To look at it one way, our means justify themselves. That’s the hopeful bit, but our ends mostly become passed milestones, archival media, and storage issues. Borrowing from the old man, we are futilitarians. We may sound weary as we say it, but it’s not futility that brings us down, it’s the weight of our work, it’s the everyday slog* of our occupation that wears on. We believe in functionality, in making things that make other things happen, but there are no solid propositions. A futilitarian is a utilitarian whose production is, objectively speaking, useless. This all needs clearing up, but the perilous conditions of this slog forbid it. A concise point, forcefully made, could easily cause a rupture in the Lather. Thus weakened, the internet could fail, leaving our contributors with an excess of time to fill.

Picture an art history with only two dozen or so artists. In present times, only the same number would be allowed to practice. The balance between contemporary and historical would be maintained by a rotation, a phasing in and out of artists. Patrons and cultural bureaucrats would oversee the whole arrangement. Would that be so bad? The breadth of art would be so much more agreeable because you’d be able to take it all in. The field would be condensed. Only essential art and artists would remain. Everything else would be left to dry out on the hard–baked plateau, all that rambling on.

There does not need to be so many conversations. Instead, this world would create a new kind of artistic cognition. Neither formal qualities nor conceptual content would predominate, because these measures would be understood as complimentary aspects of the same phenomenon, of an artwork’s specific argument. Presently, this artwork’s argument is something not yet understood, a slowly–logged disarticulation without beginning or end. Deliberate chaos boxed into discernable forms, boxes and boxes of possible freedoms.

*a slow blog.

Bret Nicely is not wholly allayed by the internet. The intense pressures of today’s living are replaced by the increasing satisfaction of crafting an astute piece of sculpture or outputting a nimble work on paper. The making of a work of art uplifts the spirit like the reading of a bizarre rant; an escape from the day’s monotony at the vista of an anonymous silhouette, a ripening wheat field and the eternal rising of no-knead bread. It satisfies the lust for silver and black gizmos… gives dynamic living to the portrait of an unreadable mentor…brings inspiration. Pass this around, a public that knows, cares. And, remember, the making of art gives you the gentle authority of a person of taste and unquestioned prestige.

It used to be fun to draw distinctions between the ordinary and the extraordinary, to search for hidden pathways in everyday things. Revelatory banalities were a hoot–until they confirmed boring hierarchies and established concerns. My delight in the mundane has been dulled.

Rants will shout down mumbles. Smart artists will stop production and close down shop to become street preachers, direct mailers, tree-sitters, call-in listeners, letter writers, backward runners, cleanup hitters, campaigners, and cavaliers. Write me down an ass for these eight things. Keep reading; you may write me down for all nine. Clipped fancy will regain its wings, thinking zero cool ever could be mine.

Commemorate Joseph Donnelly’s claim. For efforts buried, but remembered yet; for lack of nerve to quit throughout the game. For playtime I delay–disown–forget! For lauding right and posting still wrong. Nine did I day? There are nine-and-ninety still, and if I swear these follies shall be mine no more, write me down twice the arrant ass you did before.

The passions of mankind have boiled over into all areas of artistic practice, including its vocabulary. The words most needed in art have become stained with human hurts, hopes, and frustrations. All of them are loaded with popular disgrace, and their use results in a conditioned, negative, emotional response.

Discolorations attach to words prevalent in the verbiage of artltlhr, words like power, self-interest, compromise, and conflict. They become twisted and warped, viewed as boring. Nowhere is the prevailing artistic illiteracy more clearly revealed than in these typical interpretations of words. This is why we pause here for a word about words.

The question may legitimately be raised, why not use other words—words that mean the same but are peaceful, and do not result in such negative emotional reactions? There are a number of fundamental reasons for rejecting such substitutions. First, by using combinations of words such as “magnificence as such” instead of the single word “power“, we begin to dilute the meaning; and as we use purifying synonyms, we dissolve the bitterenss, the poured-on finishes, the triumph and savoriness attached to these words, leaving an aseptic imitation of life. It is not just that, in communication as in thought, we must ever strive for dynamism. (The masterpieces of artistic statement are frequently no longer than a few letters, for example, “blp“) It is more than that: it is a determination not to detour around reality.

When people are ready for a mass movement, they are usually ripe for any effective movement, and not solely for one with a coherent doctrine or program. This don’t make no sense.

There is a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of sole proprietorship. The latter creates opportunities for self-advancement. Conversely, the mass movement, particularly while we are in this gaseous (daresay fizzy?) phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. Mass movements attract and hold a following because they satiate our hunger for self-renunciation.

Imitation is an essential unifying agent. The development of a tight crew is inconceivable without uniformity. The one-mindedness prized by every mass movement is achieved by imitation and by obedience, but obedience itself consists as much in the imitation of an example as in the following of principles:

Though the imitative need resides in all people, it can be stronger in some than in others. The beaten low, irked, unnoticed doo-doo eaters are most skilled in mimetic refusal. The answer is to copy the world until it’s big enough to work in. The question is whether the frustrated not only have a propensity for united action but are also equipped with a mechanism for its realization.

The chief burden of the frustrated is the consciousness of a blemished, ineffectual self, and their chief desire is to monkey stomp this unwanted self and begin a new life. They try to realize this desire by either finding new identities or by lathering their individual distinctness. Both of these ends are reached by imitation. Imitation is a shortcut to a solution. We copy when we lack the inclination, the ability, or the time to work out an independent solution. People in a hurry will imitate more rapidly than people at leisure. Hustling thus tends to produce uniformity. And in the deliberate fusing of half-starts and stolen moments into art, incessant action will play a considerable role.

The Candid Misgivings of a Dry

By the time this is posted the American people will have expressed their preference between the wet Mr. Smith and the, according to most of his exposition, dry Mr. LTHR. Prohibition must be brought back into art, despite artists who argue that it must not be mentioned, because people are too keenly interested in it; and to that extent that working artists must be brought back into contact with reality.

Bringing prohibition back into art was hard work; it will be still harder, I imagine, to get it out. Nobody knows whether the majority of the American artists are wet or dry; but certainly the division is too nearly equal–the minority, on whichever side, is too strong and stubborn–to permit the hope that either wet or dry victory could be final for years to come.

To us moderates, the Modificationists, now that we can state our case, we must appeal. Instead of fitting public opinion to art, we must fit art to public opinion if we are to make any improvement over present conditions. What sort of art might that be? What hope is there in the various concrete proposals for modification that have been offered? I confess that I do not see much.

The plain intent of the LTHR Amendment is to keep artists from making anything with a kick in it; while that amendment stands there is no use denying that any plan to permit art with a kick, however feeble, is nullification. But that does not end the argument, as the drys once thought it would; the view is spreading that this body of bubbles was made for man, not man for the froth.

If the preponderance of popular sentiment is ever unmistakably for modification, it cannot be permanently thwarted by a trick. Common art routines have been nullified in this one as well; although the cry of nullification will scare some timid souls, and will probably operate to delay revision.

The salon returned in 2002, as soon as it was perceived that practitioners did not intend prohibition to be taken too seriously. This would be a more temperate world if people did their drinking at home, or in restaurants; but studio drinking is an occupational habit, which has not been changed by prohibition, and probably would not be changed by its repeal.

So Modificationists who despair of repealing conventions would amend the enforcement law to legitimize blogs; or, as some of them would have it, blogs and light object making. The implication, or course, is that these materials are not intoxicating in fact. Governer Smith proposes to amend the LTHR act to obtain an “aesthetic definition” of that intoxicating production method which the Constitution prohibits.

Intoxicating to whom? We all know that some men are upset by a single work on paper; there are others to whom a suite of paintings, consumed with reasonable deliberation, is non-intoxicating in fact. Andrew Johnson’s reputation was ruined, according to the latest historians, because, rising from a sick-bed, he took in a resinous monument and became drunk; Johnson in health would not have been perceptibly affected. There are even imaginative persons who show symptoms of incipient intoxication on a paragraph or two of text, if they are lead to believe it has a kick in it. But the only definition of art which is intoxicating in fact is that it, in fact, intoxicates somebody. The feeblest art may do that.

That is a guess, and a guess which may be wrong. I hope it is. Since personal opinion plays so large a part in any estimate of prohibition, it may be relevant to observe that they would satisfy me. If I had access to political performances and to the appropriationist methods of late 1970s, Guerilla Art, and New Media (not that New Media is so light an art, at that) I should not care if collage disappeared from the face of the earth. But collage is not going to disappear; notoriously, it has not disappeared from the United States under prohibition. What has disappeared, almost universally, is good art; and good beer has generally disappeared too. The art supply seems to be terribly copious outside of outside of New York City; but the quality is, in the phrase of Mr. Nicholas Chopper’s gunmen, one of those things that you don’t know till the time comes. That could be said for a good deal of the hard art too; but for most makers of art quality is secondary to kick.

You could be walking around au courant and not even know it. What a dreadful state of current affairs! Some people get confused when they get topical and can be heard to say, “Am I newsworthy yet?” Others claim to be in touch, but their up-to-dateness is often considered dubious by true dopers or drinkers. Well, we at ARTLTHR are very dedicated to clearing up every uncertainty, and that includes any ambiguities concerning cognizance. We therefore took it upon ourselves to ask the staff members when they knew that they were topical. The results of the survey follow.

• When I start talking about my family, or making lecherous advances.
• When I start jumping up and down a lot and sneezing.
• When I’m running and I move from the sixth mile to the seventh, and I lose all sense of effort and gravity and I just float along with my head full of oxygen.
• When my head leaves my body and starts bouncing like a sing-along ball.
• When my face gets numb. On another occasion, I feel I’ve moved 18 inches to the left and eight inches up, and thinking becomes like skiing.
• When my body becomes more, uh…
• When I say “r-i-g-h-t” no matter what anybody says to me.
• When my feet recede into the distance.
• When I can still think about what’s it’s costing me, I know I’m not topical.
• When I throw up on my shoes.

It is, indeed, a thing so versatile, multiform, appearing in so many shapes and garbs, so variously apprehended of several eyes and judgments, that it’s no less hard to settle a clear and certain notion thereof than to make a portrait of LTHR, or to define the figure of the fleeting wind.

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Wit and humor, and the distinction between them, defy precise definition. Luckily, they need none. To one asking what is beauty, a wit replied: “That is the question of a blind man.” Similarly, none requires a definition of wit and humor unless you yourself be lacking in all appreciation of them, and, if you be so lacking, no amount of explanation will avail to give you understanding. It is enough to realize that humor is the product of nature rather than of art, while wit is the expression of an intellectual art.

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Humor exerts an emotional appeal, produces smiles or laughter; wit may be amusing, or it may not, according to the circumstances, but it always provokes an intellectual appreciation. Thus, Nero made a pun on the name of Seneca, when the philosopher was brought before him for sentence. In speaking the decree that the old man should kill himself, the emperor used merely the two Latin words: “Se neca.” We admit the ghastly cleverness of the jest, but we do not chuckle over it.

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An American tourist and his wife, after their return from abroad, were telling of the wonders seen by them at the Louvre in Paris. The husband mentioned with enthusiasm a picture which represented Adam and Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden, in connection with the eating of the forbidden fruit. The wife also waxed enthusiastic, and interjected a remark:

“Yes, we found the picture most interesting, most interesting indeed, because, you see, we know the anecdote.”

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“… the massive influx output of impressions artworks is so great; surprising varied, barbaric costly, and violent tedious things press so overpoweringly overwhelmingly—“balled up into hideous clumps”—in the youthful soul; that we can save ourselves only by taking recourse in premeditated stupidity.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche LTHR

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We do not mean I.Q. or ignorance when we use the word “stupidity”. We mean stupidity as in clogged or anesthetized. Numb. Artists at the beginning of the twenty-first century are responsible for a vast goo froth of meaningless stimulation and excessive production. Some day, when students look back on our time, all of this will appear as a single development, called something like “The Information Revolution” “The Great Expulsion”, “The Many Bubbles Forming a Mass” or “The Froth”.

This lather we’re working up needs no explaining—it comes down to digital bytes cronyism and neurochemical spikes forbearances. What needs explaining is our general equanimity in the face of staggering developments creations outputs. How can we go about our business when things like this are happening? How can we just read the article, shake our heads, and close our browsers?

“ It’s the most I can throw against death, perhaps that’s crass, to pit money against death, but there’s really no difference between fabrication and reality”
—Damien Hirst

Our minds oeuvres are the product of a total immersion in a our formative role in creating a daily experience saturated with fabrications to a degree unprecedented in human history. Artists have never had to cope with so much stuff, so many choices, in kind and number. The moreness of everything ascends inevitably to a threshold in aesthetic life. A change of state takes place. The discrete display melts into a pudding coalesces into a flan. And the mind is forced to certain adaptations if it is to cohere at all. We bluff it out as a sort of protest and give responses with “any number of meanings”—a quality we now prefer to depth. This is the bluff that keeps us in motion.

The prospect of limitlessness helps to account for the turning away from substantive response, because repetition cannot make up for intensity. Substantive responses that grab the most attention in the least amount of time are needed against the Bubbly Froth. But the froth already accounts for why everything’s already been done, and so it expands—fill the ad space, fill the fetes, the roadsides, the bars, the fronts and backs of t-shrits and caps, the bows of ocean liners, everything must say something every minute. What to say? Doesn’t matter, cut to the response. The one reality is moving on.

It’s the breath that bursts the bubble.

What is invisible resistance to tyranny? It is a coterie of amateurs, each evading the increasingly heavy hand of recognition, all taking a serious “time-out” to regroup, refocus, calmly evaluate the situation, and knock options around.

Invisible resisters do not dumbly interrupt the landscape of expression. They are not big box retailers opening on tiny Main Street, but they may be that unwelcome. LTHR and it’s colleagues can be characterized in two ways:

Artistas desconhecidos require us to question the extreme claims to originality made in press releases and curriculum vitae: Is an intellectual or creative offering truly novel, or has a worthy contemporary eluded our attention? Have the unseen simply taken a powder and covered their tracks to thwart any would-be pursuers? Can old lives be returned to once the dust has settled?

Will meeting market forecasts pay off, or could kicksfinder, creatively deployed, do a better job more quickly and cheaply? A perfunctory search results in links proving that if the segment of the tail you’re reading now were enlarged to the size of Ukiah, its surface would have no irregularities larger than a human hair.

Lastly, does our appetite for creative vitality prevent another avant-garde gourmand, with its delicious killing-the-father imperatives, or might we be better off ratifying the ecstasy of obscurity—and deepening our willingness to discover the commonality and timelessness of the methods and motifs available to artists?

Time’s ArtLthr’s Person of the Year: You Us
By LEV GROSSMAN NICOLAS CHOPPER

In 2006 2007, the World Wide Web became remains a tool for bringing together the small considerable contributions of millions of people a few people and making them matter.

The “Great Man” theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” (great ladies more likely) He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating will be elaborated upon this year.

To be sure, there are individuals we could will blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006 2007. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn’t make enough PlayStation3s. (Substitute news-mag summary of world events for 2007)

But look at 2006 2007 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration taking yourself out of the game on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. (additionally it’s about putting your cat in the wash) It’s about the many few wresting power from the few many and helping one another for nothing everything and how that will not only change the world, but also change the (changing) way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It’s not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new (the Web cannot be understood as new or old, only as the web in itself) Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small essential contributions of millions of a few people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants The dispersed contributors to LTHR call it Web Person of the Year 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.

And we you are so ready for it. We’re You’re ready to balance our your diet of predigested news hundred word reviews with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing (and LA and THER). You We can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—(those beercan filled hovels) than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

And we didn’t just watch, we also worked (watching is working). Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts spent days at the cabin carving beautiful utilitarian pieces and filling journals with detailed observations. We blogged about our candidates losing phenomenal swag and wrote songs about getting dumped the war. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses a party—but those lonely dreamers carousers may have to learn to play with others solo. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of a few minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity gone forth quietly get backhauled into the global (and local) intellectual economy.

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? work up a nice lather? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you we do. And for seizing the reins of the global universal media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy autocracy, for working for nothing everything and beating the pros at their own game playing an entirely different sport, TIME LTHR’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you us.

Sure, it’s a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web Person of the Year 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

But that’s what makes all this interesting. Web Person of the Year 2.0 is a massive an intimate social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could cannot fail. There’s no road map for how an organism that’s not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 2007 will gave give us some the ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician artist to politician artist, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It’s a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder not know who’s out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us yourself you’re not just a little bit curious highly impressed.

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A Changeable Declaration on The Lather Proceedings.