who say they will participate in ArtPrize because they could use the money. Fair enough, but winning the $250,000 is not really a solution. It’s sort of like winning the lottery, it’s all about chance. Why can’t we use this opportunity to talk about why most artists are not valued in this society and this economy? Giving away cash prizes does not help artists, it just perpetuates the idea that “great” art is worth lots of money and to be enjoyed by people who can afford to buy it.
Fourth, by telling artists that you can win $250,000 or any of the other smaller cash prices, you are telling artists to make something that is motivated by money. I always thought art was a form of self-expression, a medium for people to articulate feelings, ideas and opinions about beauty, tragedy, liberation and oppression. How does setting out to make art with the goal of winning a large cash prize inspire honest art?
Fifth, that the money is coming from a member of the DeVos family should be reason enough for us to reconsider our participation in such an event. Now, I don’t know Rick DeVos, and frankly, I don’t care to know him. No matter what his intentions are, the DeVos family has made its money by taking advantage of working people for decades. Amway is based upon a pyramid scheme and anyone wanted to explore what this has meant should read Stephen Butterfield’s book Amway: The Cult of Free Enterprise.
Sixth, we should all recognize that the DeVos family has used its money and political power over the years to support lots of repressive policies. They have been some of the largest donors to the Republican Party, have financed anti-choice campaigns, the privatization of public education, anti-gay campaigns, anti-union campaigns, and provided funds to brutal military groups in Nicaragua and Mozambique. (See Russ Bellant’s books Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party and The Religious Right in Michigan Politics) Locally, the DeVos family has also used their power and wealthy to buy lots of downtown property, determine the outcome of local city planning, and influence policy by being involved in the Downtown Development Authority and Grand Action.
Having someone from the DeVos family dynasty head up ArtPrize for me is in part a PR stunt, but mostly it’s just good for business. Any effort to “develop” the downtown area or bring people to that part of town benefits the DeVos family by generating revenue and potentially increasing their property value. In many ways I see ArtPrize as a logical extension of the gentrification of downtown Grand Rapids that primarily benefits a small sector of this community.
Lastly, I wanted to say that I think that ArtPrize does provide us with an opportunity to have serious conversations about the role of art in public life. We should use this event to talk about city politics, economic inequality and share the stories about what local artists have done to breathe life into neighborhoods and inspire change.
ArtPrize tells us that this event is very democratic because anyone can vote. But when you have a rigged system or in this case an event in which the community has had no say in its development, then how can that be democratic? Instead of giving cash prizes to a handful of artists, why not figure out ways to support and nurture art that is transformative, art that is self-expressive, art and artists that are not for sale.
Jeff Smith does art in his garden. You can reach him at jsmith@griid.org
Media Bites – Alcohol & Men
In this week’s Media Bites we look at two recent alcohol commercials, both of which are seen through the eyes of men. The Dos Equis commercial features the “Most Interesting Man in the World,” while the Captain Morgan commercial features a group of men attempting to pick up women in a bar. In both instances, alcohol is a vehicle for men to get women, but the reality is that alcohol is common in most cases of sexual assault.
Media Bites – Burger King
In this week’s Media Bites we look at a new Burger King commercial that is promoting the new Star Trek movie. We discuss the food that that is being sold and then look at the web promotion on both the Burger King site and the Star trek movie site to show the levels of cross promotion between the film and Burger King products.
Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood
The Media Education Foundation has produced some fabulous documentaries in the past and Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood is just the latest of well-produced and thought provoking films.
As someone who has taught media literacy for years I have witnessed how the advertising and media entertainment industry has increased the intensity of how they target children. I say target, because that is the language that they use when talking about children. Here is what James McNeal, the man who wrote the fist book on targeting kids has to say:
“Kids are the most unsophisticated of all consumers; they have the least and therefore want the most. Consequently, they are in a perfect position to be taken.”
Targeting of children through advertising and entertainment media has become so sophisticated and so pervasive that most often we don’t even notice it. Well, after watching this documentary, you will not only notice the techniques that media companies use in targeting children, you will have a good framework for understanding why they do it.
One excellent point that Consuming Kids points out is that when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) deregulated children’s TV at the end of the Carter years it had a huge impact on how media companies could direct their attention towards younger audiences. First, it allowed products to be turned into children’s TV shows. Before the FTC decision, toys were an outcome of programs like Saturday morning cartoons. With the deregulation of the industry, now media companies and toy manufactures could create TV shows that were based upon products, thus turning the TV show into a 30-minute commercial.
The other aspect of this documentary that struck me was the discussion around how this hyper-commercialism impacts children. Consuming Kids provides plenty of examples and experts on what the long-term affects of targeting kids with messages that promote the idea that you are valued by what you consume.
In many ways the film is a critique of Capitalism, although it never states that directly. I say this because the idea that humans, whether they are children or adults, are nothing more than consumers is fundamentally a Capitalist notion.
Consuming Kids in some ways is too much to take in, but is an excellent tool for not only generating discussion, but getting all of us to think seriously at how the media functions in a capitalist system and what we can do to defend our children and ourselves against the images and messages we are constantly bombarded with.
For people who live in the West Michigan area, there is an opportunity to view a public screening of this documentary. The newly formed group Stop Targeting Our Kids (STOK) will be hosting a public screening on Wednesday, May 20 at 7pm in the Applied Technology Center at the Grand Rapids Community College. For more information contact STOK at stokaction@gmail.com.
Media Bites – Sprite
In this week’s Media Bites we look at two recent Sprite commercials. Both commercials are targeting a youth audience, both are basketball settings and both use hip music. While Sprite is attempting to position their beverage as a “thirst quenching drink” we point out that high fructose corn syrup beverages will not hydrate the human body.
Constructing the News: Burgers Not Latinos
One fundamental principle of media education is that all media is constructed. Let me put it this way. How many of you have ever played with Legos? When you opened up the box were they already put together for you? Did you always put them together the same way?
Well, think of media in the same way. All media – movies, news, a magazine ad, a TV commercial, a billboard or a web page – is constructed. There is not a wide-angle lens on the world where information comes to us unfiltered. Someone determines what we see, when we see it and how we see it, when it comes to commercial media.
This is most definitely the case when it comes to entertainment media and advertising. Entertainment media is all highly constructed and scripted, nothing is left to chance. However, news media can also be highly constructed. Ask yourself if you have ever been interviewed by the news media? How long did they talk to you and how much of what you said was actually used in the news story? Reporters don’t ask you which of your comments you want them to use, they decide on which words to use and how to use them.
In addition, news can be constructed based upon where the story is place in the newspaper or which story is the lead story on the 6 o’clock news. What is placed on the front-page communicates importance. Newspaper editors will tell you that a front-page story has more value that a story on page 8. This was reflected several times in the Grand Rapids Press in early April when the Press decided that a ridiculously large burger that the local baseball park would be selling this year was more important that anything else that was going on in the community.
Besides placement of a story, the other major factor is just determining what is even newsworthy that day. For example, in during Spring Break this year I had the fortune of being part of a youth media project with Latino students from the Grand Rapids area. They were learning about the importance of healthy relationships and how to prevent sexual and domestic violence.
After engaging is several exercises and lots of discussion about these issues the students then produced their own media in order to communicate the importance of what they were learning. They created a Facebook page, a MySPace page, news stories, skits, conducted interviews, created public service announcements, hosted a talk show and produced video profiles.
During the week the students invited the local news media on two different days to come and talk to them about this project. The Grand Rapids Press only sent a photographer, while WXMI 17 was the only news outlet to send a reporter. On Friday, April 10 the Press ran a very small picture with a brief caption. That same day the GR Press found it more important to have an article devoted to a local student who was participating in an American Idol contest. Apparently self-indulgent youth seeking to make a name for themselves are more important that local youth who are trying to improve themselves and the community. I also couldn’t help but notice that the American Idol student was White, while all the Yo Puedo students were Latinos.
This example of excluding minorities from the news is not new, particularly if it is a story that is not crime based. GRIID has conducted years of local news monitoring projects and the conclusions have all been consisted. Most local news stories feature White people throughout the community, even at higher percentages of the White census population. The only types of stories that minorities are represented in at a high percentage than the census population are crime stories. With crime stories, Blacks and Latinos are always represented as suspects in greater number than they are as positive agents in the community.
This disproportionately high representation of minorities in crime stories and limited representation in stories that deal with economics, education, health care or the environment has tremendous power to influence public perception. If the public rarely sees Latinos as agents of change in the community this will only feed into the discriminatory policies and practices that society will impose on people they do not know. This racial representation in local news coverage in the end becomes a form of racial profiling. The news agencies are profiling minorities disproportionate as criminals, similar to the way that police departments do.
Another recent example of how news agencies engage in racial profile was the complete lack of coverage of one of the best living Latin American poets. Ernesto Cardenal, a Nicaragua poet was in Grand Rapids from April 8 – 13th and read his poetry on two separate occasions, readings that were organized by GVSU.
Cardenal has written dozens of books of poetry, several books of essays and a recent book of his memoirs. Cardenal is also an ordained Catholic priest who was part of the Sandinista Revolution in the 1970s. After the Sandinistas overthrew the US backed dictatorship of Somoza in 1979, Cardenal became a part of the Sandinista government, where he was the Minister of Culture for several years.
The 1970s and 80s was a period when Liberation Theology was prominent through much of the Third World, particularly in Latin America. Cardenal was an advocate of Liberation Theology and was the target of significant criticism by the Pope. In the early 80s when the Pope came to Nicaragua, Cardenal greeted him at the airport. Instead of embracing Cardenal the Pope chastised him verbally and wagged his finger telling him to stay out of politics.
In addition to being a poet, priest and revolutionary Cardenal was one of the founders of a Christian base community on the Nicaraguan island of Solentiname, a community that still exists to this day. One would think that with such a prolific writer, a religious and controversial figure that the local media would have jumped on the chance to report on Cardenal’s visit to Grand Rapids. Apparently, Obama’s new dog and local road construction were more newsworthy.
Jeff Smith does media education and was influenced by a 1982 debate between Ernesto Cardenal and Dan Berrigan on the subject of revolutionary violence and non-violence.
Media Bites – McDonald’s
This week’s Media Bites looks at two recent McDonald’s commercials, one that attempts to appeal to average consumers and the other with an appeal to the Black community in a music video style spot. We also show what McDonald’s never wants you to see, their relationship to the factory farm industry.
Media Bites – Danimals
This week’s Media Bites deconstructs a new ad from the Dannon yogurt company. The ad is targeting kids with a new product called Danimals.
Media Bites – Career Builder
This week’s Media Bites takes a look at a recent Career Builder commercial that falsely sympathizes with workers. The commercial and the company provide no real alternative for workers to confront the jobs that they hate.
Military Spending and the US Occupations: Week 12 of the Grand Rapids Press Coverage of the Obama Administration
For the second week in a row, the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have surpassed economic stories published in the Grand Rapids Press on news out of Washington. There were a total of ten articles in week twelve of the coverage and 7 of those stories were US foreign policy/military spending related. Only two stories were specific to the domestic economy and The Press ran one story from the Associated Press (4/12) asking the question, “Where will Obama worship?”
More Money for Occupations
There were a total of seven military related stories during week twelve of the The Grand Rapids Press coverage of the Obama administration. Two of those stories were focused on military spending; an April 10 story on the President’s request for an additional $83 billion for Iraq & Afghanistan, and an April 12 New York Times article that presented information on the proposed changes in the overall Defense budget.
The April 10 article states that the President has made an “$83.4 billion request for U.S. military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The story continues by saying, “his Democratic allies in control of Congress are sure to approve the spending without the type of tortuous battle that characterized their dealings with former President George W. Bush.” The Press version of this AP story omits any critical comments from Democratic lawmakers who oppose the requested funds for war, which gives the impression that all Democrats support the President. However, independent reporter Jeremy Scahill provides several oppositional responses from Democrats in a recent article that challenges the administration’s foreign policy narrative.
The The Grand Rapids Press then ran a New York Times article on April 12 that begins by saying, “Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced a major reshaping of the Pentagon budget on Monday, with deep cuts in many traditional weapons systems but new billions of dollars for others, along with more troops and new technology to fight the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.” However, the article focuses mostly on specific weapons systems and presents the proposed Defense Budget as inadequate for US national security.
Both Democrats and Republicans are cited in The Times article criticizing the President on defense cuts, which probably has more to do with their ties to Defense contractors than their concerns over the size of the military budget. Unfortunately, what the article missed was the fact that the Obama administration’s proposed 2010 military budget is $21 billion dollars more than the 2009 budget under Bush. The Times does cite a military expert from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a think-tank with ties to the defense industry, but that comment only looks at the military hardware, not the overall budget. This assessment is significantly different from the analysis provided by the Center for Defense Information, which is made up primarily of former high ranking US military personnel.
More Violence and Omitted Voices
The remaining stories on Obama’s foreign policy plans for Iraq and Afghanistan are very instructive when looking at home mainstream media presents an official narrative. The April 8 AP story on President Obama’s visit with US troops in Iraq focuses on the contrast between the new president’s “spontaneous visit” and “the staid, set-piece visits by the conflict’s author, former President George W. Bush.”
Nowhere in the April 8 AP article does the reporter challenge or even clarify the Obama plan for Iraq. The story just repeats the mantra that the President plans on “ending the war in Iraq by 2010.” Independent reporter Dahr Jamail has much different assessment of the president’s visit to Iraq when he points out that while Obama praised the troops for their “extraordinary achievements,” he still doesn’t raise the issue that more than a million Iraqis have died since the US occupation of 2003 began.
The story on the upbeat visit by President Obama in Iraq is a much different story than the Los Angeles Times article which ran on April 11 in the Grand Rapids Press. The article states that a suicide bomber attacked US troops killing 5 “U.S. soldiers in the deadliest strike against American forces in Iraq in 13 months.” The story focuses on this one attack but doesn’t provide any analysis of the recent rise in violence that Dahr Jamail documents, nor does it mention the Iraqis who have been the target of violence from both insurgent groups and the US military.
Patrick Cockburn, who has been reporting from Iraq since the beginning of the US occupation, also provides some important analysis of the recent violence in Iraq. He also points out that “the Sunni who changed from insurgents to US allies over the last two years are once more fearful for their future.” This fear has increased with the plan to have more US troops leave Iraq between now and 2010.
There were also three stories that dealt with the US military campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the past week. On April 6, there was a New York Times piece on the reluctance of Pakistani leaders to support the US attacks against insurgent groups in that country. Unfortunately, the Grand Rapids Press omitted the bulk of The Times story, particularly the section that cites Pakistani leaders and their criticism of US policies. But even the full New York Times story does not provide any independent analysis of US policy in Pakistan, nor does it mention the human cost of the US use of unmanned military drones to bomb inside Pakistan.
The absence of coverage on human suffering in Pakistan and Afghanistan because of the US occupation was further reflected in an April 12 Associated Press story that focused on how Afghani rug makers have developed new designs in order to sell their rugs to US troops. The irony is that while the AP reporter tells readers that Afghani rug makers, who are desperate to make a living, have made rugs with images about the terrorist attacks against the US in 2001. What is not so ironic is that the reporter frames this story in such a way as to convey the idea that the Afghanis are happy that the US military occupies their country, despite growing opposition from Afghanis.
